Transcript: - TA McCann - Professional Sailor, Serial Entrepreneur (5x Founder with 3 Exits), Managing Director at Pioneer Square Labs

Host: Hey, Teo. Welcome to the show.

Guest: I'm happy to be here.

Host: Uh, so you're three times entrepreneur. Uh, you're currently managing director at P Square Labs. Uh, you also hosted two podcasts. Um, and I want to talk all about that. But, uh, before that, you were also a professional sailor. Uh, so tell me a little bit about, you know, how did you become a professional sailor?

Guest: Well, I grew up, um, on Lake Michigan outside Chicago. And so my parents had a boat and I was always hanging around the beach or hanging around the yacht club.

So from a very early age, uh, and I'd started sailing, you know, boats off the beach and racing a little bit. My mom was actually a sailing instructor.

And, um, at one point when I was about 13 or 14, a, uh, one of the teams that my parents knew, you know, invited me to go along. And so I decided to try it out for a weekend and that got to be pretty interesting.

Guest: And then I kind of got moved up on a couple of teams, sort of drafted in the local yacht club, you know, to the better and better team. And then ultimately we became kind of one of the best teams in the Midwest.

And I did that all the way until I went to college. And but as a kid, so that was like one theme. The second theme was as a kid, I'd had this dream of doing this round the world sailing race.

And so after college, uh, where I took a break from sailing, as I went to college on a swimming scholarship, uh, I wrote a letter to a couple of people that I'd met along the way and said, hey, I want to go do this round the world race.

Here's what I know so far about sailing. Is it something you can give me some advice on? Could you tell me what I need to learn? Could you make some connections on my behalf?

Sort of maybe what what one any entrepreneur might do today if they thought they might like to go start a company.

Guest: And those people were generous enough to help me, both in terms of offering to make introductions, giving me sort of what I might learn, but they also said, hey, we're putting together this professional America's Cup team at this point in time, would you be interested in trying out?

So it was a total surprise, uh, that I got a try out. I went and tried out the first time, got passed over. I tried out the second time, got passed over. Uh, and then one of the people they really wanted who was better than me didn't show up.

They chose a different team. And so I effectively got drafted out of the minor leagues, uh, to join this particular team. And then it's a little bit like joining a successful startup when it's, you know, small, and then it goes on to IPO.

Uh, and in that particular case, you know, we went on to win the America's Cup. And so I went from having little to no experience to being part of a successful America's Cup team.

And then just like being part of that IPO, effectively your stock goes up, your awareness goes up, your connections go up, and then I I continued in the professional path after that 1992 America's Cup.

Host: So, uh, how long uh, were you a professional sailor? And at what point did you sort of switch into entrepreneurship?

Guest: Yeah, so I, um, I was an entrepreneur before. So I'd started a couple of companies when I was in, uh, high school.

Uh, both a yard maintenance company and a boat maintenance company and even a soap company, uh, while I was still in high school, uh, working around the around the docks. But, um, I quit my regular day job in 1990.

And then I was really full-time professional sailing until really the fall of 95. So call it five or six years. And what was happening in 95 is the internet was starting to happen. Uh, and people were starting to build websites.

And so I would sail during the day and I would sit around drinking beer with people at night. And people would ask me, I was sort of like the technical guy around the yacht club, like, what's going on with this whole internet thing?

Like, should we have a website? Should we, you know, be thinking about this? And so I started building websites on the side for a lot of the people who were either owners of the teams I was sailing for or other people in the industry.

Guest: And so in 95, 96, uh, I was sort of sailing by day and building websites by night. And that was a slow transition out of sailing and in back into entrepreneurship and technology.

Host: So that uh, that translated into Senosis. Uh, Oh, that was, that's like, that's like five companies later. I mean, Senosis was my last company. So that that transition moved from sailing to a company called Soft Labor.

Uh, that was a web development company, then that moved into Help Share. And that was my first real technology startup. And we raised some external capital and that company actually failed.

So that was my first real attempt that failed during the .com crash. Uh, and then I ended up at Microsoft and then from Microsoft where many, many of those other sort of startups.

So Senosis was was the uh, most recent one, uh, of that long journey of founding five different companies and having three successful exits.

Host: So I I I had looked at your chronology in the wrong way then, because I thought Senosis was the first one and Rival IQ was the last one. But, uh, so you went on to start Rival IQ and then just and then Senosis.

Uh, Uh, that was actually, actually it went, it went from, uh, so I left, I was at Microsoft for three and a half years. Um, and I worked a lot on the exchange team.

So I learned what real enterprise software felt like the global market, you know, real impact, hundreds of millions of users, things like that. Which you don't, you don't know when you're just doing your first real startup.

You don't know what scale looks like. I didn't even know what the functional jobs were, uh, inside of a real company.

Guest: Uh, but Microsoft was a little bit too slow for me. And so I left, uh, and ultimately started working for Paul Allen. And we built a startup studio in 2006 for Paul and started generating ideas and validating those ideas.

And one of those ideas, um, was a little bit similar to what I had done at Exchange and it just captivated my attention and that ultimately was Just.

So I left Vulcan Labs, uh, to start Just and we worked with Just for about, you know, two and a half years and then sold that to Blackberry.

And then nearing the end of my earn out at Blackberry, I met some friends along the way and we started working on Rival IQ. And so then I left Blackberry to join Rival IQ.

And then uh, at some point in time, like I started getting really interested in this health category and that led to founding of Senosis. And then Senosis was relatively quickly acquired by Google, uh, for its team and its technology.

And so that was more the chronology of Just then Rival IQ then Senosis.

Host: Um, so after that you uh, you joined PSL or you started PSL?

Guest: Uh, I joined, I joined PSL after we sold Senosis. So I was an early investor in PSL. I knew, I've known all the founders for a long time having built many companies here in Seattle.

And, um, when I was actually was starting to work on Senosis, they were starting to work on PSL. And coincidentally, we were sitting across from each other in a very big and empty co-working space, uh, literally, you know, across from each other.

And, um, then after we sold Senosis, I was thinking about, I'm just going to go do another company at that point in time.

Uh, I reached out to Brad Feld, who was an investor in Just, uh, who I'd worked with a lot of different in a lot of different context and I I really values opinion both as a uh, investor, a mentor, a board member and Brad really gave me the insight to say, hey, you know, you've done a lot of companies on your own.

Maybe you should spend a little time with a lot of companies instead of a lot of time with one. And it really encouraged me to think about PSL as an option. And he's one of the largest investors in PSL.

And so long story short, like I chose to join both the founding team that was here, which they were already a couple years into it.

Uh, an opportunity to continue to work with Brad and an opportunity to see what we could protize from a entrepreneurship perspective.

Having done it a number of times myself, as well as spent a lot of time with Tex Stars companies, as well as done a lot of angel investments.

I thought that I could come to PSL and continue to protize the function of doing early stage technology-based startups.

Host: This is Brad Feld who wrote the book Venture Deals, right?

Guest: Correct. Correct. Yeah.

One of the co- one of the co-founders of Tech Stars, Venture Deals and a number of other books, you know, prolific blogger, amazing human, uh, period, just, just such an amazing person, uh, to be involved with and any chance you get to work with someone like Brad Feld, you know, definitely jump at it.

And this was one that had a lot of combinations of things of Brad, the founding team of uh, at PSL and this sort of functional work that that we do at PSL.

Host: See, I mean, you started, uh, you know, more than five companies. Uh, what made you start from one company to next, or like what is the decision factor in terms of like finding the opportunity?

Like, was there any common pattern or like some of the things that you used to, you know, I now I think this seems the right opportunity timing wise or like just the momentum wise.

Um, give me a little bit of like what was that decision making process like?

Guest: Yeah, I I think as you, as you mature and as you do more companies, right, you develop your own decision making framework as it were. Uh, in the case of, in the case of Just, it was I I felt like I could see the vision for the product.

And the first crappy little bitty product was really quite cool, right? So I would say it's a technical insight that said like, is this possible? Can I prototype this?

And is the prototype like, oh, I that is cool and I think somebody else is going to want that. So those were two things that kind of worked to get Just going. Uh, what made Rival IQ go was I had a, you know, four of us as a founding team.

We were basically saying we want to do something together. We hacked around a bunch of different ideas.

We started to get some momentum on this idea for Rival IQ, but we all said, hey, let's not quit our day jobs until we can find five paying customers who want to pay us at least $200 a month for the thing that we've built.

And so it was, we didn't know whether that was going to take a day, a week, a month, a year, or never.

But I would say this is a, a side project with people I wanted to spend time with that we kept working on that side project or we would have worked on a different side project until we found, I'll say customer traction or customer pull.

Uh, in the case of Senosis, this was also really team oriented. So the team that really was part of the founding team at Senosis had is at University of Washington.

They had some very cool technical innovations and they were looking to try and turn that into a company and they needed kind of a CEO persona to add to the other people that were around the table.

And so that was a blend of team and technology, uh, that got me excited about it in market opportunity.

But as we think about, you know, the ideas that we do at PSL, the majority of them are when do we know it's a good enough idea is really largely around all the customer discovery, customer development process, uh, type, uh, of things.

And that's the, that's been an important part of what we do at PSL.

Host: So, uh, I mean, there are a lot of ways for founders to start companies. Uh, one of the ways is, you know, you you raise a venture capital or you bootstrap it or you join a venture studio or a startup studio like PSL.

Uh, so, in your opinion, why do startups choose a venture studio? And there are different types of venture studios. I mean, you could call YC also a one version of a venture studio, um, or an accelerator. Um, but why choose that model?

And then, you know, what do you guys, what do you see as the unique factor that founders come for PSL?

Guest: Great. Let's let's first separate, I'll call broadly an accelerator versus an incubator. So an accelerator like YC or Tech Stars, they are cohort driven. They are usually finite in time and they are what I would call heavily advice centric.

Right, you go there and people say like, you should do X and you should do Y, but they don't do really any action. Like they don't do anything, they just tell you you should go do something if you're the founder.

And I've been involved with Tech Stars really since year two of Tech Stars, very involved with Seattle and many other programs and I'm I'm I give lots of that advice.

Hey, here's how you should go do some customer discovery this week or here's how you can think about pricing or here's how you can think about go to market or here's how you can think about your team, but I'm not doing any work.

If you then contrast that with an incubator or a studio, uh, I would interchange those words. Most people who are working in studios, they have lots of people to do work, right?

We have designers and developers and go to market and operations and recruiting and all of those people do real work alongside the founder to try and help create that company. So think of it as action versus advice.

Now, of course we give advice too, but more importantly, we are giving the advice and we're adding in the action.

So now the second question is, why would a founder thinking about using a studio or an accelerator, but let's say a studio specifically versus just doing it themselves?

Guest: Number one is if you're trying to build a venture scale company, you are likely signing up for the next five to 10 years of your life. If it's successful.

And if it's successful, wouldn't you want to increase the level of conviction you have for the idea? So that's the first C, conviction. And so you increase conviction by doing a lot of work, right?

Customer discovery and product prototyping and things like that. You also increase conviction by getting a lot of perspective from people who've done it before.

So you come to a venture studio like ours and all of a sudden you've got many, many people who've founded many, many companies.

You've got many people who can look at it from lots of different perspectives, whether that be product or go to market or competitive landscape or investor interest.

So you are, you are gaining conviction that this is the idea that I want to go spend the next five or 10 years of my life doing. So conviction is number one. Number two is compression of time.

So you could do it by yourself, but if I said, hey, go do 50 customer interviews, how long would that take you if you're doing it by yourself versus doing it with somebody who has lots of tooling and techniques to go find those 50 customer interviews?

As one example of compressing the time. So normally we can do those in two to three weeks, the normal founder may take two to three months.

And they may not even know where to go find those ideal customer profiles to get voice of customers, get early adopter customers. So the ICP, VOC, EAC flow is something that we can really compress the time.

So first one being conviction, second one being compression.

Guest: The third is completeness. So for anybody who's listening who's started a company before, you think there's a lot of crap that you have to go do to just start a company that has nothing to do with the company itself, right?

I got to go set up operations, I got to go set up payroll, I got to go set up benefits, I got to go do all the stuff, I got to find ways to get the company going and we have people to do all of that and not only do it but also do it at best practice.

So you now have a much more quote unquote complete company when you start versus the CEO having done that, being a CEO many times, you know, someone says, well, somebody's got to go buy a coffee maker and okay, I guess that'll be me.

Whereas, you know, in a studio model you have someone on the operations, recruiting, engineering, DevOps, all of those things that end up creating a more complete company. And then the next is really community. So it's super lonely being a founder.

Uh, and so finding a community of people who not only you can hang around with but also have a vested interest in your success. So when we define our community at PSL, we can define it as a very narrow community.

Like if you and I were starting a company, I would be somebody who feels like a co-founder to get going. And then ultimately, I would be one of your board members. And so the micro community is like the project team.

Guest: The slightly bigger community is the rest of the PSL people that are still part of what you're doing. The next bigger part of that community is really the people who are part of the portfolio.

And so when you now back out from just a an incubator studio model is you have a small community who's your co-founders, a bigger set of people who are your co-founders and a community of people who understand how that model works.

And that's a place where you now merge back into a accelerator is part of a community, a studio creates part of a community.

And if you compare that to, well, I'm just going to go bootstrap it by myself or I'm going to do it with just venture capital, oftentimes you're not getting that level of community and support that might come along.

So it's really about conviction, compression, completeness and community.

Host: So, I mean, that's a great answer. Um, I mean, nothing in life is free, right? There's no free lunches. Uh, so YC, if you go through a YC accelerator, I think, you know, YC uh, invests an X amount and take 7% of equity, all right? Uh, so what are the economics when a company joins PSL?

Guest: Most of it, most of the time we're thinking about that as like we are a co-founder in the company.

So it's much more as if you and I were doing the company together and that might be 50-50, that might be 60-40, depends a little bit on the how strong is the founder themselves and how much work have they done. Got it.

And interestingly enough when you think about a venture studio, and that's defined as somebody who has both a venture capital fund and a studio and you could overlap those as a diagram of which PSL is one of.

And so in a venture studio model, you can walk in the door and say like, I have a great idea for X thing and I need a lot of help and a lot more work to go realize this idea and I really want to lean into the seas I just talked about, right?

I really want to lean into conviction, compression, completeness and the community part. And and I can benefit by drawing all of those resources into this particular idea. That's a great studio kind of founder co-founder relationship.

If you said, you know what? I kind of got it. I got my CTO, I got some other people already working on it. I've already done some customer discovery.

I've already written a product, you know, kind of the product's already going, then I would just say great, just talk to me as a fund investor.

And we'll end up, you know, leading a round into that particular company and we'll end up with, you know, normal sort of seed terms type of thing. And so you don't necessarily need all of the studio work.

And so we have sort of effectively two products, you know, for the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurs. In general, teams that come with one or two or even three co-founders, they naturally kind of go toward the fund, right?

Both from a cap table perspective but also a, hey, we already got like somebody do all the work. If there's a single founder that's looking to really increase conviction on that particular idea, they tend to lean toward the studio model.

And then again, all the resources that I talked about, they all kind of get bundled up into what would feel like more like a co-founder relationship.

Host: Yeah, so it depends on how much help the founder is really looking from the incubator from the studio itself and then you sort of negotiate one-on-one depending on how much investment you're making on your side, right? A little bit.

And the they tend to be two paths, like think of it like a decision tree.

I think this is similar to other studios in the sense that, hey, you have a venture path and that has a certain set of economics and ownership and you have a studio path and that has a certain set of economics and effort.

And they they feel almost like products and skews uh, to us and we can, you know, back them up by saying, here's a team that used that exact same thing and here's all the stuff that we did across all the different axes of our effort.

Host: Uh, so when you're running a venture fund, it's sort of at least, um, a known formula on how to measure success, right?

You have a fund, you have a time to time you deploy in maybe three and a half, four years and you calculate how much returns you're making over 7 to 10 years.

Um, how do you sort of analyze your own performance for a venture studio, especially when there's no like a cohort, uh, like, you know, Tex Stars has a six month cohort and YC has, you know, summer batch, winter batch and you mentioned that you don't have a particular cohort, so it's always running.

So in such scenario, like how do you measure your own performance, you know, as a studio?

Guest: Yeah. So the the simplest way is we have quality and quantity of companies. So in a given year, our target would be four to six companies. So if we did two versus eight, okay, like that's one, that's one node of how well are we doing.

The second part would be the quality of those companies. And we can judge the quality of those companies by how quickly after they leave the studio, do they go raise capital, how good were the terms and how good were the investors?

So that would be a quality metric on the companies. And you can imagine that we could spend all of our effort on one company and theoretically the quality is going to go up or we could spend less effort on lots of companies.

So we're balancing quality and quantity of companies across an annual basis or quarterly basis, but really it's more like kind of annual. Did we do four to five companies? Did they get funded really well?

Did they have lots and lots of momentum and traction as they entered the market, which is a proxy of that is sort of how did the funding go?

And you can look internally a little bit also to say and how many people and how much time did we have to spend with every company to get it to that particular point?

So you can just sort of sometimes internal efficiency metrics, uh, that we would think about. But in general that's a quality quantity of companies per year is the simplest way for us to measure quote unquote success.

Host: I think in our last conversation you and you mentioned this, I think uh, in the studio model itself about systematic uh, customer discovery and customer development process. Um, so can you talk a little bit more about, you know, what you do um, as part of uh that?

Guest: Yep, for sure. I mean this is probably all things being equal, if you take no other advice, there's there's never enough customer development, customer discovery that a startup can do and a founder can do, right?

Effectively you're going to be in sales forever. So you may as well start getting good at it. And the founder himself or herself getting good at this process and starting it from day zero is important.

So functionally speaking, what we tend to do at PSL is first of all, we define a company in a framework that we call CVFB.

And I've got a blog post which you can include in the show notes of this, but the CVFB is customer value prop feature set business model. For people who are familiar with business model canvas, this is sort of like a simpler version of that.

And you can if I fill that in, you could say for this particular ideal customer profile who needs this quantified value proposition, our feature set or minimum viable product is act and and our business model is why. So CVFB is a short description.

We then define our ideal customer profile, ICP. And then we use a lot of different tools and techniques we have is for any given ICP, we are trying to drive to lots of VOC or voice of customer. That is tracked in a Google sheet or a code doc.

And every week we are going through is like, how many VOCs did I do? And if I had to restack my VOCs into who's most likely to buy and least likely to buy, why? So this is a this is really in customer develop discovery mode.

It's like, does anybody care about this thing that we're trying to do and can we find them? Then when we say the difference between customer discovery is, does anybody care? Will they listen? Will they take our call?

Then we move into customer development which is sort of the stack ranking, which is sort of like, okay, 10 people we talked to, three of them said they really, really want a solution for this and they said they would pay us what we think we want to charge.

And what is the both what do they want to pay? Are they clear about value prop and it how does our MVP fit into that? So going back to the CVFB and stack ranking, really then it's ICP, VOC, EAC, early adopter customers.

So of all the people we talk to, like who are the first ones we really want to get. And then we start to build our product against that set, right?

That subset and in theory, you know, you may have your number one and then one through three and then three through five, etc.

But that process of ICP, VOC, EAC is something that we do, you know, we're doing all the time and at any given time we're probably trying to attempt that on five to seven companies that are running in the studio at some point in time.

And we're very systematic about that.

We have built a lot of process and tools and we have lots of different techniques, whether that's a enterprise type of product or a B2B type of product or even a B2C type of product, different techniques and strategies uh for that and running that weekly sprint process at which point every Friday afternoon we say, okay, how's this company doing?

Getting better, getting worse. Is it still the same CVFB combination? Because sometimes you change that, right? Any number of those things may change. And if it's still generally the same, okay, how many VOCs did I do this week?

How many I planning for next week? And what are the additional goals in addition to the customer discovery work that we may add to that particular level of understanding for a company.

Host: I mean, the whole process can be really useful for, you know, different types of founders.

I can see why, because you initially have a thesis about a problem, but you you don't really know out there in the market whether it's valuable or not. And I think this is a great way to sort of discover whether it's worth pursuing.

Uh, are there any instances that you remember uh, where you thought, okay, this idea might not work, but you know, let's go and inquire and see if there's actually market for this and like found like surprise that there's actually market for this.

Like are there any instances like that?

Guest: Uh, based on the way the studio model works or our studio model works, um, there we sort of run in this we have a validate, we have an ideation stage, which effectively ends in kind of that CVFB.

We have this validation phase and what we're trying to do in validation is, is there a venture scale opportunity where we can actually go find customers who want this problem solved and that we can see enough of the market competitively or otherwise that this feels like a good idea.

At that point in time, we move it to the third phase, which we call creation and at that point we now have an entrepreneur leading it.

Whether we found it's our idea, we go find us potential CEO, it's their idea we're evaluating, okay, we're going to go do this idea or try to do this idea with this person.

At that creation phase, it's still not a company, it's still just a project in the studio. But we now have a leader and we're starting to really orient behind that leader and their vision for the project even if we had inspired it in the first place.

The end of creation is the day the company is founded and then the next phase is called the spin out phase and that ends the day this company is VC funded. So it's ideation, validation, creation, spin out scale out.

And in some ways because we have that process, we are going from ideation into validation with a hypothesis and we're either confirming or denying that hypothesis.

But to even get to the creation phase, we have to have a pretty strong belief of like it's for these per these types of customers and we probably already have people who are leaning in as an early adopter customer.

And that is why it pulls into creation and then you're converting those people into early adopter customers in the spin out phase. And then you're raising capital against that early customer traction.

So the process itself means effectively there's not a lot of pivoting in those phases, right? You could pivot a lot in validation, but you tend not to do too much unless something massively changes in the creation or the spin out phase.

Now, certainly companies get into, we've raised capital, hey, our first hypothesis we we got our first 20 customers and then we couldn't find anymore. Uh-oh, what happens there?

Now you didn't get your first 20 customers until you'd already raised external capital. We have had those kinds of cases and I think any VC has.

But in most cases as it gets into that spin out phase and raises external capital, there's not a lot of pivoting because we did all that pivot part back in the validation stage.

Host: But you might see more ideas, I mean, you might discover ideas that you might have not thought of validation, right? Like when a new entrepreneur comes like, do you have a list of ideas that no one pursued, but uh, you know, we think, you know, they're out there somewhere to pursue?

Guest: Yes. So we, so let's say that we had an idea and I'll say in the ideation sessions, they they start to a little sort of like hypothesis and categories for lack of a better description.

Like we think there should be a co-pilot for doctors that does X. And we think that's a good idea and we have the beginning of kind of a market landscape and we think we know maybe some people we could sell it to.

So we have like a, I'll say an idea of a company. And which is sort of somewhere between a category and a hypothesis, but it might not even be a CVFB at that point.

At that point we made a founder who says, I would love to work with you all in the studio. I have healthcare background. That sounds pretty interesting. Let's start working on something and at that point that's really the that moves into ideation.

Then we do that ideation to validation sort of work. And so we have some ideas that we got very excited about and we have not yet been able to find a founder.

So those are ones that are already validated and we just haven't quite found the right person to lead it yet.

And so those sit on the backlog and, you know, we probably have three to five that are kind of of that nature and we probably have 30 to 50 kind of categories or attempts we've had at an idea that hasn't materialized yet into a company.

I could give you plenty of examples of those.

Host: Do entrepreneurs come to you and like say, hey, I want to do my next company but I'm not really sure where or which category to pursue. And like, do you guys uh, show the list of categories you want to pursue and like say, if you're interested in some of these, then we can pursue. Like, does that happen?

Guest: Absolutely. And if you think about it as a as a founder, you want to zero in either on two axes as a founder. So let's play that out as as you did. So one is I would say like, what do you just get excited about?

Like what category are you excited about? Financial compliance, are you excited about healthcare? Are you excited about the environment? You excited it doesn't matter. Like pick a category. And then we can sort of filter our ideas into that category.

The second axes is, where do you have based on your background strong founder idea fit? Oh, well, I just worked at Xco and Yco and Zco.

So therefore, independent of the idea, I would already have likely a strong founder idea fit for something like this. Like mine might be business productivity or health.

Now, I may be really interested in business productivity and not in health, even though I could probably have a reasonable founder idea fit for a particular category.

The third way that we tend to encourage founders to answer this question is, what's the why now moment for you, either by market or by technology?

What is happening right now in the world that means you should be in this particular category, climate, health, generative AI, whatever. So a technology orientation or a market orientation, which starts to get people excited.

I usually give them that homework. Because I go, why are the what are the five bullet points of why now for whatever category of idea before you actually get to the idea itself.

So that's those are three different ways that we tend to help a founder who answer who comes in with your perspective, which is, I'm ready to do my next thing. I want to be a founder CEO of a company.

I'm not quite sure yet of the category or the idea inside the category. And whether we already have an idea in that category or we do, we try to narrow in by the three ways I just described.

Which I think is good for any founder anyway because you're going to have to do that when you sit in front of a VC, you're going to have to answer the question of how does the founder idea fit come together? Why me?

Why now is that third axes and why am I so excited about this particular category and I just, you know, can't sleep at night because I think about how cool it's going to be to build a solution for this problem in this category at this point in time.

Host: So what what are some of the companies uh, that came out of the studio and are, you know, doing well?

Guest: Uh, let's see. I can pick a few and they'll they'll start to suggest a uh, a theme as it were for the studio. So one like boundless. So boundless is really automating the process of uh, immigration.

So for all of us who have filed taxes, we all are probably quite familiar with something like Turbo Tax, but there wasn't something like that for immigration.

So when you're filling out all the paperwork, you want to make sure that you've got all the right things and all the right boxes and it's all very consistent and that you know where the thing is in the process.

So boundless is in a simplistic way Turbo Tax but for immigration with a primary focus on the United States. Uh, and that company's going very well. Um, Secure Save.

That is a company that is that is creating emergency savings plans for um, companies and their employees.

So if you think about an employee that may be on the lower end of the wage spectrum, they may be only one uh, car breakdown away from bankruptcy or not having enough emergency savings.

And so Secure Save is an automated way for companies to offer emergency savings plans the same way they might offer health savings plans uh for someone

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