 All the important stories and events in the world of emerging information. Now it's time to extract the data and turn it into action. Live from the SiliconANGLE Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, this is Extraction Point with John Furrier. Welcome to Extraction Point. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv. My guest today is Mike Morellus, who's the founder of Speakertext.com and an entrepreneur living in San Francisco. Just close some fresh financing, seed financing, series A seed financing with a bunch of good investors, one Chris Yeh, who was on the Cube with me here in Extraction Point. We're going to extract the signal from the noise in three areas, the video market, crowdsourcing, and overall technology around social data, keywords, metadata, all this stuff that's going on. And Matt, thank you for coming in. Welcome to the program. I know you're busy. It's raining in California, but you made it here down from San Francisco. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So here inside the Cube, but we had a big day yesterday around big data. Totally. You're an entrepreneur in San Francisco, all the hot action. First question for you is, tell me what's the signal coming out of San Francisco in terms of the startup community? It's pretty robust right now. It's pretty hopping. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's growing. And I mean, I think just from a very geographic perspective, what we're seeing is soma is becoming saturated and companies are starting to move into what I call soma loin, you know, where soma meets the tenderloin to the mid market area. Areas that were traditionally filled with like Chinese sweatshops and whatnot. And that just is, in my mind, is a signal of just how hot the market is and what's happening is these places that before startups never went are now suddenly there's everybody's moving there. It's a golden rush. The vibe is pretty, pretty hot, though. I mean, there's a ton of activity. Tell us what's going on. Just give us some sound bites of just anecdotal things, parties, events, meetups. You guys have a roof deck I hear in your new office, so I'm expecting to be invited to all the hot events if my wife lets me. But you know, the vibe in San Francisco, I mean, the vibe in San Francisco is amazing. I mean, people, there's just this air of, you know, it's, you know, there's this talk of the bubble, right? And I mean, I think, you know, what gets lost in that is that there's just, there's this wave of creation, of people doing this really, really cool technology. There's this convergence of, you know, pent up demand from, you know, the financial collapse and, you know, technology prices dropping. And I don't mean, it's an amazing place to be. What can I say? So Ben Horowitz from Andrews Horowitz, who I've never had a sit-down with, wrote a post. And I was kind of critical on Twitter last night, but he was saying it's not a bubble. I was saying it is a bubble. But he brings up a good point. It's a quasi-bubble. There's some over extension on some valuations. But for the most part, it's an exciting time. People see the market and people are making money. So it's unlike the dot-com bubble that I lived through. Right. You know, people were just getting public on nothing. Totally. And so, we're talking about your business, but you guys are doing business deals already. So you actually, you haven't announced it yet, but you talked off camera, you're doing some business. So, I mean, you're hungry, you're lean. Totally. You're doing business deals that keep you funded and, but you're optimistic at the same time. Is that an accurate assessment of kind of the scene in San Francisco? Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there's a mix. I mean, I obviously, I wasn't around for, for sort of bubble 1.0. But, you know, yeah, there are companies, you know, the, the, the twitters of the world that have crazy valuations. But, you know, not necessarily crazy revenues. But, you know, companies like ours, you know, we're doing deals. We're making money. You know, we are a real business. We're not just sort of, you know, a startup or just a product. And I think, you know, I think there's a lot of companies like that. You know, there's, unlike, you know, in the late 90s, there's money to be made on this whole Internet thing. You know, people are making it. You know, and even the companies, the huge companies, the Zynga's, the Groupons, this isn't just, this isn't bubble valuations. Like, they have massive revenues and massive revenue growth. I mean, so, you know, and that's where that actually bothers me a bit is when people say, oh, it's crazy bubble. How could Groupon be valued so highly? Well, I mean, they're making a lot of fricking money. What Ben Horowitz talked about yesterday on his blog really was a good point and worth acknowledging is that, you know, don't confuse bubble with boom. You know, the attitude of the entrepreneurs that are out there are aggressive, but they realize they don't need a lot of cash to get going. And, oh, by the way, they're living in the market that is just once in a lifetime, every 20-year inflection point. You know, App Store, Apple, Phenomenon, mobile, Android. Your company, which we'll talk about is in the video space, which, you know, I launched a startup in that area when it wasn't really ready. But, you know, you've got cameras everywhere now. A company just got funded with $41 million. The entrepreneur who founded OpenWave, Bill Nguyen, done a month at LaLoft, founder. On a business plan and prototype, got $41 million. Right. Okay, Flipboard just got $100 million, $200 million of valuation. Right. That's insane. That is crazy. Now, contrast to you, you're like a couple zeros off that. I mean, it should take you on the working capital side. Yeah, I mean, so I think what we've seen happen is that Facebook exploded. And, you know, what you always have is the early leader, the people who come in and the real innovators and, you know, pave the way. Everybody laughed when, you know, Facebook raised that, you know, it was $100 million valuation from Trinity or, I don't remember the UTLs, but early on they had some crazy high valuations and people said that's insane. Excel. Excel and grade lock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. And then, well, now Facebook's like ginormous. And so, everybody's kind of says, the social thing is huge. Let's go chase after the social startups, right? And so, like, in a way, the market has been validated and people have made money off. What do you think about the term social proof that's been kicked around? Is that positive or negative connotation? The angel of skies, Nivea and Naval using that as kind of like a positive thing, like social proof means validation. Some are saying it's just the sheep following the sheep kind of thing. I mean, look, humans are, we are herd animals, right? You know, I mean, we don't survive in the wild solo. You know, people are social. People follow each other, you know. We're memetic creatures, right? We see there's mirror neurons that we have. We see what other people are doing and we copy it. That's just part of our fundamental biology as people. To say it's good or bad, I mean, part of it's good. It's like a nightclub. Everyone says, hey, that nightclub is really hot. People go there because it's good. And they go and they make the judge themselves and if they like it, they tell somebody, right? You know, that restaurant's really good. I want to go back. So that's word of mouth. Right. I mean, and it's also, there's reflexivity. I think George Soros coined the term, right? Is that, you know, even in public markets, right? Is that it's not just, oh, there's, what is fundamental value? You know, part of that is the perception of value, right? And so you, what happens influences what happens in the future. So if you buy, then that changes the price, right? And then other people buy, you know, like because you bought and then that, you know, there is no sort of like static state of where you are able to about judge fundamental value. So much of it is seeing what other people are doing and what happens to the market. And you know, it's all fundamentally a guess. I'm here on extraction point with Matt Morales, who's an entrepreneur, founder of speakertext.com in San Francisco. Hot startup, great small team, the opposite of what people would call a bubble. Thanks for coming on and giving us the highlights of the San Francisco community. But you're an entrepreneur living in San Francisco and you're also plugged into some pretty cool trends. I looked at your company, you got kind of a machine learning thing going on. You got kind of a crowdsourcing thing going on. You got some technology, so you got some science. You mentioned people being kind of social animals. Let's look at it, we cover computer science meets social science. But let's dive into that. Let's talk about crowdsourcing. So we're living in social media, social networks, social world. We're connected. There's new data out there. And yesterday we were talking about big data, big data analytics, advertising is going to be a science, less of an art. Your business has a crowdsourcing element. So I'd like to get your opinion on what your angle is on the whole crowdsourcing phenomenon. And how you're looking at it and what are the benefits of that. So I think there's a mega trend on the internet. And it's an old trend that sort of people are making new again. So in the history of computer science and artificial intelligence research, there's all these people in the labs trying to make intelligent machines. And they're smart, but not that smart. And they hit some inflection point where you get diminishing returns and the machines aren't getting smarter. And in the late 90s in search, this is exactly what happened. There was AltaVista, there was Excite, etc. And they're all trying to create machines that read our web page and said, okay, what's the best search result here? And then this little company in Palo Alto came out called Google. And what did they do? They were one of the OG crowdsourcing companies, right? They said, okay, we're going to combine the intelligent machines with what humans are doing because the real fundamental intelligence is in the human. And they were doing it in terms of linking and back linking on the web. And then Google came out and the world changed and the web was organized. And if you see what happens in the AI labs, the artificial intelligence research, this is like the trend, is that there's pure machine approach that doesn't really make it out of the lab, doesn't really work. AI has been in the lab for decades, right? Because just the religious argument, what is AI? But now you've got some practical data to work with. So go ahead and continue. That's a good thread. And so what happens is that you add on some actual human intelligent layer on top of the AI, on top of these intelligent machines, and that's how you actually get something that works and is useful as a product or a service in the world. And SpeakerText is very similar on that front in terms of speed recognition, in terms of turning it, for us, our main focus is video. The web was created as this web of text documents. Video is not a text document. So what does Google do? Google goes around and reads the web. Everyone's been trying to crack the video search market for years. Yahoo tried, Google tried. I mean, this is a graveyard of carnage. Oh, totally. You know that, right? You've seen that. But you've got a different approach. So talk about your approach to video. So what we do is we turn video into text. So it can be searched, found, and engaged with and shared. And also to really cool ways. And how we do that is a hybrid model that combines, you know, more traditional AI approaches with crowdsourced labor and leveraging the web as a labor platform. So historically, you've either had, you know, either an outsourcing shop in India somewhere. Or a mechanical Turk and things like that. Or a mechanical Turk. A mechanical Turk ain't bad, but becomes this huge quality assurance problem, you know. So you can either A, have a house, you know, a transcription shop, an actual physical building with a manager. Or you can, you know, do something like Turk. And then you end up investing a lot of time yourself trying to, you know, ensure quality. Or you just get destroyed by spammers and, you know, and you want to shoot yourself. And so what we've done is we've built this hybrid workflow process. And the core of which is an autonomous quality assurance system, an artificial intelligent QA system on top of these various crowdsourcing platforms. So, you know, you can give us any video and we'll turn it into, you know, a high quality human-readable, you know, transcript. And there's a lot of things you can do with this. For one, search engines, right? Now suddenly the video is searchable. It shows up on Google, you know. You can get that long tail of search traffic. But, you know, we've built a product called CaptionBox that you show the transcript and turns it into an interactive tool with the video. Let's people engage with the video so they can search the video just like it was a, you could search through the text document. You can share quotes from the videos and it will link back to that exact moment inside the video. With that quote. That was the holy grail people were trying to, hey, three minutes in. Right. Epic soundbite. Totally. Or great content. Yeah, deep linking and telling people what's there. You know, some money quote. You tweeted it out. It links back to that money quote on your page. So it's really good experience for the consumer as well as for the producer, you know. And that's really the core of what we do. And it's, you know, the edge of this mega trend of, you know, online video which has been, you know, exploded in 2004 with YouTube and has been, you know, maturing since. And now we're seeing this focus on the metadata layer. Right. So one of the challenges early was, you know, with YouTube is actually just being able to stream video and get it out there. And now, okay, we've figured that out mostly. And so how do we make this video discoverable? How do we, you know, enable contextual advertising? What's your angle on, before we go to the advertising side, because that's important. Because I think the SEO, SEM market's dying for a new product. This might be it. But I want to get your angle on big data. Obviously it's an area that we're fond of. We've been covering like a blanket, both at a tech level and a business level. Because you're talking about, you're talking about these keywords that you're saying, meta-layer. And this is big data. You got unstructured data. In some cases, quasi-structure. What's your angle on this whole big data funnel? Also, we're here at Cloudera where they do revolution is born. What's your, as an entrepreneur, how do you look at this big data? And how would you describe it to someone out there? I mean, I think big data is, I mean, obviously it's, I mean, it's trivial to say, but it is a mega trend. Right. And with increasing data sets, you can find really interesting statistical correlations and things that you couldn't before, because the data just wasn't there. For us, frankly, a lot of it's proprietary, but, you know, searching through and analyzing all the transcripts we create, looking for connections between them, but also what people are doing with the videos. And, you know, for us, in particular, analyzing how our workers and human agents and what they're doing and, you know, detecting... One of the things just... What kind of tech is involved in some of that stuff? What's some of the tech? Well, there's... Without going into the trade secrets, but I mean, generally, is it AI? You mentioned AI earlier, machine learning. Yeah, no. I mean, there's a lot. I mean, it's a lot of AI and machine learning, some speech stuff, you know, and I mean, the core is creating an artificially intelligent quality assurance layer on top of, you know, a hybrid process of humans and machines, and that's really, really hard to do. You know, QA... I mean, if you think about it, crowdsourcing, especially in sort of like the labor model and not the volunteer model, you know, workers, you know, have an incentive to do the most work for the least effort, you know, when they're getting paid per task, and so there's a huge incentive to scam people, you know, and you have a lot of people, you know, trying to make a quick buck, right? And so, you know, anybody who's ever used mechanical Turk at any scale realizes, holy cow, the scammers, you know, the scammers, the spammers... It looks good at the beginning. It's kind of like a golf shot. It looks good off the tee, and then, you know, like, what the hell's going on? Total. Times wasted. You know, I've used it, which is why I wanted to talk to you guys, because, you know, I'm curious. I mean, this is a problem. I mean, getting the data out of the video is a really big problem, and there's more and more video, because the machines can create the contextual linkage between what people are sharing and doing, whether it's, you know, on the go, mobile, or interviews like this. But so let's talk... Let's drill further on the advertiser side, because video has two functions. Online advertising has always been keyword-based. Talk about Google. You know, obviously, ad words, innovation with ad, and keywords. There's no rich media involved. They've been experimenting with it. You know, video ad sense has kind of been gone nowhere. But here, for your customers, they can literally have search, use text to get the anchor into the search results. But also, the trend in online advertising is to get that embedded as a company, after the name of it, just the pictures and links to the photos inside of it. The guy from Facebook just joined as a board member just saw the news today. But you're seeing more of these different approaches. It's not your standard just picture or text links. And also, TV advertising, right? Totally. Where's the future of video going? Is it on the ad side is going to be more robust ads? What are you seeing for the future of the video market online in particular? Well, so part of... What's happened is there's been... Talk about big data. There's been this explosion in audience data. So people now know... There's all these sophisticated tracking systems where people know who's watching videos. But what hasn't happened and what I think we're really at the cutting edge of is actually understanding what's going on inside the video itself. So there's very little data. Nobody knows what's happening at any particular moment inside the video. Is it an interesting quote? Are people swearing? Is there hate speech? Is there something funny thing happening? Understanding that. There's a bunch of technologies... Content's locked up in the video. If you do a seven-minute video, you're talking about seven minutes of huge time commitment for the user experience. Totally. I mean, when you're at work, it's not a lean-back environment. If you're on the go, maybe if you're sitting at the airport, you can bring up your iPad, but you need iTunes. Right. So iTunes might not be compatible, right? Right. So you get lean-back at home on the couch, but you're in the office, hey, what's going on in this seven-minute clip? Or worse, we're doing a 30-minute interview here on extraction point. Totally. We're in, what, our eighth minute, ninth minute? Right. This is a pretty important topic about advertising. Right. No. I mean, the content's totally locked up, as you said. And not just for the consumer, but also for the machines. Think about it. There's all these sophisticated machinery algorithms that understand text, whether it's a search engine, AdSense, some sort of contextual advertising, sentiment analysis, et cetera. Once you have the text, you can apply all these other existing technologies in really new and interesting ways. Give an example on that. Well, AdSense, just straight up. AdSense looks at what's on the page and says, okay, we're going to serve a contextual ad. The problem is you have no idea what's going on inside a video. And so that's where we come in, is we say, look. I mean, we basically did that yesterday for our big data special. We saw that Gigong was having a big data conference in New York City. And at one o'clock, we just pulled the trigger and did six hours of live programming where we had guests come in. And we actually went in to our library, essentially deep-linked and pulled back out content. I mean, that's metaphorically the same as just saying a tweet with a link to an embed into your model, right? It's the same thing. It's just some access. Right. I mean, you had to do that manually. That was a manual process. Huge pain. Tons of labor costs. Good product. Totally. A lot of production costs. Right. But I mean, these are things that machines should be able to do. And if you have that video in text form, if you have it transcribed and all that text is time-synchronized with the video, then it's just a matter of searching through the text and highlighting and clipping-based using the text, which is you can do what your brain can do way faster than you could sit there and physically watch it. And within the online marketing or outside of just search engine optimization where you can use the leverage of the text, a lot of the advertisers are going social media. So we went from consumer companies like Ford, The Gap, to HP, EMC. They have social media teams. They're pumping out tons of video. Now, granted, some of the videos are very boring, very vendor-specific. But that's their game. That's their world. They want text, right? Right. What do they go to? Is this something you guys are targeting that audience as well? Yeah. I mean, for us... Or is that kind of going to go to that different? Going to go to that later? I mean, so for us, our main focus right now is serving media companies, people like yourselves who are putting video on the Internet and have a big incentive to get it found, get it watched, and to turn that into money. And for us, we help you do that. We help you get found by search and then caption box and some of the other tools we've created. We boost engagement and sharing. So, you know, in some of the early trials we've done, we've seen caption box, which is our interactive transcript tool. We've seen it doubling in the amount of time people spend watching the video. So, you know... I can tell you right now when we were at Stratoconference, and for the folks out there who have been following us, we'll know, Tim O'Reilly had an event in our girl Stratoconference. And we had two days of live programming there. And the CMO of Green Plum didn't believe us, but we did, and I tried to get in front and improve the numbers, but it was shocking. Two days, 1.2 million views, 500,000 views of the live stream, and 500,000 views roughly split 50-50, almost right down the middle. Once they watched the live video, they went right to the on-demand. So, this notion of using the video to capture the awareness, it's like the perfect commitment. If the video is good, it provides great aided awareness. And our numbers are clearly showing that video captures the user. Because the commitment to watch the video, and if the content is good, they're going to want more. It's like the appetizer. So, I think this concept of a caption box or having more discovery, more engagement, more stuff, is a huge value. And I just don't see anyone doing that right now. No, I mean it's... No one goes to the searcher and says, hey, let me watch a video about big data. Right. No, I mean, and the thing is that up to now it's been, people have tried to use machines to solve this problem. And it just, frankly, hasn't worked. I mean, speech recognition, some great cutting-edge technology, but it's still half the time it's... So, some people will say, hey, what's the turnaround time? How fast does it take? Is it a week later? Is it real time? Is it near real time? What does that mean? So, it depends how much you want to pay. That's a... Coin-operated, premium service. Let's just go basic and just take us through the basic service and just say, we're running an Obama press conference. Yeah, so, I mean, our approach is like the Tony Shea, Zappos kind of under-promise over deliver. So, on the website we say, guaranteed turnaround time, 48 to 72 hours. It's pretty fast compared to transcriptional firms. Not bad. But, you know, it's not real time. It's not a week. It's not a week. Most of the time, most customers get content back within 12 to 24 hours, realistically. And one thing that's actually really cool about our technology and how it works is it doesn't matter how much content you give us. We break it up into chunks and then we send that to hundreds or thousands of workers. So, a lot of the stuff can be done in parallel in a way that, you know, a traditional firm could not. And so, we can get really fast turnaround time even with large volumes of content where doesn't, you know, you don't have sort of the linear, you know, if I give you one hour of content it'll take X, you know, and if it gives you two hours it'll take two X. I mean, it still takes X. You create the, how you break it up, optimize even algorithm on how fast that turns around. You can understand. Cool. So, you have a white glove service for rapid turnaround. Yeah. Not real time, but someone needs it fast. Yeah. And, you know, and that's one thing that we're working on, right, is because we've gotten this, especially news publishers say, hey, look, you know, not all my content, but some of it I need super fast. So, you know, and we're, that's in the works. Yeah. And that's something we've actually heard from the market loud and clear. We're here with Matt Morellis, entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I see you can call him kind of the same. Not really these days San Francisco is building a name for itself. Always had a great reputation, but now it's booming in San Francisco. You got the rents going up, Cloudera just recently moved their engineers up there and it's hot. So, Matt, we're talking about entrepreneurship. We're talking about your company, speakertext.com, and we're here at the extraction point extracting the signal from the noise. And the next segment I'd like to drill down with you on is something that's near and dear to your heart, entrepreneurship startups. I know you write about it on your blog. You are an entrepreneur. You're living in a great time. Oh. I wish I was you, younger. I'm too old to do startups these days even though I'm doing Silicon Angle. But seriously, what is your take? Love to get your perspective, very candid perspective around how you see the market. There's a lot of noise out there around Angelgate, AngelList, early stage. Don't do a convertible note. I actually just saw a blog post yesterday from Manu at canine and I actually agreed to them. I did a convertible note. I will never do a convertible note again from my perspective. But what's the vibe as an entrepreneur? You're out there in the trenches. What's it like? There's all these different stories. What are you seeing? What's the climate like? Are people like VCs stay away from them? You can't say that because you're probably looking for funding down the road. But what's the general view? Are stuntings getting overfunded? Well, I think what's happening is that there's a wave of entrepreneurs and of companies like myself, like SpeakerText. I started this company three weeks after a Lehman collapse in October 2008. And this was RIP good times. Everybody was saying, are you insane? This is a horrible idea. Come on. Get yourself together. Sequoia is not funding. No one's funding. Right. And it was a long drought. I bootstrapped the company. I worked on an ambulance to pay off my college loans and keep the company alive. It was just a dream back then. And over the last year, year and a half, the market has just radically, radically changed. I personally think that incubators are overhyped. Y Combinator, brilliant idea. Techstars, good idea. Incubator, 9,700, whatever. I think that in six years from now, those will mostly be gone with a handful left. What I think is happening is that the cost of doing startups is collapsing. There's more people on the internet and mobile than there has ever been before. So mega stuff, good. Actually being an entrepreneur though, I'm of the rocky school of thought. It's not about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep going forward. And in times like this... Rocky Balboa you're referring to. Oh yeah, Rocky Balboa. The Italian Stallion. The Italian Stallion. Climb those stairs, drink the raw eggs. Rocky one by the way, right? Yeah, no. Rocky three. Yeah, no. And I think that... That's a good point though. Entrepreneurs have to take the lumps. It's no gravy. Right. Walk in the park. That's not the fantasy people are reading about or dreaming about. They want to be entrepreneurs, right? Take your lumps and... One of our advisors, our main advisor, Mark Randolph, the original founder CEO of Netflix, we're having some issues or whatever in the company and we're talking with him and he sent me this email and he's like, look at Netflix and any entrepreneur who made it in the valley, pissed blood for years trying to make it. This stuff is hard. And I think incubators tap into a certain mindset. Not all of them, many of them are really, really good. But like, what I do fear is that there's people who... False hope. There's false hope. Also, they add structure. And it feels like applying to graduate school. It feels like school. It feels like structure and that lowers the barrier to entrepreneurship, which is good, but at the same time... I call it the community college. It's like more access, which is good. Right. But it's not high-end. Right. And so... High-end is being creative, focusing on the objective, building the product, being loose, being creative. Hate the word pivot, but working with it, right? Getting the market. Well, I mean, also, you know... Put the team together. The pirate, you know, like Mike Errington had this great post a few months ago, are you a pirate? You know? And you know, when you make it like graduate school, the density of pirates drops. That said, I mean, I do think it is really, really good and really... You can't have a lot of pirates. There's only... The seas can only handle only a certain clumber clan of pirates. You know? Well... Are you a ninja or a pirate? This is one of the debates I had on Quora. Are you a ninja or a pirate? Ninja or a pirate, you know? So it's like different characteristics. Pirates working in packs, which is a Silicon Valley kind of legend. But also, you know, you can be a ninja and still be successful. So... But it begs the question, is it oversaturated with entrepreneurs? I was just seeing a conversation saying, there's the best seed market ever. We need more angels. There's people on the VC side are complaining the quality sucks. So... I don't know, yeah. I'm trying to figure it out. I have my opinion, but... I mean, I think, you know, when times are tough, you know, you get tough for people. Right? You know, when times are flush, people get soft. And we'll see, you know, there'll be this cycle and we'll wash out and see who comes out. You know, plenty of people have made a hell of a lot of money by starting, you know, when times are tough and selling, you know, when times are... you know, when times are good and starting when times are good and selling when times are still good. Right? It's that, you know, the times when you get punched in the face. And that's, you know, I mean, that's my kind of entrepreneur. You're looking at Rocky right here. I mean, I live through the... the ball of scar tissues. I've been booted out of my company and I started with venture backed and started here, scratch with no cash. So I'm with you on that. Totally, totally right on. And then there's also, you know, you got your pedigree rock stars out there who get the big money. Totally. You know, hey, whatever. You know, that's cool. Great for them. But I mean, on top of that... No, okay. So that said, Angelist, I think, is the most amazing invention, you know, in startup financing since the internet. I mean, this is... Excuse me. It's essentially functions like a public market for, you know, early stage companies. You know, before you used to have discrete financing events. Now you can kind of do these roll in closes and, you know, just sort of like a public company. You know, oh, there's just some more stock and some more capital. And that... Yeah. And it's opened up the market to new angels, but it's also startups, you know, it's just... It's really... I'm a member on Angelist so I can tell you that the deal flows good on there. And at first, I was kind of like giving a little bit of criticism to those guys. I mean, I know Neval and Nivy are partying with those guys, but to me, it's a revolution. Hmm... Major improvement. And I think what's interesting is that it can go the... what I call the eBay route. Where, yeah, it can get there. But what I find the most compelling is that those two guys are very cool, good guys, and companies are getting funded. Totally. It might not have gotten funded before. I've seen it with White Combinator. I mean, for all that, I mean, those are good systems that work. To me, the guy from Minnesota can walk in a Silicon Valley based on their own merits. Yeah. Get funded and not have to go through and kiss the ring of Ron Conway. You know, offense Ron, but the old way was, you know, go through the gates and get... Well, I mean, but I think, and that's a very good point, but I think that's a key difference between White Combinator and Angelist. You know, White Combinator is more like the iOS Steve Jobs, you know, like, you know, White Combinator is, you know, saying, hey, you know, Paul Graham has given you the, you know... The endorsement. The endorsement, you know, you've been blessed. Angelist. Whatever that means, right? I mean, yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, you can't... He's got great deal flow, so he has to make some filtered decisions. He's got overflow. Oh, yeah. Even on the Vestercite, I was talking to a one other VC told me they can't get into White Combinator because now you can only get in if you were a previous investor. Hmm. So, interesting. I mean, they're doing some really interesting, but I think Angelist is more sort of like the Android, you know, it's an open platform, right? I mean, that said, you know, we raised a lot of our capital through Angelist, you know, and a big part of... How did that go? Oh, it was awesome. And helping me out when I was a total nobody. How, Neve and Naval? Yeah, Neve and Naval, Neve in particular, who's less of the public face, but back in November or December of 2009, you know, I reached out to those guys right before we had sort of launched the most beta of beta versions of speaker text, you know, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Neve got on the phone with me on a Sunday, you know, G-Chat, you know, sort of slapped me upside the head and told me what was what, you know, and then a couple of months later, you know, I came out to San Francisco for the first time ever. And, yeah, and Neve, you know, let me crash on his couch, you know, I mean... He's a very cool guy. Those guys are very cool. And they really care about entrepreneurs and they're really trying to do the right thing. And I think it really shows... There's two types of people in the entrepreneurial world, people who want to help people and all the successful entrepreneurs and mentors and investors are the ones who really want to help. Yeah. And I think that's very key in these... which groups you kind of work with, Angelist and, you know, Paul Graham and those guys. So, you know, I think the more that happens in this market, the better. Right? I mean... Totally. And the excess of the money, even better. Angelist is phenomenal. It's like an email blast. Oh, yeah. It's like a subscription document. The most influential people in the sort of startup financing world today. You know, I think it's really interesting because, you know, where do these... why are these people matter? Right? So, Paul Graham, you know, he sold a company to Yahoo for $50 million in 1997. I mean, you know, I wouldn't be too bad, too disappointed with that outcome, but like, kind of big whoop. Right? He's not... But, how did he make his name, his essays, right? His writing, right? You know, Andy Warhol said, you know, anybody could be, get 15 minutes of fame in television, right? In, you know, the internet, anyone could build, you know, an internationally recognized brand. Look guys, like Fred Wilson, he was a VC in New York when, you know, New York was not cool, right? You know, on the consumer side, he's number two behind Greylock, David Z. So, you get the two guys, I think are the best there. Right, but he's, he's not in the valley, right? Like, you know, Fred Wilson. Yeah. Well, either it's Rich Lebendorf, and you know, all the best deals were done were by guys not from Silicon Valley. Right. Zynga, Twitter. Totally. And then, Cliner came late to the game. Look, I mean, look at, what do these people, you know, make names for themselves? They're using the internet as a publishing platform. And, you know, I mean, I think that that's, and even venture hacks, what did venture hacks, or what did AngelList come out of? It came out of venture hacks, right? And, you know, content as a, as a, as a strategy, right? As like the core of authority. Good content, good content. Oh, yeah. Good original content, serves value, not just page views. Yeah, and not, you serve the customer, you create a brand. You know, that's how you create a brand. And I think, you know, a lot of people, they say, oh, on the internet, we're going to make, you have money, we're going to put some content out there. And it's, they think like, they can just kind of like, you know, do. Well, we're siliconangle.com. We're making a brand for ourselves to high quality content. Mike Morales here, founder, entrepreneur from San Francisco, speaker text. Thanks for coming in on the extraction point today. Final parting words. Yeah, possible mega trends, if you will. Things that are, you can't put your finger on it yet, but you can feel it. Is there anything that you can talk about that you say, I feel it, I see this coming. This might be big. Oh, I mean, I don't, I mean, people aren't talking about it, but I mean, it's definitely going to be huge is the verticalization of the crowdsourcing space, right? So there's this, there's this dream, you know, two, three years ago, that somebody's going to create a generalized work platform, right? Where you, it's labor in the cloud, mechanical Turk, you know, cloud crowd, these companies that did that. And what's happened is, is that, A, the technology in that, doesn't really, there's a technology problem, there's also a marketing problem. So what you're seeing is companies like, like speaker text, you know, and like my Gango, that are, are attacking specific verticals and they have a specific workflow and process for leveraging the crowd, you know, and combining, you know, artificial intelligent, systems on top of it. And, you know, I expect this to happen in a lot of industries that, you know, machines in AI has sort of had middling success or not really knocked it out of the park. And you're going to see a huge verticalization in the crowdsourcing market over the, over the next 24, 36 months. Man, you're speaking our language, the stuff that we'd love to hear is exactly our mojo here at Silicon Angle, verticalization. We're doing it up and down, research data on our end. You're going to be a hit. I think you're going to do a great, got a great space, great vision. Love that last line. Video's hot. You're tackling that. Either way, I think you're going to be successful because you're in the right area. You're tackling video. You got the metadata. You got the technology. Mike Morellis with Speak Your Text, Entrepreneur of San Francisco. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. Thank you.