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Venture Capital & Private Investing
Recorded: Aug. 28, 2025 Duration: 1:02:30Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you hey guys good evening it's uh it's ace behind the account here i don't know i don't know if
kyle's coming to the show this afternoon but um we could probably get rolling with self-taught
success up here in ravi if you guys want to kick us off yeah appreciate it sir mr jordan
hope you're having a good day yes sir killer day of uh spaces in the markets but
excited to listen in here that's awesome uh so if you're new to the audience you know as we get
things going here and as my co-host kyle comes in we we host this show every thursday same time 5
p.m eastern and we just talk about venture capital and private equity. A bunch of different topics.
We do hot takes, just upcoming things that have been happening throughout the week.
We bring on a bunch of different panelists as guest speakers and listen to their perspective
and also to learn from the different things that they're doing.
And so that's kind of the idea behind the show.
And if you ever have any questions or any speakers that you would recommend or would like to have up, let us know.
And we'll be happy to reach out to them and get that conversation rolling.
So my name is Jared.
I go by Self-Taught Success on the Internet.
And basically what that means is all the information you're looking for is out there.
It's just up to you to seek it out, find it, and then apply it on the path to your goals.
And that's kind of the idea a little bit more, again,
behind this space is to kind of bring that information
straight to you.
And so my connection to the VC space is I help startup founders
and startup companies anywhere from pre-seed all the way up
to publicly traded companies grow their brands right here on
X. We've done over three and a half million followers, one and a half billion plus impressions.
And the idea behind that is with a bigger brand, you can market to more people and make more money.
So that's kind of my connection to the space. I've also recently just helped one founder raise
money from another founder. So that was pretty cool.
But that's kind of my background to the space.
I know Kyle will be here shortly.
He's traveling all throughout Asia, I believe, this month.
So he's got a lot going on.
But Ravi, glad to have you back on.
Do you want to give your quick intro here?
Hi, everybody.
My name is Ravi. I'm based in New York but of course I'm also traveling
over the last few weeks. So really been on this investment piece for the last few years.
I've worked very hard to look at the India US and that's a big question mark right now.
But I've also been traveling to East Africa, Middle East in the last few weeks and really looking at some exciting opportunities in this part of the world.
And I founded the Invest Forum, which is ready to look at what is the opportunity in India as a sunrise, but also looking at East Africa, which has been very, very exciting.
I think there's a lot of work happening in East Africa, Middle East with sunrise opportunities.
Of course, everything is compounded by a lot of geopolitics these days. So it's been interesting. And I've
been maintaining in most of the interviews I've been giving out to the Indian media
that we need to stay focused. I think US and India will come back together. It'll be a big
opportunity. So really, that's been very, very exciting. Also work around AI, especially in the
AI food sector, but also
launch the AI business skilling initiative for really professionals to look at AI skills as part
of business development, which is something which is very exciting. And we do run on the 15th of
every month, we run the Invest LinkedIn events, which are again looking at the investment
opportunity with Indian entrepreneurs,
both in India and in the US. So very exciting times. I think we will definitely come on the
other side when all this tariff story kind of pauses or is rebooted at some point. But definitely,
yeah, it's interesting times. Awesome. Question for you, Ravi. When you're doing all the traveling to all
those different places, what are you looking for? In today's age, you can hop on Zoom,
you can hop on Google Meet, you can hop on the phone, you can have a conversation with
the founder or whoever it might be. I'd love to just hear a little bit more about
your perspective as far as when you're traveling to go make those deals, when you're traveling to go meet those founders and find those deals.
What are the things you're looking for and what makes the difference so much as far as the total outcome of ROI that it's worth the time, the money, the energy, everything to travel across the world to go do that
instead of just hopping on Zoom or something like that?
Great question, Gerald.
I think, first of all, it's kind of curated your work on your travel.
Plan it for some time.
You just don't land up unless there's a speaking opportunity
or a business deal happening.
So most of the time, if I'm traveling towards like Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia,
it is like lining up for you, you know,
after going through a series of those Zoom meetings,
having those back and forth,
and you're almost going to finalize,
especially if it's a manufacturing, you know, startup.
You want to always, always look at the manufacturing facility
because, you know, we're sitting around this side
of the world, but we want to always go down and see it, right? You want to get the feel of it.
Meet up with teams, you know, I think that's something really, really critical. You know,
I also know that there have been something early on in the investment piece, you look at some
companies making those big, tall claims, but we actually go and see those, you know, manufacturing
plants, you don't really see those, you know, manufacturing plants,
you don't really see it, right?
So I think it's really important.
And like, I think we've spoken
on these spaces a lot of time.
Yes, it's great to be on Zoom,
but when you're sitting across the table,
you really get to know
there's that connection, right?
Or there's no connection.
So I think that really matters.
So of course, on your question that
not every meeting you just land up going, right?
So you connect, but also you expand your network. I've always seen whenever you're traveling,
you connect with people and they connect you to other people. And that's exactly what we do on
these amazing spaces that you guys have been running. But that's happening more one-to-one.
You know, I've always landed up, like if I have like three important deals or good meetings
happening, they will result in another pipeline of some other possibility so you really weigh in but most of my travel really is
to really come to the last part of you know really deciding you know is this really the final part of
the journey or not or you know that's that and of course then you're always going back to some of
the investments and you know go and find out what's up, keeping a check on them, you know, as any support you need.
Always, always good to go back to those early investments.
And sometimes, you know, you've made the exit, you want to go back and just make connection with those old folks.
Always important to make those connections and keep that healthy relationship on.
Great question. I'm sorry, I have some issues with my connection here.
I don't hear you.
I heard the earlier question.
I'll try to rejoin.
Rejoin as well.
I don't hear him either.
Might need to just drop off and come back on. ravi i think you're actually good i think um jared's gonna drop off and come back on i think he was just having some issues
i think we're all good is that mp up here too what's up m there he is all right we got him yeah
there's yeah sorry i i stuck away uh just uh i love this show so i wanted to
hop up here and listen in and i always love hearing robbie and jared talk kyle just sent a message i
saw that he's joining here shortly but glad we got jared back up well i appreciate that always
uh something interesting with spaces you know it wouldn't be a show without some kind of technical difficulty uh tell me about it it's insane yeah it's become worse for some reason
yeah who knows who knows but but ravi so the follow-up question on that i understand you go
to see the manufacturing plants like that totally makes sense like you want to see it to make sure
it is what it is because that's what you're investing in. I get that. And I also feel like there is a certain element of like
a bond and getting to know somebody and just, you know, feel off their vibe. If you're going
to give them a lot of money of like meeting them in person and shaking their hand. So like, I get
that, but also, you know, the travel across the world, do you ever you ever just hey i know this guy who lives in
wherever um you know let's just say switzerland or something like that and that's where it is so
instead of me traveling out there he might only be an hour away so i'm just gonna you know pay him
you know for the day to to go out there and check it out so do you ever you know find people
you know to to go do those missions for you?
Yeah, I mean, definitely.
But, you know, like, yeah, of course, you know,
you're looking with your, you know,
rather the bigger network, right?
So people are always checking.
Like, I'll give you an example.
Like, next week, I'm going to be in Bangalore in India
and also in Chennai.
So the other thing, of course, happens when you're going,
then there are other folks,
because India is huge, right?
So people know that you're coming in,
so people will also line up meetings.
People are coming to meet
from the other parts of India.
So I'm not going to go to every city
and start meeting folks.
So people will come down.
So there are, of course,
vetting and other stuff
that's already been done by the team.
And they're like some old
conversations that i've been you know i've had like three years ago and then suddenly you see
that you know those guys want to come back and have a conversation so definitely yes so on your
on your uh question both so there are some folks who read that for you but ultimately you need to
really go back and have that either one-to-one. So that's organic, right?
But I always try to not go for one or two meetings.
It has to have multiple purposes.
And a lot of time, I also kind of line up speaking whenever I'm traveling.
So I also line up around any speaking opportunity or something or the other or a launch that works.
So we're launching the new product line next week on air water generation,
which is extremely innovative.
We bring water out of the air,
so that's the new product lines.
I've designed the entire thing.
On the launch strategy,
we have a bunch of investors into that
who are meeting up,
and that's going to be exciting.
So that's one thing.
And then the two more folks
who are working on Meditech,
and that's something which I'm learning.
I'm not a Meditech person, honestly,
but I'm always open to other innovations.
So there are IIT guys who are coming with some fantastic innovations.
So I'm really going there to learn.
Of course, I've had at least four meetings with the team
and the core advisors,
but ultimately you just want to go and see the facility.
I always want to go and see the facility. I don't know. and see the facility i don't know i'm not into china so i've not been to any of those because i've
been always looking at the india us opportunity so i want to go there and see what's happening Oh, no. Did we lose Jared again?
Yeah, I think something's up.
I think definitely, I don't know,
we probably want to bring up Azuz here if he wants to come up
and hear some things happening in Latin America.
That'd be great.
We also have Dr.
Hari,
another very important investor.
So if you can also pull him up,
I don't know if he'll be able to come up and speak because he's also
another,
you know,
senior who's been really looking at the energy space.
So you can try to pull him up too.
Absolutely. Jordan, energy space so you can try to pull him up too yeah absolutely jordan if you see you see i just sent them both yeah beautiful uh yeah i kind of want to lead into a i'll lead into a topic here because i know jared wanted to talk
about this and we'll have him pick back up. But hardware versus software, and there was a narrative, Ravi,
I don't know if you have any thoughts around, you know, software,
obviously software being a big export of the US.
There was a narrative recently in the market that software was dead.
And we're seeing it make a little rise here.
It was one of these things where it's like, okay, is hardware,
are we going back to hardware? Is software the move? Is it overrated? Is LLM going to come in
and destroy a lot of the software stuff? What's your take around that and how it goes into the
venture capital space? And there's a tweet here that I'm going to get pinned up in the nest,
but Ravi, I'd love to hear your thoughts around software and how that fits into the VC world and how you look at that versus hardware.
What is more attractive to you?
See, honestly, it depends on the market to market.
I think software as we know it is definitely on its way out.
out, but software can never be dead because now we have all these machine learning AI,
energetic AI producing those softwares for you. So I think as we move on, in fact, I had this very
interesting conversation with somebody in Rwanda. And Rwanda in East Africa is somebody who, you
know, they've been really looking up technology in East Africa. And the question was, you know,
what happens to all these software engineers?
You know, are they gone?
I said, look, it's really critical
that every single software engineer
really needs to understand
how are they going to up their game
using the AI models,
Energetic AI, to create better software
rather than they writing it
because the writing is no longer done by them.
But they really need to understand who and how and what to use to solve what problem.
I think that's what we're looking at.
I think the same question is in India.
So in terms of hardware, you definitely see with the deep tech and the hardware opportunity.
In fact, this guy, the other engineer was like, what happens to me?
I think you need to really understand that as we are moving into this more AI-powered world economy,
I think in another one or two years, everything's going to be AI.
You really need to up both the software and the hardware aspect of it,
which also creates a lot of opportunity.
Because if you really look at deep tech, deep tech was almost dead.
I think it was dead for years.
And now suddenly everybody is saying,
I need the deep tech to really go up.
And you have all these new startups coming in the space
and doing a combination of both soft and hardware.
So I would really say that, yes, in a certain way,
software as we know it is on our way out.
And you've seen the data coming out.
You've seen all the statements coming from Microsoft and everywhere else
that we are actually going to lay out.
But the folks who are going to stay and have some very close friends are the ones who are using AI to create better software.
But hardware is definitely on our way up, for sure.
Yeah, I've pinned that tweet up top if anybody wants to take a look at it.
But SVB put out an interesting study.
And they started off with a nice catch line here.
Hardware is no longer hard.
This is Arjun that put this tweet out.
But it talks about, you know, typically people looked at software as the multiple expansion, right?
And hardware had been lagging that.
But now we're actually seeing the numbers say differently recent,
which I think is very interesting.
And Jared put this on my radar.
And if Jared's back, I would love to hear
if you had any other thoughts or questions around that.
Yeah, no, I think that, you know,
that's a good explanation from Ravi.
To me, I just think it's so interesting
because, you know, on the show, we've talked AI,
we've talked SaaS, we've talked software.
Everywhere you look on the timeline, software, software, software.
So it almost just makes me feel like in some ways maybe we're in an echo chamber here on X.
And maybe that's just, you know, my niche and kind of where I'm at, where a lot of the people I talk with and deal with, like, they're in the software side.
with and deal with like they're in the software side.
So that I feel like is a little bit of a surprise, I guess, for me.
But I guess where I would also go is the failure rate on software is probably higher.
The returns are probably higher exponentially, but the failure rate is probably higher there because on the hardware, more hard
assets, more traditional, those have been around longer, they're more proven, and there's something
a little bit more tangible. You can have software, and if it goes to crap, you have literally zero.
If you have hardware and it goes to crap, now at least you still have parts.
So I think there might be something there
as far as the actual returns,
but I would be willing to bet that there's more unicorns
and home runs out of the software side.
Yeah, I think that's a very good point
because that's what I said,
software as we know it is dead. But the way software will started selling in McDonald's.
So you will see a lot of that, especially if, and this is, you know, we've had this conversation here
that if the ongoing, and I don't know whether you definitely see that in US, and you don't use kind
of, there's some rectification in India where you're looking at the existing computer engineering colleges who are now very actively integrating AI as a mechanism to help you develop as a student software.
How do you use that to your advantage, right?
That's something which is happening. you know, one of a few colleges in the U.S., but there is definitely a huge need to integrate AI skilling
and as a tool to create better software
and using software to create better solutions
from the problems that we are facing.
I see John here.
It'll be great, John, if you can also come up.
So, you know, it'll be interesting,
and you see that in the question about hardware, right?
So you see that in defense tech, for example.
You see that a huge rise there.
And similarly, I think I was speaking to another big VC firm,
which was about $2 billion sitting out of San Francisco.
And we were discussing on semiconductors 30 years ago.
He said, you know, nobody wanted to look at hardware everywhere in
India and the Indian American diaspora. Let's do software, software, software. And suddenly they're
like, you know, there's complete resurrection of looking at chips and looking at, you know,
going back to those conversations they had 25 years ago. And suddenly hardware is the
in thing and we need to get into hardware. I think a lot of that has got to do with the
geopolitics of looking at manufacturing and really realizing that ultimately we need to get into hardware. I think a lot of that has got to do with the geopolitics of looking at manufacturing and really realizing
that ultimately we need, no matter what happens,
we need that very clear eye on ensuring that, you know,
there is a commitment to invest in creating hardware
in your own countries.
So you see that whole conversation with Intel, for example, right,
and that back and forth with the linking of Intel and so on and so forth.
So I would really say that, you know, we are in that important point.
And I think a lot of folks do not have the answer
to what these, you know, 40% or 50% of new startups will look like.
But definitely one thing is sure that, you know, and you've said that,
I think, Jared, you've said in one of these
shows here that ultimately we are waiting
for the one-person
unicorn. And they will become very common
because you want to use
the, you know, we're running this course
for the Business AI
Skilling Institute in New York.
We're working with these professionals. And this is
very interesting for me because you're
working with these techies also
who are also saying,
how do I use this little better than what I'm doing
beyond a chat GPT?
What do I do to improve my business processes?
How do I get my own personal,
either one, two, or three agents
who will do this for me, right?
And will those agents then create
better efficient models
that will improve efficiency and solve problems.
That'll take about a year, but probably when we deploy them, they will actually speed up
the delivery. So you see that happening. So there's a lot of investment that is coming
into that particular area. Appreciate all that intel there, Ravi.
John, if you want to come up, you're more than welcome to come up as well.
Ravi, if he's vouching for you, then you're good here.
I'm going to promise, John, we're not going to discuss India-US.
It's going to be only investment.
So to follow up on the software side, it kind of bridges into the next topic.
Let me pin this tweet up here.
But WAP, if you guys are familiar with WAP or if you're familiar with school, WAP would be the competitor.
Basically, a bunch of kids in their mid-20s who have built a company that's processed over a billion dollars in sales.
So, you know, they're doing pretty good, pretty impressive what they've
built, but they've long integrated into their software Stripe for payment processing. And just
this last week, I believe they moved completely away from Stripe and now they are independent where they are processing their own payments. And so
kind of how I wanted to pose this topic was as payments continue to evolve and where AI
increases ease of use and the cost to produce code for different things with your own agents,
you know, with how AI is set up, you can plug that in and set up your own
payment processor and have all the code and the software all figured out way easier than you could
have, you know, just a few years ago when Stripe was kind of the mainstay. And so for companies
that are maybe a little older and they kind of just focus on something simple like payment
processors stripe for example i would think that this ai innovation would eat up their market share
for these kind of companies that aren't very user friendly and they just do one thing versus a
company like wap who does several different things
where Stripe or their payment processor is already integrated, I would think would have a huge edge
on that. And also because they're not using a third party, their fees are cheaper, 0.2% cheaper
than Stripe. And so to me, I would think that would be a huge edge. So I just kind of want
to pose that topic like that. And then Ravi, if you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear what you
got. Jared, for sure. But I just want to say that we have Shubham there in the audience. Shubham is
another young investor from India based now, I think in Chicago,
you might want to pull up Shubham to come up too,
because he would also talk about some investment, you know,
you know, stuff happening in India from his perspective.
He's just here in the U.S.
So I don't know, Shubham, if you can send in a request to be a speaker,
that'd be great.
I just sent him in there.
Yeah, great. And I don't know, John,
it'd be nice to also bring you up really on the defense investment,
you know, defense tech investment opportunities to talk about.
So really, I think this is a great example, right, Jared, that, you know, you are getting
these young folks who are using AI and agents to create these solutions or multiple solutions
at a very reasonable cost and
you'll see more and more of that and that's exactly what I was saying that
you know I was in fact speaking to one or two you know business folks this
morning and the whole question is really that you know and people are like
will this agent really change my life will this happen I'm like guys it's not
gonna happen it's happening right now so it's really critical for you to catch up
because if you don't do that,
yes, you will find solutions,
but somebody is going to come
and probably provide a better system,
an efficient system that will go to actually
completely at some point erase what you've done.
So it is really important to look at
from a competitor perspective
to really use agents to your advantage.
So it's a great example that you give.
So Shubham, welcome.
It'll be great for you to also share your perspective.
Appreciate that, Ravi.
Shubham, if you're able to unmute your mic, we'd love to hear a quick background intro on you.
And if you want to carry on that conversation that Robbie was just talking on there, that'd be awesome.
More technical difficulties.
Space is one of these days.
One of these days they're going to get the spaces right.
They're going to...
You know what, honestly, I was running a space the other day
with India-US tariffs, and we had so many glitches.
And I don't know, there's something definitely not working out
at some point.
I think we probably need more agents working for us
on the right side of the spaces.
You know, Robert...
I have a question, Jared, for you.
You know, and this is something
which I'm really curious to ask.
Where do you see AI skilling in the VC and the PE space
to really improve efficiency for us?
I mean, from including scouting
to looking at, you know, efficiency improvement and so on.
Do you see some work happening in that area?
That's a good question.
I don't know if I'm exactly the right guy to answer that question because I'm not actively going through, you know, like Martin Tobias when he was on and talking about he goes through, you know, 10 plus deals a day.
He could probably give you a better answer on that than I could. But to me,
I would think if you could take your decks, put them into some kind of AI where it scans them,
filters them, where you can basically filter things out right away as far as whatever your
different things are that you look for in an investment before you make one,
where you have to have A, B, and C for you to even consider it.
And you put in 20 decks and it'll scan them.
And if it doesn't have A, B, C, it filters them out.
To me, I would think that would be a great use case.
To me, what I'm seeing as far as the founders that I talk to who are using it the
most is basically they're just using it to replace employees right now. So, and not necessarily,
you know, huge salaried employees, but a lot of that, I guess, maybe more assistant-like work, a lot of the office work, you know,
that lower pay scale kind of work.
What I'm seeing from founders is they're using AI to basically speed run that work,
to get it done faster and to, you know, not have to pay for it.
So, and a lot of times it's not necessarily the founder who's doing the AI prompts,
but it's somebody on their team
who is maybe now doing two or three jobs
because now they can do two or three jobs
because AI speeds it up.
So I think that's where I'm seeing it a little bit more.
Did you have any take on that, Ravi?
No, I think I absolutely hit the nail on the head
because, you know, it's really, you know because it's a combination of improving the workflow, cutting down the cost.
But I think the critical piece for us really will be that how do we really ultimately find those deals?
I don't know. At some point, we'll arrive at that.
I know one or two folks who are working on this.
Probably we'll try to see if I can bring them into space in the next coming weeks.
Because there are at least two folks, one based out of India and one based out of U.S., that are really looking at this as a kind of efficiency issue for VCPE space to help you.
But ultimately, your question where we started, no matter what we do, ultimately, there will be at some point a one-to-one meeting.
And that's where you look at human, you know,
need to have that ultimate wedding.
I don't know if you've done any of those meetings
when you've never met a person one-to-one
and said, okay, I'm going to go with this team.
Of course, I'm talking about more from a startup perspective,
not the mature companies
but Shubham I don't know if you were able to unmute and just share
what you do with Startupreneur and the work you've been doing
which is pretty fascinating with especially young entrepreneurs
between India, UK, India, US
Alright thank you, hope I'm audible this time
Hello
Alright so thank you Ravi
and thank you for, thank you, Stephen, for, you know, inviting me on the space. A little bit brief background about myself. I've been in startup space from last 10 years.
had invested and worked with startups right from the deal structuring to, you know,
consulting and advising them on the legal side.
That includes right from their, you know, term sheets to their co-founders agreement.
That was the journey for me.
And probably two years back, I founded a company called Startupreneur,
in which what we do is we are basically a venture studio.
So we are investing
in specifically healthcare startups as well as in a little bit focused on defense tech.
The idea is to work with these startups on ideation, you know, the very basic journey of
zero to one. So that's something that we are focusing on right now where we are taking startups
from zero to one right from
investing to you know helping them with all sort of commercialization as well as getting them
getting them to getting them into you know getting them at the MVP stage apparently we do a lot of
India UK as well as IndiaUS partnerships as well as accelerator program
where we help Indian startups get into the US markets
and vice versa, you know, the companies who are looking into the expansions
for their expansions into the US as well as the Asian countries.
So that's pretty much about Startup Renner.
I think Ravi, you asked a question maybe, you know,
at that time I was facing some technical issues.
But just to add on the point which you and you guys were discussing about,
were discussing about, you know, automation in PE as well as in a PE or VC space. Deal sourcing
you know, automation in PE as well as in a PE or VC space,
has become a lot of interesting area for, you know, AI optimization. I've interacted with
startups who are already, you know, they've already launched their platforms where, you know,
deals are getting sourced as well as, you know, a lot of filters as well as logical questions you can ask so that's something
that's something we we definitely can look into starting as as you know improvisation
with investment decisions i feel that a lot of times you need strong validations and and gpt
cannot give you i mean the the problem with GPT is the hallucination
and the tokenization of the context.
So recently I was interacting with one of the startups in India and they are building
LCMA, sorry, YCMA, which is, you know, which will reduce the error or maybe a redundancy in you
know generating the context. So as soon as such more developments happen I think the health the
use case for these would be you know healthcare then fintech and and the financial space where
you know all sort of logical as well as rational thinking can be nurtured into AI.
So I think a lot of things are happening and quite interesting startups
that are coming into the space who are refining the space in a very mature way.
So thank you. Thank you for that.
Awesome. We are a little past the halfway point,
so I do want to ask the audience,
if you're new here,
go ahead, give our speakers a follow.
Go ahead, retweet this space.
We can get more people in here.
We have this show talking venture capital,
private equity every Thursday, 5 p.m. Eastern.
We bring on different guests.
Next week, I think we'll have five different guests,
so I should have a pretty good show show we do have a question from the audience that i want to bounce
to here um and let me pull it back up but i think is this is from shariti i'm saying that right and
the question was if we had any advice for someone just starting their first
oh no i think we lost him again we lost him again what is the question uh can you check
i don't know if it's on these i think it's on the bubble let me just see what the question is
yeah let me see here.
Oh, what should be avoided?
Okay, that's a very good question, Shruti.
I don't know if it's relevant,
but advice on someone just starting their first startup.
Things should be avoided. I mean, that's a very, I mean, you know, I think from between, you know, Shubham, me,
and probably Jared and some others, you know, I think we can come up with a very long list.
I think the most critical piece, at least I would say, for really when you're starting up,
I think spend time researching the ecosystem and really, I always say,
while you're looking at your value proposition, you're looking at your market fit,
do look at the market.
So don't just think, I've dealt with some interesting startups,
which is this thing that they have come up with a great idea
and they're the only ones working on it.
And I always say that, you know, do some solid research,
really invest and just don't look at your own market,
look at different parts of the world if somebody else is finding a solution.
So always I like to do the competitor analysis in a very, very detailed way.
So don't overlook that.
That's one thing I would say.
Second, I think to really avoid...
This is such an interesting question.
What else are we going to avoid, Shubham?
I think, you know, I would say that you don't look at now
because all these tools that are available, right?
So you can really, like, avoid spending too much time,
especially on, you know, when you're looking at all these tools
that are available, right?
If you go early on, you look at the time when you're spending time,
endless discussions.
But now use AI to your advantage to really do a lot of your processes. I think that's
something which I would definitely do compared to if I had to do something two years ago.
So more use of agentic AI, as Shubham was saying, and deployment would definitely really save a lot
of time. Shubham, what else are we going to avoid? It's a long and it's a very big, big,
big question, I would say.
You know, there are so many things that you can avoid.
But I think for me, so, you know, in a context, you know, I'll just give my example.
At StartOpener, what we are trying right now is, and Ravi, you're also aware about this,
that we are planning to build a tool for a D2C as well as, you know, startups which are focused directly for the customers.
So the cash burn for these startups is pretty huge.
And, you know, a lot of times the journey for these startups change as and when they are not aware about their spendings.
So what we are doing is we are trying to build an ai tool and
this is this is for everyone i guess we are trying to build an every uh ai tool that will help us
give uh you know that will help us generate a color-coded report which will basically help
startups understanding which uh which which part of the you know's required and that's not required.
Again, this is just a tool that will be helpful.
But for us to taste this, we started with talking with a lot of agents
or maybe agents, I would say a lot of people who are developing AI tools.
One thing that we realized, or specifically I realized is,
if you spend three days on learning how to build AI tools, probably in a week you'll be able to develop on your own.
So there are a lot of things that you can talk with AI and a question that you more elaborative answers, provided you are
writing a very proper and correct prompt for them.
And like Ravi said, it depends a lot on the industry.
I guess that's true because a lot of times things can change given that the industry
you are in but i think to now to answer this
question i think i would suggest few things that that i usually avoid when when we look at either
investments or the startups that when we are evaluating one is you know maybe at early stage
if you are focusing on four or five different things to do uh that is something that that is that is not a good thing so avoid or maybe try and trial and error
for your two most important verticals that you think would give you a good understanding on the
journey that's first and second you know maybe having some legal document if you have co-founders
legal documents are really important and uh if you have recently
met your co-founder and that things are not fluently going as you think then having a
co-founder as well as or maybe a legal document between uh the founding team is always helpful
so start doing a hard conversations i think that, that you should not avoid.
So, yeah, that's all.
Can I just underline Shubham's point that, you know,
don't skip having those legal documents, you know, really in place.
And the other thing I would really avoid is hiring very heavy
and, you know, resource-heavy personnel. I mean, you'll need to probably look at, you know, resource-heavy personnel.
I mean, you'll need to probably look at, you know,
having the right people in the team,
but then somebody claiming to be, you know,
I've seen that with many startups.
When they get, like, the seed round or something,
they suddenly say, oh, I want to hire the best of the best.
Yes, you do, but you also need to make sure that,
you know, is there any, without getting into cost,
cutting, convert that into cost efficiency.
That's something that you really need.
So don't land up like,
and of course, we always have a huge list of stuff
that you don't need to just,
when you get the investment coming,
and you just cannot be seen throwing the money out
and heavy salaries for the founders, co-founders.
So I think you want to see,
at least at the stage of the startup,
especially at the pre-stage,
that you're really optimizing
whatever's coming through,
whatever round you have.
You want to show that to your investors,
whether it's even friends and family
or it's a safe round, whatever.
You really want to tell people
that you're really optimizing
every single drop of that dollar
to really find that solution
and to build that product
or that solution that you're really after.
I know Kyle is here. Kyle is going to give some wisdom. Welcome, Kyle. I'm welcoming you and your
own show. What up? What up? So sorry for being late. It has been a crazy week for me. I am
headed out to Southeast Asia for the month of September. So this week has been nuts as I, uh, as I plan
for just trying to wrap up all my meetings and stuff here. And unfortunately I was on back to
back calls that I just could not get off of. So I apologize to the audience, but most importantly,
I apologize to our panelists. And of course my host, Jared, for, for leaving you hanging on an
island today, but, uh, but you know, at least I'm here now. So I'm just
listening, making sure that I don't interrupt the flow of the conversation, but happy to share any
thoughts as you'd like, Jared. Yeah. We're glad to have you on here, Kyle. We were just going over,
we had a question from the audience about what you know, like what is one thing, you know, the biggest thing that you should avoid as a startup founder?
That's a really interesting question.
You know, I think the number one thing that you should avoid as a startup founder is inaction, is not moving forward.
I think the biggest thing about startups is that execution is really the only
thing that matters. I think that there's a fun saying that I say around the office all the time,
which is don't let perfect get in the way of good enough. And a lot of times in startups,
you don't have enough manpower. You don't have enough funding. You don't have enough time.
You don't have enough other resources and opportunities. Your code isn't good enough. Your platform isn't what you need. And you just got to keep moving. And, you know, you're constantly going to have all kinds of issues within your business, some of which are controllable, some of which are not controllable.
Execution is the only thing that matters. I think that, you know, many startups really focus their North Star on revenue, on servicing their clients. That can be, you know, that can be slightly disintermediated if you have, let's say, a business that relies on user retention, for example, where your customers are the ad providers that are dependent on the users.
are the ad providers that are dependent on the users. But at the end of the day,
focusing on quantifiable metrics in terms of driving revenue to your business is the only
thing that truly matters. If you have a healthy company, if you have a business that's making
money and growing, you will solve the other problems. And dawdling or spending too much time on getting things through to the finish line that
don't actually matter is a surefire way to feel like you are having a productive day and you're
being a successful founder when you're just simply not and you're not focusing on the right things
and you're wasting your time. And even though it feels productive to check your email or get your email to inbox zero or, you know, respond to messages or to perfect design elements in Figma
or Canva, these things don't matter. What matters is getting in front of customers,
is talking to investors, is following up with potential investors, clients,
partnerships that can really drive true revenue. Those are the things that matter.
And so you need to get things off of your desk and into the other person's hands. And if they're
not perfect, that's okay, because you can get three imperfect things done at the time that
it might take you to get one thing done perfectly. We've seen some examples where the exception
proves the rule here. I'm not saying that that's the only thing that matters.
I think ruthless execution matters.
You've seen companies like Airbnb or whatever that are Apple to some degree in the early
stages where design was the most important thing for their businesses and making sure
that it felt perfect or Spotify.
Some of those core components that differentiated them where perfection was mandatory.
Those things are good exceptions to the rule, but they are just that. I think for most businesses,
you have to just ship product and then ask questions later. Because quite frankly,
as we see a lot in VC, it's sometimes not even your first business that matters.
A lot of VCs
specifically look to invest in serial entrepreneurs, second-time founders, multi-time founders. And why?
Because you're going to make mistakes, right? And even in a portfolio of serial entrepreneurs,
of seasoned founders that have expertise, they still have, you know, what, 98 out of 100 that don't become
billion-dollar companies. They still have a huge fail rate, even on those qualities. And so if we
are assuming that me as a founder and Robbie as a founder and Jared as a founder and Sabam is a
founder, like, even if you take all of us and put us in a portfolio together, we're still going to make mistakes, right? So assuming that that's the case, the only thing that matters is increasing the
amount of hits that you have at the ball, increasing the amount of bites at the apple,
doing as many things as possible and pushing forward, assuming that your losses are going
to be an assumption. So therefore you need to take as many opportunities you can to find that win and not sweat some of those small losses. Just keep moving forward. I think
that's the biggest thing for me. And that's hard as a founder because that requires you to be
locked in when times are stressful, be locked in when you get rejection, be locked in when you're
dealing with issues that are difficult, emotionally stressful, locked in when you're dealing with issues that are difficult, emotionally stressful.
Locked in when you have life things that happen outside of your business.
You have to be locked in across all of these types of things and continue that relentless
drive for execution, which isn't easy.
It's hard to stay positive.
It's hard to stay motivated when things take longer than you expect, when you get a huge
letdown, when you have some of these things happen. It's also hard when things go really, really good because you close that
funding round, you close a big client, you're feeling rich, you're feeling successful. It's,
you know, it's hard to get punched in the face when you're sleeping in silk sheets, as they say
in the boxing world. So I think that keeping an even keel and keeping that relentless drive towards
execution is definitely the most important
thing as a founder at any level, whether you're a first-time founder or a serial entrepreneur.
The only ones that win are the ones that just don't stop and move at 1,000 miles a minute.
So I think that would be my big, well, long-winded answer to that question.
Bars, dropping bars.
Love that, Kyle. Glad you're here to share all that and definitely appreciate that. I want to ask you, Kyle, while we're here, we got a few minutes
left. I saw a tweet you had earlier this week and I wanted to bring that up. And so, Kyle,
maybe you could give a few minutes on
that and then we could let, um, the other speakers hop in, you know, and give, give their last
thoughts as we get eight minutes here, but I pinned that tweet up here in the top. Um, and,
and Kyle, uh, I'll kind of let you summarize it from your standpoint, but, uh, the basis on it,
uh, you know, I'll, I'll just read the tweet and then Kyle,
I'll let you give your perspective and your thoughts and why you,
you think this as a hot take.
And the tweet says a reminder that accounting practices are not standardized
between companies.
Adjusted gross profit makes me want to vomit.
EBITDA is the only thing that matters.
So obviously, you know,
there's a lot of fancy tricks you can do in accounting, but Kyle, I'd like to, I think this is a good thing to share with the audience.
Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, part of my PTSD, obviously the vomit part is a bit
comical, but it's actually something that I do have a little bit of just like post-traumatic
stress about the adjusted growth revenue or adjusted gross profits terminology, because my background
is in capital markets doing a lot of tokenization. So that means applying blockchain technology,
but to real investment opportunities. So I wouldn't say that I'm very much of a crypto
guy. I'm much more of a structured finance guy. And how can we leverage technology to do that more effectively,
cheaper, faster, X, Y, and Z for banks, for governments, for institutions, wealth managers,
asset managers, and the like. And so early in the life cycle of this market, there were companies like Key Zero, if you've heard of them. There's companies like INX that we've featured on Wolf Web 3 many times. There's companies all over this
space that had launched security tokens that represented these adjusted numbers. And often
they would title it as adjusted gross revenue, which sounds, because you see the word revenue
and you go, oh, revenue,
that must mean it's a profit sharing or it's a revenue sharing opportunity where if your
top line is $10 million and you're giving 10% adjusted gross revenue, then that means
that I get a million dollars that distributes out to shareholders.
And then you read the fine print and it says, yeah, well, it's adjusted gross revenue because we take the revenue and then we subtract all the expenses from it. So it kind of looks like
profit, but the expenses are variable such that we can decide how much expenses there are and
there's no one holding us accountable. So therefore we've never made a dollar in our entire life cycle
of our business from a profit perspective.
So our adjusted gross revenue is zero and we made $10 million in revenue, but you don't get to see a dollar.
Right. Or, you know, there's a variety of types of processes here where the companies would then be incentivized to offer zero trading fees, for example. And it's like, well, wait, do I as a user, if I own the token,
do I really actually want zero trading fees?
Because it means that, you know,
yeah, maybe there's more people trading,
but I don't actually get a piece of any of the trading or a variety of other factors.
And we see this happen a lot.
And I'm not just necessarily trying to pick
on any of those guys.
I know many
of the people from all of those teams. And I actually have voiced my perspective on some of
these things to their teams directly in the past. And again, it's all love. They're good friends
and are building great things and driving industries forward. And I'm not just picking
on them. As we said, in the context of this tweet, it was actually talking about AI companies.
In the context of this tweet, it was actually talking about AI companies.
And it was talking about gross margins of a lot of the AI models,
Anthropic, Perplexity, OpenAI, and others seeing 50% to 60% in margin
as gross profit as a percentage of revenue.
But then at the bottom of the thing, it says,
note, Perplexity, Replit, lovable, and stack blitz do not incorporate the
costs of running AI models for non-paying users in their calculation. While OpenAI does,
Anthropics accounting couldn't be learned. So boom, we just calculated that, oh my gosh,
look how amazing this is. You know, Anthropic doing 60% margins,
Perflexity, 60% margins.
And then you read it and you're like,
oh, wait, wait, but all of their free users,
we didn't factor in those costs.
Okay, so it's just margins on the paid users,
which is what, 1%, 10%, 20% of the users of these platforms.
And we're gonna act like that is a effective way
of showcasing how healthy and successful this business is.
You know, when we talk about the fact that $1
in the AI space translates to $13 of costs downstream
across all these intermediary vendors,
we're gonna try to act like none of that stuff costs anything
because it's not part of our revenue stack. And so I think it was just a little bit of a PTSD moment for me where, again,
I love the AI space. I think it's fantastic from a consumer's perspective. I don't have a lot of
very extensive portfolio of investments in the space just because I think for a lot of these
reasons. But it's just funny where we like, we try to do
all these accounting practices. We try to add, you know, look at forward projected recurring
revenue on your best month of revenue. Like we did 50,000 in revenue this, this month. So that
means that we're going to do, you know, X amount, you know, 600 K of recurring revenue per year,
ARR. And it's like, well, not really. Right. Like,
like, like it doesn't actually. So I think that in a lot of ways we see a lot of these funny
accounting principles and practices and look, I'm no saint. I know how the fundraising game goes.
And, and, you know, sometimes you want to, you want to kind of boost the, you want to sell your
product. That's the point of a founder. You're trying to sell the positive parts of the business. But yeah, I could go on for 10 more minutes. I'm going to
stop there. But that's kind of where my intensity comes from. A lot of good insight there. The
downstream part, 13 to one on the dollar, that's a stat I haven't heard before. So that was definitely a good
nugget to pick up. Ravi,
I want to give you a chance.
You got about 90 seconds.
Yeah, Shubham, do you want to come in?
You are the CPA, Shubham.
Hello.
Yeah.
Can you repeat a question for me
for last night?
We were just talking about the pinned tweet there,
but just as far as how companies can kind of hide numbers
with adjusted gross profit and EBITDA is the only thing that matters.
We do have about 30 seconds here.
So if either of you guys had any quick takes you wanted to throw in, go for it.
I think I'll take more than 30 seconds, but maybe I'll keep it for the next space.
Because it's going to be a collaborative one.
It's not going to be a short 30 or one minute, 30 seconds or one minute answer for that.
But just to add very briefly, I think there are a lot just to where you know just to add a very uh briefly i think there
are a lot of ways where uh you can i mean founders do uh uh play with numbers but if you're good with
with numbers on understanding how how things are moving uh you will be able to catch and i think
the very very precise way to look at the actual cash flow in the company
is looking at the cash flow statements i think that that gives a pretty uh you know very clear
transparent picture of the company the operational revenue your assets and everything so i think uh
looking at your cash flow statements would make more sense rather than just looking at the ratios
of a beta percentage and whatever,
you know, fancy ratios founders throw at. So that's about my take on that.
Awesome. Well, I appreciate our speakers here and joining on. If you're in the audience,
thanks for being here. Make sure you give our speakers a follow. We'll be back next week again. We should have, I believe, five different speakers. So we'll have a good conversation. Some new speakers. I think four of our speakers have not been on before, so we'll get some new perspectives as well.
I have a bunch more guests here lined up for this coming month in September.
So make sure to tune in to hear more about VC and private equity and Kyle and Jordan.
If you guys got any last words, I'll let you guys throw it in.
Hey, Jared, you did an awesome job.
Really appreciate you being here.
Thank you, everybody, for tuning in.
Check out all the different Wolf channels for trading, betting, and tune in here 5 p.m. EST every Thursday to talk venture capital and private markets. Jared, I thought you did an awesome, awesome job today. Ravi, always great to chat as well. So with that, I'll kick it back to the Wolf account and we can close it out for today.
Yeah, a great convo guy.
I always appreciate listening to these and appreciate the panel that comes on.
And I'm excited for next week, too.
So it's going to be a fun panel.
It's going to be a fun conversation.
As always, we're going to wrap it up here.
But we'll be back live bright and early on the Wolf Trading Account to wrap up the week.
And, yeah, we'll get into the weekend.
It's going to be a long weekend, too, because we've got Labor Day Monday.
So that'll be nice for us traders getting an extra day off.
But, yeah, everybody enjoy the night. We'll see everybody bright and early make sure you guys
are following this wolf account follow all the speakers up here it's been a great day we'll see
you tomorrow thank you guys thank you everyone thank you for for having me today Thank you.
