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01:10:33 · Kosta, Fabian, Sam
[01:10:33] S0: Yeah. Give us give us a founding story. Why why why this? Why now? [01:10:36] S6: Yeah. For sure. So basically me and these three other friends met at CDTM. And CDTM is probably the most underrated startup community out there. So it's a network in Munich. It's a collaboration of TU Munich and LMU. And basically it's a cohort of 25 people every semester. And it's basically a program that leads, yeah, guides you through a seven week intense workshops of collaborating with these other people. And then it opens up into a community of roughly a thousand people. And through that community, around 20 to 30% of all German unicorns were produced. So the outcomes of of this small group of people have been tremendous. I think there's like a lot of KPIs on how much money went into it and how many euros of taxes were returned. And it's like a a crazy ROI. And people actually don't know about it so well internationally. So, yeah, this is basically the community where me and these three other friends met. And during that time, we realized that it's actually really amazing to try to get to SF. And I wanted to do Stanford research since I was very young. So basically that community enabled me go there. And we realized that because of these amazing KPIs, there's a lot of VCs that now have like pockets full of money and don't really know where to spend it. I mean, there's more VC money ever, but like less investments than ever before. Right? So it's very concentrated. [01:12:07] S1: Mhmm.
01:12:07 · Sam, Fabian, Ed Leon Klinger, Kosta
[01:12:07] S1: Mhmm. [01:12:08] S6: So VCs are struggling to to really differentiate and therefore having very early access to amazing talent is actually a strong mode to to do something. Right? Yeah. So we basically sat down and talked to a couple of investors and and realized that they actually have a willingness to pay just to have a house with amazing people to get to know them, to eventually be able to invest at like a little bit of a... At an earlier point than others. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, used that to to get initial funding. Yeah. And... Yeah. Like, the initial discussions were more more bumpy until we met Gabriel Vasquez, one [01:12:44] S3: one of [01:12:45] S0: the recent... What a legend. Always guys like to game. [01:12:47] S6: Yeah. Massive legend. We met him at Slush last year, actually. [01:12:51] S1: Nice.
01:12:51 · Sam, Fabian, Kosta
[01:12:51] S1: Nice. [01:12:52] S6: And... Yeah. Through... When we pitched him the idea that we wanna have a hacker house, he was basically like, guys, fuck off. Anyway, I'm not gonna pay for your house. Just get a fucking Airbnb. Just do like everybody else. Why why do... Why would you want to move to Palo Alto and not SF? It's just old people there. But so... And after some time, we, like, tried to lay out the plan and he was like, okay. But you guys don't really seem like winners. I was like, hey. Okay. Okay. And we were like, fuck This motherfucker. So we basically went home and texted a couple of people that that we knew Gabe had good relationships with. And the next morning, they all called Gabe. And we're like, Gabe, you like, you gotta you gotta support these people. They're great. They actually have the talent that they say they do. So basically that led to Gabe supporting us tremendously with the network of, yeah. Basically international founders that that moved to SF to build companies there. So we received tremendous support from from from people like Sebastian Meijer, Elias Torres, and a couple of others that helped us to to pull this project off. [01:14:01] S1: Really cool. That's a great [01:14:02] S0: story. What... Going back to like Gabe's response to you guys, you know, there there is truth in what he says about why why Palo Alto?
01:14:02 · Kosta, Fabian, Sam
[01:14:02] S0: story. What... Going back to like Gabe's response to you guys, you know, there there is truth in what he says about why why Palo Alto? [01:14:09] S6: We we really like the proximity to Stanford. So there's a lot of amazing AI researchers there thinking about building companies. SF is more like the the place where everybody sort of converts to anyway. So it's really hard to distinguish yourself from all the other events that are going on in SF. Whilst if you're in Palo Alto, you can attract all the Stanford people with an amazing mansion that you have, and then you can just host a a lot of events there. Yeah. We hosted over a 100 people for events over. We had 75 people that lived with us in the last couple of months. So... Yeah. It was really like an intense community, and we wanted to be like that. So... Yeah. It was actually an advantage to not be sort of in the pressure cook off as well. [01:14:49] S1: Yeah. Yeah. How are you you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but how are you guys specifically, like, activating the community? Do you guys put checks into to to this? Do you intro them to to, you know, VCs and all this kind of stuff? Like, how does it work?
01:14:49 · Sam, Fabian
[01:14:49] S1: Yeah. Yeah. How are you you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but how are you guys specifically, like, activating the community? Do you guys put checks into to to this? Do you intro them to to, you know, VCs and all this kind of stuff? Like, how does it work? [01:15:03] S6: I mean, like, that that is basically what it eventually turned into to some extent. But the core purpose of the community is to really have aligned incentives to just build companies. Right? Like, we we don't want to have half of the people there as investors trying to prey on, like, young potential founders, which is what usually happens in these communities. Right? But we just wanted it to be a space where we can, like, really ideate freely without pressure, without like investors' expectations so much. Mhmm. And so, yeah, it turned out that we would like... We also port each other massively. Like we got a lot of people in just based on references. So we didn't do like an official application thing. We didn't post anything on social media for a bunch of reasons. But... So basically, that's that's what the community is now turning to. So people invest into each other. Of course, there's a lot of, like, VCs that are interested to open doors. But also actually the founders are really supportive with each other. Like everybody's going through the same kind of problems with hiring, with finding customers, with finding right angles to pitch projects, to go from pilot to actual proper converted long term contracts.
01:16:06 · Kosta
[01:16:06] S0: Tell us a little bit about why this is so important for the community because, you know, I imagine, you know, especially like how more founding teams are getting predominantly technical based. I'd say we're seeing like an increase in terms of like, you can now have two co founders that are just like inherently technical. Maybe previously it would be a technical co founder and then an individual who maybe is more socially adverse typically than a technical individual. But you know, are probably technical founders out there who may be shyer than most, who may not know where to go, who may not know how to get their name out there. I think the role that you guys are playing in that is connecting them with the right people, giving them a safe environment to innovate and be comfortable and bring the best ideas out. Talk to us a little bit about why this is so important to the ecosystem.