00:15:26 · Jae Lee
So I think the important thing is if you're building something really impactful and you think that it's going to significantly change the industry that you're in, there will always be someone that has very similar thesis. It's just a matter of how do you get yourself out there? How do you let the people know that you you you exist? For us, that was the competition. After winning the competition, companies like Index Ventures and Radical Ventures had very strong thesis around multimodal AI. The next idea would be what's next? And video happens to be the most relatable multimodal data. These amazing companies actually came in inbound. Right? So they reached out to us, and we started jamming. The conversations turned into next conversation, and then we talked about technology, and and it just happened very serendipitously. Right? The first pitch deck, I was in Seoul, and and my first call with Index Ventures was at, like, it was, like, 03:30AM Seoul time, and we didn't have pitch deck. And we just felt like, this is our first meeting. And we we we knew nothing about fundraising then. We didn't even know this was going to be like a friendly introduction, but I just kind of felt the need to be like, oh, we don't have pitch deck. We need to build one. So I remember staying up till 3AM building it. I think the storyline was quite simple. We didn't have much to show for it. The idea was, hey. The problem that we're solving is massive. 80% of the world's data is in video, and there's no adequate solution out there or technology out there for developers and enterprises to make sense of it all. That is the market that we're
00:17:04 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S11
Ad[00:17:04] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini in Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini in Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:17:29] S1: This episode is brought to Ad[00:17:31] S2: you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. Ad[00:17:41] S3: It boosts your job post to help Ad[00:17:42] S2: it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:17:59] S11: When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC two, ISO twenty seven zero zero one, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowflake got audit ready in a month and closed a multimillion dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com.
00:17:59 · S11, S12, S13, S14, S15, S16, S17
Ad[00:17:59] S11: When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC two, ISO twenty seven zero zero one, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowflake got audit ready in a month and closed a multimillion dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com. Ad[00:18:27] S12: Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials? Ad[00:18:37] S13: Experian can help take the pain out Ad[00:18:39] S14: of canceling by handling it for you. Ad[00:18:41] S12: Think of it as operation get your sanity back. Ad[00:18:44] S15: Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. Ad[00:18:47] S16: So get started in the Experian app Ad[00:18:49] S12: and see how much you could save. Results will vary. Ad[00:18:52] S17: Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.
00:18:52 · S17, Jae Lee
Ad[00:18:52] S17: Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details. [00:18:57] S9: We're tackling. We wanna index all of that eight... Like, 80% of the world's data. And this is the technology underlying research work that we've done, and then that was it. VCs ask a lot of hard questions. The most memorable one. If I bring you TikTok as a customer and they want to index like billion hours of content, how long does it take? And I think we were we were thinking about maybe like a million hours is going to take like ten years. Right? That's when we realized we should never be comfortable with what we've built. This whole new incredibly large world out there, you know, that maybe some people are impressed with our system being able to index like a million hour, but there's others that are thinking about billion, 10,000,000,000, 100,000,000,000 hours. And that was like a really challenging question because like what we said during our pitches, we wanna index all of the world's videos. And that question kind of made me stunned. And I think about all of the technical issues that we that we had at the time. You probably find it, like, funny, right, where I was trying to give my best answer as a founder. It's like... So the company has raised about $30,000,000, in seed funding.
00:20:05 · So Young
[00:20:05] S18: My name is So Young. I'm one of the cofounders of Twelve Labs, and I currently lead our business development and go to market. We had a customer who was paying for our product, but they weren't actually using it. But we had gone through a lot of work to actually get them as customer through a lot of sales and kind of relationship building and and so on. But I think they were, you know, they were extremely early and we had almost pushed the sales to happen. And I think what we learned from that experience was we have to optimize even early on. It might have been better for us to not actually make the sale because the customer pop... Probably wasn't ready. They didn't have the passion or the innovative drive that our other customers had had. But we were optimizing for kind of hearing the yes. We tried so hard to make that no into a yes, and we had succeeded. But at the at the end, I think it turned out that we probably should have kept it out of no and focused on all the other customers where the yes was more clear. And they had a very clear vision of how they can build their new experiences with the technology. And especially for earlier products and earlier technologies where resources are limited and you want to, you know, build for your best customers and the innovators in every field, you should probably start to optimize for hearing the no, than the yes because that will help you find the right direction faster. We quickly think we learned through trial and error that the types of companies that we need to... Early customers that we need to find and work with are true innovators in their field, whether they come from, like, the content creation space, law enforcement space, elearning, and so on. We've had instances of trying to oversell. We were going through sales 101 books or sales methodologies. And we were trying to pitch to the customer, hey, here's the use case you could build out with our technology. You know, we'll improve your ROI by x percent with our technology. And we did make some sales from those, but I don't think it was something that we probably should have, you know, spent so much time on doing. Because if you find the right customer who's innovative, you don't need to explain anything to them. You show them a use case based demo of... You know, for us, it would be...
00:22:14 · So Young, S0, S1
We we would index some videos that resemble the customers, and then we show them how you can search or you can generate text very easily, like a... Like just like a person would had they been watching the video. They can draw out the full map of, okay, this is what I want to provide to my customers or my users. This is a technology that you have, and I can... They can, you know, fill that gap in pretty easily. And they know already what the return on that or or what the opportunity of that experience would be for them. For the kind of really large high profile customers that we have right now, it was all the same process. We actually learned all of these from the customers because they had, you know, seeing our demo and seeing the early kind of hints of the techno Ad[00:22:58] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:23:24] S1: This episode is brought to