 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. It's a beautiful day here in West Lafayette, Indiana, and I'd like to welcome all of you to this edition of the Boiler Engineers and monthly fireside chat. My name is Arvind Rahman. I'm the Executive Associate Dean here in the College of Engineering. Dean Lundstrom is on international travel and he asked me to host this panel in his stead. Here at Purdue Engineering, we strive for the pinnacle of excellence at scale. With 11,000 undergraduate engineers, nearly 5,000 graduate engineers, we are by far in a way the largest engineering college that is also ranked in the top four amongst the very best in the nation. The depth, the scale and quality of student talent here is amazing. Purdue Engineering in particular has become a national magnet for talent from coast to coast and internationally that are attracted here by an unbeatable combination of a top-class education, affordability and world-beating research. The quality of students is tremendous, not just in engineering, but in the STEM disciplines and beyond, and a record number of them are graduating debt-free or with very low debt. That combined with research innovations that are pumping out of our faculty's research laboratories makes this a combustible mix of ingredients that is really gonna spark the next breakthrough growth in Ballermaker startups. Now, we would love for that breakthrough exponential growth to happen here in Indiana, in the Hoosier State, making this into the startup heartland of America. But we are delighted with Ballermaker success, no matter where it happens in the world or outside the world. Regardless, when we look ahead to this exponential growth, what is very clear is that it is going to need the presence of a strong and thriving Purdue Alumni Entrepreneurial Network, which is the topic of today's panel. And without further ado, I'd like to introduce my co-host and moderator for today's panel, Bruce Schechter. Bruce is an advisor and or investor in a variety of technology startups, including Light 360, Big ML, Carbon Lighthouse, and Illumeo. Bruce started his career at Intel and spent nearly two decades there during the hyper growth years, in many roles, including microprocessor product management and later serving as technical assistant to the senior VP of corporate strategy during the Andy Grove era. Bruce enjoys mentoring student entrepreneurs at both Stanford University and Purdue University and his active and nonprofit work, including his role as founder and president emeritus of the Intel Alumni Network and as co-founder and past co-chairman of Purdue SV Big, the Silicon Valley Ballermaker Innovation Group. Bruce received a BS in physics and mathematics from Purdue University, where he graduated with highest honors in Phi Beta Kappa. And much later, he was granted Purdue's Distinguished Science Alumnus Award. Nearly three decades after his undergraduate education at Purdue, he received an MS in computer science from Stanford. Bruce, over to you. Thank you very much, Arvin. So we titled this event, Amplifying the Purdue Alumni Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. So I just wanted to say briefly, real quick, some words about ecosystem. As you all remember from biology, ecosystem is a word that comes from biology and Webster defines ecosystem as a complex community of organisms and its surrounding environment functioning together as a unit. And I think what a great analogy for our desire. I mean, Arvin's already given the perfect speech, like we wanna see a thriving environment in and around Purdue for fueling new and better startup activity there. So let me, I'm gonna start with the introduction of our panelists, but first one thing about questions. If you, we welcome questions, we'll try to get to as many of them from the audiences we can. So if you wanna put those in either the chat or the question window, I guess preferably the chat, that would be great. We'll see what we can get to later, primarily at the end. So let me fire away with our excellent panel, all that I can count as friends of mine. First, Anand Iyer, who I've known much longer than any of the other panelists. That's a story in and of itself, but Anand is a founding partner of Canonical Crypto, an early stage VC fund focused on Web3 and crypto infrastructure. He also recently joined Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the premier Silicon Valley VC firms where he focuses on crypto infrastructure. Well, before starting Canonical, he founded a company called Trusted and we'll get a little chance to talk a little bit more about that later. It's a consumer marketplace, which was eventually acquired by Care.com. And moving along, Adam Weinstein, Adam is an investor and entrepreneur who most recently helped lead the product team at a company called Data Robot following their acquisition of a company called Cursor that Anand had founded and served and led as CEO. Prior to that, Adam was leader on LinkedIn's analytics team and head of data and analytics at Bright, an AI-powered recruiting firm that was eventually acquired by LinkedIn, thus leading to Adam's joining LinkedIn. Now, let me just take a break and say there's two different cohorts of panelists here. Anand and Adam are people who graduated Purdue, took more traditional jobs and years later started companies. Well, not too many years. You guys are all way younger than me. But then the other two, which I'm going to be introducing here in a moment, Candace and Joe, either founded their company at Purdue as students or at least envisioned the idea of their company while still at Purdue. So with that, Joe Watkins is co-founder and CCO Chief Customer Officer of a company called Socio that I suspect many of you have heard of. It's an end-to-end event management tool with a focus on attendee engagement. A year ago, congratulations, Socio was acquired by Cisco Systems and Socio is now known as WebEx Events. Joe studied computer and electrical engineering at Purdue and was very active in student entrepreneurship activities, including hackathons and the Anvil. Another set of topics I think we'll try to talk more about later. Joe can probably say that he personally wrote a good portion of the code that became the first version of the product Socio. Finally, and far from least, Candace Z is co-founder and CEO at VO. VO provides shared micro-mobility programs in more than 50 cities around the US and is growing very fast. Candace got her BS in finance with distinction at Purdue where she was extremely active and extracurricular activities. Too many to mention now, but I was intrigued by Salsa Club, which I wish we had more time to talk about, but anyway, in her copious spare time, she served as a consultant at the Purdue Foundry to help startups develop their concepts and their business plans. So what a great panel on our topic. I wanna first dive in by going around and talking to each of you a little bit about the creation story behind the companies that you founded. I'm kind of intrigued most by something, I'm gonna go to you first, Candace, because you told me that the idea you came up with at Purdue for VO, but eventually you went and took real jobs. That's a lingo term, real job. And then later, or soon thereafter, came back to Purdue to found the company. Can you say more words about that and why Purdue? Which is so interesting to me that you came back. Yeah, thanks for having me here and thank you for the intro, Bruce. I will say for this idea when I was a student at Purdue, I live in Hiltop and Craner, it's like a mile away. Every morning I took bus to Craner and if not, I will walk to Craner. And I always look for a term of transportation. And I'm not at a position to afford a car at that time and car parking is very expensive. So there's no a better solution when I was on campus. And that issue amplified when I moved to Chicago to start my first job. When I was a single woman there and I find transportation is not very convenient and also safe. Public transit is not very reliable and you need to meet your schedule to fit their schedule. And when it comes pretty late night, it's a little bit unsafe for a single woman to take public transit and walking outside sometimes can also be also very slow. Driving is also a very expensive option with all the parking. And Uber, if you take it every day especially for last two mile transportation it can become pretty expensive as well. So I was searching for something that can be convenient safe and I didn't have anything in the city. And when I chat it with my friends and I do think there's a lot of people with the struggle when in terms of like last mile transportation. So I have the idea and I chat it with my co-founder and he was a bike engineer at track at that time. And we felt like this is something we need to create and want to address and Purdue seems to be a perfect location that if we start a company we can use Purdue as the location that we can build out our business case and also operation model. So we decided very quick and quit our real job and came back to Purdue building our like coral tide business plan and started our marquee entry plan at that time. Great. Okay. Good. And so Joe I recall a story that I don't remember if it was you or one of your co-founders told me long ago but I believe that the origination of socio came from a couple of you went to an event and you found it just disorganized and you thought somebody ought to organize this better. Is there any truth to this? Yeah. There's almost like two stories in one there but the very first one was actually Purdue BGR week. So the Boulder Gold Rush refreshment the first event we went to as founders and you kind of realized that you had all your phones and all these people were trying to connect and you had to kind of get your phone handed to somebody in a group they had to pass in a circle they wrote their phone number they put their Twitter in there and everyone was passing their phones around and we're like, well, there's got to be a better way to do this. So that was the first inception of how to like network better connect people better in the very beginning and then that grew one day to see, hey, why can't we run bigger events even better and even more events that we attended? And one of the key things in between that is we took that idea at the anvil that you were talking about Bruce earlier and within 48 hours we built the first version where you could just take your phone, shake your phone and connect with everyone around you in a quick circle so that you didn't actually have to type your phone numbers in one by one and that was the very first version of Socio before we kind of became an end to end event management system. Okay, fantastic. So Adam, when you envisioned and helped co-found cursor, I'm thinking of all these stories that each of you have told me, but Adam, if I recall correctly, there was some element of you had worked at a bigger company and I think you recognized a problem that ought to have a solution and eventually you came back and solved it. Is that correct? Yeah, no spot on. So it's been most of my life in early stage world. It recently been kind of acquired into LinkedIn from Bright, but most of my life had been at rather small organizations where if you had an answer to a question, you couldn't throw a ball and hit the person that knew the answer, like you were probably doing something wrong. And so arriving at LinkedIn where you had a globally distributed workforce and hundreds of people doing the same role or similar roles, knowledge was much more fragmented. And so being like an analyst, so I wrote a lot of SQL, a little bit of Python, things like that, I was struggling to find answers to data questions that I thought should be pretty easy to answer. And we didn't really have a great source of truth for a lot of these things. We had some reports and dashboards and Tableau and things like this, but nothing was really documented all that well. And so after like asking tons of folks on Slack and collecting a nice little repository of answers, I basically posted it in a little bit of like a Q&A app internally that then a bunch of people started using without kind of me sharing it all that well. And so I realized like, okay, maybe there's something here that folks that work with data on a daily basis that are writing a lot of kind of ad hoc exploratory code need a better place to find it. And so that was kind of the genesis for Cursor. It was a problem I had that kind of solved with a poor man's app internally that we built in like a weekend. And then realized, okay, maybe this could be useful to other large organizations as well. And so yeah, very similar, I think to seeing a transportation problem or hearing that, I remember BGR quite well, but I think as long as you have passion and some insight into how to solve it, the rest is just elbow grease. Good. So Anna, finally, your company trusted, if I, there, my recollection is there was an element of necessity as the mother of invention because you were a new parent. So can you tell us that story? Yeah, definitely. So there's sort of a sequence of things that kind of formed the confluence of trusted coming together, one of which was obviously necessity for my wife and I where we saw the landscape and we're like, there aren't enough marketplaces or opportunities for us to find care, whether it's childcare, elder care, the spectrum is pretty vast and large, but the sequence of things that also contributed to the timing being great for starting trusted was, we were at the cusp of understanding or coming to terms with getting into a random person's card, we transported from one place to another or staying at someone else's home, right? And so Airbnb or Uber and Lyft and these sorts of concepts were starting to pave the way for how we think about marketplaces, number one, but also second, the mobile was taking off in a big way. And so I think from a timing perspective, we felt like there was an interesting opportunity, obviously, yes, to answer your question was absolutely, we were new parents living in a big city, no family nearby, trying to figure out childcare, daunting a task for many different reasons. And so that was a spark, but also I think timing and luck were also big ingredients in trusted coming together but also becoming a success. Great. Okay, let's move along to, a lot of our conversation moving forward would be around what, if any role Purdue played or the Purdue network played in each of your founding founder experiences. Joe, I wonder if you could start. Tell me, I guess I'm trying to forgive me if I'm trying to put words in your mouth, but I think there's a story here about mentors that you found that challenged you to think big. Yeah, that's a big one with the SV big group, Silicon Valley big group there, but the list is quite large. Like I think on the first time we were talking, Bruce and just catching up was, I actually kept remembering more and more and more instances of the Purdue ecosystem and just how vast it was. The first thing you did call out right away is there was something by the anvil and partnered with the foundry was actually that's what ran the hackathon that our team came together, right? And we ran with from there, we met our first investor who was in the Purdue ecosystem that actually got us to actually start and incorporate the company and decided to do that. From there, we kind of had an initial conversation with Guru from Lightspeed, member of SV big and a great guy, great mentor and really helped us throughout multiple difficult parts of the company where he had a very fun and interesting way of looking at things. He deals with a lot bigger companies than a small Purdue company from day to day, but still gave us a lot of direct feedback way back when we were just a group of founders. And one of the things he said was, if you're gonna start a company you have two options, like you can just start a company and have a regular old company or you can build an excellent amazing world-class company. You're gonna spend a lot of time, you're gonna spend a lot of hours, you're gonna spend a lot of sweat and tears regardless. So which one do you wanna build, right? And having that really Aaron, I think like early on really led us to take some huge swings like challenging ourselves, figure stuff out, push through boundaries that everyone acted like were there but you could just run through them sometimes like there's some really great things from that. And I would say that was super, super beneficial and that owner of the anvil and the foundry back in the day was our first advisor as well. So at many, many points that were difficult it's so helpful to bounce ideas off of different types of people. They're never gonna have all the direct answers for you but their insights and points of view are like invaluable. And the list also continued on quite a bit in the Purdue ecosystem just to the person I started my first company with which actually crashed and burned and went bankrupt. Luckily not too much money but he ended up coming back later and being our series A, series C investor actually and saving us from a huge potential loss and control of the company. So I could go on and on for a while there but just a couple instances of, hey, if I didn't have those connections for my Purdue days and undergraduate days I don't know if the company would be where it is. And a lot of that is just due to the Purdue network and ecosystem surrounding us with mentors and advisors and then just people to bounce off ideas from and that allowed us to get investors as well Bruce. Great, fantastic. So Candice, how about your perspective? Very same question. What was impactful from the Purdue network for your beginning of your company? I agree with a lot of points Joe just mentioned and when we started the company no one knows what is Douglas by share or scooter share and people look at myself and my co-founder and thinking, where does this to keto coming from? And they have no track record and not sure if they understand the product and working with the government contracting process. So to come to where we are here we did get a lot of support from Purdue network. First of all, all of our funding team we are coming from Purdue. My CDO is a master's student from computer science. My co-founder was like a mechanical master's student from engineering team and we also hire a lot of people right now we still have them from Purdue along network to start the company. And then we get a lot of support from Foundry they have excellent like entrepreneur in resident program and we got a lot of suggestion and to get our business starts. And when we are looking to raise funds we also get engaged with SBB group which Bruce you're inside as well and we met our first investor from that group. And at the beginning his suggestion is that don't do that. But over like one to two years he see our progress and he bought in what we were doing he actually became our first institution like investor to fund our Sears Ape like last year. So I do think there's a lot of great things coming from Purdue but my suggestion is that you need to utilize it and also maintain those relationships. Fantastic, that's good. And he speaks very highly of you to me as well not to mention any names. Okay, so let's see. And then Adam, Adam how about in your case it's a very different world for you because again you're the long gone from the Purdue network but how about just influential people from Purdue in any way shape or form over your years that might have contributed? I actually go back to like time on campus which like you just said it dates me a little bit but I think I started off as a CS student in computer science and I guess I'm the imposter here on the call, right? I don't actually have an engineering degree. So I started in CS and then ended up basically dual degreeing in CS and industrial management. And there was a guy who was a professor at the time sort of like almost retiring named Arnie Cooper who was kind of a legend in school management. But I was trying to figure out whether or not I should stay in CS whether I should add industrial management whether I should make either one in a minor or a major and he kind of took me through this like almost behavioral assessment. I don't think I realized it at the time that I was kind of the subject of it but just to understand where my passions were and what I wanted out of a career which I mean asking me at age whatever 19 I think I probably was at the time wasn't exactly a scientific thing but really made me realize that I think I needed a bit of both that I loved and will always be passionate about technology but that like the human aspect and like the business building aspect is something that I probably will also like equally. And he was just a great advisor for even just a few times I met with him. But time at Purdue I think taught me a lot of like grit. I think CS engineering, a lot of the sort of scientific disciplines at Purdue I would say they're intended to be a little bit of a grinding type experience and that's helpful to like what you feel on a startup. Like startups don't have, it's not all rosy even though TechCrunch might make you think that. And so that was a bit of it. And then when I, if you fast forward when we moved out West 10 plus years ago it's amazing like if you start networking professionally Purdue grads and I would actually extend this to big 10 grads. Purdue is by far the best but nonetheless I think they tend as a whole is fits the mold are all super warm and willing to help. There's just sort of a kind of it's the Midwest mindset although now we've got UCLA and whatever else but like I think there's just a willingness to help that doesn't always exist in every part of the country or world and I mean Bruce, you and the big group have been a great part of the network. I think beyond that like tons of folks from LinkedIn from DataRobot from elsewhere that were Purdue grads that I wouldn't have known and didn't know but like we're still really, really helpful as much as it could be. So long answer but Purdue's had a lot of intersection with life. Great. Okay and on finally same question by the way I have to say I mentioned I've known you longer than anybody else on the panel and I would say that's in large part because we're fellow Purdue you were working at Microsoft and you spoke at a big Microsoft technology event of some kind and I thought I want to meet that guy. So anyway, that's the beginning of our relationship. So yeah, any Purdue people in any way, shape or form that formed your career along the way especially your ability to found your company. Yeah, yeah. I'll try to keep it succinct but I mean the reality is that I don't think a day goes by when I don't think about Purdue or like conversations that I have with someone where Purdue doesn't come up but it's a part of who I am, right? It's my, it's been morphed into my DNA. But it goes back to, I think 1999 I think there was a job fair when I met this individual from Cisco Systems and he's like, oh, and of course I grew up in the 90s, obviously rode the internet wave and as a junior at Purdue, I met this gentleman and he said, hey, you should come work at Cisco because given the sort of like the skill set that you have and I think you'll be a good fit for our team. And this guy obviously was a Purdue grad. He'd gotten his master's in CS from Purdue and he's only recruited me into Cisco and as a junior and as an immigrant having moved to this country the Silicon Valley was like everything that I, it's where I wanted to be, right? So getting this opportunity to interview with his team let alone moving to the Valley as a junior I took a whole semester off actually and I'm becoming more of a co-op and an internship. But that was sort of the beginning of my exposure to the Valley, which as we all know is sort of like the birthplace of a lot of innovation. So if it weren't for him, and again, like timing and luck in many ways, I wouldn't be here. And I'm still very close to him. He's still a very big personal mentor of mine. His kids have grown up and it's insane. Like it's been 22 years now and we're still very, very close. So yes, I'm indebted in so many ways to the Purdue network, but also these individual connections I've made whether it's you, Bruce or Ron who recruited me back in the day from Purdue. It's been quite a journey. Great, fantastic. I'd like to follow on the same vein as what we've just talked about, but like how to use the Purdue network. And Joe, I think there might be something you can share because I remember when we talked earlier, you talked about it just being, if you're gonna start a company, that's your natural network of where you're gonna find talent. Is there any more? And by the way, how do you do that? You know, like if you're looking for talent at Purdue, it's not gonna just show up at your door. How did you do that? Yeah, there's quite a bit to that. I think a lot of that is just getting involved. I think I usually say like just taking changes with stuff, like go do some hackathons, even if you don't always have the idea, there's a ton of communities at Purdue that are entrepreneurial. That's how I met one of my co-founders. And then, hey, he introduced me to the other one, and that's how we get into the hackathon, is just doing some things and then making sure that you kind of actually do them, not just a project, but hey, go try to actually sell a product or create something. I think that that was been very, very beneficial. And really it's important, I think, to get off of campus. I don't like to understatement that, but it's like, there's a lot of stuff right outside of the campus walls, where then that's where a lot of stuff is happening with Purdue Innovation Park. There's a lot of companies and advisors that are right across the river actually. And I was kind of shocked when we met them and they later invested in us and things of that nature. I'm like, there's a two-one person company by a Purdue founder right here. And he was willing to talk to us any day of the week, just to try to help somebody out. And all of that just came from going to events around and in the community. So take advantage of a lot of things going on on campus and take advantage of things going on around campus. It does take some effort to do those things and make sure you follow up, you get people's phone numbers, then you make big ask when you need them and people usually answer. And I think one of the main things I like to focus on there is like, the one thing that I just feel I get less and less of every single year is like, hey, the ability to find great people. And if you squander that opportunity while you're at Purdue or shortly after Purdue, I think that that's a big thing you shouldn't try to let go to waste is the amount of great people that we got involved with. And just like Adam said, how nice they are, how willing they are to give advice is actually amazing. And sometimes they know when not to give advice and say, hey, this is something I can't answer. Like that was completely invaluable. And I would say it's something that everyone should focus on. You know, I will say one personal comment you mentioned hackathons. The last time I was on campus, you may have heard there was a big pandemic. So I haven't been there for a long time, but it was like at least three years ago. But there was so much talk among students about hackathons. And I think that, I mean, it seems to be a real, I don't know if it still is three years later, but it seems to be a real Purdue thing. And what a great way to kind of get your feet wet or your hands dirty, whatever analogy you wanna use to pretend like you're building something real. And in fact, maybe it turns out to be real. So Candice, I wanna basically give you the same question I just asked Joe. I remember you mentioned that you were recently, I don't know how recent, but you were back at Purdue and you were surprised that students you talked to just weren't aware of resources they had on campus. And therefore, is there anything you could share I'm sure there must be many aspiring entrepreneurs on the video call here at Purdue. So what advice do you have to the students? Yeah, that's a very good call. When I came back to Purdue this April, I spoke at Craner at their executive forum. And I did a very quick poll and find out only one force of the students in the audience know about foundry, Enval, et cetera. And I was very surprised because foundry actually have a very great system called fire starter. When you like contact them, they can help you to flush out all of your ideas and they have different EIR with different specialty understand how to build out the business. That is actually where we started. And foundry is so warm that they just take us in after we send an inquiry and started to offer different resources they have and also connect us with a lot of amazing people in Purdue network. So I do think there's a lot of resources available at Purdue but we just need to go out to find it. Because for example, what I noticed that the reason why I get engaged with a foundry is because when I was undergrad, I look for projects and I know there's some needs for Purdue foundry with their startups. So I volunteered to be in and help on the financial modeling. And I also know there's a lot of entrepreneurship certificate classes people can go through just to learn about entrepreneurship, understand like what it takes to build a business. Great, okay. Let's maybe, I'm a big believer in the value of mentorship. And I wonder if I could, let's see, go to Anna next and ask you about any advice you'd offer to either Purdue students or just anybody listening who's an aspiring entrepreneur. What advice would you give them about mentorship? How do you find them? And how do you really make use of them? I mean, it's not a natural, I don't think it's a natural thing for people to know how to form that kind of relationship. Yeah, it's a good question. And I feel like the landscape is changing pretty drastically because I think the, you know, if I were to sort of look back at sort of my own trajectory, first of all, I think I had some inhibitions about reaching out to people. And I think in the likes of LinkedIn, we're really quite there when I was graduating, right? So it was really, you know, your email was your CRM was your network, right? Like that's as far as things got. But now of course there's many tools to be able to connect with folks. Honestly, if I could just pin it down to one thing I'd say, and there've been many Purdue grads I've met this way who've just been very direct about reaching out saying, hey, you know, I am an ECE grad, I'm looking to do this, I'm moving to the valley, would love to catch up and talk to you about X. And I, you know, as much as my email and schedule permits, I will respond and we have a candid conversation about whatever it is that happened. So I think the, honestly, it's not, I don't want to overly complicate it, but it is really, I guess it's a two-step process. One, you know, harness and canvas the landscape of your networks and find the three or four people, maybe even more that you want to really get connected to where you feel like you can get good value from them. Script your ask, make it super succinct, right? Like here's the three things I want to discuss with you, right? Like put that an email or the case might be maybe something that makes it pop so that like the other person feels compelled to respond and then, you know, keep up the conversation, right? Keep at it and make it, when you wrap up the conversation, once you've had it, close the loop such that it feels like you can give something back to the mentor as well, right? So it's always sort of a two-way street. So, but, you know, I think you were asking sort of about the top of the phone, like how do you find people? But honestly, I think the tools are there, right? It's just about, you know, putting it to work for yourself and making, you know, just adding a little bit of extra effort, right? Like I found great people through Twitter, through LinkedIn and, you know, the next step is just about sending that cold message and not worrying about how it might be received or even if the reception or response rate is low, just keep at it. No, that's a great topic and I would say, I'll share that so many times I've talked to entrepreneurs where not necessarily just from Purdue, but like I tell them, go search LinkedIn and especially find somebody who went to the same college you did and reach out to them. It can be a cold email via LinkedIn, whatever. But if you passionately talk about, I'm so thrilled that we're both fellow alumni, I think, you know, the hit rate on these are gonna be, there's gonna be a lot of rejection, but the hit rate is gonna be not bad. Adam, do you have any more to share about, like, if you were, maybe from your own personal experience, but if you were advising young entrepreneurs about finding mentors, what would you say? Yeah, I mean, part of this just goes back to like what is mentorship? And I sort of think of it as, you know, learning and growing, mostly professionally in my case, but there's other angles of it too. And, you know, I think I look at like the people that I've found to be most like inspirational and enlightening or, you know, educational, mostly the people I've worked with, certainly investors and others that like kind of, you know, been a part of life as well as fit that bill. But I don't think anybody ever explained to me like, okay, if you want to seek out this entrepreneurial path, how do you, like, what's the best way to get started? All right, you can start your company, you can go work with a bunch of really bright people. But what I ended up, you know, inadvertently doing was just, I mean, when I moved out for Bright, you know, it was a job site, I had no experience in the space, but I was just blown away by the three or four people that were at the company when I interviewed there. They were backed by the same investors as Exactarget. And, you know, they were just like out of this world smart. One dropped out of high school, one, you know, the other didn't go to Purdue, but like both like incredibly brilliant. And like I learned a ton from them. And if that's all I get out of a company or a startup or a company, even if it doesn't succeed, I think it's super, super valuable. So I, that's one thing. You don't have to formally ask, you don't have to do anything, just being around people that are, you know, special or have some deep expertise is really, really, really fun. Yeah. And to Anand's point, like, you know, ask for sure if you have a special need or, you know, a pointed interest. And yeah, I think, you know, Purdue's a great ecosystem as well. Like I think I probably didn't take advantage enough of it. I don't think there was a, there wasn't a guide, there wasn't a social network, there was barely a website in terms of looking up things. You know, hey, I want a resource for X. I mean, today all that stuff is searchable, easy to find. But back then I think ITAP had, you know, some semblance of a directory, but it wasn't all that great. So... Okay, good. So very soon we're gonna switch over to Q&A and we have a fair number of questions here. So we're off, but please audience, please tell us what you want us to talk about. Candice, I think a really important topic is that, how do I say this? I think that it's pretty well documented that female entrepreneurs have a bigger challenge than male do, unfortunately. And because, I mean, you've, I've read the articles, you know, about you and your role as CEO at VO. So what advice would you like to share with younger or aspiring entrepreneur women to wade through this? Yeah, that is the big F in the room. I will say I work in a transportation industry and which is very heavily male dominated and also I'm an immigrant. There's a lot of, and I'm a first-time entrepreneur. So there's a lot of unfavorable tech on my like shoulder that is not favorable for VC perspective. But I do get a lot of support along my road to today, especially getting through like support from mentor, Purdue alum network, understand what has been successful for them and learn from them like how can I do to be successful in leading the team and the company? So I will defer to the comment we just discussed on the mentorship. But the other thing I want to also mention is that reach out to people, reach out to mentor, but also we need to like spend energy to maintain the relationship because that is two-way streets and you need to spend calories to maintain the relationship you had with your mentor. For example, count prepared to your meetings, share people your updates and keep people warm, keep the relationship warm or things will fall through and things will not like cultivate naturally. So I will say for women especially, I will look for groups who support each other, who offer helps to each other and also in your day-to-day champion for what you believe in and also address the topics you feel like it's not fair or things you can like talk about, discuss for. For example, in my company, we believe we need to serve all different demographics and women has a very special and unique need in my mobility. And I took the role and champion for the product design product line. And that is something everyone can do in the real life as well. Great, okay. One last prepared question I have before we move on to Q and A. Anna, I'm trying to think how to phrase this, but you told me something when we talked during the prep about you think entrepreneurs need to not expect to be taught. For example, like at a school, you don't expect the coursework to tell you how to be an entrepreneur and you're gonna figure it out yourself. Share with me your feelings on this topic. Yeah. I think someone alluded to this earlier during this chat as well, but I think of it as shots on goal, right? I think you just need to try a lot of different things and just build the muscle on what it means to be an entrepreneur and that only comes from trying and actually do practically doing things, right? So you can get a lot of top-down content and education. I think you can get some guardrails and frameworks on things that you can do and landmines to avoid or pitfalls to avoid. But at the end of the day, like when you're in the driver's seat, it's kind of like getting schooled and what it's like to drive a car when you drive a car. There's a lot of the variables that will show up when you're actually on the road. And so, yes, you can hear a lot, I can read a lot and there's no shortage. I think Adam alluded to TechCrunch or other networks where I think folks are very open about their journeys, but everyone's journey tends to be different. So yeah, I think just given all the tools we have today to start something, and I know there's a big asterisk on this because if you start a deep tech hardware company, for example, like that's a different ballgame, but if you're starting something in software, for example, like it's actually much easier to do that today than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So I think it's, and it keeps going down, right? So I would say that, yeah, just try it out. Take the plunge, dip your toes in and maybe you start to get more comfortable and you go deeper, but these things matter. And I think now as someone who spends a lot of time talking to founders and figuring out if there's an opportunity for us to work together as an investor, the first question I tend to ask them is, tell me your founding story. Like how did you get here? What have you tried before? What have you failed at? And oddly enough, this is something I talked to my daughter about, it was nine now all the time, which is tell me something you failed at this week, right? Which is, and I want that to be okay for us to talk about, like failure is fine, but it doesn't happen unless you take shots at goal. So yeah, a long-winded way to say, try things and challenge yourself. Great, okay. Arvind, I believe you've been watching the questions coming in and I'll turn the mic over to you to offer them up. Yeah, we have a number of questions. Please keep them coming in the remaining time. I'll start at the very top here. The question is that I've been thinking a lot about personally owned versus shared micromobility if someone uses shared micromobility regularly, it ends up costing more than purchasing a scooter or bike after a few months. What are your thoughts about shared micromobility going forward to really be affordable for the first and last mile solution and not just affordable for a fun way to travel around on vacation? Candice, I suppose this is for you. Yeah, happy to answer this one and it's a very good insight and personally myself have been thinking about this question a lot. The allergy I would use is that even though a lot of people still have cars today, we are still heavy user for Uber and Lyft. I would say the convenience of shared micromobility is kind of unbeatable when you compare it with the personal owned one. So from our end, the responsibility for the company like us, it's our goal to reduce the cost and make sure our commuting user, they're not incurred so heavy cost that the economics can be justifiable for them. So there are a lot of things we are rolling out on the pricing side, we are pushing for direction to make commuting trip more affordable and make sure we are able to cultivate habits of using micromobility going forward. Thank you, Candice. Bruce, the next question is regarding students. One of the most common questions received from a student is, quote unquote, I do not know what I want to do. So what are your suggestions and when did you realize you wanted to become entrepreneurs? Oh, let's see, who would like to take that one? I haven't got it. Yeah, I'll give you a two cents. So, I started off as a consultant, which I kind of joked is the undecided path to figuring out what you want to do. But I actually think if you know that your heart isn't working in a small business, so like working and having no limit on responsibility where you just have to figure things out as you go, find a group of people that are really good, like good and your own judgment is all you need in terms of, hey, is this someone that I can learn a lot from and just go work really hard. Like I think your 20s should be all about experimentation. I don't think anybody ever told me that. I don't think I ever, it certainly wasn't coursework, but go work at one, two, three startups, fail fast, learn from it, if you succeed even better. But I don't think there's any playbook for figuring out what you want to do and learning the skills you need to do it. Just go work with some really smart people and there's plenty of that in Indiana, there's plenty of that in Chicago, there's plenty of that in the Bay Area, there's plenty of that everywhere in the world, but I think network into it and people will always accept people that want to work hard. Like it's just a thing. Yeah, you know, I'll just add one thing, it's like something like 15 years ago, I was at an event where John Doar spoke, John Doar at Clanner Perkins, one of the legendary VCs here in Silicon Valley invested in Amazon and Google and made a fortune. He was asked by a young person in the audience, how I want to be an entrepreneur, what do I do? And his answer was like, right off the bat. Well, if you don't know what you're going to go do right now, don't do something. Go get a job at a company that knows really well how to get stuff done and then watch how things get done and then wait until you've got to find something that you have a passion for to do and then hopefully you'll find it. So I've always, that's my answer to that question. I would love to add just a tidbit to that. I think you guys both said it, but being an ECE, this is pretty near and dear to me. I think just make sure that your students, especially I think this was coming from a professor when the question came out, like go take an internship, go do a co-op, go work in the business world and see if you like that. If you don't like that, that's what I did and that was amazing and I had great mentors there. Then I realized exactly what Adam said, I want to take a swing in my 20s, like I already did the work. I know I can come back to this later. So let me go take a couple of big swings and that's where I came up with it and a lot of people, like two of my founders didn't know what they want to do. We just took the ideas from the other two, right? Like, and then we took it from there, right? You don't have to be the person that comes up with the idea for the startup or anything like that. I don't know exactly when people become entrepreneurs or not, some people do it in college. I felt like I knew it in high school, but that didn't stop me from doing internships. I think one of the worst things in ECE or any engineering is to wait to like your senior year to just get that job. The producer and a great job of this too, like it's more flexible than ever if you want to do an internship for a semester and come back. So I just recommend trying out both sides and then making that decision just like Adam and Bruce said. This is a great question. And one thing I want to add on very quickly is that trying out different things can also help you to understand what you hate, what you want to avoid going into the future. For example, my first job, I was in corporate finance at low finance, but I hate like every month the routine is the same. So that helped me understand I love dynamic. I love like smaller company who can make impact faster. Good, great. Well, Bruce, the next question here I have on the list is in your experience when did you start raising funds from BCs relative to getting funding from government programs like SBIR and STTR related? Are there a critical fraction of BCs who'd like to see a professional CEO for them to take your company seriously? Oh, wow. There's a couple of different questions there. I mean, I have never founded a company. So I'm not qualified to answer this question. It's a fun question. I'll dive in there first and feel free to dive in another one. I'll kind of call you out a little bit and on here, but I think there's two things here. It's like there's general businesses where I don't think VCs put any idea of whether or not we need to be professional or you need to have tons of years of experience. Then there's other ones where it's you're building missiles or you're building rocket science or you're building crypto. If you don't have experts on your team or expert mentors, you're gonna get a little bit pushed back at some point from the VC level. And so I think that answering the second question first like I wouldn't want to work with a non if there was no experience on crypto, right? Like you want someone who knows crypto or some of these advanced things and they're not gonna lose lots of money or security. And so it depends a little bit on your idea, but I don't think you need it early on. And then us personally, we did non-government money for the first two, three rounds and then we had some government contracts come later. I think government money is great in a lot of cases, especially grants and things of that nature. I didn't know that two programs mentioned, but we did some other programs and I think it's great, but it's sometimes not as fast and it's not willing to take as many risk as sometimes other VC money. So just something to take into account that that usually means it's gonna be a little bit later stage, at least in my experience. Yeah, I'll echo the same thing. Like the pace of something that you're trying to get off the ground usually doesn't allow for waiting for the government turnaround. And so in the very, very early days I would probably avoid the government program let VCs be your signal. I mean, VCs may not know everything about every space but they're really smart thinkers and they can reason through a problem. And if there's something that has potential, they'll write a check for it, maybe a small check at the beginning, but they'll figure it out. And then if there's something that seems off about it, we'll then use that signal, go back and revise the pitch and try again. And then professional CEO, like I actually think it's almost the opposite. I'm not sure what a professional CEO is in this context, like is this a hired gone or is this somebody who's like a business person? But I don't think you really need either of them. I think there's plenty of examples of incredible businesses where engineers led them from day one till present day. And there's examples of businesses that the person never had a day of experience to see in their life until they started a company and all of them work out. So I don't think you need to hire somebody who's done it before. You know, I'd like to weigh in briefly on this. This could be a little controversy or opinion, but in my interaction with Purdue startups over the last 10 years, there's so often a conversation around should we have a professional CEO? And I would say, if you live here in Silicon Valley, these aren't even words that mean anything. Like if you're gonna found a company, you better just go found that company. If you think you're gonna hire a CEO, no good CEO, and this is really controversial, but I'm gonna say my opinion, no great CEO is gonna come and work in your five-person startup. You're gonna have to prove that there's a real business there. No, I mean, it's perfectly common that once companies become five, 10, 20, $50 million companies, it's time to bring in professional CEOs. But you don't do it when there's five people in the company. So there's an opinion. Yeah, I'll add on to that. I think it's a really good point, Bruce. Because I think one of the most interesting traits that I've seen work with founders and just having lived and worked in a valley for so long and surrounded by just incredible people is that, like there's a sense of adaptability, right? Like a founder or CEO is, you're wearing just multiple hats, right? Maybe the most common thing from day one to like the day you exit or even beyond is that you're always, always, always recruiting. Like that's the one thing that doesn't change. That's the only constant. But everything else is our variables, right? And you just need to know how to block and tackle. You need to know how to get, just move on with the things that get thrown at you. So I would say that as an early member of the founding team, if you were to wear that hat, just be prepared to do a lot of different things. And if at some point it feels like you're gravitating towards one specific business function, then yes, it makes sense to bring on someone who can lead the charge and be the person who can be the CEO. But out of the gate, just be prepared to do a lot. And the most important trait is just to be adaptable and be prepared for change. Great. We have lots of questions and I'm actually clustering them into groups dynamically here. But I think there's an interesting one. This is from Leo, one of her students here, international senior majoring in industrial engineering. He asks, if given his status as an international student, where should I start with legal processes in order to begin my entrepreneurial journey? Good question. Does anybody have, I know this has been an issue of for a long time. Candice, do you have- Yeah, I've been able to answer it. I tried different visas. And the suggestion I have is that prepare early and consult with ISS and Purdue Foundry. They also have great program that can support you. So have those conversations as early as possible before you start a company. Yeah, I would don't have direct experience, but two of our founders are Turkish and I oversaw almost all legal. I would say ask questions. There's almost always options is what I like to say. It depends a lot on your personal story. Like what visa you're gonna get depends on something else, but there's some really great visas in America for undergraduates or graduates to get started with the business. Essentially you can work almost as like an intern. I usually would start there and then there's better visas you can get. But there's some great places in person. And then there are some great legal firms outside of like the in-person assets at Purdue that you should go talk to. But if you don't feel like you're getting great answer then just try a different route. Like we said earlier today, there's some really, really great firms that can do a quick call with you in an hour for free. And they'll give you the name of two or three visas that may or may not be the best fit. I think we may have time for just a couple, Bruce, maybe, maybe one more question too. We'll see how it goes. Next question on the list is a colleague who has a brand new cloud database optimization company and is also a engineering alumna and now a professor and would love to be part of PAEN. The question there is, what are some of the challenges specific to B2B companies as opposed to client-facing companies? I'm trying to think, well, let's see. Both Adam and Joe are primarily B2B, what would you add? I guess challenges specific to B2B, it is a different market than B2C. So it kind of goes back to almost some of the, anything from mentors to points of view. Like I love what we said earlier, when we talked to mentors and we would ask other mentors, we had asked at the end of our slide, hey, we need to talk to somebody in this industry or we need to get a hold of somebody that's done B2B, not B2C. Because it is a different market. It moves at a different speed. It's a lot more, I think predictable and higher value, but there's a lot more demands. For that, like kind of it's a general, still general question, just like challenges specific to it. A lot of it's gonna be like convincing the buyer to buy from you. These are not gonna be low dollar amounts. They're not gonna just like implement it. You're not gonna be able to get a university to buy something company-wide and roll it out right away. You're gonna have to maybe work with small companies first and work your way up to enterprises. It's a very, very common problem. If you go straight to the enterprise, that's possible as well, but usually then you're gonna have to do a lot of work to win that first deal and learn a lot from it right away. So the main call out, I would say, is the challenges, I would look at them differently and when you read books or you try to get mentors, do have some that are B2B focused, not B2C. It does move at a different speed and the feedback loops from the customer base are gonna be quite different. That's great. We have a bunch of questions related to how to connect with the Purdue alumni entrepreneurs. And I just wanted to read out a few resources that are in the chat box, the Purdue Alumni Entrepreneurship Network that just launched a colleague from the Purdue Dial Ventures at dialventures.com here at Purdue is also inviting you all to chat. There's also Purdue Ventures. This ecosystem, there's an email address, rtgibbfbrf.org. And then a colleague, Eugenio Colercillo, has offered ease of campus, would be happy to discuss startups ideas or connections. Just wanted to kind of summarize some of the different resources that people are offering. And it's back to you, Bruce. I think we're just at time. Well, yeah. I think I want to be respectful of people's time. So I just want to thank, two thank yous, first and foremost, the four panelists. I mean, you guys are very busy running your companies and I really appreciate you taking the time. This has been fantastic from my vantage point. And Arvind, I want to thank you in the School of Engineering for offering us the venue. So I think it worked out very well. You bet. Thank you all.