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all right so up next we're going to do pitch practice this is something that we invented by accident a couple of years ago um one of our speakers had to cancel at the last minute so we just threw together this idea let's bring up
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some startups this is NYC we've never done it uh on stage before but the idea was you know a lot of people they've gone through YC it's coming up to demo day and actually they've never had a real experience like pitching an investor just like cold someone who
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doesn't know anything about them um so we got this idea hey let's just try it out uh you know have a Founder come up give their pitch um and just to warn you they're usually like pretty rough that's kind of the point of it uh and then we
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have a partner in this case it'll be Sam come repitch the business um and hopefully he does a smoother job we'll see um uh a few things to keep in mind this will be a little bit like the office hours except uh not at all helpful and um probably uh uh maybe a little bit
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more uh brutal so just to kind of give you some context like as a seed investor um something you have to keep in mind is that the median startup is ultimately worth about $0 um and probably 95% of startups are a bad investment so you kind of get in a
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mode where you're just a default no right um and it's a very it's a little bit cold because you know people are pouring out their hearts and they're putting all their dreams into it but uh you know nine times out of uh out of a thousand probably um no the
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other way around anyway it's always a you have to say no a lot um and so when you when you when you see a business um what you're looking for is like why are you the exception right so it's not good enough just to be like oh that sounds
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like a nice business I have to think like wow this is that one business that one that I've been saying no for months but today I'm going to say yes so just to just to kind of frame it for you all right uh first up oh let's let's give a round of applause [Applause]
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also just for context I don't know anything so uh I'm not actually pretending that I didn't bother to learn anything so this is I'm hearing about the business for the first time so okay Jo want to tell you yeah launch in okay introduce yourself so I'm Jenna um I'm
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from shipper Max and we help uh agricultural energy and Mining uh companies uh hire ships and just to be clear uh I'm not talking about containers I'm talking about full ships okay so you do something with ships I got that part um so this is like
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if I need to go rent is this like a rental like I need to go rent so you are a commodity Trader you need to shift 50,000 tons of coal from uh South Africa to rdam um you come to us to find that ship I see so I took a position on coal
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in South Africa and then I'm like uh oh now I've got to get it someplace else and what would I do today I I don't know anything about this business so today you would pick up your phone and your email and you would call 5 to 10 Brokers and and say hey I need to move this
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stuff I see so this is like a marketplace where right now these Brokers and they what do they take a big cut and then you're going to like what's the value proposition for me as as a Trader so think about it like this um today you're speaking to all these
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different Brokers um it can take you 3 to 24 hours to get some indications back it can take you um up to two weeks um to actually book that ship uh with shiper Max we use satellite technology and navigation um to cover every ship on
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Earth and we can tell you which ship can make it in time and fit the specifications and is open in seconds okay so is is the idea that it's just easier for me or do I get a better price like what's what closes the deal so there's there's two things when you
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think about trading one it's like a a very binary thing as a commodity Trader um you need to know what your delivered price is um to the customer otherwise someone else can come come and get that deal instead of you um and both myself and my co-founder have lost
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multi-million pound deals for not getting frayed fast enough um and the second proposition is really um service would you rather uh speak to five broker and receive thousands of emails for per deal or would you rather say this is my ship let's
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go uh the ladder sounds better I'm not in that position so so do you have a lot of traction I mean are you what's your growth rate so we launched um about uh our beta about 7 weeks ago and since then what we were trying to do is talk to these charterers these Traders um to
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see if they would talk to us and give us requests um to date we've had about 4.5 Million worth of crusts and um last week was um a great win for us because we signed one of the uh largest energy trading companies in the world they
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shift 150 million um tons of products annually and what does that deal represent for you how much revenue are you going to make off of that so it's we're still competing with other Brokers right now the revenue potential is 15 million annually so we're now receiving
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those requests to compete on a deal by deal basis to be faster and better so from their perspective you're just another broker is that right yeah they don't even know that you're like a tech company they're just like oh new broker yeah is that good or bad for you um so
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we're kind of edging our way in so the way I've started this conversation is saying like hey um our goal is to make this much much faster like help us get there um so they're giving us a go they want smarter intelligence um the smaller
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companies want better access to the market um so today we're just saying yeah it's not all perfect out of the box right now but um give us a go we're not worse than the other Brokers have they used you yet or did they just say we'll
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think about you no yeah yeah they they they're giving us requests to so how many ships have you shipped we haven't shipped any right now we've basically been getting those requests which was our first test to see will they give them to us because that's actually quite
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a big deal because they're telling you Market information um does that mean that they're sending the request but then they're going with a different broker um right now basically what our problem has been is that we um need a bit more funding to get uh more men on
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the ground to help fulfill these requests um because right now some of the larger Brokers have better intelligence um so we're starting kind of from zero and each time um we're kind of getting closer and closer to actually booking
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that deal and beating the brokers so you haven't actually won any deals yet no yet how soon will you win a deal I think next week all right well we should talk next week so how much will that deal be worth then assuming you do get this deal next
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week um that should be worth $10,000 and and and what will be your cost behind it is that like pure profit for you uh that's like pure profit so it's our cost is just like the men the people now why is this why is this going to be like a hundred billion doll
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company um so it's a huge Market um so today like the the amount that these Traders spend on brokerage fees today is about 3 billion um dollars at least at current market low rates um the largest company today is uh a company go claron to um make 240
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million GB um pum um I mean to me that also means like you have some really formidable competitors like are they really just going to roll over and let you take their business uh well no I don't think they're going to roll over but um so I
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think what's kind of what's interesting that's happening is that the problem with these big guys like they are superior to the small Brokers right they have more intelligence and they can serve bigger clients better but who they can't serve is the little guys um
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and they can't serve them because it's so manual with all their processes so so basically you're thinking you're going to come in at the bottom of the market where they're just totally neglected yeah is that who you're going after right now is that who this first
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customer is is that at the bottom of the market um no we been starting at the bottom Market but actually a lot of the big guys want to talk to us too because of the superior intelligence that we can actually leverage free data but but I
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mean if if there is this bottom of the market that's totally neglected why not like because you haven't done any ships yet right like why not just go find some of these guys who are super neglected no we we're all working with those as well so is this it seems like I see a
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lot of startups where they're basically the high level pitch is there's these Brokers that make a lot of money and we're going to cut them out with technology and take all the money um but I mean just as a general form like the most uh obvious for me and familiar to
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most of us is like the real estate market right like red fin or someone was going to come in and just blow away the Brokers but so far it seems like I don't know if I've seen any of that those markets it seems like the Brokers are
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very good at holding on to their position so the key thing in this market I mean I mean there's one thing to say that we still have Brokers um so we're not a pure technology play We're enabling our Brokers to be much smarter
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than anyone else and the core thing about this Market is that um intelligence is the main driver uh Traders reward their Brokers with deals based on intelligence because you need that intelligence to keep getting good rates so if you can build a platform
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that is the the only thing that can um Aggregate and digest this like explosion of information at scale um you're the only person that can scale um speak to these small companies and the big companies and mine all that data to actually serve people um more
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effectively than anyone else okay so supposing I do believe all of that and that like there is going to be this one tech company that just manages to displace all of the Brokers why should I believe it's you um so our team combines like a few things
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like one um St experience and actually growing businesses um two uh very experienced Brokers on team as well as people have been on the trading side of this Market as well as deep technical Talent um and I think you need all those
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things and it's it's very difficult people um people in this industry generally don't know anything about technology um it's a very old industry um and people who understand technology um generally don't understand like the niche things that you need to care about
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when shipping 50,000 tons worth of Commodities have you shipped a lot of Commodities uh a few how much uh so it was more my co-founder than me on the Commodities um and he was shipping I don't know uh thousand tens of thousands of uh tons of
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fertilizer people are are signaling to me does that mean it's time okay all right I think I think that's time thank you very much thank you all [Applause] right all right all right so I have uh this is that was the first time I've met Jenna and heard about the business uh so I'm
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going to try to repitch it but I will probably get all the numbers and secret plans for the future wrong uh hopefully it will still be illustrative and helpful um and I'm going to treat this like I would treat uh a meeting with an
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angel investor that I was trying to get to write me a check uh so uh hey Paul I'm Sam from shipx hi uh so I'd love to tell you about what we do and uh maybe I can just start with kind of who we are so we are building a Marketplace for shipping uh shipping is still 9% of
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world GDP it's one of the biggest markets people don't think about and it hasn't moved forward much with technology so it's still if you need to ship something you call around uh you call a broker who then knows a bunch of ships they try to find one
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somewhere in the world that can take what you need uh and and then you pay them and they and they ship it for you everyone thinks that the market has become really efficient because they've read the box and they know about containers and they think they're like
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this is a solved problem um but still more than half of all cargo doesn't get shipped that way and it uh is there's been no winner that's emerged for a uber-like shipping experience where basically you click a button you say I need to ship from here to here you get a
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rate you get a boat and it goes so that's what we're building uh and the the standard broker fees are like 15% um and so we think this is you know really large Market um I'd be happy to tell you about more details of our approach but
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is this something that at a high level seems interesting to you uh yeah if you're going to make a lot of money it is it is interesting to me so well I'd love to tell you why we're going to make a lot of money um not only is this a
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giant market you know shipping uh broker fees on cargo shipping is $150 billion a year Market um but there is a natural monopoly in that like any other Marketplace the the the people that have cargo want to go where they can get the cheapest rate and the most options and
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the people that have boats want to go where the most people that need something shipped are and so uh even though no one has brought software to this industry yet and it's been this sort of network of people calling PE you know Brokers calling
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around to to ships they know why haven't one of these existing Brokers just eaten up the market well why do why does any industry uh not adopt software I think there's a great quote I heard recently that it is harder for existing companies
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to get good technology people than it is for good technology people to learn about other Industries and this is why startups have an opportunity this is why is is that the only way that you can eat the industry then is that I mean it's
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just naturally fragmented if you don't have software is that is that your theory well yeah I think it's like any other industry it's like Airbnb couldn't have worked without software you just had people call around and find vacation homes that happen to be free or you had
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to call taxi companies before Uber and find a cab that was free um the magic of software is just that any of these industries can become centralized on one platform that gives everybody uh a central experience and in these large
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markets these platforms tend to be winner take all or win or take most and create super valuable companies so my fear with these kinds of thing businesses is always just that you know anytime like tech people go in and they say oh we're going to change everything
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but then they show up and the customer says I've been doing it this way for long last 30 years I'm going to do it till I'm dead like how do I know they're actually going to adopt your your new approach one one of the secrets that we've learned as we've been working on
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this business and we're very new we're only 7 weeks old uh we still have a lot of things left to figure left to figure out but one of the things that we've learned is most people are either uh all humans or all software and that that
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approach doesn't work um and what you need is the combination uh you need humans aided by software this is just like py or how PayPal dealt with fraud um and this is what customers want so we're actually going to have a bunch of Brokers that customers can talk to on
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the phone like they're used to um but we'll give them software that makes them 100 times or a thousand times more efficient but you're totally right and the reason other people have failed doing this is they don't understand this and they just have a pure software
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platform and it really is the combination of of humans and software together that makes this still work with customers that have been doing it for a long time but have the advantages of uh a software company in scale so is this working right now do you have a lot of
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customers so we're super early um we don't have haven't hav't been able to raise any money yet we're only 7 weeks old in that 7 weeks we've been able to get 50 people that have sent us jobs we don't yet have enough uh infrastructure
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in place to fulfill those but we expect to actually book three boats next week and we'll make uh our first $10,000 of Revenue um and we think we have a path from that just over the next few months on our existing contacts and what we
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know coming uh what we know is coming in our pipeline to get to $100,000 in revenue and that's not gmv or anything like that that's actual profit that we're going to keep we have nearly 100% margin on that and then what are your expenses well as I said I think one of
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the key insights here is that we're going to be humans and software together we're going to be Brokers and a platform so our biggest expense by far uh will be paying the the broker's uh salary and and commissions but again I wasn't
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joking when I said I think we can make them 100 times more efficient with software you would not believe how broken the industry is today it would it would pain you to watch how one of these Brokers works so we think there's still substantial economics for us there so
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how big does this get ultimately like what's where do you see the business in like five and 10 years well the charter Market alone I the broker Market alone is about $150 billion uh and is that gross uh no that's net in the market the shipping Market that's their markup yeah
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the shipping markets in the trillions again it's one of the largest drivers of of worldwide GDP um but you know like we're pretty ambitious we think this is a big market and that there is a natural monopoly it could get pretty big we're
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very early but um and why why should I mean assuming I do believe that story like why do I believe it's you and not some other uh some other people with software so um we ourselves used to have to do this a lot and we understand a lot
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of the things uh that most people don't we're Commodities Traders we've shipped huge amounts of goods and and we we've learned these non- obvious things like the most important thing for a a commodity Trader is not uh the price but the speed and the certainty so it's
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really important to know if you're going to trade on a ra razor thin margin uh that you can have a ship on a particular day at a particular cost before you buy the coal or whatever um and that's just one example I could give you of many but
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we've been doing this our whole lives we really know about this and we're software people that's great well we're we're out of time but so really quickly um I'd love to have you as an investor um I don't you want to arrest your process but what how should we follow up
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what are the next steps how do you think about this uh you know I I usually like to just kind of turn on it for a little while and I may come up with some extra questions so just drop me an email and uh include whatever other info that uh
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would be helpful okay I'll send you an email now and can I follow up with you in a week or two and see if you need anything else sure yeah just just feel free to ping me all right thank you Paul great [Applause] thanks should we talk about it a little
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bit or should kind of short on time but there anything quick quick recap I mean so this is one where it's a business that I don't know anything about so there's there has to be like a pretty strong educational component to to start with
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um and so it definitely um you helped especially that you're able to give like some high level overview um and especially like trying to understand just like the fundamentals of like what drives the business because for me like my default assumption about the world is
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that 99% of people will want to just keep doing the same thing that they do day after day unless they have no choice and so change happens when people are like pushed and so like the Commodities Trader with the margins where it's like
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he he's going to lose money if he doesn't get the right ship or whatever like that makes sense right because it actually becomes like a competitive thing where the people who adopt the technology um will defeat those who don't right one thing at the end uh don't
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leave a meeting without some plan for a followup um it's like really good to just say like can I email you should we meet again what are your thoughts um always have an ask it and you shouldn't just say like can I have a check after a
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first meeting that really annoys me I think annoys people even more when people do that to us but it is always good to ask for a followup you were really good by the way yeah yeah good job it's it's a tough it's tough to pitch up here all right we would normally talk
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about this for longer but we're running a little bit over so we'll move on to the next one thank you very much thank you very much you have a mic never mind hello hello good to see you how's everybody so hi I'm Paul hi my name is Kelly Thomas Drake and I am
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the President and founder of my purple folder my purple folder is a hippoc compliant Global healthcare app that provides consumers easy access One-Stop shop leveraging and connecting existing patient data while also delivering hospitals and Physicians decreased
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administrative costs associated with patient care and an improved patient experience so is this like a EMR thing is this my health record it's actually all of them combined in one I I I'm I'm having trouble wrapping my head around so is this is this something that
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I as a patient want or or is it something for doctors who who's the customer so the actual end user is the patient the caregiver which is their family member and it's called my purple folder because I kept everything in a purple cording
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folder when I was going through this with my grandmother okay so this is a place that I keep all of my medical records essentially so essentially if you're from the Bay Area and you have a Clipper pass and you can go from ferry to BART to mun to all these
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different transportation systems with one pass that's what my purple folder is so I guess that's too abstract for me so I mean I've been to hospitals and things like like what is the problem that it solves for me is is the problem that I
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have to move my medical records around I'm still trying to figure out is this for my medical records or is this something other than medical records so I'd like to tell you that answer through a story basically so as of 2011 a federal piece of of legislation
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was passed called meaningful use which made an already Antiquated system more disjointed so my mother as of late was diagnosed with breast cancer she is better now she's in remission however she went from having one patient portal
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on one Hospital campus to seven because of Hospital Health Care Systems being so federally compliant that they forgot about you and me the patient the caregiver the human so this is a go between no matter what patient portal no matter what hospital Health Care System
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no matter what city state country this is global access coordinated all at the top of my app my purple folder the patient care easy button so it's my medical records is that right I I'm is it like just yes or no is it my medical records yes in addition to some
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things okay what else is it so it's my medical records it's your medical records it's your healthc care legal records it's your your prescription my my um what do you call it like if I had a DNR or something it would be in there is
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that so do I keep my will in there or like Advanced Medical directives is that just Advanced directives medical power of attorney durable power of attorney um we have a universal hip agreement because I also feel that when you're caught like a deer in the headlights and
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thrust a clipboard you shouldn't have to answer legal questions then you should have it figured out already I see so I've got all of that in advance so so once I have this I walk into to the doctor's office and I say hey good news
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I've got uh my purple folder here and then the doctor says that's awesome or like like does it work if the hospital or like medical facility I go to does not yet have your software or do they have to be a like do you need to sell all the medical offices before it works
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for me as a patient absolutely not the way that we do it is we the environment is right for doing the digitized version of what I did for my grandmother there and what I've learned as of late so and what we've developed so we leverage and
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connect existing patient data we we connect to the backend EMR systems so that you the new care provider says oh well I don't have that yet we send it through geolocation technology you receive a007 encrypted link and you input it in your system as you like okay
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great well we're uh all out of time but thank you very much thank you all right thanks before I start we have a little surprise we found pb's kids Thomas and Camila backstage they wanted to say hello to all of you hi Dad you could give them a
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round of applause hi hi YC uh winter 2024 we're excited thanks for coming all right um so we'll do the same thing again I know very little about this business all the numbers will be as close to my memory as I can remember or think of from what I went earlier but
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they'll be made up all right all right um hey Paul I'm from my purple folder hi so um Healthcare in the US is horrible uh we spend 19.5% of our GDP on it and we have the lowest satisfaction of any developed nation and you might wonder
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why that is do you have any idea yeah I have lots of ideas uh well I would actually love to hear before we jump in What do you think is is the single biggest driver uh I mean I think there's like no underlying economic model other than driving the cost higher fundamentally
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right right make more money by driving cost up so we think the same thing uh in a you have this like runaway growth because there's just no incentive to do anything but charge more do more tests do more procedures and the patient's out
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of control so our whole goal is to put Healthcare back in the hands of the patient so they have a sense of what's going on uh and see everything in one place as we've had this explosion patients have data on six or seven different systems they have
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prescriptions they have appointments they have communication with doctors most people can't use all the systems or one and so we've just tried to make one consumer portal for all your medical records and any other Medical Data you have if you have this you can actually
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understand your care or Family memb Care uh and actually have a much better experience and hopefully over time Drive the cost way down in the process uh we become one Central repository for all patient Health Data that actually works
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so basically as a patient I just this just has all of my medical records in there is that is that kind of yeah so we make that work magically uh we connect with every system we don't have to do any deal with them we just use the apis
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that they all have to have uh or secure email whatever they have but we make it work so that as a patient you just say you know I need to connect to these few systems or your doctor can send you invites and then you can view everything in one app I see now I I um is this
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something you sell to the patients or to the doctors who's the customer here today we're going to sell to patients uh it's really hard as you may know to try to sell things to doctors and hospitals um but we have we have customers with
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you know their hair on fire this Burning problem of not being able to manage their Healthcare the healthare what is the thing that actually drives someone like what is the moment where like my hair is on fire well um one particular scary story from a friend of mine was a
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missed message about a potential cancer screen um but it's usually something like that it's someone gets really sick or something bad happens because of a lack of information and communication and so the pitch to me as a consumer is
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that this brings together all of my information just so that I can like peruse my medical records or like what what am I doing with it well it's so that you can get better care like the the issue many people have taking care of a sick parent or grandparent have run
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into the issue where they don't know what to do you know the patient doesn't remember something or the family member doesn't remember something and the idea is like these are complicated things you'd really like to have a single set of information that says say here's when
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you need to take these medications here are these test results you have to go in to get this test this doctor said this thing I wants you to tell this other doctor it really is just about you know better care and and people are willing
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to pay an unlimited amount of money if they can get that actually to be good are they paying you an unlimited amount of money right now so we've just started charging um we unlike most healthcare companies don't want to drive the cost
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of healthcare up and up and up we kind of hate it when people say oh I make this medical device for you know $7 and charge 22,000 cuz insurance will pay me that's not who we want to um so we're only going to charge $99 a year per patient uh although over time
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we'll become such a powerful how many customers do you have at that price this is made up we have 150 so far and we're growing at uh 12% per week that's great all right well uh I'm all out of time but uh thank you do you want to invest
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do you want to learn more what how do you think about this uh yeah you know it's it's it's definitely an area that I'm interested in but I think I need to learn more about the product so maybe you can send me like send all metric our financials and we'll go from there okay
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great all right thanks thanks I probably butchered that sorry I don't believe you did all right I hope I got Alman saying my my business to everybody all right so this is a tricky one because like we spent a lot of time with me just trying to wrap my head
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around what it is and to be totally honest I'm still not entirely sure I think it's basically a thing that brings together all of my medical records right um but but and this is a really common thing where startup Founders saying no
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no no it's it's that and like a thousand other things but it's really important especially at an early stage that you be able to be focused so you know if you can say yes it's that but here's the part that's really exciting is it grows
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bigger but I I need to be able to wrap my head around it otherwise it's it's almost like it's like a Christmas tree right you want to like hang the ornaments off but without the tree like it's just ornaments SM mashing on the floor so like I need to have that that
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like concrete framework in my head first so like the first thing I ran into to is just like unsure what the product is me too I it's always so tempting to try to tell this sort of grandiose and exciting story but if you can't if the person
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you're pitching can't understand what you actually do today in the first like 30 seconds the pitch is unlik likely to get better from there uh and so just like saying it in plain language just what product actually does what a user can do who your customer is what they
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pay you for and what your product does is super important yeah and in fact this is the once you're in YC this is the first thing that we work on and so it's not easy like it takes the companies in YC usually about a month to get it right
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so every time we meet with them uh in regular office hours or especially we have a thing called group office hours the very first thing that each company has to do is give me their on line description and usually at the start of the batch it's all incomprehensive
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princible um and so it's something that you know it's normal that that you have that um because almost every company we fund it's normal that I have that sounds like a disease yeah it's uh learning how to make easily curable though yeah
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learning learning how to really reduce things to their Essentials is is um super important but not always easy that is the number one skill of pitching though to to practice all right I think we're way out of time yep thank you all right thanks job thank you