6 College Students Pitch Us Their Startups | MFM Shark Tank

Tommy Potter

Yeah, so just to preface here, I'm Tommy Potter, a student at UMich. I'm really excited to be bringing you Startups today. Just to illustrate the community, we're Power Hour, which is the CIA for college entrepreneurship. What I mean by that is that you don't know who we are or where we meet. We are this underground society of handpicked, killer founders.

Shaan Puri

Wow, hold on, hold on. If you're building the impossible, we got Tommy, like Tommy Potter, like Harry Potter. And then there's no meeting place, there's no information, there's no way in, and there's no way out of this club.

Amulya Parmar

It's a

Shaan Puri

Tap on the shoulder.

Tommy Potter

It's a tap on the shoulder, just like the CIA. We let you know individually where we're going to be meeting.

Shaan Puri

Dude, Sam, they're speaking your language already. This is some real **skull and bones** shit.

Tommy Potter

And I want to preface this by saying this is a live audience. If Sam and Sean, you don't know, I'll pan the room. We have like 65 people here ready for you, Mitch. Let's see here.

Shaan Puri

I'm a show. Yeah, yeah, that's a noise.

Tommy Potter

The ecosystem is out here today. I know the same is going on down at UIUC. They got a massive room. How many do you have in that room, Austin? Yeah, I'll pan the camera too real quick.

Shaan Puri

Oh wow.

Tommy Potter

So, but yeah, we've... they don't want to. All the points that Tommy said, I basically helped get all the amazing founders, as well as entrepreneurs and content creators—everybody that's doing awesome stuff.

Shaan Puri

So, we got Tommy. We got Austin. The club is called "Happy Hour," is that what you said?

Shrikar Lekkala

No, we're... we're power hour.

Shaan Puri

Oh, power hour! Power hour, I got you.

Tommy Potter

An hour full of power.

Shaan Puri

And it's all student-run. There's no faculty, nobody who's making this happen. Is this like, has this been around for 10 years, or did you just invent this on Thursday? What's going on?

Tommy Potter

Do you remember Bobby Feierhousle? He was on this podcast about two years ago.

Shaan Puri

I may never forget Bobby.

Sam Parr

So, the bobby started all.

Tommy Potter

Of this, Bobby started this. It's kind of been planting around, and at UIUC, as their community, we're very deep in our partnership there as well.

Sam Parr

This is so... this is fantastic! To give the listener some background: two years ago, we had this guy named Bobby. Bobby, I think, was in Michigan. He gathered a group of maybe 15 entrepreneurs, and like 4 of them pitched us, and they were awesome. Apparently, Bobby has this "Fight Club" thing and has gone out from university to university to convince you guys to join in. This sounds awesome! So today, I think 6 of you—3 each—are going to pitch us, is that right?

Tommy Potter

Totally correct! Yeah, there's a lot of school pride on the line in terms of which school is going to come out on top in this competition. So, we're laying it on the line for you. We have tons of creators in the audience. It was tough to get it down to three startups, but we're giving you our best. So, can't wait! We're ready to go.

Jonah Liss

We're ready.

Shaan Puri

To roll, this is college Shark Tank style. Two schools are pitching from both sides, and we're going to have a winner. We might even have a few other awards that we come up with. I invested in one of these last time, Sam, out of Michigan. I invested in a company that already failed, so we're not going to hold that against you all. You win some, you lose some, and we lost that one pretty hard, pretty quick. But that's alright.

Sam Parr

Alright, but let's see if you guys can beat Michigan. So the first one that we're going to hear from is "Meet Your Class," and I think it's the University of Michigan. Are you guys doing three in a row? Then it's going to be... we're going to one and fourth. Alright, alright, so doing that.

Shaan Puri

We just need to step aside and let this kid emcee. He's got a natural ability as a host. See, I'm using college words!

Sam Parr

Is it "let it bake" or "let them cook"? Which one is it? Whatever.

Shaan Puri

We're going to let them bake, alright?

Sam Parr

Alright, the first one is the folks at Michigan.

Jonah Liss

Hello, my name is Jonah, and I'm the COO of Meet Your Class. Two years ago, my co-founders and I created a platform for prospective college students to meet each other before coming to campus. Meet Your Class quickly grew in popularity, largely because the communities we built extended beyond our own platform and integrated with the social media apps that nearly every high schooler uses on a daily basis. Within two years, this system has scaled to over 400,000 account creations and even generated over $600,000 in revenue through a freemium business model. While this was a great success, an even larger opportunity emerged when we were approached by a university called The Christ College, which was struggling with enrollment. Basically, they were having issues filling seats, and they were not alone. This is a really big issue. Recent polls have found that over two-thirds of university CFOs are deeply concerned about declining enrollment. A significant factor in this, that The Christ College and really the majority of universities across the country struggle with, is a phenomenon known as "summer melt." Summer melt refers to when a prospect gets all the way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel, only to at the last second renegotiate their deposit, renegotiate their commitment, and decide they no longer want to go to college. At The Christ College, believe it or not, this was happening with one in three students, which eventually led to a 33% vacancy rate at the school. The Christ College believed that Meet Your Class could help decrease this summer melt because our platform had gained a reputation for building excitement among prospective students and providing them with a support network. Furthermore, we also found through discovery that Meet Your Class data was very valuable for universities in helping them allocate their limited time and resources towards students who needed extra attention and help. We are very excited to say that this worked at The Christ College. Students who used Meet Your Class last year experienced a 61% reduction in summer melt, which is expected to add $1,700,000 back to their top line. We’re thrilled by these results because, at a minimum, this summer melt issue is calculated to cost the higher education system over $11,000,000,000 per year. Of course, it’s going to take more than one case study to really tackle this market, but luckily we now have scaled to eight partners for the upcoming admission cycle. Amazingly, that same B2C business that I described at the start is helping us and empowering us to create a product that’s industry-leading and loved by students and administrators. It also got us admitted to Techstars and has allowed us to bootstrap our way into a much larger, much more qualified team ready to take the higher ed market by storm.

Shaan Puri

Wow, alright, that was great! Do you have an ending for us? So, sharks, who's ready to... you know, blah blah blah? Are you actually raising money or not? Not raising money right now.

Jonah Liss

We're planning to potentially open a seed round when we graduate.

Shaan Puri

Spring. Okay, great.

Sam Parr

That is awesome! Alright, so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. Really, a lot of people who are listening have a full-time job and they want to start something on the side—a side hustle. Now, a lot of people message Sean and me and they say, "Alright, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea?" And again, what they're really just saying is, "Just give me the ideas." Well, my friends, you're in luck! My old company, The Hustle, put together 100 different side hustle ideas, and they have appropriately called it the **Side Hustle Idea Database**. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas. Frankly, I went through them and they're awesome! It gives you how to start them, how to grow them, and things like that. It provides a little bit of inspiration. So check it out! It's called the **Side Hustle Idea Database**. It's in the description below; you'll see the link. Click it, check it out, and let me know in the comments what you think. By the way, of the $600,000 in revenue, how many people are working there? What's your profit? Do you have any profit?

Jonah Liss

Yeah, so us as initial co-founders have not paid ourselves a dime. We reinvest every single penny back into the team. I don't know the exact profitability off the top of my head. You know, we try to keep the bank account enough to stay alive, but we reinvest every penny back into growing the team and getting more university partnerships. We're trying to get 50 by the end of this upcoming admission cycle.

Sam Parr

Of this $600,000, how much is in your business account right now?

Jonah Liss

I think around $300,000. We've got $120,000 from Techstars and then have also won some pitch competitions.

Sam Parr

Competitions, okay.

Shaan Puri

Okay, cool. And Blake, your name is Blake, right?

Jonah Liss

My name is Jonah. Blake is my amazing co-founder.

Shaan Puri

Okay, great! So, Jonah, great first pitch. Really cool business. At first, when you were talking about it, I thought, "Well, you know, you sort of created Facebook 20 years too late. You're trying to help college kids connect." But then the story got really interesting when you started talking about how colleges are struggling to fill enrollment and they have vacancies, just like a hotel has vacancies. A college has vacancies, and that maybe your tools actually could help them decrease that. Then they would be your customer, right? You'd be charging them. Did you charge that first college? And what are you charging those other eight colleges who you said are partners with you on this?

Jonah Liss

Yeah, so our initial partners are heavily discounted relative to the market rate for a solution like this. We're trying to get more logos and more case studies. Currently, those partners are at under $10,000, but there's a very clear path to scaling this once we have a bit more credibility under our name.

Sam Parr

You said "market rate." Who else is doing something like this, and what are they doing?

Jonah Liss

We do have a handful of competitors. So, this initial thing that we're describing is called **mid-funnel conversion**. It's basically getting people who are later on in the enrollment funnel and then trying to convert them. There are a few competitors listed in that second column. Where we really stand out from them is our integrations with social media. We're able to get a large organic user base at the earliest and latest stages of the enrollment funnel. A lot of our competitors are like third-party apps where the university basically emails all their students, saying, "Hey, download this," and kind of forces them to use it. The reason they do that is because these communities generate so much valuable data, and they have a lot more control over it. Social media, stand-alone, really doesn't do this for them because it's not a tailor-made higher ed tool. So, we're basically retrofitting these social media platforms and bringing all the data that they pay for.

Shaan Puri

Different brands. So, Jonah, if you were charging them, what do you think you can charge them? Have you had any conversations about how much they would be willing to pay, either as a percentage of saved students or as a flat fee? What's your sense of how much each college is going to pay you?

Jonah Liss

So initially, just for this mid-funnel conversion tool, we believe that it should be pretty reasonable. Of course, the colleges vary in size, but we've seen these at the lowest for the smallest schools around **$20,000**, and then we've seen them scale past **$200,000**. This is, of course, just one small part of the enrollment funnel. There are many more issues that we believe we're trying to solve. That's just a general rate that I almost want to say is a commoditized rate that the university is comfortable paying with.

Shaan Puri

Is this the biggest problem, or is there a bigger problem?

Jonah Liss

This is one of the biggest problems. As I mentioned for Christ College, 1 in 3 students were melting. So, it's just like kind of the lowest hanging fruit to initially go after because these are kids who arguably should be going to college. They got very, they got way to the tail end of the enrollment funnel, and then we converted more of them. But they obviously want to just get more blocks and C's throughout the entire process.

Sam Parr

Jonah, how's this? You know I always ask how the story ends. Is there a vision for where you're going to be in 10 years with this?

Jonah Liss

We're still trying to figure that out. We are very motivated by genuinely improving the student experience and making college worthwhile. In the long run, we want to put power back in the students' hands. A lot of students don't know that they have negotiation power in the tuition price. Many of them also end up at places that are suboptimal. So, we kind of want to, in the long run, become the go-to place that students come to when they figure out where they're going to be the most successful.

Sam Parr

for

Jonah Liss

10 years down the line.

Shaan Puri

Did you just say that you can negotiate the tuition price? Because I had no idea that's possible.

Jonah Liss

It is possible. I personally didn't do it, but some members of my team could speak to it a lot more. Students have a lot more power than they realize. Universities need students in order to stay in business. The majority of schools, not the University of Michigan, but the majority of schools are tuition-dependent for revenue. Tuition in Michigan is like a very small percentage of revenue. So, if you ask for decreased tuition here, that likely would not pan out because they're not really struggling with any financial situations. But at the end of the day, colleges need to act like a business; otherwise, they're going to go under.

Sam Parr

I was just Googling some of these companies, Sean. Have you heard of Unibuddy? Did you Google any of those community apps? I had no idea this stuff existed. Some of them are actually quite large.

Shaan Puri

How big?

Sam Parr

Unibuddy, I think, raised $30,000,000. They raised it during COVID, so there's, you know, to be determined if it's legit. But it seems like it's a business that does many tens of millions in revenue.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, Jonah, my quick take on this is that I think you actually have a real business here. One of the biggest investments I missed was the very first guy who ever pitched me as an angel investor. He had an idea for something called ApplyBoard. What he was doing was helping international students get into small colleges. He was helping these colleges get more international students because international students just didn't know their names. I’d never heard of Christ College until you just said it. He was charging the university $2,000 to $3,000 per student that actually got admitted and enrolled there. So, he was making tons of money. That company really took off. I think you have a real business here. The only thing I would say, I guess to wrap up, is that I don't think you should ever raise money for this. I think you should bootstrap this thing. If you actually just stuck with this idea and bootstrapped it, in 4 to 5 years, you would be sitting on probably $20 million, which would be a phenomenal place for you to be exiting this business. I think the biggest risk for you is not a business risk. It's that we raise money because we pitch investors that this could take over the world. We thought that's what we're supposed to do. We thought you have an idea, you pitch investors, you raise round 1, round 2, round 3, and suddenly we're looking at you saying, "How are you going to be a $1 billion company?" The reality is, this might be a phenomenal $50 million company, but there's no chance at a $1 billion company. So, my advice to you would be: don't raise. But great pitch overall. Sam, any last thoughts?

Sam Parr

I completely agree. Let's take...

Shaan Puri

Thank you! A big round of applause!

Sam Parr

Alright, so where are we going now? Illinois.

Tommy Potter

Yeah, we've got our guy out in San Francisco right now, Shikhar.

Shrikar Lekkala

What's going on, guys? Nice to meet you. Alright.

Shaan Puri

I love it! Did you drop out? You're not even in college. What's going on?

Shrikar Lekkala

No, I'm actually on a gap semester. Hey Sean, I'm in Founders Inc. I know you know Safon.

Shaan Puri

Oh, no way!

Shrikar Lekkala

I just met him yesterday. A couple of my buddies and I are visiting San Francisco to see if this is the right place for us. But yeah.

Shaan Puri

Alright, well, "gap year." I like the sound of that already.

Shrikar Lekkala

About a year ago, my co-founder and I were watching the Spanish TV show *Money Heist* on Netflix. Unfortunately, neither of us knows Spanish very well, so we had to watch an English dub. Anyone who's ever watched a dubbed movie knows that there are a bunch of issues. The lips are not synchronized with the audio, and the voice actors sound nothing like the actual actors. There's one scene where two voice actors had the same actor, making everything extremely confusing. We looked into this issue further and found that it is extremely technically complex, expensive (at $100 to $1,500 per minute), time-consuming, and low quality to dub a video nowadays. With all of this, dubbing is a $60 billion market in 2022, and there's been no clear solution for this. We started by translating content for creators like MrBeast and Mr. Nightmare and found that the essential use case is within education. Imagine the millions of people trying to get an education in their second language where the content is not meant for them. So, we created Metafrazzo, an automated, authentic, and affordable translation solution for educators. All a user has to do is input a video into our solution, press the input and output language, press submit, and within minutes, get a lip-synced voice clone and text-on-screen translated video—just like this one that we translated for our client, UIUC, and Geese and Coursera.

Sam Parr

Utilitarianism suggests that an ethical choice will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. That's pretty good, so...

Shrikar Lekkala

So, as you can see, the professor's voice is perfectly cloned from English to Spanish to French. His lips are synchronized, and our key differentiator is that any text on screen is translated with the same font, text, and color. For our enterprise clients, we have a human-in-the-loop process where we translate videos with industry-specific terminology, keywords, and idioms—knowing the issues that Google Translate has. We also have the most languages and the cheapest product on the market right now. We're at $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue, translating videos for the University of Illinois and corporations like Velcro Corporation. We are actually in talks with Coursera for a potential integration in Q1 of 2025. Just to look at one of our potential deals after our paid pilot with Geese, just one degree looks like 30,000 minutes in 5 languages, generating $1,350,000 in revenue for our company. This actually saves the university 91% in actual costs in curating the course. Our team combines business and technology, with myself taking a gap year to focus on this and our machine learning team of 5 engineers having 37 years of experience in computer vision. Hi, my name is Shirkarla Kala, and my purpose is to break language barriers. Thank you guys very much.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's awesome.

Shaan Puri

Great pitch! Great pitch! Please leave some of the slides up, as we might need to go back to them. First of all, the demo was great. Can you just tell us a little bit about the magic there? You said it translates the voice and makes the lips match, which I've never seen anyone do that.

Sam Parr

Did you see Dana White do that, Sean? You didn't see Dana White do that for the Mexican Independence Day UFC? It was great!

Shaan Puri

No, I didn't see that. So, what are you doing to make the lips? Is it superimposed on top of their lips?

Shrikar Lekkala

Yeah, so essentially we take one of my buddy's YC model. We take any original video or any original audio, and we are allowed to synchronize their lips based on the input of video and audio in our backend system. We then curate that.

Shaan Puri

You're going to say you took one of your buddy's lips, and he's a model. So, you're saying there's an off-the-shelf library. Basically, a lot of off-the-shelf models do this already. You guys are just integrating that.

Sam Parr

Is that correct?

Shrikar Lekkala

That's true. That's true.

Shaan Puri

Okay, and another question. You said something like, "If they did this just one course for one university, that's like a million in revenue for you." Are they currently... are you convincing them, "Hey, you should dub this," or are they already dubbing it just at ten times the cost?

Shrikar Lekkala

Yeah, so right now they're translating videos automatically and they're translating courses. Imagine quizzes, tests, and just reading papers, but they're not translating the videos. So, a Spanish user has to go on Coursera and, you know, take the course in Spanish but has to read the subtitles on an English video. For these videos and courses that they're creating right now, we're basically providing the solution that standardizes the actual viewing experience for the end user. So, they are doing this right now, just without...

Sam Parr

The... you said that you think in 2022 or 2023 or something like that, that dubbing was a $60 or $70 billion industry. What is that number? Tell me about that number. That's ridiculous!

Shrikar Lekkala

Just looking at traditional dubbing, this means in film, education, marketing, and just translation in general. It's a huge market with a bunch of different positions that we could put ourselves in. I was trying to tell you guys that we also translated for content creators like MrBeast and Nightmare. However, we found that the niche was in education for us, just because of the essential need. Think about the applications of translation for people who have life-changing opportunities stripped from them because they can't take a course in their preferred language or they're not able to understand the professor in a classroom. So that's where we got that number.

Shaan Puri

Right, but the key distinction you mentioned is that they're already doing this. However, the way you said it was that they're translating the tests and the quizzes; they're just not doing the videos today. So, for them to agree to do this, it would be a new cost of **$1,000,000** to them that they're not currently spending.

Shrikar Lekkala

So, in terms of translating a video in general, they're trying to translate these videos. But for a person to translate a 10-minute video, it takes about 4 hours. They have to curate new slides, have a new professor go in, and speak in a new language. They have to contract these people. This would cost them $3,000,000 to edit these videos, you know, go over and edit the screen text.

Shaan Puri

But there's a big distinction. Basically, let's say I'm sitting at this university and I look like I am with this vest on right now. I'm sitting there and I've got my budget. What I'm asking you is, today they don't already spend on this. You're not saving them money from something they're already spending. They're currently not spending because it would be too expensive to do it, too slow, and too expensive. So, you're going to be a new cost to them, right? That's going to be a big point of friction because they're not going to make more money necessarily off this. You might be able to convince them that if they do this, they might be able to get more customers. But on day one, it's going to be just extra cost with no extra revenue. Is that correct?

Shrikar Lekkala

That is true. However, they are going in the direction of putting these courses online. Digital translation is a thing that they're already doing. This would just be an added cost for them at the end of the day, but it would potentially provide a better solution, being a marketing ploy for international students to come to the university as well. But to answer your question, yeah.

Sam Parr

What are you doing for Velcro? First of all, I didn't know Velcro was a brand. I thought Velcro was like clean extra tissue, you know? I thought it was a thing. That's pretty wild. But what are you doing for them, and how did you close those guys? They look like a big old sluggish company.

Shrikar Lekkala

Yeah, we had a personal connection to one of the higher-ups of the company. We do internal communications for them. Every month, there's a 90-minute internal town hall where the CEO, who is an Italian woman, speaks in English. She had a bunch of issues when speaking English; she lacks emotion and kind of doesn't feel like herself. We were able to provide them with a solution where she could give the company updates in her true persona in the new language. She spoke in Italian for 90 minutes into our camera. We put that into our solution, and within 3 hours, we were able to curate a translated video that she could send to all the plants at Vowelco Corporation in 10 different languages. We provided that solution to them today.

Shaan Puri

But it sounds like you're not doubling down as much on enterprise. You want to go for this university education niche, is that right?

Shrikar Lekkala

So, we want to go into the education niche. This includes universities, educational content creation, and corporate training as well. We understand that these educational sales cycles are extremely long, which is why going to translation agencies for educational content can help us apply a geometric approach to our sales cycle. This will speed everything up and help us gain more traction. Additionally, the university brand itself creates a stance where people say, "Hey, the University of Illinois uses this. I'm an educational content creator; I trust them. I'm going to trust this company as well."

Shaan Puri

Right, well, I think you have a solid pitch and a really great product. However, I believe this is a product in search of a market. I think you're going to run into a lot of trouble because you're going to go to these universities and say, "Hey, we're great!" But they're going to respond, "Yeah, that's awesome," yet they have no budget. They won't have the budget for it, or it will just be seen as an extra cost without a clear extra payoff or sort of ROI attached to it. Understood? I think that's going to hurt the sales cycle. What's already a slow sales cycle in university sales is going to get harder because you're costing them money rather than saving it. One thing to consider is if there's already a big market for dubbing out there and they're doing it manually, this could actually look like a private equity play. You could go buy existing dubbing services that have established books of business, then fire all the people and replace them with AI that can do it better, faster, and cheaper than they're currently doing. You mentioned it costs about $100 a minute to dub with humans. So, what you could do is buy companies and then rip out the cost structure by replacing it with AI. That might actually be a better way to approach this market. Again, this is something you don't really hear a lot about. You're in San Francisco now, and many people don't talk about this, but there is a whole other avenue of business—roll-ups and private equity—where they're looking for this. They buy something at a fair price and then cut the cost in half by using technology to make things more efficient. You could do that here.

Shrikar Lekkala

Understood. We are actually trying to do that right now by partnering with a translation agency to understand exactly how they derive their clients and how they navigate these sales cycles with refugees and people going through different educational content. One thing about universities is that I do see this being globalized in systems and learning management systems like Coursera. We just had a meeting yesterday with Coursera to essentially say that at the University of Illinois, if the pilot goes well, they're willing to give us a shot at integration for translation for a couple of courses there. This would allow us to increase our dubbing capacity from about 1,000 minutes every two weeks to maybe 1,000 hours every two weeks. This just shows you the kind of stance we're taking in terms of universities. We're focusing on the learning management systems, not the individual universities.

Sam Parr

Hey Sean, I don't pay attention to this world too much, but how impressive was that video that we saw?

Shaan Puri

I mean, it's definitely impressive. I think they're doing a couple of other things that are specific, like changing the text on the screen. I think that makes the whole solution work because then the actual course works. So, it's definitely impressive, but I know there have to be 10 other companies that could do this today. There's nothing like a scientific breakthrough with what they're doing. So, this is really going to be a question of who builds the best business around this new technology. The technology exists, and anyone's going to be able to build a business around this. It's really going to be about who figures out the right market, the right go-to-market strategy, and the right pricing model to actually build a business out of this.

Sam Parr

What do your parents think about you taking the gap year?

Shrikar Lekkala

We got into Techstars in June but ended up declining that opportunity. My parents are South Indian, and they are kind of driven by percentages and prestige. I was able to show them that, hey, maybe I'm in the top 1% of pre-seed companies by getting this accelerator. I showed them that, and they let me take this gap semester. Now, I'm going to have to show them some KPIs as I keep taking time off from school, but I'm loving it right now.

Shaan Puri

I hope they listen to this. Hey!

Sam Parr

Kids or parents, your kid's amazing. This is... it's gonna turn out alright. It's gonna turn out more than alright, I think.

Shaan Puri

There's a kid at F F Inc, where you're at right now, in the office you're at right now. His name is Johnny Dallas. He was in 8th grade when he started working with us. He began in the summer and then started working every day after school. Then, I think in 11th grade or so, it was pretty clear that this guy is awesome and he should just work here full time. We made him an offer, and his mom was freaking out. She said, "I can't! My son's gonna be a high school dropout! This is crazy!" I reassured her, "No, no, no! He's going to test out, he's going to graduate, he's going to get his GED." What I convinced her of was that he's not dropping out; he's going pro, the same way LeBron James went pro because he had incredible skills. That reframe, I gotta tell you, that was some of my best work with that mom on a bench in a park, convincing her that he's going pro, not dropping out. Then we got him to go full time with us.

Shrikar Lekkala

Got you. Got you.

Sam Parr

Dude, congratulations on your success! Good job, and thank you for letting us listen. You're the man! Yeah, alright, what do we have next?

Nathan Shatz

I'm Nathan Schatz, co-founder of Millu, and we are creating personalized skincare that's built for your microbiome. My journey with microbiology began when I was 8, after I had a life-threatening encounter with flesh-eating bacteria. This experience sparked a fascination with the world of microbes, like bacteria and fungi. Since then, I've been driven to understand how the skin microbiome, which is the trillions of microbes living on our bodies, affects human health. Let me paint you a picture: think of the skin microbiome as a city, a complex community of microbes, each with a unique job. Just like these little guys on the screen in our skin city, some help manage inflammation, others retain moisture, and some even fight off viruses. This microbiome is unique to each person, like a fingerprint, and its well-being is essential for healthy and beautiful skin. But here's the problem: many common skincare products contain preservatives and harsh chemicals that are detrimental to your skin microbiome. Using these is like dropping a nuke on your microbiome city, leading to chaos and any number of skin problems. Acne, dryness, anti-aging, and other common skin concerns drive a $150 billion industry. Yet, most products rely on an outdated, one-size-fits-all approach that overlooks our unique biology. This leads to a frustrating cycle of trial and error, where consumers waste their time and money looking for the right product for their skin, often to no avail. People need skincare that is hyper-personalized, and that is why Millu is different. We create skincare that works with your unique microbiome. So here's how we're changing the game: meet the Milubiome Sense System. This is a comprehensive solution that combines microbiome science, AI, and personalization to meet your skin's unique needs. It starts with our at-home microbiome collection kit. Simply swab your skin, mail it back to us, and complete a short survey about your skin concerns, lifestyle, and habits. In our lab, 3 miles west of here, we analyze your microbiome sample. Our AI-powered algorithm then integrates this data with your survey responses to create a personalized skin insights report, along with custom formulations: a serum and a cleanser designed just for you. As you use our products, we adapt through retests and reformulations. We ensure that your skincare evolves with your skin's changing needs, restoring microbiome balance for lasting skin health. Plus, our plantable boxes and recyclable packaging reflect our commitment to sustainability. Millu offers high-quality personalized skincare for $59.95, which includes the test kit, analysis, and custom products. With the $16.95 monthly subscription, you get refills and retests as needed. We are pioneering a science-driven personalized approach to skincare, and we're currently inviting new members to join our beta program. Please visit our website to learn more and join us in making personal care truly about you.

Austin Majors

Thank you for... hey.

Sam Parr

Hold on, brother. Keep that up. I'm gonna try it.

Shaan Puri

Go for it.

Sam Parr

There you go! This is pretty cool. When I thought of "microbiome," Sean, what did you immediately think? I thought it was gut-related. Yeah, I thought it was gut and poop. I was like, "Do I gotta poop at a thing and you're gonna give me a thing to help my skin?" But that's... I didn't know that it was related to skin.

Shaan Puri

The microbiome was a thing that's pretty baller.

Sam Parr

How's your skin care routine? You know, the body wash that goes on my armpits also goes on my face. It's not very good, but I'm bought into the idea that it is important. I do want to get better, so this is interesting to me. Do you have any revenue at all?

Nathan Shatz

No revenue. We're currently in development and doing beta testing.

Shaan Puri

Okay, gotcha. And really smooth pitch, by the way. You are a talker; that was really well done. Okay, so let's give some thoughts on this.

Sam Parr

Dude, by the way, his deck, Sean, was great. Those cartoons told the story wonderfully.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, who made that? You made that?

Nathan Shatz

The deck and the story? Yeah, no one made it. That's just my story.

Sam Parr

Well, it made itself. The graphics are cool.

Nathan Shatz

Oh, the deck! Yeah, my co-founder Ron and I worked on it. We also workshopped it with a bunch of other students in the community.

Shaan Puri

Gotcha! Okay, you know one thing I think that would help you is this type of story. I think it would go viral on TikTok. Basically, what you told us, if you were like, "I used to think skincare routine... well, I used to think, you know, I didn't care about my skin. Then I got a flesh-eating bacteria. This is me after my trip to Costa Rica," and you show a picture. You're like, "So here's what I did to get rid of this," and while never looking at any of these skincare products the same again, you knock over a bunch of bottles on a table. Right? If you do something like that, you're gonna get like 2,000,000 views on a TikTok. You can actually include that in this, which is gonna be like, "We know how to tell our story and get out there." That story resonates with people. People are looking for something that's more personalized, that's actually science-based, and not just, you know, a fancy brand. We're gonna use content to our advantage, and that's how we're gonna have much cheaper customer acquisition. The smart brands in the D2C space are basically content-first right now. They know how to tell their story on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and that's where they're getting a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody else who is just doing very basic static ads on Facebook, type of thing.

Nathan Shatz

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we observe that many of our competitors sunk a ton of their initial revenue into advertising. So, we're looking at a different go-to-market strategy. We want to please 50 people in our beta testing. We want to work very closely with a smaller group of people to make sure that our product and our algorithm are really working the way that they're supposed to before we go mass market. But I like the idea of doing short-form content because I know that definitely resonates with the younger audience, which is our target market.

Sam Parr

Who's your competitors? Are there other people doing this?

Nathan Shatz

Well, there's no one that's doing exactly what we're doing. There are skin care companies that do microbiome testing, and there are also personalized skin care companies. The biggest skin microbiome company currently is Parallel Health, and they offer a $200 a month protocol where they do sequencing on your skin microbiome. It's a super high market, high-end product. There's a company that's been successful for 7 years now called Proven Skincare. They were on *Shark Tank* and they do personalized skincare based off of a quiz only. So, we have a quiz and we have microbiome testing, so we're sort of the baby between those two ideas.

Austin Majors

a lot

Sam Parr

Of times with health stuff... health, health stuff, or skin—anything involving your body—that's very controversial. Because there's always a bunch of people who love something, typically, and then there's an equal or greater amount of haters. This doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong; it's just that health is very controversial. What would the haters say about this? Would they say, "Dude, microbiome stuff isn't actually important. If you just use these three things, it's going to do most of the job. You don't need to worry about this other stuff." Like, what are the haters going to say about you?

Nathan Shatz

I’d say the biggest liability is that the skin microbiome field is actually very nascent. Basically, we're testing a hypothesis: we believe that skin care that's precisely tailored to your microbiome is better than the traditional methods out there. I think people would likely continue to hold on to this societal idea that all bacteria is bad or that we need to stay in this sort of sanitized mindset. People really like to feel clean. So, I think that’s the biggest objection to this: we love germs. We want to harness the power of the germs that are on your face, and we believe they hold a lot of potential. So, people might be like, "Oh, it's gross," but you know, it's just science. Science is grossing.

Sam Parr

Well, I think the criticism is that I'm an idiot, but I pay attention to health stuff. I think the criticism is like, you know, that thing will just move the needle by 1%. Whereas if you do these other things, it's mostly gonna get you there and be perfect. Do you know what I mean? You know what I'm saying, Sean?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, 100%. It's like in health stuff, you can listen to Huberman for 92 hours, and suddenly you're Brian Johnson or whatever, trying to take 42 supplements a day. But 80 to 90% of the gains are going to come from, like, you know, good sleep, drinking water, and eating clean whole foods. If you just do those things—and you're probably not already doing them—that'll get you the bulk of it. The rest is really like, you know, edge optimizations. I think you're right, Sam, that a smart skeptic would probably have that thought. But I don't think that's what's going to drive success or failure in this case. One thing you were missing from your pitch is to convince me that people care about hyper-personalization and that that's where the puck is going. What you want in a pitch is for this to feel like an inevitable outcome of what's happening in this space. Whether it's you or somebody else, that's sort of secondary. You really want to convince investors of two things: 1. Inevitably, this is where the puck is going. 2. Inevitably, we are going to be the ones who take advantage and score when that puck gets there. You kind of need to make two cases when you make a pitch. For example, I know that in hair care and beauty products, there's a lot of this already. The trend has gone in this direction where you do quizzes to figure out, "Oh, I have curly hair, and my problem is that it's dry." For that, you're going to get a certain product. What you would want to show is that the companies that came out in the last wave for beauty products that went the personalization route have outperformed and had all these really great exits. But nobody's done it for skin care yet. But they will. Here's what's going to happen in skin care: the same thing that just happened in makeup and hair is going to happen for skin. The same thing that just happened in vitamins is going to happen for skin. That makes it feel sort of inevitable. Oh my God, he's right! The next wave of successful skin care companies is going to use this kind of science-based hyper-personalized approach. I think that was missing from your pitch. That's kind of my feedback for you.

Nathan Shatz

Thank you. That's good. That's very good feedback.

Sam Parr

I thought you did a great job telling the story. I'm still trying to understand... I already asked that question, but like the other answers could have been, "Everyone agrees that this is right." But the question that we're trying to figure out is: can we, or anyone, even figure this out? I wanted to figure out what this all hinges on. Because if you're talking to, like, on a beta, what is this? What are you having to convince the world that needs to happen in order for this to be a massive breakthrough?

Shaan Puri

Let me ask you a very simple question. Do you believe, let's assume it works, that it's going to be a visually different result? Meaning, if I just showed you two pictures: one person who's using your product and one person who's just using off-the-shelf stuff. Honest question: do you think it's going to be where I could just look and go, "Yeah, that's clearly better"? Because if it is, then all your marketing is going to work that way. If it's not, then the science kind of falls apart. In the world of supplements, vitamins, and creams, let's be honest: nobody has a clue if any of this actually works. So then it's all just a branding game. It's all a marketing game. It's all about who can convince the consumer that if you buy this product, you'll be more beautiful and everyone will love you, and things will go well for you in life, right? So I think we're kind of at a crossroads. Unless it's literally visual, where you can see the difference and it's going to be inarguable, then it's just a question of whether you're going to be a great marketer. Why is L'Oréal successful? It's not because we know that their product is scientifically better than anybody else's. It's because they're better marketers. That's the reality of the situation.

Nathan Shatz

Yeah, we certainly recognize that. We definitely want to sort of latch onto the trend towards clean and sustainable beauty, which is why we made a box that you can plant in the ground and it grows flowers. We think it's really like the beauty's in the details here, so I absolutely agree with you. Before and after pictures are one of the best things that we can get. The results of our beta testing are currently looking very promising. But before I start to make claims and put those pictures on the website, I want to do a really thorough analysis of how the products are working and how the algorithm's working to make sure that we have something that is really solid.

Sam Parr

Alright, brother. We appreciate you. Congratulations on this and solid pitch. We gotta go to the next one.

Shaan Puri

Great job! Thank you.

Sam Parr

Is Brother Brother Nuts? Is that who's up next?

Austin Majors

It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name is Austin Majors. I'm the co-founder of Brother Nuts. Here at Brother Nuts, our mission is to kick fake food to the curb and revolutionize healthy snacking with organic sprouted nut and seed snacks. First off, my family found that half of the snacks out there weren't actually healthy, and the other half tasted like garbage. But why did we create this business? Well, our business started back in 2010, actually, when my father was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. He was given seven weeks to live, and through changes in diet and lifestyle, he turned that seven weeks into seven years. One of the biggest issues he and my family had was finding a snack that was as healthy as it was tasty. Our current-day CFO, aka Chief Flavor Officer, aka Mom, being the amazing mom that she is, went to work and created what is now known as the crackled cheesy almonds. My family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were flavorful, but also very crunchy. That's what makes us very different. All of our nuts and seeds are sprouted. So how's it gone over the last seven years? I started this company when I was 13 years old, and my father passed away with my older brother, who was 15. Over the last seven years, we've done over $1,000,000 in sales. We sold over $1,000,000 worth of nuts. We're currently available in 200 retail locations, and the future is very promising. We have a clear path forward over the next four years to take this business to $10,000,000 in sales and become a national brand. How are we going to do that? We're going to do that by doing the hard work that no one else wants to do. I know no one else wants to do it because I speak to these stores, and no one else is doing it. So what is that? First of all, it's expanding and making more money from our current clients, clients like Fresh Thyme, Mountain's Organic Market, and Fresh Market. But it's also about expanding distribution and getting into new grocery stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, and HEB key accounts. How are we going to grow within those stores? We're going to continue shaking hands, doing what I just did for you guys, telling my story, having people try the product, and letting people know that there's something out there like this. Lastly, we're going to continue innovating through our product. Right now, we're developing a clean chocolate almond, and we also have a high-protein variant of our most popular flavors—something that's never been done in this space. Now, on a more grand scale, I mean, there are 62,000 grocery stores, and the nut market is selling $10,000,000,000 this year. I look at the biggest companies out there, and we can absolutely get there. But what's really cool is we are on the up and up—seed oil-free, sprouted, gluten-free, gut-friendly. We check all the boxes. Finally, something that my dad did in 2010 is now mainstream, and we are on the cutting edge of it.

Austin Majors

Over the past year, products labeled "sprouted" grew 34% in their velocities and sales. We are on the up and up! But let's remember why we're doing this. The reason we are able to have this success, why we can land these retailers and get through these gatekeepers, is because every sale we make and every milestone we reach contributes to continuing my father's legacy. Everything we do is to grow his legacy and to create my own along with my brothers. We know that by changing what people snack on every single day, we can lead them to live longer, better, healthier lives with their families. So, if you're ready to join us in kicking fake food to the curb and evolving the way you snack, I'd love to talk to you.

Shaan Puri

Dude, that was great, man! I got goosebumps. What an amazing story! Good for you, dude. I'm really happy to hear about this.

Sam Parr

Listen, I just placed a $50 order. I'm going to try the cheesy ones, the garlic ones, and the spicy basil pumpkin seeds. So let's see what you're about.

Shrikar Lekkala

We'll.

Austin Majors

Throw some extra stuff in.

Shaan Puri

There for you! This is great. So, you're in some stores today. Can you just give us the basic rundown? How many stores are you currently in? Is that one chain or multiple? What's going on?

Austin Majors

Yeah, so it's multiple chains. Our very first store that gave us our shot was Fresh Thyme Market. There are about 70 stores across the Midwest. I mean, the story with that is my brother cold-called the CEO. He got a callback in the lunchroom during his senior year of high school. We sat down with the team, got 3 stores, and proved ourselves in those 3 stores. They then gave us 30. We proved ourselves again, and they gave us 70 stores. They only give you that many and allow you to expand if you're selling well. So after we had that success story, we went out and targeted smaller chains like Mom's Organic Market on the East Coast and The Fresh Market, which we're starting off small with. With that data, we're now going to new stores. We met with Whole Foods, and we got a "yes" from them. We faced some pushback, but we're fighting to get a bigger and better "yes." We have a huge meeting with Sprouts tomorrow, actually.

Sam Parr

Wow! And so, what was the revenue so far?

Austin Majors

Yeah, so since inception, over the last 7 years, we've sold over $1,000,000 worth of nuts. This year alone, we'll do $400,000. Last year, we did $200,000. Next year, with some of the launches that we're planning, we'll probably do closer to $2,000,000.

Shaan Puri

And what do the retailers tell you? So that fresh thyme that you're in... you're sorry, you're in 70 stores with them, or they have 70 stores?

Austin Majors

No, we're in all 70 of their stores. We're in a total of 200 retail stores across the country, from some of those bigger players to some just smaller one-off stores, health food stores, and golf courses.

Shaan Puri

And, like, you know, the way that retail works is they need to see the velocity of how much you're selling on the shelf at their stores for you to get into more stores. So, what data do you have? Is that currently a strength or a weakness? What's going on with the current cycle rate, or whatever they call it, for retail consumption?

Austin Majors

Yeah, so the velocities and the data are the biggest things. Our product is incredibly unique in that we are one of the only ones who offer a product like ours. We have very few competitors; I can name them. So, what we have to do is, of course, first demonstrate a gap on the shelf. "Hey, you do not have any nut-flavored nut options that are organic, sprouted, and contain no seed oils." So first, we have to do that, and then we just share the data. I mean, our velocities—if they were bad, if that was an issue—Fresh Thyme would not have let us go from 3 to 30 to 70 stores. They came to us; we didn't have to approach them on that. We were just killing it so much.

Shaan Puri

Okay, okay, fair enough. I feel like you answered a question that should be answered in numbers with letters, but that's okay. Alright, so here's the problem that I have with this business. I like your name, I like your story, and I really want to try your nuts. However, when I go to your TikTok, I see 50 followers. When you're young, you have a lot of disadvantages. You're not going to have the same level of experience, the same amount of funding and resources, or the supply chain experience that your competitors all have. But you do have a story, and what you should be is amazing at social media. You should be telling your story on social media and getting people excited about this. Take that excitement to the retailers and say, "Look, we're this young, exciting brand that consumers really care about." Consumers are excited about your product, and you don't have an option like that. The nut shelf for you guys is stale; it's just Blue Diamond. It's the same old brands that do the same old thing. They're not on trend, they're not seed oil-free, they're not whatever, right? You have that story, but you need the social side to be kick-ass because social just takes creativity. It doesn't take money. You're part of the generation that should be better at this than whoever the CEO of Blue Diamond is. Their social strategy is obviously going to be pretty boring. So, I think that's where you're dropping the ball. That's what you're going to need to get into retail. I've talked to retailers, and what they care about is that they need to believe you are going to help drive traffic to the store or that customers care about your brand. They want to add young, hot brands to the shelf. That's what you need as your story. So, I think that's what's missing for me right now.

Austin Majors

Absolutely.

Sam Parr

Yeah, who is involved with the family business like this? Do you and your brother own it, or is your mother involved? Who owns the company?

Austin Majors

Yeah, so my brother and I are 50/50 owners. We do have my mom, who is our Chief Flavor Officer. She's in charge of making sure the nuts taste as good as they do. I mean, she's the original person who created these recipes, and we just took them and started selling them.

Sam Parr

Dude, this is awesome! Congratulations! I'm bought in with Sean as well on the story. The story was very good. I saw your about page and I saw the personality. I was like, "Alright, this is definitely going to be something interesting." I'm now a customer and I'm very eager to try it. This is pretty badass!

Shaan Puri

Sam, do you remember the name of that nut brand? He's kind of like on Twitter. He might be a fan agent. Is that it? It's like a peanut butter brand, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, they do many figures a year in revenue.

Shaan Puri

Many figures, so tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Have you looked at these guys, Austin?

Austin Majors

Yes, I'm familiar with them.

Sam Parr

And I think they just got popular on social media. Their shtick is different than yours; theirs is like the opposite of what you're trying to do. But you do have, like, I've invested in a bunch of these seed oil or seed oil-free companies. I think it's to be determined if it's going to be mainstream yet, but it definitely seems like it might be. This is super fascinating. You have a lot of tailwinds to help you out here, for sure.

Shaan Puri

I think you want to include that in your pitch, by the way. An investor doesn't really know how big a brand can be. Your numbers, while I'm not saying that they're bad, are on the small side for an e-commerce company. If you've done $1,000,000 across 7 years, that's not huge. I think you need to paint a picture that this can actually be really big.

Sam Parr

I looked up blue diamonds. By the way, blue diamonds generate about $1,800,000,000 a year in revenue, correct?

Shaan Puri

So, I would show that the nut category is huge. You know, you have Blue Diamond, which does $1,800,000,000 in sales a year. The next one does this, the next one does that. We would use this phrase on MFM that "there's a sea of sameness." You walk down that aisle and it's all old brands. There's not one challenger brand, and all of them have the same problem: they're lacking X, Y, Z. We have fresh packaging. We're a challenger brand. We have a better story. We're hot on social media. So, I think you need that part of the story. I would include others like Nerdy Nuts and show examples of others who have come into this category and are doing very well. You want to paint the picture that you're the next in line. Again, it's that sort of air of inevitability that you want to convey. When you don't have the traction that shows your own trajectory is inevitable, you want to show the inevitability of a category change. Some of the things you talked about, like sprouted products, are growing 34% year over year in these stores. You know, that's the kind of data you want on slides because it feels like every category now has a sprouted product, and the sprouted products are overperforming. Guess what? Nuts don't have a sprouted product. We are that sprouted nut. You want to paint that picture for the investor. Overall, this is really good, and honestly, I actually think of all the businesses we heard today, this is probably the one that could be the biggest.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

But I don't think you're using your strengths. I think if you keep going on the same path you're on, it won't be huge. But you're still young, and you have time to change. If you actually take some of the feedback to do it, I think this could actually be a lot bigger.

Austin Majors

Awesome! Thank you so much, Ed.

Sam Parr

Thank you, man. You're the best! Awesome majors. Thank you very much. Alright, we have the last one from the University of Michigan, right?

Amulya Parmar

Alright, hi Sam, Sean, MFM fam. We are Toor, the AI-powered salesperson for property managers.

Kishan Sripada

Today, only 4% of apartment prospects that ever land on an apartment website actually end up taking the in-person tour. It's no surprise that the in-person tour is the highest converting part of the apartment sales process. I mean, there's nothing like someone giving you a guided experience of something you're about to buy.

Amulya Parmar

But when 96% of the potential prospects that hit your digital storefront never get the chance to experience your tour—the highest converting sales moment in the apartment process—leads get missed.

Kishan Sripada

Yeah, these leads get missed, and these apartments are left with hundreds of thousands of dollars in missed opportunities and unleased vacancies that could have been filled if these prospects had taken a tour.

Amulya Parmar

That is until the apartment installs Tour. Tour helps apartments like Arbor Apartments scale. Mariana, their digital salesperson, now doesn't have enough time to tour every single prospect that visits the property in person, much less all the prospects that visit the property online.

Kishan Sripada

But what if we could recreate Mariana's best in-person tour and replicate that on the website? So that Mariana is on the website for all prospects 24/7.

Amulya Parmar

Our property manager just pastes a link to an apartment website. We scrape the website and generate video scripts that help Mariana with the infrastructure to record the tour. We then combine it all together with the knowledge base into a smart virtual leasing agent once the tour is complete.

Kishan Sripada

Ready? All the company has to do is paste a little piece of code on the website, and now Mariana is on the website 24/7. When a prospect goes on the website and starts to browse, we're actually learning about that prospect through small digital micro-interactions. Mariana can pop out of the right-hand corner of the website at the perfect time and ask them if they'd like to take a tour. Once in the tour, Mariana can teach them about the apartment and even offer to give them a tour of a specific floor plan or a specific amenity that we deem appropriate for them. Mariana can also ask qualifying questions for that prospect, such as, "Would you like to take an...?"

Amulya Parmar

In-person tour or would...

Kishan Sripada

You like to schedule a callback, all while driving engagement and increasing appointments booked.

Amulya Parmar

Now, replicating that in-person tour for these apartments can drive nearly **3x the engagement** and create more qualified leads for the apartment. We know this because we're working with some of the largest property managers in the nation. In the spirit of the podcast, we delivered our first million tours and helped drive over **$30,000,000** worth of leases for the apartments. Additionally, this has helped us reach over **$1,000,000** in revenue.

Kishan Sripada

And that's not all, guys. Do you remember those videos that we recorded with Mariana earlier? Well, now those are one of the biggest assets for the apartments tour. It automatically repurposes those videos to follow up with leads and automatically runs TikTok, Meta, and Google ad campaigns.

Amulya Parmar

Look, Shopify has set the experience with the advent of Shopify. Online shopping for everyday commodities is compelling, visual, and video-first. However, larger purchases, like shopping for an apartment online—otherwise known as leasing—still remain stuck with static photos, manual scheduling, and follow-ups. But that ends today with Tour. That's right! This shopping online for apartments is nearly **twice** as large as all other forms of e-commerce combined.

Kishan Sripada

That's right, guys. This is a **$2.5 trillion** industry in which property managers rely on their tours to close over **80%** of their sales. We're a passionate, driven team who has designed and delivered some of the best experiences at the best companies in the world, including **Growth at Ramp** and **Google Shopping**.

Amulya Parmar

We started on campus to solve our own problems in our shopping journey. We got into Y Combinator (YC) and are just getting started with solving it for 1,000,000 or more with Toor, the AI salesperson for property management.

Shaan Puri

Alright, alright, alright.

Sam Parr

That's pretty great! So, you've raised money already, or what?

Amulya Parmar

Yeah, we've raised about **$350,000 to $400,000** so far, but largely been bootstrapped. We've had many interesting moments throughout the journey. However, we've been really focused on getting the product experience as good for our customers as possible.

Sam Parr

Can I tell you? I used to work in this industry a long time ago. Can I share the three reasons why I think this could fail? You could tell me how I'm wrong. The first reason is that there is this thing called Matterport that has existed for a long time. I know Airbnb tested it on their website. I used to be an Airbnb owner, and they had these Matterport models that created realistic representations of what your apartment looked like.

Shaan Puri

Basically, a 3D virtual tour.

Sam Parr

Yes, similar to this, they found that it decreased conversion. The main thing being is that a lot of apartments for rent are not great. It's like, "Dude, I just need to get someone in the door." Once they're in the door, I can do some salesmanship to sell them. But online, it looks pretty bad in a three-dimensional way. The other point is that right now, I don't know if apartments need to be filled at the moment. It seems like a lot of these folks are saying, "Dude, I'm killing it right now. My vacancy is quite low. Why should I spend money or do this work?" The last point is that a lot of apartments that you need, I would imagine, to do sales on are kind of not great. I don't want someone to see them online; I need them to see them in real life so I can sell them on it. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't want a user video of a 1994 Honda Civic. But if I get you here and you're like, "Dude, I got $1,000," I'm like, "This shit box is for you," and I don't need a video for that. You know what I mean? So, can you refute some of those points?

Amulya Parmar

Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. Matterport is one of our comps. You know, they're doing $540,000,000 per year. They are a public company. But the big thing that they do that's different, or that we do that's different, is where...

Sam Parr

You're telling me that Matterport does $500,000,000 in revenue?

Amulya Parmar

Yes, yes. Now, the big thing that is to put it in perspective: the big thing that we do that's different is two things. The first thing is we are fundamentally an active experience that's partnered with the apartment to funnel someone down the whole sales funnel. This starts from the first moment they meet them to following up on email and targeting. This allows us to hit a much larger market than Matterport even does today. The other thing that I think you talked about is the nature of most of these apartments, which are fundamentally not necessarily like... maybe old, drab experiences. I think the first thing is, look, things change. Apartments are becoming one of the largest purchases we make. It is one of the largest purchases we make, and these are becoming more commoditized. They're becoming more amenitized. I mean, the whole future is going into the experience economy, and I think the experience is going to be a very important part of how our Gen Z or even Millennials shop. We see that because a lot of our tours—we've delivered over more tours, many of them are international or out of state. These are important decisions that people are on the edge of, which different shops or different apartments they might want to work with. Now, for example, one apartment might want to have a virtual leasing advantage compared to others, and that's why we help fundamentally become part of that virtual leasing advantage. The last element, I know Christian, you would want to say something, is just that we're also augmenting the sales force. Most of these businesses have a fundamentally high churn; there are people leaving the building all the time. If we can help augment their sales team, we have a much larger staying power with the actual property—not just a one-off virtual tour. One thing I'd like...

Kishan Sripada

To add, Matterport's essential goal is to communicate the physical establishment to the customer. Obviously, we do that, but what we're trying to do is augment the website to better communicate that, as well as segment leads. This way, they know how to allocate resources best to the highest intent leads. That's another area where they save money by better allocating resources and the tour.

Shaan Puri

The tour that you give... Sorry, I might have missed this during the thing. Or, like, I don't know, maybe you have a demo. Is it just a girl talking and photos, or is it like a walking tour that you generate? Do you go film it first? Like, what is the actual thing? Okay, here's the video.

Kishan Sripada

Yeah, we go and film it.

Amulya Parmar

So, we have two elements. We either have a video production network that can help film it, or we're building more and more scripts that you can easily start filming from your phone. The iPhone 16 rivals Sony cameras, and then once we have...

Shaan Puri

Gotcha. So, this is not AI-generated. This is like a video you guys make.

Amulya Parmar

Yes, and then we take the knowledge base as well as that media and supply it throughout the whole sales process.

Sam Parr

Got it.

Shaan Puri

Okay, cool. So you guys film a video when an apartment starts to work with you. Then you have the AI wrapper around it where it's chat, Q&A, scheduling appointments, and following up with targeted ads. It's things like that. That's what you guys do after that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. And the $450K of ARR that you have right now, that's from how many customers?

Amulya Parmar

That's from a 130 property managers, usually around the price of $300. Some are paying $250, while others are paying more.

Shaan Puri

And how'd you get the 100, whatever, property managers?

Amulya Parmar

So, the cool thing is we have a **land and expand** motion. Once we're inside a property manager, usually they manage many properties, like large apartment buildings. What we do is demonstrate our results, and most of our other property management companies start expanding within the property managers. So, the problem is that one property manager inside a company refers us to some of her additional properties in her portfolio or to some of the other regional property managers.

Shaan Puri

So, how will you go from a hundred something properties today to, you know, a thousand or ten thousand in the next year? What are you going to do?

Kishan Sripada

So, one of the big things we've been trying recently is **automatically generating tours**. This allows us to demonstrate value to apartments before we even have to go in person. Obviously, that's a large cost, like videotaping the actual apartment. So, we can immediately just scrape the website, pull some images, and use Flux to kind of turn the images into somewhat of a mock video. We can also pull some information from their website and generate a tour that can act to segment leads on the website. Then, they can see the value of it. For example, if a tour lead comes in, this is a **high intent lead**. Let's follow up on it. From there, if they're pleased by the value, then we can actually go out and record that video making the tour.

Shaan Puri

Even better! Okay, so you're going to go and autogenerate these videos as a prototype, as a sample. Then, you're going to cold email them and say, "Hey, we could do this for you guys."

Kishan Sripada

Cold email referral. Yep.

Shaan Puri

Okay, and then what do you guys run an A/B test? Do you show on any of your apartment websites if you have us installed versus if you don't have us installed? What's the difference in revenue?

Amulya Parmar

Yeah, absolutely. So, what we noticed is that when it comes to the actual properties, the amount of value we generate for the properties usually results in an additional $300,000 to $500,000 in leases. Now, specifically, we do three things really importantly—at least, these are the fundamental items. The first thing is we deliver four times the number of tours. Prospects who are on the website get three times the engagement. Also, the leads that we end up capturing are obviously going to be more qualified, right? So, those leases convert at a higher rate. Okay, gotcha.

Shaan Puri

That's pretty convincing. If you told me, "Hey, however many tours you're giving per week right now, I could 4x that if you add this thing to your website," that's a pretty compelling proposition, don't you think, Sam?

Sam Parr

Yes, I still think that there are a bunch of other questions related to the things that I said, but that is compelling. I just think I'm scarred from this industry of selling to these companies and how hard it is. Have you guys noticed how old school some of your customers are? The two customers that we've had in this presentation or in this section have been campuses or colleges and apartment buildings. I'm like, "Oh my God, those are both really, really hard." Have you guys noticed that when you're selling to these apartment companies, they're a pain in the ass to work with?

Amulya Parmar

It definitely is an old guard. You know, things change ever so often, but I think they're realizing how important it is, particularly when they're looking at e-commerce and how things are evolving. It's important for them to be extremely competitively advantaged. The nature of competition has really been trying to somewhat push the...

Sam Parr

They're just slow. They're really slow.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I do think, though, again, back to that idea of making this feel inevitable. I think there is a clear line you could draw where you say, "Look, if you were an apartment building, back, you know, 15 years ago, you might have been able to get away without having a website." But about 15 years ago, you now had to have a website. You had to be findable on Google; that became mandatory table stakes. Then, after that, you had to have photos. If you didn't have photos, you were not even competitive. You were nonviable. Then you had to have videos. After that, you had to have a booking system where somebody could schedule a tour without having to call you. That became table stakes. Now, 98% of apartment sites all have a way to book a tour online. Well, guess what the next one is? The next one is an AI agent that's helping you book those appointments by either answering questions, upselling you, or putting together a higher quality pitch to get in front of you. That's the next wave of this. All websites had to go through this, and when the tech made it possible, it just became too competitive. If you didn't have it, you were left in the dust. That's what's going to happen in this space. All websites are now going to have an AI agent that helps them sell. Agreed?

Amulya Parmar

Yep, I love that, Sean.

Sam Parr

And you guys have done great with your matching zip-ups that are nicely merchandised. Congratulations! That's step one to being a startup, so you've nailed that one. You've also nailed the revenue thing too, so congratulations to you guys.

Shaan Puri

The $1,000,000 tours are also pretty good, and $30,000,000 of leases came through your appointments. That's also significant.

Sam Parr

That's okay as well.

Shaan Puri

But really, the jackets are fantastic. Alright, thank you guys.

Sam Parr

You guys are badass.

Shaan Puri

Well done! Yes, we kind of grade them on a curve. It's like, if you're already in Y Combinator (YC) and you already have, you know, a million tours done, then yeah.

Sam Parr

I kinda feel like these are unfair, to be honest. I feel like if you are in YC or taking a gap year in San Francisco...

Shaan Puri

No, well, those... I don't know. The gap year, that's fine. That's like, yeah.

Sam Parr

Do you even go to college if you're in Y Combinator?

Shaan Puri

Like, that's what they're saying. Those guys put up a team slide and it was like, "I've experienced at Google, at Yelp, at like all these companies." Like, dude, I thought you were supposed to be like 19 years old. What's going on? Are these even college kids? I mean, what is happening? Alright, I think we have one more left. The final pitch is coming in from Illinois. Who do we got?

Advay Gupta

Hello, my name is Advai Gupta. I'm the CEO and founder of Pathlight. It's really nice to meet you guys today.

Sam Parr

What's up, brother?

Shaan Puri

Nice to meet you too, man.

Advay Gupta

Alright, until a month ago, we were working on a no-code engine that helped businesses automate their daily tasks with AI. It was going really well. We were working with extremely large enterprises, like the Big Four, and had more than $1,000,000 in VC money to accelerate our growth. However, the more we worked with enterprises, the more we realized that our most valuable automations for them ended up being email-related. They wanted help managing their cluttered inboxes. A fun story our lead investor once told us was that she went for a week-long break and had 8,000 unread emails. A business owner we were working with told us his employees were spending more time on emails alone than on the jobs they were actually hired to do. These stories are not one-offs. According to McKinsey, the average employee processes more than 600 emails per week, wasting 13 hours and thousands of business dollars. Despite it being an essential part of our lives, email has become a burden, and we find it hard to keep track of even the most important emails in our inbox, often losing them. Yet, according to industry research, 86% of business professionals still prefer using emails for some reason. So clearly, we can't get rid of emails. What can we do? To solve this exact problem, we are currently building a virtual executive assistant or secretary that handles your emails for you. What if, just like a real secretary, it could learn from you and respond to emails on your behalf? What if it could tell you what the most important emails in your inbox are every single morning? And what if it could automatically respond to emails that you don't care about? Well, you can have that secretary because our mobile app does all of that, and we are launching on the App Store next week. No, we're not joking. We have been actively working with a Big Four customer, netting us six figures in annual revenue, and are starting a pilot with the largest children's enrichment franchise in the world next week. Not only that, but we have also been working with five global financial institutions and completed an oversubscribed seven-figure raise. We were also fortunate enough to win first place in one of the Midwest's largest startup pitch competitions. My name is Advai, and together with my co-founder Mark, we collectively bring more than a decade of experience in AI and building companies. My entire teenage years have been spent building and scaling numerous online security businesses to millions of users, and Mark has tons of AI research and startup experience under his belt. We're now working together to change the way you interact with email today. So join us in helping you reclaim the biggest part of your daily workday. Thank you.

Sam Parr

So hold on. The first five words of your pitch were pretty funny. You said, "Until last month, we were doing this thing." Let me answer some questions. But then you have a six-figure enterprise contract and you've raised $1,000,000. I don't understand. Can you briefly tell me the...

Shaan Puri

They had a product. They're pivoting. They raised money and had a customer, but it wasn't the right thing, so they're pivoting.

Sam Parr

Yeah, is that right?

Advay Gupta

Is that yes? For sure, I can answer that question. So, essentially, we have... it's the same business. We worked on the generative AI engine that we started just this February. All the contracts that we have are now converting to the email client. Essentially, we were using our technology to develop email automations for all these businesses, and we had raised money on that. But now, we simply changed the user interface from a workflow builder that looked kind of like Zapier, etc., to more of an assistant email client interface. We found that it works better with enterprise customers.

Sam Parr

Got it. Alright, because your website doesn't tell that story. But then, if you click, you have this folder up top that says "New!" Our email client, which is pretty cool, tells that story a little bit better.

Shaan Puri

Can I look at a PSA about the fact that our team has decades of experience?

Sam Parr

Oh my gosh, I didn't want to get on that, but yeah.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I guess I gotta say, because a couple of the pitches have had that. I don't think you should do that. It seems, you know, what you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor that, "Wait a minute, I think this is even bigger than what they're saying." So there's this subtle art where you're desperately trying to convince them that this is gonna be big and awesome and it's gonna work, but you cannot appear to be overselling it. You have to feel like you're underselling it, and then they feel like they're finding some diamond in the rough. So, you know, how old are you? I'm 20. You're 20, right? So to be like, "We have a combined 12 years of experience," I think that's a bit of a tell. What you would be better off saying is, "I started coding when I was 8. By the time I was 12, I had already built blah blah blah. When I was 14, I hacked into my school's system and changed my grades. Now I've figured out, you know, for the last few years, I've really been obsessed and focused on AI." That's a more believable and exciting story for me. It's like, "Oh, this is one of those boy geniuses," right? Like, "Oh, you're one of those hacker types that started early." I can pattern match and say, "Yeah, a lot of the best performing founders I know have that same story." That story works better versus when you tell me, "Me and my co-founder, who are 18 years old, we've got decades of experience." It's like, "No, you don't." Right? Okay, and now what else can't I believe out of this? Even if it's technically true, the whole cumulative years of experience of your team is not a real metric that most people put in their pitch deck. So I would...

Advay Gupta

Get rid of.

Shaan Puri

That’s right, thank you. Having said that, alright, that’s a public service announcement. I do have a question. It seems like you’ve done a great job of selling to people who are really hard to sell to. So, how did you go about getting an enterprise contract from a big four consulting company worth over $100,000? I’m curious to hear what you did there. What’s the short story?

Advay Gupta

Yeah, very good question. So, the short story is that I was working as a consultant on campus as part of a university organization. Thanks to my opportunity there, I was able to connect with a very high-level business executive within a big four enterprise through my mentor, who happened to also be the director of the consulting organization. So, long story short, it was very network-driven. They were looking for a solution to fit certain problems that they had within the enterprise, and what I was building as a personal project happened to solve those exact problems. So, once I had that, we essentially made it a company.

Sam Parr

And what did they say when you were pivoting? I mean, did you pivot because of them?

Advay Gupta

They are partly the reason we pivoted, but it was also when we started engaging with more and more prospects. Our initial generative AI workflow engine was essentially designed to take AI and plug it into any legacy systems to automate complex day-to-day tasks. For example, if you're a VC and you receive a lot of pitch decks every day via email, we could create an automation for you. This would allow you to automatically process those pitch decks, analyze them against your investment thesis, portfolio companies, etc. Then, you could also send out replies saying, "Hey, we love this! We would love to have a meeting," or "No, for the following reasons..."

Sam Parr

And what you're describing is that... Sorry, I want you to finish. But is what you're describing similar to Lindy.ai?

Advay Gupta

Yes, so Linde Dotai was definitely a competitor of ours in that space. However, as I was saying earlier, the more we engaged with customers and prospects, we found that our product was explicitly being used for email automations. A big problem with products like our previous one and Linde AI is that the barrier to entry for a lot of non-technical users is quite high. You have to almost be a developer to actually use even these no-code tools. That is why we decided to change the interface into a much easier to understand virtual assistant or secretary.

Shaan Puri

Gotcha. I think the challenge with this business is that you seem really smart, and I believe whatever you work on will be interesting. However, the challenge here is that you're going into the most competitive space. I do feel, undoubtedly, that email inboxes are going to start to have AI in them. The AI is going to help you process, categorize, and summarize your emails in a way that also assists you with responses. The problem is, do I really believe that you are going to be able to get people off of Outlook, off of Gmail, and onto your service? In addition, they're also going to be implementing AI, right? Google is definitely going to be adding AI into this, and so is Superhuman, and so is Microsoft. They basically own OpenAI. I think this is going to be just an absolute bloodbath category. From an investment point of view, that would be my problem with this. Even if I like you and even if I agree with the idea, it's kind of that second inevitability I talked about. One is, where's the puck going? Yes, of course, it's going this way. The second is, are you going to be the team who captures that opportunity? It just seems highly unlikely that you would be the team that captures that opportunity, given that people don't want to switch email clients and that all of the email clients are already aware of this capability and are highly incentivized to add AI to it.

Sam Parr

How did you say how much you've raised so far? You said $1,000,000.

Advay Gupta

Yes, we have raised a little more than $1,000,000.

Sam Parr

Are you still in school, or are you even living in San Francisco?

Advay Gupta

Currently, we're on a gap semester. I'm on a gap semester, and everyone else, including Mark, is also on a gap semester. He has one class left, but everyone else is full-time. We have four people.

Sam Parr

Dude, I think like that first company, "Meet Your Class." It's that middle funnel thing that's the issue. All these kids, all these smart kids, are bailing on university. That's amazing that you...

Shaan Puri

Guys are.

Sam Parr

All just like picking gaps.

Shaan Puri

So, well, I just told you that you're probably going to fail. Tell me why I'm wrong and I should "kick rocks."

Advay Gupta

Yeah, for sure. So, businesses switching to our email client is definitely a very big hurdle that we are also trying to navigate. What we found is that by verticalizing in a lot of businesses with our own kind of information management secretary, many businesses prefer us over their standard email clients like Gmail and Outlook. Currently, as I said, we're starting a pilot with the largest children's enrichment franchise. They entirely run over Gmail, but they're still willing to switch to us simply because some of the features we provide are something Gmail and Outlook just can never do. This is because they have to cater to large groups of audiences and cannot fit the specific niches of certain requirements that many customers have.

Shaan Puri

Okay, alright, fair enough. Sam, what else you got before we wrap up?

Sam Parr

I don't think I have much. I think that it's so early; it's hard to ask questions because I'm on your website, and it looks like it's very much in beta. So, it's hard for me to fully understand. I think, Sean, you were asking about replacing Gmail. According to the website, it's an integration; it's not replacing Gmail. It's hard to fully understand because you're so new. Do you...?

Austin Majors

Agree, Sean.

Shaan Puri

Do you just keep using Gmail and this is overlaid, or is this a new client you download and you're supposed to go here instead of Gmail.com?

Advay Gupta

Yes, so essentially you just log in with your Gmail. One way we're beating that barrier to adoption is by not saying that you need a new TLD and a new domain. You simply log in with your Gmail, we get all your emails, and then you start using our interface rather than Gmail's.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's like **Superhuman**, right? So, you keep your email address, but fundamentally, you're not supposed to go to Gmail every day. You're supposed to go to **Superhuman** and open up your email and use that for all your emails.

Advay Gupta

Yes, that is correct.

Shaan Puri

Alright, good pitch! Thank you, and best of luck. I think this is a huge idea. I believe it's going to be super competitive, and if you can pull it off, that would be amazing. This is a multibillion-dollar win if you can actually do it. That's the good news.

Advay Gupta

Thank you.

Shaan Puri

Alright.

Sam Parr

Round of applause! Thanks, brother.

Shaan Puri

Alright, to wrap it up, can we just name... I think, do you guys want to do the winning school that we thought brought the heat? Secondly, our favorite pitch—the best pitch, meaning the one we would be most likely to put our money into. Then, I think we should maybe do an audience choice as well, which is to let the crowd react and see which one they think is best. What do you think, Sam?

Sam Parr

Alright, so let's start with school. I have a winner.

Shaan Puri

In my recap, real quick: Michigan did meet your class, which was helping the university with the summer melt. The middle final for the university was the personalized skincare microbiome stuff and tours, which included the AI apartment tours. Then, UIUC was basically about Metafrazzo, which is the dubbing company, Brothers Nuts, which is the sprouted nuts company, and Pathlet, that one we just heard about, the AI email client. So those are the schools. Sam, what's your pick?

Sam Parr

Illinois all the way! I think that Michigan is an incredibly impressive school. But I thought it was incredibly impressive that the Metafrazzo guy was at Founders Inc. or what's it called... the I.

Shaan Puri

Think they.

Sam Parr

The way this young guy, who just went, had already raised a little bit of money and was taking a gap year. His brother's business is already doing like $400,000 a year in revenue. I just thought it was more impressive that a Midwestern school has people who are going to the coast. I think that's a really good thing. Do you agree or no?

Shaan Puri

I would disagree. I would have gone with Michigan. I think that, traction-wise, Tour had the most traction, right? Half a million dollars in ARR and 1,000,000 tours served. I think Tour, and they're in NYC, is doing the best. I think Meet Your Class has a real business. I think he stumbled into a cool business where half a million people have used this thing, and now he found a business model that might actually work. So, I thought that Michigan had the better businesses overall.

Sam Parr

Alright, good. They each could have voted, but we disagree.

Shaan Puri

And it's a tie! Alright, so let's do our favorite business out of these. If you were going to invest your money into one of these, Sam, which one would you have invested your money into?

Sam Parr

The business that I don't want to invest in, but I wish I owned, and I think the people who own this one might get the richest the fastest of all these businesses, is Brother Nuts. I think Austin Major, Brother Nuts... I don't think they should raise money. I don't want to invest in them, but I would love to own that company. I think it could be a family business that makes hundreds of millions, or even more, throughout the next handful of decades.

Shaan Puri

Okay, I like it.

Sam Parr

My head tells me.

Shaan Puri

My head tells me it's either "meet your class" or "tour," but my heart is with Brothers Nuts. I'm going to go with Brothers Nuts as well. I think they are one step away from actually making this a real, legitimate business that you're going to see on the shelves in every grocery store. I think they're not far away from doing that. In fact, I would actually invest in this business because I believe you could make it happen. It's not theoretical here.

Sam Parr

I think that most of the companies had an AI element, and I applaud that. I think that's where the puck's going. But it's hard to stick out, man. There's just so much going on.

Shaan Puri

The one with an almond element.

Sam Parr

Yeah, an almond element... I don't know, man. Right? Doesn't it seem... it kind of seems like it's TBD as to who's going to be the winners? It seems really hard to pick a winner at the moment.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's sort of a trade-off of more competition, but maybe more upside.

Austin Majors

Well, you...

Sam Parr

You said it well. You said, "This is definitely what's gonna happen, but it's gonna be a bloodbath."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and... yeah, and...

Sam Parr

That's how I feel. Alright.

Shaan Puri

So now, the crowd's choice. Can you guys unmute? I'm going to say the name of the business, and the crowd reaction is going to dictate who wins the audience choice. Let's see if this works out. This might be crazy with the audio situation here. Our producer is freaking out. Oh yeah, turn the laptops. I want to see the crowd actually. Okay, so we got the crowd. Yeah, alright. We're going to start off from Michigan: meet your class. Okay, from UIUC: Metaproza. Alright, he might just be closer to the mic or something. We'll give him credit for that. Alright, from Michigan, we have the skin microbiome company, Milieu.

Sam Parr

Hey, right. VMC is actually putting his mouth next to the knife. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Alright, we're going to go from UIUC. We have Pathlet... lukewarm. I'm going to call it what it was. From Michigan, we have Tour. Alright, so from Michigan, it looks like Milieu was the loudest. And now from UIUC, the last one we have is Brothers Nuts.

Jonah Liss

So, Sean, I'm...

Sam Parr

I think I know who won that one. I think it was the Metafrazzo.

Shaan Puri

Metafrazzo, I think, had it. I think they had a shot of your card.

Sam Parr

We miss you, Beau. We miss you.

Shaan Puri

Alright, alright, okay. Wonderful, guys! Great job, everybody. This is really impressive. You guys are way ahead of where I was in college. I think, Sam, it's probably the same for you. You guys are ahead of the curve. I hope our feedback is helpful.

Sam Parr

Even the people we criticize, like if we ask hard questions or give you a hard time, every one of the six people who presented the six companies, you're going to be in the 1% of the 1%. You already are in the 1% of the 1%, and what you're doing is badass.

Shaan Puri

By being active, you're badass, and it's a sign of respect. If we are willing to keep it real with you, that's because we actually think that you can win. If we just wanted to be nice and say, "Oh, congrats on the participation! I'm so happy for you," that wouldn't have been helpful to you. It also wouldn't be a sign of respect. We respect all of you for doing this. I just want to say that I would not have become an entrepreneur had I not had a class like this, where a speaker came in and just got me hyped about the idea of doing a startup. I did not know what to do. My first idea was terrible, and my execution was absolutely horrendous, but it got me on that path. It just seemed like more fun. So, if you're listening to this or you're at one of these schools right now, if it seems like something that you would want to do and it seems like the lifestyle, go for it! Don't let that hold you back. This could be a tipping point.

Shaan Puri

Moment for you, just like it was for me.

Sam Parr

And it's the... you are currently in the phase of life where it will never get easier to do these things than where you are right now. You have like a 4-year window where it's like you have nothing really big to worry about except for this. Also, I think it's Austin and Tommy. Give these guys a shout out! You guys are the man. It's really hard to organize this type of stuff, and I think that getting this type of energy in one room, like you guys have done, it's contagious. Sam, are...

Shaan Puri

You thinking what I'm thinking?

Sam Parr

I don't know what you're thinking. Words for you.

Shaan Puri

I got two words for you: **nationwide**. We're taking the Power Hour nationwide. And then the second two words for you: **pizza party**, sponsored by MFM. I think we should give these guys some money, let them host some events, and have some fun. So, we will connect with you, Tommy, after this, and we'll give you guys some cash so that we can encourage you to throw more events and get more people excited about this. I like that it's underground. I like that it's off the books. I like that this is not the entrepreneurship club of the school. This is just the people who actually care about building stuff, want to do cool things, and want to get off the conventional career track. I’m for that.

Sam Parr

Thank you all for doing this. We appreciate you! Have a wonderful Wednesday. If you're listening on MFM, you gotta go and give all these guys a little bit of love on their websites and check out the products. Alright, thank you guys. That's it, that's the pod.