Welcome to the TechCrunch Live Podcast. This week, we hear from Alex Bouaziz, CEO of Deel, and Anish Acharya, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) in this TechCrunch Live episode. This show is a little different, and it’s Alex’s fault. He doesn’t have a pitch deck, and TCL generally shows early pitch decks and pulls out insights. But Alex raised $629m without a pitch deck. In this episode, learn the strategies he used to pitch without a deck, and hear about the deck A16z used to pitch itself to Deel.
Welcome to the TechCrunch Live Podcast. This week, we hear from Alex Bouaziz, CEO of Deel, and Anish Acharya, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) in this TechCrunch Live episode. This show is a little different, and it’s Alex’s fault. He doesn’t have a pitch deck, and TCL generally shows early pitch decks and pulls out insights. But Alex raised $629m without a pitch deck. In this episode, learn the strategies he used to pitch without a deck, and hear about the deck A16z used to pitch itself to Deel.
Want to pitch your company? Join us on Hopin for the next TechCrunch Live on Wednesday, April 27.
Matt Burns 0:00
how they can help build your future. Everyone, that's Matt burns, welcome to TechCrunch live where we help founders build better venture backed businesses. Today's show is a little different. And it's totally not my fault. It's Alex Boise's. He's the CEO of deal. And he's one of our guests today. And generally, we have our guests bring pitch decks, but he doesn't have one, you see, he raised over $600 million for his company dealing just four years and didn't use a pitch deck. So that's kind of interesting. I'm excited to have him on to talk about him. Joining him is a nice exterior, and partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who lead deal Series A, and we want to know what makes deals so special that they can raise all this money without using a pitch deck. Two quick things, and then we'll get into it. Number one, TechCrunch has other shows, including equity, which won a Webby last year. Now, this year, our other show found is up for a webinar, it'll mean the world to me if you can jump over there and give them a vote. And if you have not listened to Darrell and Jordan unfound, please do there's so much better than I am. The Lastly, use the instructions and hop in to apply for today's pitch practice. We're still looking for three companies to pitch to Alex and the niche. And we're gonna do feedback this time. So you have two minutes to pitch and then they're gonna give you four minutes of feedback. It's it's fantastic. But you have to be in happen to apply. So with that, Alex, nice, thanks for being here.
Alex Boise 1:26
Thanks, Matt. Matt, for everyone applying to pitch Matt has promised us it will not be like split games, high stakes, but not that high stakes.
Matt Burns 1:35
Exactly. Not nearly as high stakes. I want to make that clear. It's a whole lot lower. So don't believe what he's saying.
Anish Acharya 1:42
Well, thank you for having us. Yeah, well, Alex,
Matt Burns 1:44
I need to start with you. Let's give a timeline of deals, founding and fundraising. When was the company founded?
Anish Acharya 1:51
Yeah. So I'm first super excited to be able to finish is in quite the story at Dell. So it's gonna be a very fun chat. So when was Dell started, so we we started in early 2019. We went through Y Combinator, and we were, you know, that company that devoted five days before Demo Day. So definitely didn't find our fit for quite a bit. But we officially launched our product in April 2019, and raised our seed round at the time. And the different time, you know, the different timelines I think are interesting are we raised our Series A in May 2020. Raised on the back of that our series B in September 2020, our Series C in April 2021. And recently our series D in October 2021. So that was about 600 mil across, I think less than 18 months. So it was a bit of a ride. I'm thinking of taking a break from fundraising for a little bit.
Alex Boise 2:47
Are you Alex? I can never tell?
Matt Burns 2:50
Well, I guess that's my question. Alex, when are you filing your S one?
Anish Acharya 2:55
Well, I think we've got time, we actually just announced that we reached 100 million they are and thank you guys actually for covering it because we didn't plan it as new. And yeah, I mean, we're very excited about the future and where we're going. But I think it's a little early as my board member he's here.
Matt Burns 3:12
Of course, you know, we covered these when when startups hit 100 million annual recurring revenue, right? Because it's an important signal that now by pretty much any definition of the word, you're no longer startup and you can go to public markets, do you still need capital to scale,
Anish Acharya 3:27
we're definitely a startup. And we still have a lot to do with only in the company is only I think three years old now been in market for what two years, like, we've got so much to do so much to build, we're definitely a startup and there's still a lot of upside a lot to build. And, you know, I definitely wouldn't consider it anything else in that.
Matt Burns 3:46
Why do you consider yourself a startup? Like what is it specifically?
Anish Acharya 3:51
Um, it's a different thing is just, first of all, we're growing really fast. That means organizational changes are happening really fast. You know, the type of people we need and how the company evolves. It's just very, very high pace. I mean, I'm quite biased. And you know, maybe you can get the perspective Phoenician. But I think we still ship at the cadence that a five person people team, I think, and that's the mindset, right. It's always the building always been focused on customers and not losing yourself into into the corporate part of building a company. Although it is very important to build the right infrastructure and to make sure that everything is aligned, having the mindset of we're nowhere near where we need to be is what at least that's what to me is the most important things for startups.
Alex Boise 4:33
Yeah. I totally agree with Alex. I think it's one of the most remarkable parts about deal is just the momentum like startups have gravity as they scale and so far DL has defied gravity. It's been amazing to watch Triller
Anish Acharya 4:47
Let's keep it that way.
Matt Burns 4:50
Know a nice you led the series a right and did you foresee at the time how quickly deal would grow or and did you see at the time that they're going to eventually go public
Alex Boise 4:59
or I completely predicted it. Of course not. No, look, I think it's hard to meet Alex and not get the feeling of inevitability. And I think that's how a lot of the best founders are. There's just this feeling of momentum, and they're in a hurry, Alex is always in a hurry, and it's going to happen. And the feeling is it's going to happen, whether I'm a part of it or not, and it's just an x. And that's exactly the kind of feeling that you want to feel as an investor. And, you know, that's how it felt two years ago, and that's how it certainly feels today.
Matt Burns 5:28
Yeah, I'm curious about that first meeting, who was it a pitch to Andreessen, Alex, or, or did Andreessen reach out to you?
Anish Acharya 5:36
Um, so I think initially, it was an investor introductions, we actually met in person, he's the only person I met in person out of all my fundraising rounds, which I met later on. Because we all have our rounds remotely, which was always quite funny. I mean, very fitting for the narrative of deal. But we I think we had a short meeting, right, like we grab coffee. And it was an introduction from Ryan, from product over time. Right, Ryan Hoover. Great. And I think you can you pay me back a couple months later, right? Because that coffee, I think that was the the flow.
Alex Boise 6:12
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think more than anything else, we didn't talk that much about the business, we talked a bit about the product, it was that feeling that I remember that feeling of like, this is a person that's going to do something and you know, we've fortuitously reconnected.
Matt Burns 6:25
Yeah, it's open to dive into that a little more, what type of flags do you look for, or signs and early pictures that you know that the startup is going to going to explode? In a good way?
Alex Boise 6:36
Well, I look, I think founder mindset, you know, tends to not change. So I hate to keep coming back to the same thing, but you know, output per unit of founder time. And the only way to know that I mean, one is of course, you have some intuition about it. But it's also just to get to know people over time. That's why, you know, there's an old saying that by the time you need trust, it's too late to build it. So having an opportunity to get to know people outside of the context of look, this is going down in the next week, is really important. And that's what we have the chance to do with Alex and Sure.
Matt Burns 7:07
Yeah, well, Alex, let's talk about your pitch. Why, why no pitch deck?
Anish Acharya 7:11
Um, well, all the other rounds that we raised in general, we had to put something very small together for the GP meeting and a16z. But most of my talks with, with an ish, where we were indexing and all the other rounds that we raised, we never had a deck because I think one of the thing that's super important for us, at least it always worked for us. And I don't know if you know that. And by the way, we've burned capital. So we had raised at our seed round $4.2 million. And I think we came into our Series A in March, and we had like $3.8 million left in the bank. And that just gave us a lot of momentum, right? Like you're in a place where you're building your clinic growing. And that was actually I want to say pre pandemic, even that you did that deal, right, pre COVID. And, you know, we just knew we were in the right place, and we just had to keep building and we weren't in a rush to take any investment. Right. Maybe I had some will talk about the terms of the deals, but he actually gave us the terms we wanted, because we have the rush of actually taking any more money because we were not burning. So we kind of made it an internal concept where we like to burn, like around before. So I you know, we as a seed company with a seed investment, we were burning like a preset company, I believe, actually, that still happens today, right? As a series D company, I believe we're burning like a Series C Company. And that just keeps us in check and just puts us in a much better momentum in terms of when it becomes you know, when is the right time to fundraise. And if you have like the good momentum, you have a lot of money in the bank, then people want to invest, right? And my approach to investment is never hey, I need that money to get there. It's more Hey, you want to buy part of our company, you want to be part of the adventure and I this is the price this is how it's going to work. And I want to remain focus. I don't want to be drafting this pitch decks.
Alex Boise 8:49
Yeah, that's right. I remember it being very opportunistic. I mean, if I remember if you remember the Sox, but I put a deck together to pitch you. And I think that my deck to pitch you on why we were the right firm and I was the right partner was longer than the deck you put together to pitch us. And that just sort of tells you like we were really excited. Alex definitely had the feeling of momentum and it was opportunistic for you. I don't think you had to raise by any means.
Matt Burns 9:13
Tell me more about that duck. How often do you do that niche?
Alex Boise 9:17
Well, I can't reveal all my secrets here, man.
Matt Burns 9:19
No, you can you just talk?
Alex Boise 9:22
Yeah, no, look, I think for us, and this is something I don't think there's too much of a secret. But we really pride ourselves on being experts in like the companies, the markets and the areas we invest in. So I I do FinTech and fintech adjacent, and that's all that I do. So a lot of it is an exercise and also sharpening my own thinking, and then it's a way to demonstrate to founders that, you know, we've really done the work here.
Anish Acharya 9:44
I mean, it definitely helped quite a bit, right. Like for context, what we do at deal is we help companies hire anyone anywhere, and it's very, FinTech adjacent, because we move a lot of money across all the different countries and you know, I think the research at the time that initial foods and met at the time with him and above focus, the depth of understanding of the market and where it could go, what are the different financial services we could offer? What are the different parts of the HR stack we could tackle really made a difference in our perspective, like, Hey, this is the right person versus some of the investors that were just, I mean, honestly, just trying to throw cash at us, which was not the right mindset.
Matt Burns 10:16
And nice, you're on their board, right? Yes. And you guys seem to have a great relationship. But what happens when there's conflict?
Alex Boise 10:26
Well, look, I generally, the way I work is we always defer to the founder. So whatever Alex wants to do, I'll give him I always commit to giving him the strong form of the truth, and then supporting him in whatever he decides. So I don't know if Alex, you remember this anything. The first time we had a big discussion strategically was entering er, because I know it's something that we had talked about not doing at the series A and then you said, Well, I think I'm just gonna experiment with this opportunistically, and I, you know, for a different set of reasons. I felt like, Hey, we should stay focused, but I support you. And we did it. And now it's turned out to be, you know, one of the most important growth drivers of the business. So I think if you've got trust, you can resolve almost any conflict.
Anish Acharya 11:07
Yeah, double down on that. I think, you know, our board has always been there for us when we needed and I think it's the right mix of good in science. And at the same time, let us execute. The thing is, when you when you're building a company, does growth, like when the pace is as fast as what we have, so many things are moving. So there's so many things that are going right or going wrong, that if you don't have enough internal perspective, or if you don't have enough value add, just letting us execute on what we think is the right thing is usually the right call to make even if we make mistakes, because we like to move fast. We correct them pretty fast. You know, I we're using hoppin, right, and I actually, this is one of my favorite thing from from helping founder, we'd like to run the company like we're running out of time. And that makes it that whatever mistakes we make, we corrected really, really fast. And I think that's one of the thing that our board really understood and keeps understanding, even at this stage of the company, which is just let us execute. And when there's really something that you think we shouldn't do, let like tell us, and that has been helpful.
Matt Burns 12:05
That's great insight. And I want to dive deeper into those those internal culture things because you raise all this money. Without that pitch deck, when the pitch deck is often a word of God type documents. How did you keep everybody aligned in those early days on the same goals and executions?
Anish Acharya 12:21
Yeah, first, I still do monthly investor update. So most of my investors are getting a monthly update in terms of what's going on at the company, where are key hires? What are some of the things that we've shipped? And, you know, I actually found that by now, I will probably not, but I just find it really useful. And, you know, we've got a pretty large bunch of investors, and it's actually they're actually still helping, which is really great. Obviously, our board meetings are quite helpful as well, right, we get quite a bit of materials and the whole team at a16z. And all the other funds we work with, have, you know, have quite a lot to say when they see that and usually guide us in the right direction. And, you know, generally I'm pretty close to my board. So you know, whether it's bi weekly meetings, or every every month, whenever it's done. I've been I think I've been decent leaning on them when needed when you tell me?
Alex Boise 13:11
No, it's been like, I think it's a story very well told. And it always has been, it's just been crisp. You know, storytelling really matters. It's how you can it's not just how you communicate, it's actually also how everyone around you communicates. So when one of your engineers goes home, and they tell their partner or they tell a friend at a cocktail party, hey, here's what I'm working on. Here's why it's so important. Like for that to be crisp and easy to tell is very, very important. And I think this has been one of the strengths from day one.
Anish Acharya 13:40
The practice changing as well. And we're evolving, like you said, right, we're working on we worked when we started switching to our ER model, which is basically like, having like 80 Plus entities around the world and like fully employing people like that was a pretty bold move. And even in the narrative of like my board members, they need to be able to fully communicate, like what does the audit so that they can get us more investors and more customers. So you know, keeping a tight relationship between investors is important, even in the, in the good times, like the bad times. It's very important.
Matt Burns 14:07
What about other internal executives? Right? How do you keep everybody aligned there?
Anish Acharya 14:16
That's a great question. You know, that's something that until I think our Series C i that we had a quite a tiny team and then the bench is getting bigger, right on the exec side and on our CEREC you know, Andreessen and actually call it the runway Y Combinator, an ally organic join our board. And I think he's taught me a great bunch on building a great exec bench and just making sure that you're bringing the right people all the time. So I mean, alignment usually comes from hiring people that you know, are really strong, maybe a couple months, if not a couple years ahead of what you probably need and then can really, you know, take the job end to end and so you can forget the Oregon just make sure that you have the right alignment from a strategy perspective, a culture perspective and just spend a lot of time with them. That's, that has worked for So even though you know, we are almost 100 900 people fully distributed team across 60 plus countries, I think we maintain pretty strong alignment across the whole company. That's
Alex Boise 15:11
just to build on that. Matt, if I may, I think one of the things that you've done best is combining an eye for talent, like people who have a lot of potential and are just great generalists. hustlers like those are the most important people, often the most important people in the earlier days, and then later knowing how and when to hire for specialists who actually have a lot of expertise. And that's like, not an easy balance to get, right. Typically, companies either over hire on experts, or, you know, go for too long with just the generalists. Maybe you can talk a bit about how you've done that, or maybe it's just intuition for you.
Anish Acharya 15:46
Yeah, I think we're still learning the, I think we're lucky enough to be, you know, always thinking a couple months ahead. And, you know, this is a funny company, because, you know, we, since our numbers are kind of public, we added almost 50 million in ARR, in a quarter, and that changes the whole company, right? Like, it's just not the same company. But you know, when we hired our success, you know, he's really great. You know, it was when we're at 10, or 15 million in ARR. And his pitch to me was, I know how to take it to 50. But that happened in like, three months, and then three months after we were 100. Like, you know, it just blows up the organization in so many interesting ways. I think for us, we've always been able to kind of forecast our growth, and at the same time, control the forecasts that we had, or our investors and our internal employees, which means that we can always proactive in terms of what skills are we going to need versus what skills we have now. And the strong, strong generalists that you can bring early on, if they've got the hustle, you need the weeds you need and no ego, they just can build so much with you that you get to a point where it's obvious that you need to make the change and bring someone that's just more generalized. I think a great example is our head of communication, right? Like, amazing exec, very, very specialized, that are used to sit under our groove department for quite a bit. And then there was a time where we thought, who like comms is going to be so big for us, like, we need to invest there. And I can two months, we hired someone amazing. And now, I mean, we're like, the luckiest honor to have her in our organization. Right? So like, it's kind of natural, but at the same time very flat through I don't know how to explain it further than that, to be honest.
Alex Boise 17:27
It's well done. Whatever it is.
Matt Burns 17:30
Yeah, well, I mean, let's talk about your timelines. For a minute it's all your forecasts it to me from an outsider, it seems like you forecast at too low several times in a row. Is that correct?
Anish Acharya 17:41
Is it forecasting too low? Or is it for guessing? The thing is, I learned from an issue I don't know how you feel about me talking but it's an issue but we'll have to go with it. The first board meeting I forecasted too high. And he told me he can do that. Because the day you're public if you miss your quarter, you're screwed. Since then, I never get too high. I always do forecasts right and I always try to be three numbers. So that was the first lesson initially actually on my board.
Alex Boise 18:10
A nice nice I don't remember but yeah, no look at these guys have just continuously crushed numbers. I don't know what to say. I'm great. Yeah.
Matt Burns 18:17
Well, give me general advice here for founders that are you know, raising their series A What advice do you have to them for forecasting?
Alex Boise 18:26
Look, I mean, I think that there's as this starts to kick in a lot more of the series of even even at the series a there's a slider between story and metrics. And I think that if the slider is all the way over to story, like it better be a really compelling story really well told. And if it's all the way over to metrics then you know look there the story is important but secondary so I think you know having both and that's been the thing about deal of course the stories while told the team is really compelling but like the metrics and always been so incredible, that it feels like a no brainer so like I think at the series they it can be tricky to find that balance but think carefully about you know, as Alex said not having to do your series A but wanting to do it and doing it once you have that balance right
Matt Burns 19:09
you know what Alex told me the other day we were doing a prep call and he was like I just raised on my numbers, but the numbers don't lie. I don't think he said that part
Anish Acharya 19:17
that's always gonna say actually like I think our Series A I don't know if that's wrong, but I felt like at least my interactions with you on that A was team marketing numbers because we were still a bit early when it comes to numbers when you make it on for that after that like sure yes. Yes meaning from spark to letter A Series B was definitely team as well and potential market but yeah, that's what I was telling you the other day might like might be CD investor could have just looked at our cohorts looked at our budget and invested without talking to me I'm pretty sure they could have I don't know I don't know what you think on the pro side and each but that's like, that's how I
Alex Boise 19:53
know for sure. I mean, it's a no brainer. Look, even at the series a I don't know if you I remember the revenue scale it was 100 Is it 1000s of dollars, but it was growing quickly. And you know, it's small a small amount of data, but it all was going in the right direction. Plus the story was well told plus the team, etc, etc. So there was definitely there was some data there you right, it was overshadowed by like Team hustle, story, etc. It was there.
Matt Burns 20:16
What I mean, when does it make sense to lead with the data instead of the story? You touched on it earlier? I was hoping you could expand on that?
Alex Boise 20:24
Well, look, I think that you need both. You know, I do think that you need to have some of both. But I just, you know, again, I think the more data you have, the more the story feels like a reality that is playing out versus a set of assumptions that still need to be validated. And that's the balance to strike.
Anish Acharya 20:41
The story changes, right, like, to be completely honest, like, there's a lot of things we got wrong, right? And like Candice was telling you, like, at the beginning, that our Series A we pitched something, we were never going to do something that is today our biggest lesson in business, right? So I mean, we made so many mistakes, and the story you taught your series A obviously is more is going to change and evolve over time. And it's okay to own up to those mistakes. Just you evolve your board, you evolve your company, no one expects you at that time to have everything right. I mean, we get most a lot of things wrong still, right. And we're still doing that. We'll keep on doing that. So tell the story that makes sense for you, and that you think is going to get a lot of people excited, right? Like you want an itch to feel sure if I don't get on the train right now. I'm gonna have to pay up in like three months from now, which is never a great feeling that
Alex Boise 21:27
was true.
Matt Burns 21:29
Yes. So Alex, you were saying that you you left Y Combinator a little early, right? Because you're still trying to find your product market fit?
Anish Acharya 21:37
No, we pivoted during Y Combinator. So when we got into YC, we spent two and I spent three months roaming around payments and contracts and freelance and global hiring, trying to find their fit, and just iterating so much, like literally locked down in an apartment in San Francisco, in I thought it was a great area. But it's not a great area like markets, right next to Twitter building. I don't know if you've ever been there. So we ended up being like, for like three months, just building building and iterating and going through YC there. And I think it was five days or six days before Demo Day. We just came to our at the time YC partner and told him, Hey, this looks interesting. Like, can we dive on that product? He was like, Yeah, that looks cool. Just build it. And that kind of was the trajectory after that freedom.
Matt Burns 22:26
Yeah, the the the timing around the idea is always something that founders struggle with. I think Marc Andreessen has a neat theory that the startup will be successful if it's at the cross section of technology, Economics and Psychology. How, what advice you have for founders about the timing around launching their product, have
Anish Acharya 22:49
a few things. First, you should always be launching, actually learn that from YC is, most people forget who you are, what you are, within two months, you can try and try and try and try again, only you know that you've launched so that one is super important. The second one is we've always been very metrics driven. And that's like the one thing that was quite interesting for us is every time we launched a product, we felt like we had something but we never really did. The only time we did is when you know the story of Dell is section on our about page on the website, one of our batchmates started using deal the way it is today. And we're like, Okay, this is where like what's going on here. Like there's something interesting and the time that we followed our customers really and like when to talk to them and realize, okay, there's there's a big gap in the market. They're like, how are people doing it? And eventually, how are they doing it? Right? Because at the time, we thought it was just about payments. Eventually, we realized it was about a lot more like global compliance, global hiring, like those were the things that were quite interesting. I think it's all about like talking to users iterating on the mark on the market on the problem, you know, what you feel right? Like, our story is, you know, French founder and a Chinese founder building together in the valley, a company that's meant to help other companies hire other talents, right, like Squire Squire, relatable story. It's something we felt and something we we've lived through. So you know, the relatability of the product in terms of what we wanted to build a product founder fit. I don't know how much you talking about that and isn't like product from their fitness. And then it's just grit, right? Like, I didn't get in YC for three times or two times I applied. Right. So just building and building and building.
Alex Boise 24:22
Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, it's like what informs your intuition, it feels like it can be one of two things. It's either lived experiences, which is what Alex is describing, or it's, I've spent my entire career in one field and therefore I have a differentiated point of view. And it does feel like those you know, you can't study the market top down and you know, and do do a market map and decide what company needs to be built. You've got to use your intuition that's got to come from somewhere.
Matt Burns 24:49
Has there been a time where you've seen a picture and you just knew it was too early? What did you tell the founder?
Alex Boise 24:56
Well, I'm not the one who decides what's you know, too early or not? It's Really the market? So I'd say go back to Alex's point, just launch, you know, just, let's find out. Exactly.
Anish Acharya 25:07
It was too early, right when we met the first time. I mean, we didn't even talk about that. But it was way too early for us to actually work together at the time.
Alex Boise 25:15
And then once we reconnected, you had launched, and the timing was right, you know,
Anish Acharya 25:21
a bit of growth, some direction Tim started. Right, it kind of made more sense.
Matt Burns 25:27
So that brings us today. And last week, you announced that 100 million arr. So I was hoping you could spend last five minutes you're talking about scaling right now scaling forward, what is your your forecast, say right now?
Anish Acharya 25:40
Well, I haven't really forecasted. I had I had an answer, boy, that we will do something like 3x in 2022. But it looks like I need to re forecast. We'll see. I think it'd be a great year if we can for external revenue. So 2x, from what we have right now. But let's see how the infrastructure develops. You know, we're very, very focused on customer experience. It's not growth at all costs. It's how do we grow, but at the same time, keep on giving an amazing employee experience, keep on helping companies have a good experience when hiring people. And that's the main main focus. And if we can combine great customer experience with good growth, then then that's what matters to us. And yeah, I mean, we're truly only getting started. So let's, let's hope for it to accept this before the end of the year, if not more.
Matt Burns 26:26
Does that make the board happy? And niche? Yeah,
Alex Boise 26:29
yes. All is happy. Oh,
Anish Acharya 26:31
I did not say that. Right. The board stick to the numbers.
Matt Burns 26:35
Yes, yeah. So He's a board member? I mean, what have you seen a niche that that's allowed the company to scale so quickly, I'm looking for something that founders can take to their own companies.
Alex Boise 26:45
Like, a lot of it is just the, you know, continued speed of execution. It feels like, you know, things can only slow down and this team has managed to maybe speed up but certainly not slow down. And when you're moving that quickly, you know, just again, like it really does defy gravity to go back to your earlier question. You know, when is a startup, a startup, I would say that a startup is a startup for five years after they launch. And after five years, no matter what scale they're at, they're no longer a startup. And it feels like that's the sort of part of time that's the enemy. So we're very much still on like startup mindset. And that look, I think that applies as much when you're two people as it does. You know, when you're 2000.
Matt Burns 27:23
Alex, you'd like that answer, right? Because you're still a startup
Anish Acharya 27:26
with different needs to startup like 100%?
Matt Burns 27:30
Yeah. Well get those founders one more piece of advice, when you look back to to pitching your your first couple rounds. What do you look back? And you're embarrassed at?
Anish Acharya 27:40
Who embarrassed a lot? We got quite a bit of nose actually, in the very beginning. Why am I embarrassed that, you know, I was embarrassed about that. But it ended up paying off at our seed round. Me and for, we're really good at splitting our like our chats, like we're really good intent them like so for context shows my co founder, you should probably have her more than me, she's the interesting one on this type of shows. And she's the she's the smart one on the team. And actually, this is exactly what we used to do, we used to clearly player off as like the smarter one into the in the team, when we were pitching, we just had a really good, we had a very well rehearsed pitch that just, you know, highlighting our strengths versus our weaknesses, which at the time, to be honest, was we had, we had no idea what we were doing, right, we like one week and a half into building a product, we had a lot to figure out, we just had like, good college is good team that have known each other for a long time and going through YC, which is an advantage, right? But just like that, that pitch was so well rehearsed at this stage, where everything, when there's nothing it's all about team cohesion and who you are, and what are you going to build and why you're building it. Like if you can really telling a great story there, then people aren't going to want to come I mean, you have to believe it, right? You have to feel it, you have to be passionate about it. Like you know, I'm excited to help 100 million people get to work for the best companies in the world, regardless of where they're from, right? That excites me that makes me want to work if you can pass that excitement. And if you have, if you can build and ship then you can convince anyone to follow in your right I think I don't know, maybe by us, but
Matt Burns 29:20
yeah, well, I think that's a great place to end that your passion and your competency really comes through and I can see why it was easy to pitch without a pitch deck. But now we're going to do that live on here on pitch practice. Both you thank you for joining us for the TechCrunch live session and you're sticking around for for pitch practice now, right? Yeah, we are to the end of this part, right. So what's gonna happen is we've picked three startups from the attendance on on hop and then there's a lot of the submission to this time. So we have three startups in the first one is Oh, Lena from Ender tuning, and she's going to or Ender terrain. She's going to have two minutes to picture company without a deck And then we get four minutes of feedback from the three of us. Okay, Alina, are you there?
Unknown Speaker 30:07
Yes. Hi, Dan. Rejoining. Hi, how are you? Yeah, I'm good. And it's a little bit pressing to hear that I'm one to three. I thought they were, like 10 teams or whatever?
Matt Burns 30:23
No, we're gonna make it special. So you have two minutes to present, no ducks, and then get four minutes of feedback, okay? Yes, absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 30:30
Hi, I'm Elena. Hi, I'm Elena from Andela, Turin, and we drive sales and customer care teams to their excellence. So how we do this. We are a platform that analyzes all the conversations across sales and customer care teams. It provides analytics and real life feedback from our AI to real people to improve their skills. Imagine three's 800 millions of hours of recorded conversations daily. And less than 2% of those conversations are really tracked for the purpose of training and coaching. And actually company don't choose to hire lousy sales or customer care agents. And those people don't choose to be a lousy employer. But the problem is that there is no individualized and real time feedback on how they are doing. Our AI platform allows real time analysis of the conversation, providing feedback, what the person is like in in soft and hard skills, and also combining it with the best examples of top performers. So we collect top performing guys, and then they have their best practices to the rest of the teams. Were three founders, six people in the team, we made it last year with 10 paying customers were pretty early. And we already going to the US market with a product from Europe. And we do 24 languages with our own automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, which we don't buy from a third party, we have our own team. And we made 135k in annual recurring revenue within 10 paying customers are ready to scale. Thank you very much. Hi, Melinda.
Matt Burns 32:28
Every good, that was great. Thank you. What's your website? So people can find you?
Unknown Speaker 32:34
Yeah, it's www dot. And they're cheering as one word under as and their game and Turin as volunteering.com.
Matt Burns 32:44
Great. Thank you any feedback?
Anish Acharya 32:47
Oh, it's up to you. The first? Okay, sure. First of all, good job. Thank you for taking the time today. And this is super exciting. Well, so there's a few things and I guess maybe we do questions now after?
Matt Burns 33:03
Sure. No, you can ask whatever you want.
Anish Acharya 33:05
So ideal I believe we use a company called Gong. How similar is going to what you're building? And I guess how differentiated is it?
Unknown Speaker 33:18
So how similar is that we both analyze conversations, how different is that going is towards more management and providing analytics for management to see how their pipeline converts, and how to manage people, we're more focused on providing help and self coaching for employees themselves. So our approach is their approaches up to bottom, so from manager to employee to control and proven push performance, our approach is bottom up. So we upskill people and then improve the performance of the team. And all our features focused on the Stand user as a sales rep not the manager.
Matt Burns 34:00
That didn't your question.
Anish Acharya 34:02
Yeah, I guess it doesn't. My question. I think my only feedback is it maybe it's very personal. But how long have you said that you've worked on on this company?
Unknown Speaker 34:13
One year? Yeah.
Anish Acharya 34:14
So you know. And maybe it's like completely off but whatever. I'll just say like I feel like building your own NLP engine after one year for 24 languages seems like something's off maybe it's not but it just like for a seed stage company and making 500k Now after one year of building it just doesn't like he just rings them. Okay, I need to clearly dive deeper into this company was I don't think you I don't think you need to raise it at that stage. My experience with investors is like they're quite pragmatic. It's like maybe I would have opened up like more. Why are you the right person to build this like, why are you building this? Why are you Why does it make sense for you to build it and how you're going to make this a great company, and then talk about the founders and eventually the market and eventually the Tech because I don't know my gut says the tech can be that crazy advance, like maybe you're not using Watson or whatever in the backend, but like it would be quite the lift to build such a strong engine and like one year.
Unknown Speaker 35:10
Yeah, that's a good point, probably I was a little bit nervous, waiting to refocus on what we do. But actually, we have a really cool guys to have AI researchers, you create a pipeline for automatically creating new languages. So we don't do this, like with manual human labeling or something with the data? And why because we are European and 34 languages in Europe, you cannot just work with one language to to cover the market, you just have to? And if we would start with the US, yes, it will be probably one language. And that's it.
Matt Burns 35:48
Simple folks in the US.
Anish Acharya 35:49
Yeah, I'm French. Understand.
Alex Boise 35:53
Your the No, no, I mean, look, I agree with some of what Alex is saying. The big thing that I would start with is just what is your personal connection to this? Like, why are you building this? Why do you want to work on this for 20? Or 30 Or 50 years? Or, you know, however long? Like, why is it so important and personal to you? And I think out of that Mayfield the answer to some of Alex's questions. So maybe you spent your whole career researching NLP. And this is the perfect application, maybe you're a frustrated sales rep and you know, a manager change your life by giving you just that right piece of feedback at the right time. So I think it's, you know, your personal connection. I think it's, you know, maybe describing the importance of the technology, is that a 10x better or not, and why. And then are you solving for the same or a distinct use case from Gong? I think it's also important that we touched on
Unknown Speaker 36:43
three seconds, and I leave, but maybe you can, somewhere?
Anish Acharya 36:49
Yeah. So he has to,
Matt Burns 36:54
we can help with a connection
Alex Boise 36:57
to connect and share more. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 36:59
Thank you so much. But
Alex Boise 37:00
it's a story very well told you're very, you're articulate, and you're confident. And you know, I came away feeling like, hey, there's something happening here. Whether I'm a part of it or
Unknown Speaker 37:08
not. I mean, the acid in June, let's go. All
Matt Burns 37:12
right. Thank you very much. All right, we have two more. Next we have David from your B. It's two words. I don't know how you pronounce that. Every week. I have trouble with startup names. David, are you here?
Anish Acharya 37:28
And if that's hustle, you gotta respect that. No doubt. Absolutely.
Matt Burns 37:34
Take your shot. Right. David's connecting on Zoom, so we'll have him in a second. All right. David, I think you're muted. There you are. How are you sir?
Unknown Speaker 37:49
Hey, guys, I'm doing well. How are you all doing?
Matt Burns 37:52
Good. How do you say your company name?
Unknown Speaker 37:54
You'll be? I got it. You did get it right. It actually used to be yellow V. But we changed it. marketing people felt it was a better name. So here we go.
Matt Burns 38:05
All right. Well, you have two minutes present your company starting now.
Unknown Speaker 38:09
Perfect. Gentlemen. Thanks. Thanks for for joining me today. My name is David Douglas. I'm the founder and CEO of Kilbey stands for your life only better, we're effectively a job and upskilling or rescaling platform, we're focused exclusively on the entry level marketplace, we feel that the future will be quite detrimental in particularly for entry level with AI and dissemination of many jobs as well as sort of the future of work where there's going to be an incumbent responsibility on people to continually skill up. It'll be particularly troublesome for the underserved populations, people with disabilities and things of that nature. We built a very unique platform to address this. So we basically partnered with organizations who are catering currently to those to those to those populations. So those are workforce agencies, school districts, cities, communities, community based organizations, and so on. They not only bring access to that population, but they also bring access to quite a few employers as well. So we've built a three sided marketplace, which is the most difficult to build. It's a b2b platform. We are currently engaged with a number of organizations serving this population, including the entire city of Milwaukee where we have 60 Different agencies working with us. We also work with a number of different schools. We are launching a product for the solar based industry, which is going to have a tremendous amount of uptake in terms of opportunities and jobs. And we also have a grant through a number of different research organizations, catering to vocational rehab. We have the ability to launch in up to 10 Different states, starting with the state of Illinois this year. We're currently looking to raise $1.5 million in the seed. We are revenue, but we're looking to build a lot of premium based features for the remainder of this year, grow out for those three different target markets and then to expand later from that point.
Matt Burns 40:06
So yeah, very good, David. That was, that was great. And just as a reminder to listeners, we picked these companies out of our audience about 20 minutes ago, and they had no prep time. So that was wonderful. Nice. Alex. Questions. Alex, you're muted. Yeah, there you go.
Alex Boise 40:22
I can start. Yeah, I'll ask you the same question that I asked Elena David. So you know, why are you building this? Why are you you have so many things you could be working on? Why is this personally important to you?
Unknown Speaker 40:33
Well, we started out focusing on the youth market, in particular, my father, and one of my daughters got caught up in a bunch of negative things. And I was it was out of anger at social media and the lack of access to good social capital. So one of the prerequisites for the company is we need to arm people in particular, the entry level with social capital. So we started out with a twist toward LinkedIn, people who join a platform actually connect with people. And that's the actually best way to to find opportunities in the first place. So I am intent on arming people with social capital that need to succeed.
Alex Boise 41:07
Got it? And then one other question is, you know, how, like, how important is software? How much leverage do you get from software feels like it's a hard bootstrapping problem with the marketplaces. And it's not totally clear to me what the product is.
Unknown Speaker 41:22
Yeah, so the solution to this problem is not it can't be entirely software based. And by the way, I come from the corporate world as a consultant, and implementing software in general is not is never the solution. So you need to bring people with you, the shaman, there's a change management function associated with it. But actually, we haven't had a lot of concern. This is run as a true solution for all of the organizations catering to that population. There's nothing that's actually working for workforce agencies today, they have very tremendous difficulty reaching out to populations, and so on. So we come to the market with a platform that allows them to basically emulate like an Instagram, connect with me, follow me follow my organization. And by benefiting, I don't get to see Kim Kardashian as pictures, I get to see all the resources that the city brings all the agencies that are part of it, all of the people that are part of that, overall, I can partake in that. And I can join a number of those. And we see that replication, being able to replicate all of those different networks across across the United States. And then ultimately, across the world. I think it requires quite a bit. My team is global. So we're excited to start expanding as soon as we possibly can. And we are bootstrapped. I've been bootstrapping this thing for a number of years, had about 400 $500,000 in investment capital. But, but this has been a passion project for me and I am intent on making it work.
Matt Burns 42:43
Yeah, the lobbyists? Absolutely. Alex, do you have any questions?
Anish Acharya 42:50
Yeah, first, I think, you know, we've been off on this issue. But I don't think the audience will understand. I think this is great. Great. I think you're working on something super interesting. And upskilling is important. This is a question. I'd love to ask you. Point. I'm sorry, if that puts you on the spot. But how many years? Have you been working on this?
Unknown Speaker 43:14
About six years. First, I didn't have a Technology Co Founder for a while. And so I bootstrapped in high schools trying to figure out the problem, brought on a co founder dealt with the eventual ups and downs of that he moved on. And then I continued to build out there brought on another co founder. So it's been both were the best place we've ever been. Right.
Anish Acharya 43:33
So my feedback, and finish, I don't know how you feel about that. But you know, after six years of building a business, I think it's usually quite hard to convince venture capitalists to invest in your company. Unless there is like, a great way to show that now is the time where you're going to be able to double down and scale and when you get there. And, you know, my question for you is, if you were to start again, point zero, right, like, what would you have done differently over the last six years? Right, like, give me an A C? Okay, now is the time now is now is when I should get on board? Because it's not going to be like the first
Alex Boise 44:05
six years,
Matt Burns 44:06
we're running out of time. But take take 3040 seconds and answer that that deserves that.
Unknown Speaker 44:11
Yeah. You know, I've always said, If I had been handed a check for three or $5 million, at the beginning, we would have failed. This is an incredibly difficult space. And I would never forsake everything that we've learned. There's a reason why it's been very difficult to sort of drive opportunities to people traditionally had been underserved. And we're going to extend it from there. I've had the luxury of having failed in what we currently built, which is why ultimately, this has taken a certain amount of time, and we've rebuilt the entire product. We've never been in a better place. I've got a team now that's committed, excited, and we have plans for I think a bright future. So I've learned a lot in this process. And that's what I would actually say to everybody.
Matt Burns 44:58
So that's great. Cool. David, thank you so much. And what's your website?
Unknown Speaker 45:03
Your b.com yolbe.com. And I'm David at, actually yellow B Y O L ob.com. Or you'll be both. They both work. So thank you all very much. Appreciate it. Alex, congratulations on everything you're doing, man. Appreciate that. It's awesome stuff.
Anish Acharya 45:20
Good luck, my friend. We have
Matt Burns 45:23
we have one more company we have surged from strict. Sir just coming up and actually a niche. Can you answer that? Like, what? What do you do when companies have been around for a while and they're struggling? Like, what? Do you still invest in them? Or what do you look for?
Alex Boise 45:41
I don't think there's a hard rule. But I think to Alex's point, there's got to be a moment where something is changing even the world, either the world has changed, or something you know, that's specific to the product or the company has changed, you know, because startups really are momentum machines. And you know, when you lose it, it's hard to reestablish it. Yeah. Outside of some external catalyst.
Matt Burns 45:59
That's great. All right, search. Your turn, sir. Hello, guys. Hello. Two minutes starting now.
Unknown Speaker 46:07
Okay. I'm service co founder of Outreach. Outreach is a video first internet is no ads web three economy built in. Why video? No, because people don't read anymore. And video is the main layout and format of delivery information. Today, YouTube is the number one search engine for next gen. And that means video is a new entry point to the internet for next gen people. But at the same time to video as the format is stuck in the past and has not been changing during the last 25 years. video stills the same passively virtual pixels, but just in different sizes, and how it's possible. When you end reporting to the Internet has no any capabilities or like on web to interactively interact with this, like objects. That's why people will leave a video to get additional information outside. Just imagine for a second, if all materials demonstrated in videos were not just as screenshots or screencasts. But real, tangible and usable objects. You can interact with wisdom and data and use it for example by Samsung, or something like that. For example, you can keep watching video and independently at the same time, enlarge photos, or build your own route or something like that flip pages on book, buy the rights here inside the video with the ballot developer this unique video format, where all the material materials are detached from the video itself to let you interact with this all objects inside video, like on website, but inside the video, it's like a video on steroids that absorbed all web capabilities inside and welcome to the next gen video and install next gen video browser on our website.
Matt Burns 48:15
So extent thank you for that now guys, do you have any feedback on on the picture or the pitch style or anything like that understand this outside gray areas? Okay,
Anish Acharya 48:29
so sorry, I'm usually pretty brutal on this. I'm gonna be very honest. I think it's a bit hard to understand what you truly do. You know, during YC I don't know why I keep going back to ICU maybe because they taught me how to upgrade things. But like you need to have like a one liner that makes it really really clear. Right? Like we help people hire anyone anywhere, right? Like, I'm not sure I fully got what she did for that which is not great. So I think something you should fix. Secondly, I know we talked about it a couple of times, but I do think at least for me at your stage. Do you have any revenue and not yet?
Unknown Speaker 49:04
We just launched few like one week ago that's why
Anish Acharya 49:09
Okay, so I wouldn't go back to when we sent two pitches right I would very much focus on like the team right like Why you What makes you different Are you like a Video Experts you have like, I don't know some computer vision background. I can really say because I'm not sure I fully understand what the company does. But making it super simple, super accurate, especially in the space like video which is super crowded and super hard and super important. And the second thing is I would be very focused especially at your stage on the team and the market right that I didn't really get a sense of like, why you why you guys special and how big this can really get we all know video is big, right? Like, thanks you too. But like what makes you guys really special? I'm not sure.
Matt Burns 49:53
It's good advice. Yes. A niche.
Alex Boise 49:56
Yeah, well, I mean, I it's a plus one on the team question. I'm not going to read He asked the question as the other two founders on the why, what's your personal connection? Like, I think the thesis is really interesting to me browser feels like one of the last platforms that no one has really gone after in an interesting way. And there's a couple of startups, but I love the idea of attacking the browser. Generally, I think with consumer, it's impossible to predict what consumers want or how they'll behave, I think you can have a hypothesis and test it. So I think with consumer plays like this, which I believe this is, you've just got to launch. And I think, by the way, the thing that's maddening about building consumer companies I built to is that a lot of times it kind of works. It doesn't it rarely, like completely fails. And if it completely succeeds, you know, but you know, getting to the place where you're like, am I just not trying hard enough? Or is it not solving an important enough pain point is a psychology shift. That's super important. So I would say with something like this, you know, the thesis sounds reasonable, but you know, I'd really just want to see how it performs in market.
Anish Acharya 50:55
And this is a consumer investor, he got into SAS for a very weird reason. He's a consumer,
Alex Boise 51:02
consumer deal those
Anish Acharya 51:05
consumers really hard. My first company was in consumer, actually. And it was actually in the video space, funnily enough, and it didn't do very well, for lots of different reasons. I think what I learned, and maybe something that can be interesting for you, is that one, it's really hard to convince video, consumer investor video investors to invest until you have like real traction. So I would really focus on getting enough traction where you can get someone excited, or at least some form of product market, some form of early signs of product market fit, because consumer is super hard. I like I mean, I guess Andrew Ryan from a16z can tell you like, I think he doesn't, I mean, I can speak for him. But I think you don't really look at a consumer deal unless there's like, significant upward traction, right? And,
Alex Boise 51:47
yeah, it's because you can't really you just have to observe the phenomenon. That's like the best way to invest in consumer.
Matt Burns 51:54
So I wanted to give you a quick second, do you have a one or two liner on your company?
Unknown Speaker 51:59
What one one or two?
Matt Burns 52:02
Could you describe your company in one or two lines?
Unknown Speaker 52:05
Yes, we are building the video first. Internet with first mobile video internet browser, we believe to the video. And we believe the video is one and new entry point to the internet. And every every single will be start with video. And in our case, out of his video too, because all transactions built in inside video or like interactions built in inside video. That's why we believe video is the future. And we will be the first browser in this space. That's
Alex Boise 52:43
seen here. I'm going to download it. Yes, yes. So that's always good.
Unknown Speaker 52:48
So thank you very much. You can try it and feel like smell of the future of the next gen browser by yourself. I love it. What's
Matt Burns 52:57
What's your website, again?
Unknown Speaker 53:00
Outreach stream, which means stream plus peach Street, STR, ITC h.com You can install a video Internet browser from there. And yeah, we appreciate for any feedback, because as I mentioned that we just started for us. It's very important. And All right, thank you very much for your feedback.
Matt Burns 53:26
Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. And go ahead, I'll give you
Unknown Speaker 53:31
just one very important sentence on my screen. Because we have like unusual business model, with no ads where businesses pay subscriptions, and these share revenue, share this revenue with creators. And we think we finally find a way how to solve the problem which Marc Andreessen didn't solve it Netscape Navigator by him own words. And he called it like, the original sin of the internet, because he wanted to build the pay button inside the browser. But he unfortunately didn't, unfortunately, for entire internet, and that's why we built in a business model and play button from day one, to inspire search. I
Matt Burns 54:22
gotta I gotta cut you off there. We're out of time here. But thank you so much for joining us.
Unknown Speaker 54:27
Thank you very much. Nice to have you find. We find the soul.
Alex Boise 54:33
I'll have a chat with Mark about it. Thank you very much.
Matt Burns 54:38
And each Alex, I respect everyone's hustle today. Thank you for joining us, including you too. And I hope you guys have a great day and last thing before we go. Please go over and vote for that Web3 For found Darrell and Jordan deserve it. Thank you all. Thanks for having
Unknown Speaker 54:53
me
Transcribed by https://otter.ai