 Good morning. Thank you for coming. I'm really excited to see such a wonderful crowd here today. I'm Tamara Kinzer-Ursim. I'm the associate dean for graduate and professional programs here in the College of Engineering. I'm also the Marta E. Gross Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the proud co-founder of OmniViz Incorporated, which is a produced startup and a diagnostics company taking the power of the lab and putting it into the palm of your hand. But today I'm putting on my College of Engineering hat and I'm very happy to introduce Bruce Checkter, who is our distinguished speaker today. So Bruce currently resides in Palo Alto, California. He's an active advisor, consultant, and investor in a variety of technology startups, including Life360, BigML, Carbon Lighthouse, Illumio, and 3-point data. Bruce began his career at Intel Corporation in 1980 and has served there a 17-year tenure in a variety of roles, including Fab Process Engineering, Microprocessor Product Management, the Corporate Strategy Group, and the Director of Online Marketing. Bruce was on the founding team of Pandesic LLC, a pioneering e-commerce cloud service provider where he served as Director of Operations Management and later Director of Strategic Alliances. Bruce's connections to Purdue run deep. He received his Bachelors of Science degree in Physics and Math where he graduated with the highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Later, as he was building his career in Silicon Valley, he received a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. Bruce is active in mentoring students, student entrepreneurs, at both Stanford and Purdue, and is active in non-profit work, including his role as Founder and President Emeritus of the Intel Alumni Network, which is a worldwide network of former Intel employees with a focus on thought leadership. I know Bruce and have made his acquaintance through his work as co-founder and past co-chairman of the Purdue Silicon Valley Boilermaker Innovation Group, otherwise known as SB Big. This group is a set of fantastic people, esteemed Purdue alums, that offer mentoring to Purdue startups in the Silicon Valley, or Purdue startups really worldwide. So the College of Engineering is very excited to have such a distinguished thought leader with us today. Please join me in welcoming Bruce Schecter. Now, sounds good. Well, that was quite an introduction. Let's see if I can live up to everything Tamara said. First, I just wanna start by saying I'm just another guy like the rest of you. That's, you might notice, the one in the middle, that's me. That was in 1980 when I graduated with my degree in math and physics and had, I hadn't, I thought I knew what my career would be, but what I ended up doing was just had nothing to do. This is like what I say to every student who will listen to me is like, don't fret too much about all these big decisions you're making because life has a way of just offering you opportunities over and over and you'll fall along the way and you'll get back up and things will happen. So anyway, that was me, but here today, I'm here because I'm guessing many or most of you have aspirations of being an entrepreneur. Let's just do a little experiment. Like, who all in the room in any way, shape, or form either aspires to be an entrepreneur or is already working on something? Now, no surprise you wouldn't be here. So that's basically everybody. What about who all is actually in some way working on something? Like you're building a product or, oh, that's awesome. And finally, who all, if any, have actually gone out and tried to generate capital or funding for your startup? Okay, good, well, fantastic. You'll be the experts, I'll be calling on you along the way to help me for things I don't understand. Before I dive in, I've got a bunch of caveats. Like, first of all, I'm gonna be talking largely about how you prepare to go out in the real world and talk to the likes of angel investors or venture capital firms. But in fact, those are not the best funding sources. Best funding sources, hands down, are what we, at least we in Silicon Valley, broadly define as bootstrapping. Bootstrapping means, first and foremost, it's great if you can get a customer to pay you money for a product. Because later, when you talk to investors, they're gonna be very impressed that you're already generating money. So, but this can come in any forms. And here, what I see is here at Purdue, oh, I'm not used to being able to point at my screen, here we go, like NRE, like non-recurring engineering, like meaning like some companies so excited about what you're doing, you generate excitement with them that they might pay you like blocks of money as some kind of pre-purchase of something that's coming down the road. Or government grants, this is another thing, exceptionally good resources here at Purdue for generating government grants. So these are the ideal funding sources, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I am here to talk about preparing to talk to the traditional investors. Now, someday as an entrepreneur, you'll probably walk into a room, maybe for the first time in your life that looks something like this, where some investors are gonna walk in behind you and sit down in front of you. And it's a daunting experience because I call it like, it's my analogy to asymmetric warfare. It's like, they know all the rules, they've done this 500 times before, you've never done it, you're not sure of the lingo, blah, blah, blah. And my goal here today, to any extent I can, I'm hoping to try to kind of fill in some of the blanks for you on what you should know to be better prepared to face them. And more caveats I wanna make. I've never met a venture capital firm outside of Silicon Valley, so I don't know the lay of the land here in the Midwest, but I can't imagine it's all that much different. And I will also say every entrepreneur is different and every venture firm and every investor is different. So I'm gonna tell you about what I think are some great kind of rules of thumb, there's no magic, I mean, your experience may be very different. And in fact, to the extent we have time, those of you who said you've talked to investors, feel free to raise your hand and argue with me along the way. I think that'd be great fun. Let's talk about different experiences. So I'm a big believer that every presentation has to have one big thing. So let's talk about my one big thing is investors don't fund products, they fund companies. You know, I talked to, I forget who it was earlier this week here on campus, somebody was telling me that they watch Shark Tank, which I've basically never watched. Apparently they say this all the time on Shark Tank so I'm not the first person to come up with it, but, well, let me explain what I mean by investors don't fund products, they fund companies. So imagine this some mythical scenario here, here's a wonderful tech startup CEO, the woman on the left. She's here bragging about her amazing product and all the amazing technology they've invented to underlie it. And these are really important things and they should be very proud of them. But what do you think the, in this case, they're all guys, the guys on the right, what do you think they're thinking? Well, because I'm in such a hurry, I'm gonna tell you the answer. But they're interested in products, but they're thinking much bigger view of this company. Like, things like, they're trying to do a lot of mental math on how would I judge like what kind of total profit margin over the years can this company generate? Do they have a sales strategy? Like, are they just trying to believe that if we build a better mouse trap, people will come and hand a millions of dollars? Well, in fact, everybody knows every startup has trouble generating sales. If you start a startup and you have some trouble with your first sales, welcome to the crowd. I mean, that's part of the game. And we'll talk more about that as we go. Team building, I mean, I could list 10 other items here on the right, but there's a lot that they're looking for. And this is the theme of my talk, to be thinking about primarily all those things on the right. I mean, you're here at Purdue, you're gonna learn about great products and great technology here, I can't add to that. But I can add a little bit to the things on the right there. Now, I'm gonna talk a couple more thoughts about helping you try to think about the mindset of investors. Well, at least in Silicon Valley, we tend to over-simplify the world into two categories. First, the ideal Silicon Valley company is what we call venture scale startups. Meaning, they're usually tech companies. They tend to have something about them that once they get the engine going, they can grow hyper-fast and get very big, faster than a Kleenex company would be or something like that. And we compare these to, it's a little bit of a derogatory term, but we call everything else lifestyle businesses. And what we mean by that is like, you look across the United States, I don't have any stats, I'm making up stats. So let the buyer beware, I'm making all this up. But I would say like 99% of businesses in America are what I would call a lifestyle business. They can be really successful. The founders may become very wealthy. They may have many employees. They may live on for 100 years, whatever. But they grew at a rate that was not fast enough to make the venture capital type of investors ever have an interest. So they're gonna have to take loans from banks and things like that. It's a wonderful business, but it's just completely different than anything I know about. So it's kind of like, if you're interested in that, you know, I'm sorry you came to the wrong talk, but I don't think that's you. And let's see. So one more thought along those lines. Venture companies often talk in terms of a power law distribution. Now you're all math nerds in here like me, so you can relate to this. You know, it's like we're like, imagine you're ranking size of something. Let's say it's like size of cities across America. And if you rank them, you'll find that they tend to fall statistically along something along the lines of the rank varies in inverse proportion to some power of, I'm sorry, the size of the city distribution varies in inverse proportion to some power of its ranking. But most importantly, it turns out this is true for companies. And it's true for companies within a market segment. Like, you know, pick your market segment and go look it up. You'll probably be amazed. Like Google, Google, like 85% market share in search. Bing, 9% market share. Yahoo, 3%. And then beyond that, nobody's even heard of any other company there. Now it took years for this to settle out. Didn't start that way 25 years ago, but as it settles out, some companies gonna dominate. Well, if you're an investor, you know, doesn't take, doesn't take a rocket scientist like Neil Armstrong to think about what are they looking for? They're looking for that one on the end. They, you know, they'll settle if they get top one, maybe top two, maybe even top three, but anything below that for them, it's a loss. Now, so what, so what you're looking, now imagine you're in talking to these investors, your job is to convince them in some way that you think you can, you can grab that share over there. You know, often these are called category killers. You know, investors love category killers. Some, there's new, you know, technology's constantly disrupting. New entrants are being created, but somebody's gonna dominate the category. Your job is to, number one, do dominate the category, but number two, convince your investors early on that that's, that's the game you're in. Okay, so one more thing about knowing your audience. I find, this, this is utterly fascinating. I hope you find it as fascinating as me. I've, I've recently interviewed friends in venture capital firms, because I wanted to see if what I'm saying here is reasonably correct. These are orders of magnitude what I'm gonna talk about, but like, this is like, how does a VC spend his time across, let's say, one year? So typical VC might see a thousand different companies coming, coming, seeking investment. Now, most of the time, vast majority of these came in on email or some form of something like email, excuse me, and this, this man or woman at the VC firm never even saw the company. Like they'll knock out, let's see, like 85% of them, according to my stats here, they'll take 150 first meetings. So 15% of those that came their way. So right off the bat, you're thinking, you've got to be very crisp and clear when the first communication goes to that investor, because you don't want to be the 85%, you're gonna have to be the winners. So let me try to pick up the pace here. So out of those, now we're down to only 10% of those, get a second meeting. And then it gets more complicated from there because if you're at the second meeting, you're pretty serious, really seriously in the game, but there's a lot of activity that will follow. And so finally in the end, that investor only does two investments in a year. And I used to think, wow, that's crazy. What do they do all day? Well, think about it. What happens is if you're the guy from a man or woman, by the way, from the venture firm, and when you make an investment, if you're the person that brought the deal into your investment firm, you're probably gonna take a seat on the board of directors of that company. And that's a huge commitment and it's gonna last for years. We always say it's like a marriage. That person on the board is gonna be with that company for years to come to get them grown up and try to get them big. So big commitment, but the point is, imagine this, 1,000 came in and two yielded. So part of pitching investors is be prepared for a lot of no's. I don't know any company that didn't get a lot of no's, but it's very much like what I love to say about sales. If you're getting a lot of no's, your job is to not view those as bad. You're gonna view those as learning experience. Every no, you're learning, because what is a startup? A startup is a problem-solving entity. You look for problems and you solve them. When somebody says no to you, you try to figure out why did they say no, and it's easy for me to oversimplify this, but it's like you rank all those issues you know of and you figure out which ones can we fix, so that might get us over the next hump to move on to the next stage. Okay, so think of this as a funnel. Your job is to figure out, optimize all of your preparation for the introduction to these companies and your meetings with these companies so that you pierce your way down through that funnel and come up the bottom of the funnel. And finally, on my setup, I would say, I love this analogy that supposedly famously, first of all, Michelangelo often thought of as the greatest sculptor that ever lived. And someone supposedly asked him, how in the world do you take this big block of granite and create this amazing sculpture? And he said, well, it's easy. I saw this angel in the marble and all I did was carve to set him free and now you're thinking, what does this have to do with talking to a VC for him? Well, I think it's the same. Like you, if you're an entrepreneur and those of you who already are kind of know this, you start to gather all kinds of information about your market and your product and your company and all the issues involved in your company. But when you go in and talk to an investor, you have a really short amount of time and you have got to carve that granite out of the way and figure out in your limited communication with these investors, where's the powerful story in there? And the biggest mistake we all make, all of us, is we talk too much. And I like to say, you'd say things that don't need to be said. You're often just throwing red meat to an angry dog. It's like, give them more things to argue about. And I'm not saying lie or give misinformation, but just pick the information that's the winning story. Let's see, how am I doing? Oh, good, okay. Now, moving right along. One other thought about your mentality about speaking to these investors is that when you prepare, it's not about you, it's about them. Your whole mentality should not be, what do I want to tell them? It's more like, what do they want to hear? And the rest of my talk is trying to do my best to kind of feed you, what do I think's on their mind? Like, you just have to be so careful that you think about what are the things that these people are looking for and you feed them that. And it's not a natural act. You have to learn. And it's iterative too, back to my earlier point. Like, you go into these meetings, like typically you will early on, you need to decide who's the CEO of this company. That will be the spokesperson forever to investors because they're the one that represents you in the board of directors meetings. And that person should bring along a key lieutenant that's also in the room and watching every move during the meeting, like where did the, where did they go from smiling to frowning during the meeting, because that might clue you in on something that didn't convince them. And also I have to warn you, beware. Investors love what I would call happy talk. Like they'll tell you, oh, this is so great. I love that you're doing this. You're a little early for me, so let's keep in touch. And first of all, that may just be simply true because a lot of companies have size targets and they won't invest earlier, but if they really believe in you, no matter what size you are, they can invest. Your job is to discern what could we have said that day? And the thing you never do, the sign up to me of a not mature entrepreneur is they come out of the meeting and they look at each other and they say, geez, those guys, they just don't understand. What kind of idiots are they that they didn't understand because if they don't understand what you're saying, who do I think made the mistake? I don't, you know, they may be idiots, by the way, but still, I don't care if we want their money, you know? But it's our job to explain things simply and clearly to get through. Now let's talk a typical introduction. I like the engagement of a relationship with an entrepreneur. It goes through a sequence. At some point, there's some early introduction. Sometimes you're lucky you're in some kind of a conference and they are there and you grab them in the hallway and you give them your elevator pitch and they express an interest and then they might kick off a conversation via email, something like that. But most of the time an intro is simply somebody in your valued network introduces you to them. Okay, and then you, oops, I'm sorry, I have to, oh, oh, I've, I can't stand to mess up on my build slides. So usually that's gonna follow up with you're gonna stand a little further. They're gonna say something like, send me more information. So you send something before they're likely to take a first meeting. Then they take a first meeting. Now you're really, now you're starting to be in the game. And at least for the purpose of this discussion, that's as far as I'm trying to prepare you. Now I'm gonna talk about all the things I think you should prepare to go through that sequence. Well, you all know the classic elevator pitch concept, you know, I can't emphasize enough how you obsess about this. You wanna have the equivalent of a strong paragraph and you rethink it over and over. You test it on every human being you ever pass because it's gotta be strong and powerful and convincing but not too technical because you don't want, you can't trust that people that you're talking to even comprehend what you're talking about. So this is a really difficult challenge but you're trying to get a crisp, simple story that gets you, for them to say, I want more information. Then I would, I wonder if I can point with, nah, I can't point on here. Then I call it an executive summary and I'll show you in a minute an example but like a one pager you send ahead that gives much more information than, like an elevator pitch to me is like a 30 to 60 seconds of information consumption. An executive summary, even though it's only one page, gives somebody something to think about for like 20 minutes, a lot of thought. Finally, you get in the room and you're gonna bring a PowerPoint deck or whatever tool you use, Google Sheets or whatever and now you can really delve into quite a bit of detail and we're gonna talk about all of that as we go. So, first let's talk about the elevator pitch. Oh, good, I didn't remember if I got this quote in here. Many of you may know about Y Combinator, you know, it's like the premier accelerator program in Silicon Valley and like you look at the power law, Y Combinator is the one in rankings of all incubators in the world. It's the one that dominates like so many great companies came out of there. Anyway, Paul Graham's one of the founders. I'm gonna read what he said. Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you don't know it well as you thought. Putting ideas into text is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong. You have to rewrite the sentences over and over and get them exactly right. So these, whether it be your elevator pitch or your executive summary, please don't think it's like a homework assignment where you write your essay once and you're done. These will evolve sometimes for years because if you're a wildly successful entrepreneur, you're gonna go through multiple waves of fundraising and the story has to get better and better as you go and you're gonna rethink these things over and over. And every time you leave a failed investor meeting, you rethink these things. So don't underestimate them. Now, I'm gonna give you an example. This is completely made up, but it makes a point. This is, imagine me, I have a friend at a venture firm and I've offered to introduce an entrepreneur to that gentleman. So I'm just gonna read you the key element here. I wanted to bring to your attention a company called Flex-Tech Sciences which soon starts human trials on a device promising to cut the cost of knee replacement surgery by 60% and increase resulting ambulatory response of dust by 30%. At an ASP of $5,000 and 800,000 knee replacement surgeries per year in the US, this offers an available market of $4 billion in the US alone. They have several medical supply distribution partners already prepared to ink deals and their CEO previously ran sales at Medtronic and their CTO's EU PEN grad. Now, the fact is this is a pretty short message but there could be a huge amount of thought went into this. For example, you do notice I didn't talk about how many megahertz per millicycle or titanium per, I mean, I didn't talk tech. I talked about business fundamentals. What real difference in the business this can make? I talked about what I will be talking later about go-to-market strategy. They know how to go out and find customers for this product. I also did probably some conniving things like I might have said that the CEO ran sales at Medtronic because I happened to know that that investor used to work at Medtronic and they would love that. Or it's like you guys, everybody should refer to, like if some investor has some relationship to Purdue University, you're gonna brag about that. These are the games we play. And same for the EU PEN thing. I probably only mentioned the EU PEN thing because I know there's some affiliation with EU PEN. Okay, so that's an elevator pitch. Now let's go on to the executive summary. I want to, oh well, hold up on that. Let's see, so I've talked about being concise and clear. I think I love this quote from Pascal who supposedly, he was in a, I don't know what the context was, but he was writing letters back and forth with another scientific scientist in his day. And I'm sure these were very complex discussions. They were having via mail. But he, at the end of one of his letters, he said I would have written a shorter letter but I didn't have the time. And this is so demonstrative of your challenge of talking to investors because they have very little time. And it's really easy for them to lose their attention span if they're reading something you've sent them. So in executive summary, it's all about power in short amount of time, powerful impact. And we scientists and engineers don't always have these communication skills. So news flash, you know, like this is really important. And I'll tell you, when I was a student here, I thought it was a sissy, a silliest thing to take a communication class. But now I know that was not wise on my part. So okay, this is what I think of as an executive summary. This is literally a template that I, when I coach entrepreneurs, I offer this template and work with them on filling this whole thing out. These are the basic things. I'm gonna go rapid fire through all of these bullet points here, but to me, these are the key elements. Oh, I forgot to mention, by the way, I am going to, it'll take me a couple of days. I'm gonna give you a URL at the end where I'm gonna put a bunch of resources of things I mentioned or things I haven't mentioned here. So I'll give you the URL. It'll take me a couple of days to get the slides up, but a lot of this is gonna be there. So if you're busy taking notes, you don't necessarily have to write everything down. So I like to do this on a single sheet of paper. And I have to, I'm gonna admit to you, a lot of people in the industry kind of think of that as old school, and that's a debate we could all have. A lot of people do this in a very simple PowerPoint deck. That's perfectly fine too. I just like, it's like the Y Combinator founder said, put it in words. This, because it's like, you're getting caught on the street someday with some opportunity to explain your company to somebody important. You want, this should just be like gospel memorized to you, like to be able to describe all this. So that's why I like it in text. Okay, let's jump in. I'm gonna go through all of these bullets one by one. We don't have time to do it in great detail, but I'm gonna say a few words about each of these. So problem solution. Please, everybody needs to talk about a problem out there. There's no product that I know of that's interesting to talk about without explaining what problem did you see out in the real world that needed a solution. So always, unless you, I mean, yeah, I highly recommend this. And make it really clear what this pain is. There's an old saying, let's see, do I refer to it here? Yeah, must have versus like to have. There's a lingo in the VC community. It's like people, like VCs love to have pain killers instead of vitamins. And that means like pain killers, when people need them, they are gonna get them. You have to have them. Vitamins, I forgot to take my vitamin big deal. So be very clear about the pain. And next on my list, market opportunity. It's basically, when you walk in that room, by the way, this is, I guess, more often than not, Zoom calls now. I'm still getting used to the new world that started three to four years ago. Same animal, but anyway, I'll talk about the room, even though it might be a virtual room. When you walk in there, a big thing that's, whether you primed, excuse me. Been a long week. When you walk in there, whether you prime them with data on this topic or not, they're, these people are really good at mental math around numbers, particularly market share and how it relates to financials. So either you give them your assumptions or they're gonna make up their own assumptions. And I'll guarantee you that your assumptions look way more favorable than their assumptions. So don't let them make up the numbers. So, and my favorite thing is what you saw in that earlier example of the, of my example elevator pitch. I love a, what I call narrative equation, where you would say, well, it was like that example. Like you say, well, I'm gonna sell cloud storage. You know, there's so many gigabytes of cloud storage needed in America and I charge, you know, $2 per gigahertz per megawatt or whatever. And then you give them enough data, like two or three or four data points where there's just some simple math where they can come up with a big number. It's like, okay, if all these assumptions are realized, we're a $4 billion company. You give them that, now they can, they can't argue with math, that's good. You know, math is pretty solid stuff. They can argue with your assumptions, that's fine. We'd be happy to have that argument around the assumptions, but you give them an anchor point to work with. Okay, so moving right along, competition. One thing you never say is we don't have competition. It's awfully tempting for people who feel like they've invented something new. Everybody has competition. It's often very indirect. It's hard to tell. Often the competition is just, like you have a technological solution and there is no other technological solution. The competition is the refusal of people to use technological solutions, you know? And that is a serious form of competition. And also be very honest because trust me, if you don't signal who the key competition is, they're gonna figure it out and then you just lose credibility if you're not clear about that. Oh, and another thing, finally, a lot of entrepreneurs love to explain what's amazing about their competitors, you know? But you should be explaining what's amazing about you. You focus on your advantage, not focusing on what their advantage is, obviously. Okay, now business model. Basically, business model to me, and I see so many weird interpretations of what business model is, but to me it's simply who sells what to whom for how much money. It's like you make money. It's often so unclear to those people across the table, like you start talking about some ecosystem of we sell into this market, this and that and we fix this problem. And then in the end, the guys on the other side of the table are thinking I'm not even quite clear which piece of this they sell and which is it that their partners sell and whatever. So you've got to be really dead clear. Who is the customer? Very clear, who is your customer? Who writes the check to buy your product? Okay, go-to-market strategy. I think of this, I'm gonna go in reverse, or I call this the big dog or like, and I call it think big and start small and I'm gonna go back here and explain. Like, what I mean is go-to-market is how do we acquire customers? There could be some marketing, there could be some kind of social media or if you have some real money to spend, there might be some sort of advertising, there might be some tele-sales, there may be whatever. Every business is different, so it's very hard to generalize. But keep in mind that investors are smart and if you're an earliest stage entrepreneur, you don't have any, for all practical purposes, you have no money. You're barely surviving, every startup company's the same way, unless you, well, I mean, there are always these grand exceptions, but you have very little money. So don't tell the investors we're gonna have advertising and direct sales. Well, that means nothing. They're looking at you and you're like, let's see, there's four of you here and you have no money. You're like, how are you gonna do direct sales and advertising? And I think what you probably meant was eventually we'll do that. So that's why I call it start small, think big. So be very clear, here's what we're gonna do now. You're gonna write a check to me for the next year, but you're gonna write a check to me and that's gonna cover me for the next year. During that next year, here's what we're gonna do. And oftentimes that means we got nothing but a network of our own that we've already built through whatever and we've met a few people at some conferences and we're gonna work those really hard. But then you're gonna say, that's the kind of closer to more of the bootstrapping approach. Then you say, now if we can achieve some milestone, then we're gonna go big. Then we're gonna hire direct sales. Is that the 10 minute warning? Great, five, oh no, I'm really in trouble. Okay, anyway, you're at the point. So now I've hit all the key bullets on that list and please just test it everywhere you can. Like make sure everybody on your team understands it because any of you might happen to make that right connection at the right times. And also your team, if you're the CEO, the team, they just need to understand it. If they don't understand it, you're in really big trouble. We say this all the time, laughably, talk to your parents. They're a great example of, can we explain this to people who have no idea? So many VCs have said this over the years that they prefer that entrepreneurs can tell this story to their mom or their dad because then they know it's been simplified in a way that anybody understands it. So yeah, okay, you get the point. Now finally, PowerPoint, Deck, this is what, when you get that big meeting, that executive summary got you in the door. When you get that big meeting, now is your chance to really tell the whole story and really everything we've already, okay, DaVinci said, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Keep, you're gonna have PowerPoint slides or whatever tool you use. Keep it really simple. Minimize words, minimize complex technological data. Just like, make sure they just fundamentally understand what you do, how you make money and how big you think you can be. And then, oh, the famous Guy Kawasaki rule, I don't know if any guy was this famous evangelist in the early days of Apple and he later has worked for years in venture capital and he had the 10-20-30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, no font, any smaller than 30 points. Like, write no treatises on your slides. You're the star, you walk in there. It's what you say that matters. They wanna know that you understand it. If there's a big pile of words on your slide, this happens to me all the time. Somebody's got this big pile of words on the slides and they're talking and I'm sitting there thinking, hmm, am I gonna listen to her or am I gonna read those slides? I can't do both. A lot of you are smarter than me, you probably can, but I can't. So anyway, you get the point. Now, really, I'm gonna, in the interest of time, I'm keeping this very simple. Basically, the pitch deck tends to align exactly with everything I just said about the executive summary. All those topics, you just expand and make it a little more visual in your PowerPoint deck. And I would, I love, I think style is super important. Presentation style, can't be underestimated. And I love to study the masters. My favorite example is just go, I have this link in the URL I'm gonna give later, but go find the original iPhone release that Steve Jobs did. It is the, it's kind of the classic. And it's a very different thing because it's a product launch, not an investor pitch, but his style, just so amazing. His slides are always simple and elegant. He's the star, he tells the stories. The slides just kind of keep the pace and convey some interesting visual information. And now you may ask, well, how do I find these investors? Well, that's the topic for a future talk. So I can't say much today, but it really is all about your network. I mean, this, LinkedIn used, years ago, used to have this tool where you could visualize your own network. Unfortunately, they killed it off, which kills me, and I love this visual because you can see all of my Intel friends, all of my angel investor friends. You can see all of my Purdue friends and the different colors here. But anyway, work your network. And I mean, and I can't emphasize enough for those of you who are still fairly young, now is the time to build your network. Don't wait until you need the network to build the network. So I just can't say that enough. I do think that's a whole topic in and of itself. So now finally, some tips and tricks. I need to go really quickly. So get fantastic legal counsel. Oh, I'm gonna say, I'll emphasize this top one. Company and team clearly described on LinkedIn. I don't know how many times somebody says, hey, we're a startup. We wanna talk to you. And what do I do first? I go look them all up on LinkedIn. And then here's the losing story is if I look them up and they claim there's a team of four, only one of them is even mentioning this company on their LinkedIn profile. And they don't even have like a link to their company page, whatever. Like if you're claiming you're a company and you want somebody to write a check, better be dead clear. That company is represented with the company's URL on LinkedIn and every member has their title acknowledged. Now, many of them have day jobs or they're students, whatever, that's fine. You can have two roles at once. But if you're ashamed, I don't know what the reason would be, but if you're not putting yourselves clearly on LinkedIn, I guarantee you, anybody you're gonna go to try to talk to is just like me. They're gonna go look on LinkedIn. So, okay, speech complete. And well, I was gonna revisit this. We don't have time. And finally, if you remember one thing, remember, investors fund companies and not products. So that completes my prepared remarks. I'm just gonna steal a mic. We have some time for some Q and A. So if you have any questions, we have a mic in the back and I've got a mic here. So we'll start over on this side and then see you and then I'll come back to you. Hi, thanks for the great presentation. My name is Rodrigo. I would like to ask in the elevator pitch, especially by email, is it beneficial to use a brochure or visuals together with the paragraph or are you trying to make it as small as possible just by text? You know, I think you probably just used judgment. And see, in my mind, from my experience, overwhelmingly, this is used not by you, but by somebody representing you. And they're gonna feel very uncomfortable getting involved. They just wanna do an introduction and get out of the way. So if it was you personally, I would do the elevator pitch in the text of the email and I might have something else attached like that executive summary. But part of it is also a game you're playing if you're trying to forgive the term, I don't have a better term, it's like a strip tease. You know, you wanna gradually reveal information. If you reveal it all at once, there's nothing left to talk about when you get there. I mean, this is big trade-off for entrepreneurs these days is, investors will say, send me your deck. Well, if you send me your deck, when you get there, what's new to talk about? So that's where either you use, anyway, you get the idea. Hey, so if you have a product that's ready, the question is, is Wendy start asking for money, right? So do I make the website myself or do I hire someone to do a perfect job of it? Do I try to read the terms and conditions or do I hire a lawyer? At what point should I really be starting to look for venture capital versus just doing that work on my own? Gosh, it's such a, I mean, it's a great question. Everybody has the same question, but everybody's so different. It's really hard to say. It's like the right time to ask is when you have a decent chance of getting it. And you probably don't know what chance you have of getting it. I would kind of say generally, it's never too soon to go talk to an investor. What I would highly encourage is, if you can get an intro, tell that investor I'm not looking for your money, I'm looking for your advice. This I think is the most brilliant thing you can do because they're gonna decide when they're gonna write a check. It's not when you tell them to write the check, it's when they want to write the check. If you go in and say I want advice, you're giving them a compliment. Oh, you're so smart, I'd love your advice. And maybe you'll get lucky. And if not, they'll tell, I mean, if you don't get lucky now, which on average you won't, now you've got a relationship. And oh, by the way, this is something I didn't talk about. Some of the best advice I can give you is you start a mailing list, an email mailing list. And it would have a distribution, maybe every quarter, like every three months. You gather, every investor you talk to, whether they say yes or no, and most say no, you put them on that list. Every advisor that you're trying to recruit to be an advisor of your company, every professor that expressed an entry. I mean, anybody interesting. And you use these to, number one, you distribute good news. Hey, this customer expressed some interest. We won this customer. We hired this woman that has this expertise. But the other half of the email is, here's all the things we need. We're hiring such and such, or we're looking for introductions to IBM, or whatever. And I've seen this, and I've seen it at Purdue also, like startups are good at this. And they tell these stories, the things they got out of these mailings. And if they had not done that mailing, these things wouldn't have happened. And how hard it is, how are, anyway, so there's my story. Hello, I have a question. What is the best way in your experience to leverage non-diluted capital, like an SBIR or STTR, into actually raising funds? Well, first of all, I'm not an expert on this topic, except it's kind of a, how would I say it? To me, there's not a best way. It's just that if you can get non-diluted funding, odds are there's no argument against it. Every investor is gonna say, we love that non-diluted funding that came in earlier. So take it where you can get it. I mean, I gather, I've heard from some companies here that they often have some handcuffs with them where you can't spend, you have to spend that money on technology development. You can't spend it on customer acquisition. And that can be hard, but you can deal with that. And it's just a good thing, that's all I have to say. So yeah, my question is, how do you protect your IP while in develop? Sorry, I'm over here. How do you protect your IP while you're in development, so while you're kind of like sharing your idea with other people, but not trying to give away too much to kind of, I don't know, not put yourself fully out there? Yeah, this is another one. You have to forgive me. I don't consider myself an expert and hear it produced. They love the topic of IP. In my world, it's just often not that big a deal. The world moves so fast. The world moves so fast that what the investors care about is just traction and progress. But if you're highly, highly technical, if you're doing some research, yeah, how do you do that? Well, I have people sign NDAs, I guess. I think it's pretty common that you could have some IP. I mean, you can go all the way through and present to investors and you can tell them, they hate NDAs, by the way. Everybody hates NDAs. Nobody wants to sign an NDA, because if I'm on the side of the signer, all you've done is create a liability for me. Now I have to worry that you're gonna come back and sue me later because you're gonna claim I told somebody about what you're doing. So I mean, this is all what I learned in corporate America. Never sign an NDA if you could possibly avoid it. But VCs will sign an NDA if you've got them really convinced that you got something really big. So that would be the steps I'd go through. And customers, hopefully, you don't have to keep this. It just all depends, I think, on your situation. Hi, in the initial part, we had discussed bootstrapping versus going to a VC or an engine investor. So in the bootstrapping phase, do you think is there an absolute minimum revenue that VCs will look into or any thresholds like that? No, I mean, yeah. Something I'm gonna have to find a way to quantify all this because everything is different. I mean, I've been on the side of the table. I haven't done a lot of investments, but when I have, I've had to think really hard. And everything's different. It's kind of a package deal. It's like you love to see some revenue, but that may not be the big thing. You love to see unbelievably talented founders that are incredible communicators. And all of these are all separate. It's a multi-dimensional space that your grading curve exists in. And so revenue's great. Lots of times people don't have revenue. I mean, like there's probably a bunch of biomedical device people in the room. Biomedical devices, there's no way you're gonna have revenue because you have to go through these FDA approval processes. So you're gonna have to raise a bunch of money before there's any hope of revenue. So they're all different. Thank you very much. Let's give Bruce another round of applause. Thank you. Do we have a couple minutes to take the podium down? Okay, great. So we're just gonna kind of rearrange the stage a little bit. Well, next up we have a panel discussion. And we have two student co-founders who are gonna be coming on stage. We'll do introductions kind of once we get set up here. But it is my pleasure. I'm gonna go ahead and introduce and welcome the panel moderator, Chari Sovran, who is a professor of mechanical engineering and the director of the John Martinson Entrepreneurial Center here at Purdue. And Chari is also a co-founder and maybe he can say why we're getting switched around here. You can tell us a little bit about your, just hype your start-up now. All right. Thank you very much for coming here. It's lunchtime and hopefully we were able to provide a little bit of something for you. So Chari Sovran, and I'm very happy to be here. I am the, I was an undergraduate, Purdue undergraduate myself, I was here in 94 and 98. And as Professor Kinzer Ersem pointed out, I'm the director of the John Martinson Entrepreneurial Center. What we are wanting to do is to have every single one of you start your own company, okay? That's our goal, okay? So as she mentioned, I'm also a startup founder named my company Sovran Technologies. And our goal is to revolutionize non-invasive diagnostics, especially in the fields of women's health conditions, okay? So with that, we would like to get started on our panel. So we have Bruce Schechter, who doesn't need any introduction. We have Professor Kinzer Ersem, who doesn't need any introduction, but I'm still gonna ask her to talk about her company. So in addition to Bruce Schechter, we have three founders here, founders of Purdue companies. We have Nick Nadi, right? Of AeroVee. We have Jay Shah from Nourava, and we have Professor Kinzer Ersem from Omnives, okay? So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna ask three questions, okay? But before asking the questions, I'm gonna ask each founder to talk very briefly about their companies. And then we're gonna get to the question. So the goal of this panel, again, is not to have just a general discussion, okay? We have an agenda, okay? Our agenda is to convince you that instead of looking for a job, you should be starting your companies. That is our goal, okay? That's our hidden agenda in the back of our minds, which I just revealed to you. That's why we're having this panel, okay? So even though I'm gonna be asking some very specific questions, I'm gonna ask the panelists to answer them in any way they want. If there's some anecdotes that come to your mind, and if you feel you need to go off a tangent to address something else that you feel is more important, please go ahead and do that, okay? So let me first go around the podium here and have each founder talk about their companies a little bit. Please, Professor Kinzer Ersem. All right, thank you, Chari. So my startup company is Omniviz Incorporated, we're a diagnostics company, and our tagline is putting the power of the lab in the palm of your hand. This is founded on a technology that was developed by myself and Steve Worley, and graduate student at the time, Katie Clayton. It was a particle diffusometry technology. We found it was very sensitive in detecting pathogens in different infected samples, whether it be body fluids or infected water. The CEO and other co-founder is Katie Clayton. We also have Jackie Linus, who's a professor in biomedical engineering here as well. Katie runs the company day-to-day, has been doing so for about five years now full-time, and has been just an absolutely wonderful experience to support her and watch her growth and grow the company. We've had over $3 million of non-dilutive funding, and currently raising our first series, a venture capital at the moment. Thank you very much, thank you very much, and I'm gonna skip Bruce here, who enlightened us, a great deal. So, and go to Jay. Jay, please tell us a little bit about yourself and the company. Yeah, hi everybody. I am a Purdue grad. I did my PhD here at Purdue in electrical engineering. I worked in a medical devices lab out in the BME building, and from there we started Narava. So I'm the CEO and co-founder of a medical device startup called Narava. We are developing wearable devices for epilepsy patients. Our wearables are looking to not only do seizure detection, but also being able to monitor something called SUDEP, or sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. So these patients can suddenly die normally healthy, suddenly die in their sleep. So we're creating wearables that can help track that, detect it, send alerts out to mitigate the risk of that in these patients. So yeah, looking forward to being on the panel today, thanks. Thanks a lot Jay, and Nick please. Hey everyone, my name is Nick Gennady, founder and CEO of Arovi. We're based right out over on Northwestern in Wang Hall. A three-time Purdue student, so I did my undergrad here, ended up going to masters, and then was pursuing my PhD in AAE. So really drank the Kool-Aid. But it's great to be back here at Purdue. Arovi is a cloud-based energy management and planning company that works on electric aviation. So our main customer are airports, vertebrates of the future for mobility. We just raised our first pre-seed round of just around a million dollars, and we're scaling quickly. So yeah, so deploying for the next three Olympics, working with a lot of big names and excited to be here. All right, thank you very much for those introductions. So now I'm gonna go to my first question, okay? So the first question is, what is it that made you start a company, like at the personal level? You or your co-founders, whose idea was it and why in the world did you wanna start a company? Okay, let me start with Professor Kinserson. I'm going to, yeah, there was multiple reasons. So I actually worked at a startup company after my post-doc. So I kind of caught the bug there. I was the fifth hire in the startup company and just loved the very dynamic environment there and loved what we were able to do. But I couldn't resist when Purdue came calling. So I am now a career professor. But the impetus for founding Omnivis was really Katie Clayton's vision. She knew that she wanted to be an entrepreneur. She knew she wanted to be in global health. She wanted to make a difference in the world and I wanted to help her and be a part of that journey. So it was very kind of, from a personal standpoint, just kind of seeing where we could take this company together and we saw a lot of promise and she has boundless amounts of energy and I feel my role here is to support her in that. He really does have a boundless amount of energy. By the way, I know her. Awesome, then what do you think, Jay, from your perspective? Why did you guys start this company? Yeah, so I can give a little personal story as well. So growing up, I was always sort of interested in business as well. My grandfather had a toothbrush factory in India and then my dad, growing up as kids, we'd always talk about the stock market and he'd always be teaching me about the stock market, supply and demand, markets, all that stuff. So I was interested in that but I was also always interested in medicine. My other grandfather had a pacemaker so I was always interested in medical devices and so when I came to Purdue, I knew I wanted to do, obviously pursue my PhD, get a better understanding and developing medical technology but I always had an interest in entrepreneurship. I joined another one of my professor startups, started getting exposure to that, what it's like, what are the challenges, what are the benefits, all that stuff. And one of the main areas of focus in my lab was epilepsy and so our lab had discovered a potential mechanism of action of why the sudden death events occur in epilepsy patients. And me and my co-founder, when we were talking about this in our lab meetings and this discovery was happening in our lab, we realized that, hey, there isn't a device out on the market for these patients that can help mitigate this risk. There was a true unmet need, a clinical unmet need that these patients were suffering from. So that led us to form the company and start the company and say let's see what we can do to help these patients. And at that point, we also then reached out to patients, their parents, their caretakers, physicians in this space and they just continued to validate what we were talking about, what the need is, what this problem is and how our solution can help solve this. So that's what kind of provided that extra motivation and saying hey, this is a real problem, let's go out, form a company and try to solve this. Yeah, so I think I'll take it from a different angle. So when I was an undergrad, I interned at American Airlines and then eventually worked at GE Aviation and I think like Jay, I had some family entrepreneurship and grew up in the Bay Area, you're always sort of infected by the startup bug, I would say, but I think what really changed my mind was being in these massive companies, 100,000 plus people working on aircraft and engines. They're really good at doing big things at scale, but they're actually not so good when you need to do small problems, the market's not big enough, so it leaves space. So I was always wondering why do startups exist if these big corporations can do it themselves in a week and it's because they move slowly, there's a lot of bureaucracy, there's so much overhead and so that I think was the premise for when I went into grad school, we started working on studying operations and future limitations of electric air mobility and it was just staring us in the face that energy was gonna be the biggest barrier for this whole industry. So we just submitted a project to the FAA competition, it was actually a roommate and then I, a good friend of mine from undergrad, for just for fun, we submitted a project to the FAA competition and then we ended up winning the competition by accident, I would say and afterwards the FAA pulled us aside and said, this idea is actually pretty good, you should really commercialize it and that kick started the process of enriching the technology and pulling it out of Purdue IP and working through commercialization. So I would say if there are opportunities for class projects, federal student project activities, opportunities, there are always opportunities to kick start companies that way. Awesome, so Bruce, you've seen a lot of founders in your experience, why did those people start companies instead of doing something else? Were they all different or was it like a common ground? Oh, sorry, I do think there's, I don't know if it's genetics or what, but there is kind of a, there's just a mentality and so often like, so often you see these pitches from entrepreneurs and you think, I think it's a really common scenario where you're thinking, gosh, are they really gonna be able to build a business around this thing? But these men and women are just, there's something there that you wanna bet on. It's like, I have so many, this has happened here at Purdue when we and SV Big select companies that we're gonna mentor, it'll happen very often. We'll just say, these are entrepreneurs. I don't know if this company's gonna work, but some company they're gonna do is gonna work. And then you just wanna be a part of it. Yeah, could I just say something unrelated because I'm sitting here looking here on, and I think me being on this panel with you four amazing people is a sign of the power of the Purdue network because I know all of these people, which is really cool and so you should never underestimate that there are alumni out there. It may not be easy to get them, but there are alumni out there that can be beneficial to what you're trying to do and don't underestimate the value of trying to do that. Thank you very much, yeah. So I guess it goes to something that you mentioned in your talk, investors don't invest in technologies, they invest in businesses, and a part of a business is the founder, right? Would you agree with it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's an equally common catchphrase of investors don't fund companies, they fund people. That's similar, but different, but absolutely. Which brings me to my second question because I think it's tied to that. What are some of the most important challenges that the founders face in running the company? I mean, we can get really granular with this, we're not going to, we don't have that much time, but if you were to generalize it, are the biggest challenges technology related or execution related? We can lump everything non-technology related into execution related, like fundraising and this and that and people and all that, so tell us a little bit about the challenges. Yes, start on the other end. Sure, of course it depends, right? But I think going into it, I had always expected the technology development to be the most difficult and challenging, but you know, we're at Purdue, there's probably a subject matter expert and whatever technological tech challenge that you're trying to solve, what we really struggled with was pure execution, right? Managing your mental health, you see me getting a couple of reactions here, managing your time, it's a very emotional process, right? It's you're really marrying into this company that's extremely arbitrary. I wanted to echo, like in the early days, when an investor invests in you in the pre-seed or seed round, valuation is so arbitrary, there's not really much else to go off of except for the founder and picking the jockey over the horse, as people say. At later stage, BC plus, now we're looking at the pure fundamentals. So that's just the perfect storm for imposter syndrome, right? Like somebody who comes up with the technology, has a cool idea, just develops signs in LLC or C Corp for a couple hundred bucks and now you're valued at several million dollars. That's terrifying. And so managing that and trying to balance all of the moving pieces all at once and learning as you go is, I think, was my biggest challenge and still is. I guess if I were to continue with a sub-question, in order to make a company survive or even get it started, do you have to have figured everything out? Okay, is there such a thing? Right, why don't you answer that? No. No. Okay. Okay, maybe. If you think you have, then something's probably wrong, right? Like you really, you wanna be developing the company and the products with the customer and I think needs change over time too. So. I guess, is it fair to say that it's just, it's just important to do it, just start it and then figure things out as you go because there are problems that are always gonna occur, right? In everybody, there'll be technical problems, there'll be people related problems, you're looking for someone or someone that's working for you, they might leave, somebody else might knock on your door, they're very qualified, but you as a startup may not be able to hire them and that sort of thing and is it fair to say that? It's just very important to just keep doing what you need to be doing and then worry about problems as they occur. Has that been your experience? That's been my experience as a startup founder. So I just wanted to ask if that's, if you share that, if you don't, it's totally fine. I agree with that. I think, you know, whether you're seasoned or a fresh entrepreneur, any new business is gonna have new challenges. I think you need to go in with the mindset of I'm willing to learn and adapt. Saying I know the answer and this is the answer is not going to allow you to be successful because A, you probably don't know everything and B, things change. So having the mentality of willing, the perseverance and the mentality of willingness to learn and adapt is very crucial. Now, you obviously don't wanna be jumping to the next, the new shiny object every two months but making a conscious decision of when to pivot. You're gonna hear the word pivot a lot when you talk about startups and pivoting is important. You obviously don't wanna overdo it but you don't wanna underdo it as well so that you can create a viable business because I don't know the answers to so many concepts and I'm running this startup right now, right? Like every day is a new day where I'm learning so much more and continuing to make progress on the business. What is your take on it? Yeah, well, I'll start with the first question and we can go into the sub-question. So I think what you're hearing, just to summarize, is that execution is actually where you find the most challenges and maybe that's because we're sitting in the College of Engineering right now and as you mentioned, there's technical expertise all the way around us and you can outsource technical expertise to subcontractors but we don't train you as professors here. We don't train students to manage people. That's actually kind of probably the biggest weakness of a lot of founders is they're coming from a technical background but we haven't really learned how to manage people and there's challenges and new learning every day on how to best do that. How do you motivate your team? How do you keep them on track? How do you become a project manager? And so that I think has been a very large learning curve for us to keep the company moving forward and there's peaks and valleys. One wrong hire can change the whole morale of a team. We've experienced that, gotten through that and are now come out on the other side better and stronger than before. So yeah, there's a lot of execution in the non-dilutive funding if you're getting a grant or even I can imagine from venture capital they expect you to do something so how do you make sure that you deliver what you've promised as well and a lot of that is just kind of project and people management. Well, my final question, and again we can after that we can open the floor for questions or we can really hear from these wonderful founders about other things that they wanna say but let's be a bit more Purdue specific, okay? What do you think about Purdue? Well, Professor Kinzer, Erasm and I are already Purdue professors so we are obviously biased, right? We're wearing multiple hats, we're company founders but we're also professors, right? So, but we have these two guys over here, right? And they're not really professors or administrators at Purdue. So I first wanna ask them and then Professor Kinzer, Mercer and I and then Bruce we can give you our perspective of what makes Purdue different. What are some of the advantages that we have over here? So, you know, we are a technology school, right? So I came here to do my PhD in electrical engineering. I had no real business knowledge or how to start a company or what to think about. I just knew I was interested. So when we had formed the company, Purdue has this great resource. It was called the Foundry back then and now it's under another umbrella of Purdue Innovates. So when we started the company they provided us a lot of guidance and just mentorship of what to do, what to think about, how to start a company. So I thought that was a fantastic resource that Purdue has invested in and has grown and created a good resource for students. The other thing is as students, it's, you know, we're gonna go to class and that's what we are sort of paying to do, right? We're going to class, we're getting a knowledge or we're trying to learn the knowledge. When you're trying to now start a business or do these other things outside of what the normal situation is of a university. As a student, we need to be more proactive in finding those resources. So I've heard from people, oh, we didn't know that this entrepreneurship center existed. We didn't know about Purdue Innovates. So it's finding those resources, talking to people and networking. And I thought Purdue had a great network. We met Bruce, you know, several years ago and has been a great mentor for us and we got connected to him through the Purdue Innovates, Purdue Foundry sort of network. And so it's being open, growing your network, which I know Bruce had talked about in his presentation, and finding these resources and going out and asking people for help. So that's a little bit, I think the Purdue ecosystem is great. I think there's a lot of people in the network here within in West Lafayette and then Indiana in general as well as, you know, globally as well. So it's all about finding those people and using those connections to help you learn and continue to grow your business. Yeah, I totally echo that, right? So in terms of the startup world, I mean, on the university scale, Purdue hasn't always been, you know, quite far from it, the leader in developing, incubating, pushing out startups. But I think the components of the ecosystem are there as, you know, just to echo what Jay is saying. So being from the Bay Area, we've been always trying to figure out how do we move back or how do we move to the coast? But it's actually been quite difficult to do so. So Purdue has become really a strategic partner. We're launching at the airport. There's so many resources available. There's a lot of capital available, more than you would expect, I would say. The other, you know, just to echo the Purdue network is so strong, right? So a lot of the folks we talked to at Boeing, Embraer, we're talking to like the CTO of an Embraer startup that was a Purdue Aero alum, was a PhD student of one of the professors I worked with, right? So this connection is very strong. Purdue runs deep in industry. I think the ecosystem partners are certainly there and growing. And yeah, I would say, you know, get involved, find the Purdue Innovates Foundry. It's a fantastic resource and just lean into that alumni connection. Bruce, what do you think? Oh, wow. I think your original question was something along the lines of what makes Purdue so special. And I guess I feel I'm remote and I can't answer that question, but I can answer a related one is that, so our SV big organization has been around something like 11 years now. And all I can say is things have changed a lot in 11 years. Because, I mean, the whole foundry didn't even arise until like a year or two after we got started and that was a big game changer. We couldn't even figure out, we figured there must be entrepreneurs on campus. We couldn't figure out how to find them. And now there's so many resources. I would say we just see momentum and progress. You know, the second derivative is positive. So I think we did just come out of a terrible period named COVID. Things seemed to really went south everywhere. For entrepreneurship is all about connecting people and working your network. And, you know, when you're stuck in a dorm room eating food alone, you know, you probably don't network very well. I don't know what it was like, but I will say, oh, random thoughts. First of all, I gotta say, it's amazing to me to see faculty involved in startups love to see it because I mean, how you have enough time to have a life and do all this, you know, good for you. I mean, of course, same for students. You know, I guess you deserve as much credit as well. But, and also, I don't think we put a plug for the John Martinson Center, which Charri runs. And that's, so we don't, I don't think we have anybody from Purdue Innovates here, but they are gearing up to have a fund. Well, they, I guess they have one, but it's getting more sophisticated. And then Charri's involved, there will be funding coming out of here. I don't think this is gonna be widespread, but key startups are gonna start to not only get money outside, but here, these are things we couldn't have imagined 10 years ago. So, yeah, it's an exciting time. Thank you very much. Well, that's absolutely right. We have John Martinson Entrepreneurial Center over here. We have some amazing activities. Some of them are geared towards super early stage ideas. We have a pitch competition. If you haven't heard of it, let me know. That means we didn't do a good job disseminating that information, because you must have heard of it by now. We have been having this pitch competition for the past two years now. And you pitch in front of judges, which includes Bruce Schechter and some of his friends from SV Big. And everybody usually wins something. I can't guarantee that that's gonna continue happening, but and if you win, we basically write you a check. It's a personal check. You can do whatever you want with it. You don't even have to have a fully developed business idea. This is a super early stage. Our goal is we wanna make you start thinking about commercializing your ideas. That's a super early stage. Now at the later stage, even though that's still early stage, so early, early stage and later, early stage, but this is all early stage. As Bruce mentioned, we have just launched a fund through which we invest in companies. So actually, you see two companies over here that already received investment from the John Martin's Entrepreneurial Center Investment Fund. And that's an investment made to the company. So I have some things to say about what, in my opinion, makes Purdue very special, but I'd like to first ask Professor Kinzerursem what she thinks, please. Yeah, thank you. And I can't wait to hear your experiences and your ideas. But I think we took advantage of almost every single resource. And I'm just trying to run through the list in my mind. We started, we really built the first prototype in a senior design course. It was a capstone project. And that team, mentored by Katie Clayton and myself, went around to different pitch competitions. So we did the Burton Morgan pitch competition. We ended up going to Rice, which has a big pitch competition. And then went from there, went to, I think Fortune 500 and submitted our idea, or Fortune Magazine and submitted our ideas. And then started, and then leveraged that to apply for NSF iCore funding. And there has, there's a, used to be called the Fire Starter Program here. There's kind of a 10 week, you do 50 customer interviews, kind of pre NSF iCore. Then we leveraged that into the full iCore where you get $50,000 from NSF to do customer discovery and use that to travel and talk to potential customers and really flush out your business ideas. You pivot from what your original idea was, because your original idea was wrong. And then you figure out, what that next business model looks like. Then we leveraged that into NSF SBIR funding. The state of Indiana pitched in $50,000 as well on top of that. And then, you know, and then we, so that, you know, kind of, we really took advantage of a lot of resources here at Purdue to launch the company all the way from that senior design project to, to launching it out with that first SBIR, which allowed Katie to then start working for the company full time as the CEO. I'm sure I'm missing things along the way. There was Trask funding from the Office of Technology and Commercialization. We got paired with a mentor in the Foundry that helped us kind of navigate these different spaces. And I'm sure, like I said, I think I'm missing things on my list of resources that we took advantage of, but there's many, many out there. And there's, you know, people within this Purdue network that can help get you connected with all of those resources. And you just kind of use one to leverage the next and then build from there. I couldn't have done a better job describing all the resources that we have. But then for my, I just want to add to that. From my perspective, what makes us as Purdue different is the mentality that we have starting all the way from the top, okay? And so, and I'm going to give you, and I'm going to give you a regarding entrepreneurship, mentality for entrepreneurship. I'm going to give you an example. I actually happened here in this building when our current president among Chang, he was first dean of engineering, as you know, right? So this must have been like six or seven years ago. I can't remember exactly when now, but I sent him an email. I said, hey, can we meet? He had just become, so he said, yeah, let's meet. So I came over here, it was up there. And I thought that he was going to ask me questions about like what I teach and, you know, my research and he didn't, or grants. And he didn't ask about any of that. He said, hey, he had done some homework. He said, I heard that you have a startup company. Tell me about that. That was his first question. So I started talking about it. And at that time, I was carrying around a thumb drive that had some company slides. And he asked me, he said, do you have a pitch deck with you? I said, yeah, I do. Well, let's fire it up. That's my first meeting with the dean of engineering, right? You would expect that they would ask you some more garden variety academic questions, right? What classes do you teach? How many students you have and things like that? It wasn't any of that. It was just directly about the company. And he went through my slides. He gave all kinds of advice. And he even like picked up his phone. And he's a very connected person, right? He connected me to a VC. He said, hey, there's this person over here. So you get the idea, right? And he's the president now. And so it starts all the way from the president's office, so we have a president who really wants every single one of you to become an entrepreneur. And our new dean right now, Arvind Rahman, I know him personally very well. And he and I meet quite often. And this is exclusively what we talk about, right? How many student companies do we have? Student-born companies? How many faculty-born companies? How can we enhance this? And every university has some sort of an entrepreneurial ecosystem, right? Every university, you can see on their websites that they'll brag about, you know, or entrepreneurial ecosystem and that sort of thing. But here it's really true. So in many other places, as far as I can see, even though every university really wants to brag about being an entrepreneurial ecosystem, when used, and I'm saying this as a professor, right? When you go a little bit further down into the trenches and start talking to other academics, you will start feeling that it's actually viewed as less than academic to be an entrepreneur in other universities, not here, okay? It is very, very important here. It's a part of the new academic culture that we really want to create. And I can say this to you as a faculty member, as someone that talks with the dean and the president and other people in the office all the time. So it is very important to us that you start companies and you make those companies successful, okay? And I want to echo something that Professor Kinzereson said. We as professors, we don't train you for everything. We can't. I mean, you're only here for a limited amount of time. I'm an ME professor. If we teach you how to free body diagrams, balance the forces, set them equal to zero, or if it's moving, then anyway. But we don't really train you on how to handle a situation when the bank where your startup's money is residing is about to collapse, right? It's actually happened to me. You must have heard of a Silicon Valley bank collapse, right? When that happened, I was on an airplane. And I was a friend of mine who was a Wall Street banker, texted me. I was on an airplane. On Southwest, you can actually text. It's free texting. But he said, man, they're taking your bank into receivership. It's bankrupt, right? I'm like, open the door. I want to jump out of the airplane, right? So it's investors' money, right? It's very stressful, right? It's like, what are you going to do? It's not really my fault what happened, ultimately, it is your fault if you're really running the company, right? So you start thinking about all of these things. But this may be an extreme example. And in the end, nothing happened. As you know, the government stepped in and all that. But there are all kinds of stressful situations that you never plan for when you're running a company. They just pop up out of somewhere. And for many of them, you're not really trained for. And the most important thing, in my humble opinion, in my experience is to really stick to that idea as though it's your child, right? There's no abandoning it. There's no abandoning it, right? Unless things are really, really, really bad and in a totally unmanageable situation, there's no abandoning it, right? And I can't really say enough about how important it is to take action as opposed to just sitting and continuously thinking and building a list of what things could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this can go wrong. There's a pretty good chance that many of them are not going to go wrong. And there's a pretty good chance that there are many other things that you didn't even think about that will go wrong, right? So the most important thing is to really keep thinking very positively about that very end goal, like you really keep imagining your company very successful leader, it's acquired, we're making products and people are buying the products, you're making an impact on people's lives. From our perspective as faculty, we love seeing our inventions coming out of our lab so they don't just benefit our own students, they don't only produce papers, but they get in the hands of other people and make an impact on people's lives, right? So we really would love to achieve that here at Purdue and you are the ones that will make it happen. And we're here to help. So I think to put a bow on it from the student's perspective, right, I think to emphasize it's totally OK to fail, right? Like this is probably the first company that we've gone this far, but there are two or three other companies or things that we tried that you'll never heard of that we've done. So we've failed many times in undergrad on trying to commercialize things, trying to work on things. And so it's just about getting your reps in. And I think Professor Jamar also emphasized that, right? Like just go for every opportunity that's available. It really doesn't hurt to try. I don't really see like there's not the barrier, I mean the opportunity cost at the earliest stage of it is like extremely low. Yeah, and just to echo that as well, as students typically younger, not as established, not don't have a mortgage, don't have all these other things, right? It's the risk of failing isn't as severe. And so go ahead and take that risk. It's one thing that when I was thinking about, OK, should I do this startup? Should I go an industry? Was OK, what's the worst that's going to happen? I'm going to let's say the startup fails, I'm going to gain so much knowledge of that will help me not only just differentiate me from my peers, but just grow professionally and personally. And so like the worst thing that's going to happen is I'm going to learn a lot, right? So I think kind of going into that mentality and continuing to just persevere, right? As Professor Saverin had mentioned, right? It's like just being able to push through those days and just persevere when the going gets tough and having that mindset. I mean, just one also thing, Professor Saverin, he's been a great mentor for us as well. And so just having mentors and people that can surround you, that can help you and build you up is another good, just important thing to keep in mind as you start the company. Yeah, so I think Jay mentioned something there that I wanted to echo. It's like at our stage, right? At our age, even the worst experiences in a startup are amazing lessons learned, right? And I think somebody asked me, maybe it was our professor or chief scientist. A couple months ago, there was a tipping point where everything could have fallen apart. He's like, Nick, like the company could die next week. Like what are you going to do? And honestly, I looked at him and I said, look, I'm like 24, if this all fails, I'll continue doing my PhD with you slowly, nicely, and then go work at a big company and try again later. So it's, I mean, you could start an entity today online, very cheap, and the opportunity cost is so low. Anything you'd like to add? Yeah, I'll just pitch in on, we don't teach a lot of the skill sets that you need to be an entrepreneur. And a lot of that motivation is that internal motivation, but hopefully what we have taught you and something that we pride ourselves on is teaching our students to be problem solvers, to take initiative. And I think those, if there's anything that you can take away is learn how to be good problem solvers, take initiative, drive it forward, that's one thing that I would take away from an engineering education. Thank you very much. And Bruce, do you have anything to add from an investor perspective? No, I guess, yeah, all I can say is I think you've all said the right things. I love the mentality of, yeah, I mean, the stakes, I mean, it'd be better to go do this for a couple of years and fail now than to wait way down the path in your career. The opportunity cost is gonna be much higher. And by the way, for any of you, I mean, for the ones of you who think you know what to go do now, great. I mean, I think you've already gotten a lot of advice. If you don't know what to do, I have a couple of thoughts that I would share. It's number one, consider joining one of these companies. Like that might even, we've had it, we've seen this happen, literally like volunteer, because they have no money really, typically. So I mean, at the very early stage. I think Jay does. So, what's it? I think Jay does, not that much. Well, see you guys are way down the path now. I think of you as mature end of it and entrepreneurs. No, but seriously, we've just seen this recently that there were three, I'm not gonna name them by names. I don't wanna embarrass anybody, but three engineers are working on a startup and they needed like business help to think about sizing the market and such. And through Hooker by Crook, we happened to find out about a student at the Daniels, whatever it's called now, Mitch Daniels School of Business that wanted to do that kind of thing. He volunteered to spend whatever, I don't know what it's gonna be, six months with him in his spare time, doing that, he's gonna be a winner. He's gonna get this great thing on his resume and hopefully that's gonna win for them. But also it could be literally joined. Or the other thing is, if you don't know what to, if you have this dream, but you're not sure where to start, just do something. I mean literally, just think of it more like a hackathon. One of the slightly famous recent years startups out of Purdue with Socio, this meetings planning software that became later bought by Cisco became part of Webex. Those guys met each other at a hackathon. They envisioned this on alert in a hackathon. So just get together with friends and build something. And it's related to what both Nick and Jay said, so you build something and it doesn't go anywhere. You've learned a lot about how to build stuff, how to collaborate as a team and try to solve some problems. So just do something. Completely agree, completely agree. Anything you'd like to add, Professor Kinzerzim? Should we, should we, yeah, any questions? Yes, sir, please. I think different people may have a different answer to that, but so we're obviously not gonna argue that we are a Silicon Valley, right? So it's or Boston for that matter, right? So having said that, the world has become smaller, especially after COVID, right? I mean, this gentleman lives in Silicon Valley. He's here right now, right? So besides we don't even need him to be physically here to anymore, to be connected to him. And for example, my own startup company is in the Boston area, right? It's everything is just as if I am there really, like we're communicating through Slack and everything. So now, as far as resources are concerned, Purdue has a lot of resources, okay? So we as a John Martin Entrepreneurial Center, obviously we are only focusing on engineering, right? Because we're an engineering center, right? If you're not in engineering, have nothing to do with engineering, then, you know, we work with our own students, which is already a pretty big population, right? But we have other opportunities and resources at Purdue in PRF, for example. We have the incubator, okay? And they cast a very wide net, right? They have programs and we have the foundry again at Purdue that actually does investments, that invests in, even as the John Martin Entrepreneurial Center, we invest in companies through the foundry, right? So, and we also have a lot of founders that have already started companies. If they have started a company in your field of interest, then I'm pretty sure, especially if they've been successful in that, I'm sure that they can offer very good advice and echoing some of the things that Bruce himself said. Network is very, very important. It's all about the people that you meet. It's actually, I'm gonna say this to you, as someone that develops and teaches technology, it's actually more important than the technology, because the technology, you already know how to fix those problems. You're trained to do it, right? It's something, or even if you can't fix it, you will know who can fix it, right? So, technology is actually not that much of a problem. But when you're working on an idea, you're sort of like inching and inching and inching, like there's this linear, linear, linear increase, and sometimes you're thinking, well, this is just not going fast enough, and all of a sudden you meet someone, one pivotal person, and then boom, you tunnel to a different level, okay? And very non-linear, okay? And then there may again be another period where things are going linearly, linearly, or maybe sometimes flat, sometimes they even go down, actually. There are gonna be times when you will feel like, oh my God, are we failing, right? And then you'll go back up again. But the most important resource we have, in my opinion, is that we have a huge alumni network, okay? Purdue has so many people that are successful businessmen, successful entrepreneurs, okay? And far more important than the classes that we teach here regarding entrepreneurship or the certificate programs that we have, which are, I encourage every single one of you to go through them, is to enhance your network and meet those individuals that can be, that can make all the difference in the world, okay? In terms of helping you get funding, or giving you, or connecting you to another potential buyer or potential partner, and the key is that you continue persevering. Like, you continue clawing with your fingernails, right? The moment you don't really get the help that you want, then you continue, then you talk to somebody else. That person doesn't help, you talk to somebody else. In the back of your mind, it really has to be that this is really gonna succeed, I'm really gonna make this happen. You send an email to someone, if they don't respond, send them another email. If they don't respond, send them another email. Then send somebody else an email. So that really has gotta be the mentality. If you, once you get into that mentality, then even if you're the resource scarce environment which you are not, Purdue has tons of resources, you are gonna make things happen for yourself, really. I'd say there's actually quite a few resources, not just TRASC for AIML. So the president has, I think AI is one of the core first tier focus areas for the school. There's a ton of opportunities. There's the JMEK fund. There are two separate PRF funds under the Innovates brand. If you're early stage, I would start at Incubates which is run by Justin Renfrow. There's iCore that Professor Tamara has highlighted. So there's a ton of capital to work with early stage. Some of it's just coming online. There's an angel network that's coming on with a lot of Purdue alums and VCs. A ton of the VCs are Purdue folks, like our lead investor is a Purdue guy. So I'd push back and say that there are a ton of resources out there for AIML startups at Purdue. Also, I have to say this gentleman was at a talk I gave yesterday. So I give him extra points that he listened to me twice. Cut him a check. Any other questions? Yes. Can you start from scratch, please? So at Purdue, we are trained to solve pretty much any problem, whether we do it ourselves or we know who to ask to solve the problem. My question is, how do we find the problem to solve? Because a lot of small businesses fail because there's no market need for what they develop. So I think that's, you'll learn that through some of these Purdue resources, I-Core, Firefighter, Purdue Foundry, or things like that. But it's, you might have an idea to solve this quote unquote problem, but you need to test your idea out in the market. So going out and doing customer discovery. So, you know, for us, we thought that our wearable should look like this. And then we realized that, okay, let's go talk to customers, see what they would think about how this device looks and feels, and we ended up actually pivoting and shifting the design of our product because of that. So I know that doesn't exactly kind of, that example isn't exactly to what you're talking about the problem, but having that mindset of being willingness to change and adapt and pivot based on what the market is telling you. So you may have, you may see a problem, you may think about that, oh, this problem exists. You may even hear from somebody else about this problem. As you start thinking about the solution to that problem, being open and willing to change as you test your solution with potential customers. Yeah, it's a great answer. So honestly, the answer is just sort of start anywhere. Right? Like, if you look at major companies that have been successful, Slack is a good example or Brex, Brex is that corporate finance for start-ups company. I think they started as like a VR tech company, right? And they just realized that this would not work. And they pivoted halfway through their Y Combinator experience into a corporate card start-up. So I think the easiest answer is just to try something and be open to changing it when you realize it's not quite right. To your point, it's like Slack, you know, the company Slack, they started as a game company and they, in their spare time, they happened to build a communication tool to help themselves communicate better. But, you know, I'll give a, maybe it's a controversial answer to your question is, I believe if you're gonna start a company, and I mean, not just experiment, you know, it's great if you wanna do experiments, get team together, see if you like working together, those are all great. But unless you believe in what you're doing, don't go too far. I would argue, go get a job at what I would call a best known methods company. Pick a company that you think is really well managed, also preferably a company that's growing quickly so you see what it's, because you have to understand how to deal with rapid change because that's what startups are all about. And you'll learn so much. The great thing about the real world of corporations is don't tell anybody I told you this, but corporations are full of problems. Even the best run companies, it's gonna be full of problems and then it'll help you think about recognizing problems. I feel like maybe Nick, you said this, you worked for these big companies and you saw their problems and you decided to solve their problems. So I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth. I'll take it. Yeah, so just like asking the right questions, just looking at things that you know, right? Like I'm an airplane guy, so the only problems that I could find were in that space, J's in the BME space and we don't stray too far from what you know is what I'm starting to realize. The Brex guys had done finance before they tried doing this VR thing and then reverted to a finance thing, so. Even if you, from my perspective, even if you think that you found the right problem to solve, that's probably gonna change. Probably. It's not definitely, but probably you're gonna find out because things change. Couple, maybe a couple years later or a year later, a very big company might come to you and say, look, we love your technology, but we would love it if you actually worked on this problem and not that problem and then you start hearing that from a couple other companies, right? Then you wanna be responding to that, right? You can't just be stubborn on insisting on something that is not really being received by a potential acquirer or a potential customer, right? So I would say something along the lines of what Nick said. Well, first of all, Bruce is absolutely right. You have to really, really believe, religiously believe in your idea. Otherwise, it's just not gonna go anywhere because it's not easy to get, you hear all these news of this company acquired, this company for this many hundreds of millions of dollars and then you only hear that story and it sounds like, oh, they just met and they shook hands and they wrote the check and it's not like that. Okay, it just takes a very, it's a long process, okay? So you really have to believe that, to go through those tough times, you really have to believe in your idea, but once you have that belief, right? Go ahead and start somewhere. You really have to take that action, you know? Start the company, start working on it, invest your own energy into it and then if things change, things will change. You have to adapt to it, okay? That's basically what I would say from my perspective. One thing they teach you in the NSFI core and I'll just be really quick here is to do this customer discovery that we've been talking about, but not just putting your hypothesis out in front of people and asking what they think about it, asking them what their pain points are and then going another few steps forward, why? So always ask why, why is that their pain point? Why is, and just keep drilling down. You do that 10, 20 times across different people in the industry and you'll see, it's amazing. I mean, I saw that firsthand. You start to see these commonalities point out. So that's kind of just a practical answer, but talking, using your network, leveraging those contacts into others and being able to pivot, but within where your passions lie. So that's kind of my summary. I think I had one more question. Hi. So I'm not so much of a technical question, but every single company that has succeeded, most of them have had a co-founder or two. Can you speak up a little bit, please? Or just bring it. Is the microphone working? Yeah. So every single successful company, most of them have a co-founder. How do you guys pick your co-founders and how do you guys evaluate that? This is the person that I wanna go into business with and this is not the guy that's gonna screw me over when we wanna get bought out or something like that because as someone who's also managed a team here, I got screwed over, unfortunately. And so that has taught me is like, okay, I need it. It's very, like what you guys said earlier, it's very important to be like, one bad hire can ruin an entire team. One bad co-founder can screw over your entire project or your company. So how do you guys know this is the person and how do you guys evaluate that? Because that's not something that you can find on paper. You can do it on paper. Oh, sorry. But you can protect yourself on paper, right? Like with cliffs, sorry. But I think I have an interesting perspective because I was also a co-founder and then we went through a co-founder separation and quite frankly, it's very synonymous to a divorce. Especially if you're a later stage, equities already started vesting, now lawyers get involved, who takes custody of the children comes up. But yeah, quite frankly, picking the right co-founders is extremely important. I would say it's like dating, to be honest. Like you kind of just have to feel each other out in terms of how you work, do you respect each other? Is there a mutual level of do you work well together as the fundamental thing? And I mean, any of these folks will tell you the co-founder will be the last person standing on the team when everything else goes wrong, right? Like so ultimately you're looking for that quality and you're looking for somebody who will be in the trenches with you. But there are ways to structure this on paper, right? Vesting with cliffs, you can have a co-founder separation and it works out and then find a new co-founder later on. You can always start something and then add a co-founder. That's something that frequently happens. So the founder of Coinbase, who in fact went to my high school, started with the idea and then found the co-founder like two or three stages later than you would expect. So you can develop the idea yourself and then tag someone on when you find the right person. The co-founder that we have today, I met in a lounge in San Francisco airport. We just happened to hit it off. So you never know. I met my net Chick-fil-A. That's tasty. Yeah, I can just quickly add to that is, my co-founder and I have had a great experience. We started in our lab together. So even before we started the company, we had two years of us just getting to know each other, building a both a professional in the lab and also personal relationship when we actually became friends and then we started and went into the business. Yes, I agree with everything Nick said. You can protect yourself on paper through legal documents and you should do that for sure. Finding somebody I think who has the same vision as you but also has a different set of strengths. So if you are both the exact type of thing with the exact same strengths, what value is each other co-founder bringing? So finding somebody that can compliment your strengths even though I'm technical, my co-founder is technical as well. There's on how we execute and how we think there's differences in our opinions and in our mindsets. And so yeah, we're gonna butt heads and but it's having a shared mindset and having a shared responsibility and also shared respect for each other that okay, we're both trying to see this thing through and we're working together. So yeah. Also, I would add to that the personal aspect of this. Like you need to listen to your gut feeling. Like if you don't like the person, okay, then it's probably not a good idea to be partners with them or even recruit them as an employee into your company. Okay, it's even if you think that they have really good credentials, if your gut feeling is telling you, I don't really think I can get along with this person then you probably won't get along with that person. Eventually something is gonna happen. So you really should listen to that gut feeling. And but beyond that, you can't really control what's gonna happen in the future. You just need to act. So there are certain things that you can do. Like Nick mentioned, some of it you said cliffs, right? The cliff basically is that. So they have to work for at least a year, for example. That year is the cliff. And if they leave before the cliff is up, then they don't get any stock. That makes sense. So you don't wanna keep giving stock to people that are just gonna work a little bit and then it basically makes your cap table very complicated. You don't wanna have that many shareholders who no longer have any stake in the company or who may have left the company without, you know, on bad feelings, for example. Does the cliffs thing apply to founding employees too? Like people you can hire later? Yeah, it's pretty standard. The most standard is four year vest, one year cliff. Yeah, four year vest, one year cliff, yeah. But yeah, so those are some, but even beyond that, right? You can't just control everything that you can't just worry about. Is this gonna, if you really like the person and then you set the cliff into place and your lawyer has seen it and you know, you're interviewed them and you have some high expectations, things are going well, then you just gotta go ahead with it. You can't continuously worry about what's gonna happen three years down the line. Something's gonna happen, it's gonna happen anyway, so. Yeah, I worked at a VC in Palo Alto this past year and the biggest red flag that you'll see is when half of the cap table is taken up by somebody who has nothing to do with the company anymore. That's pretty much like the biggest turn off. You can get to a term sheet and once, like that might not pass diligence, so. Oh, sorry, what do you mean by like the person is unrelated to the company? Yeah, so if you have a co-founder that you started with, right, and you split the company 50-50 and then you enter some sort of funding round, you get a term sheet, they're going to go through diligence. One of the items on the legal side of diligence is typically reviewing the cap table. And if 50% of the company is owned by a co-founder that you have now fired, so it's, right. Who now hates you, right? Right, who's not willing to play, who has voting rights that, you know, might be a deal breaker. It usually is a deal breaker, so. Maybe you should explain what a cap table is. It's just the percentage breakdown of ownership, right? So how many hands are in the pie, effectively, yeah. Professor Kinzer-Ersim, should we wear our professor hats and ask our students to go back to their classes or should we continue this wonderful discussion? I think as much as, yeah, as much as we would love to keep talking, I think we are at time. I want to thank Charri again, and Bruce, and Nick, and Jay, completely blanked, sorry, I'm looking right at you Jay, and especially Bruce. Thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom with us, we really appreciate it, so. My pleasure. And thank you all of you for sticking it out with us in the end, we hope that you've heard a lot of things that are motivating and interesting, and you can go out and plot a path for yourself to entrepreneurship, so. Thanks again. Thank you.