Jason’s Put a $5K Bounty on His Dream Chrome Extension | E2338 transcript

All right, it's time, Lon, for us to reveal round one of our bounty program for annotated.com. I own the domain name annotated.com. I had literally bought this for 30 or 40 grand after I sold my second company, weblogs, Inc. >> to AOL. And I said, "My next startup is going to annotate the web." And my idea is you could highlight any piece of text and then you could dispute that piece of text or give additional content, right?

Because I had been hit with a lot of copyright issues and because we were doing blogs and gadget autoblogs. Joy said, "Well, these are great blogs." Uh, shout out to Peter Rojos and Ryan and Sean Gold and of course Brian Alvie. >> Very successful business. I said, "This could be my next business because I don't have to do the content, but there'll be a story in the Wall Street Journal. You highlight two sentences and then you give your opinion on it and then other people can go to that page and give their opinion.

And I just thought this going to be my this is going to be my billion-dollar startup. Well, here we are. It's 20 years later. I forgot I had the domain name. Uh forgot I had bought it. And then vibe coding happens. I said, you know what I want to do? >> I want to put out a $5,000 bounty for people to make me finally my Chrome extension. Now, this would normally have cost 20 years ago $500,000 to build. Maybe five years ago I could have done it with an offshore group for 250.

Maybe two years ago I could have done it for 50,000. But right now just putting out a $5,000 bounty. I think you can get this is my premise vibe coding folks people using these tools to build it in a week or two and then at least I would get let's say the 5,000 doesn't result in a final product. At least I get ideas. Yeah. >> And we get some show content. And that's really my goal here. That's what annotated.com is. I see it as a Chrome sidebar as you can see here on the website premium domain and I said just for this contest we want somebody to execute my idea as explained on the website and then make a Chrome extension.

Now >> if you could L be so kind >> to explain uh the the the broad strokes of this. This is a $5,000 bounty. You're gonna have to pay tax. You're gonna have to submit your stuff. If you don't want the money I'll donate it to somebody. I I don't know. But I own uh the whatever code you write is uh open source is I guess the rule and uh I have complete control of the contest. I can cancel it if everything sucks. I can give two prizes.

I can split the prize. I can do whatever I want is the idea here. >> Uh basically so caveat caveat caveat. Ship it win 5K. Tell us what we got. >> All right. So we've got three entries to go through today. Uh the hard to distinguish between them. I'll just use the creator names because they're all called annotated or variations of it. Our first one comes from uh Robert. He did not give us a last name. It's annotated.wtf.

This works with X. It works with YouTube videos. It works with articles. Though with articles, you were saying your your dream version was you could just take a little bit of the article, highlight it, and then discuss just that segment. The way Roberts works, you could share the article. So we haven't yet drilled it down into share just this quote. You could share the article and give your thoughts and then you could say of course he the author says this one sentence and I disagree with that.

Uh so we do have a demo uh prepped and ready to go. >> So this is annotated.wtf. We'll call this submission one. This is officially submission one. >> Let's take a look here at what they built and you can sports cast it. >> I will be happy to. Let's roll Robert's demo. So, as you can see, we're on this uh this CNN uh article uh about the Six Flags roller coaster that Oh, I read about this. This was the there was a roller coaster that they're saying over the years, X2, I believe it's called, and it was knocking people around that they were actually developing brain injuries that were requiring medical attention over the years.

So, that is the article that we have found here. We are annotating that article and as you can see, we've pulled it up. It's It's in the sidebar and now we're on the annotated page and we're leaving a comment. I can't believe people are getting injured by roller coasters in 2026. And now uh the demo is even progressing and we can see you can also edit a so it created a page at annotated.wtflewartups.com WTF for the handle at twwartups.com and then a slug >> right >> on-score yada yada >> and here they said the annotation is at the top I cannot believe people are still getting injured by roller coasters.

How is this still a thing in 2026? That's the comment from the individual. And then below it is an image from the page. And then uh when he scrolls down, it has a link to that source. On the top left, we see the person can hit the edit button. And uh very nicely done. And I like the sidebar. The sidebar and the design of this is very appealing to me. >> Um and it actually used a highlighter metaphor. I like this branding idea.

This was actually my original idea was to use a yellow highlighter as the iconography of it. And so this person picked up on that >> which also is a somewhat obvious idea on and he's highlighted and he has the marker there annotated. WTF and on the side you know he says hey select 30 to a,000 characters on the page the quote will appear here yada yada very well constructed easy to use. I would have put a screenshot of the web page >> and then the quote underneath it, but I never thought putting the quote up top and then the screenshot below it.

Interesting design choice. I guess that's something we could AB test. Let's go on to the next piece and look at clipping a video. This is a very controversial one. You know, if you clip a video, uh some people might be like, "Hey, that's my video." Of course, there is fair use, so you get to clip a little bit of a video these days. feel like this it's a generational thing. The our our era, the idea of taking a piece of someone else's video and then re-sharing it was like, "Oh, I don't know.

That makes me a little uncomfortable. You should just link back to them." But today, clipping has become such an art form unto itself. And maybe arguably the best way to share content to make it get wider attention. I feel like people have less of an issue with it now. I feel like you can clip people's things and as long as you're giving them credit, it's not, you know, more than a few minutes of the the original content.

I I think that's okay. >> I think you're right. If it's a percentage of the original, that doesn't preclude somebody from watching the original and it's clear you're not the owner, >> as it would be on a website called annotated. And if you're doing fair use, the four-part test for fair use you can look up. But one of them is you're doing criticism here. So taking the whole episode, no bueno. I would say taking, you know, I don't know, two minutes would be just fine with any podcaster.

Let's see what we got. So, here and show on the sidebar, nice and slow, what the person's doing. >> Sure. I would also note you there is a file a claim button at the bottom if you feel like somebody has clipped too much of your original work and you're a little salty about it. >> Okay. >> Uh, so yeah, like take a look. Uh, we're we're in the sidebar. Let's get it playing again. Uh, and you can see that they're they're now leaving a comment.

I thought Punit's demo was super sick on this episode. Uh, now they are marking the source and there it is. It's live and you could go visit the page and see the segment of the video that they clipped. It's processing right now. Uh, there's the headline once again. I thought Punit's demo was super sick. There's the content right underneath it. And then a comment thread where other people I think this is really the magic of your concept and how we could see it going and becoming like a a destination to itself is that almost like old school aggregation sites your your digs your farc.coms your Reddits one person's annotation and comment on this video could then lead you into a whole discussion thread a vibrant community of people talking about each other's links.

[clears throat] >> Yes. Uh, very nicely done. And I saw if we scroll back a little bit, he did give the starting time and the >> correct >> uh closing time. If you go back to when he's first clipping it. There you go. And he's uh just picking he wants 42 minutes and 51 seconds to 44. Um, so he set the start, he set the end, and he clipped it. I love that part. Yeah, this one actually a lot of the annotated a lot of the annotateds that we saw had this clipping feature and and sometimes it was awkward to navigate. >> Uh this one very clean as you can see. >> Okay.

Yeah. Wow, this is great. >> Yeah, they did a did a really nice job. This one is is pretty slick. Uh so now we're on we're on a we're on x.com the everything app. Uh this is a this is a post from Jason with a chart. And again we're we're doing the same thing. They're going to add their comment. What's your take on the tweet? >> More men need to lock TF in. >> FN. >> Yeah. And now that's it. Super fast. I mean, you can see, and I like that, too.

If you go back a little bit, uh, the post to X. You could take your comment and post your comment as a new post to X. So, it's sort of integrating X workflow within annotated without ever leaving. You could just keep the conversation going. That's very nice. Starting a company is hard enough. You need to focus on running your business and building a great product. And you need to clear all that back office work, all those chores off of your plate.

And that's why every exists. E VR Y is the all-in-one platform for incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, basically your entire back office. And every has worked with over 1,000 startups. If you're just getting started, they'll handle your Delaware CC Corp, EIN, and getting yourself a registered agent, all with no legal fees and no delays. And if you're further along in your founder journey and need to scale up your team, Every will help you hire contractors in over 200 countries.

Plus, you're going to get 3% cash back on every dollar when you use your Every Corporate Card. So, head over to every.io io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's evio. Every io this is kind of the vision. This would have taken 20 years ago, 6 months to build. >> 5 years ago, would have taken three months to build and to get the, you know, 1.0 out and now it takes but two weeks or less.

Well done. >> Yeah. >> And uh there's a feed at the top. So obviously if things were trending or were today or maybe an AI based algorithm maybe just take the Twitter algorithm the X.com algorithm is now >> um >> open source you could just go to the feed but here you have people going to the feed and I'm wondering if it takes a screenshot of the tweet so it's preserved forever because that's one of the problems. >> Oh interesting you're right. >> I think that's an image um or it might maybe they're just embedding the image.

Are you on the live site right now? This is a pre-recorded demo that you're seeing. Oh, >> no. No. I think he moved to the live site. Well, there you go. Okay. So, you're producer Jacob's on the live site. If you right mouse click on that, is that an embed from Yeah, that's an embed from uh Twitter. So, that's an interesting way to do it. Um, it's an embed from Twitter because you're hitting. >> I What I would do here, I'm just going to give a little punchup.

I would give the user the ability to embed Twitter, do a screenshot, or both. maybe a little too advanced. Um, but absolutely fantastic. >> Well, the screenshot idea because so many things get pulled off of Twitter, deleted, people think better of it. That's why you would be a screenshot would be a savvy move there because then you could >> correct >> annotate it would be your way of preserving a hot tweet that you think might get pulled.

All right. Yeah. >> I'm going to give this one um on a score eight and a half out of 10. I mean, it feels close to production ready. I I have a tiny couple of little things. I I guess we have to test it, but my lord, you're logged in with the This Week in Startups account and using it. My lord, this is fantastic. I want to give it an 8.5 of 10. Let's go to our next demo. >> All right. Our next demo comes to us from Alan Shifflet number two.

Okay. Uh it's another take. There he is. There's Allan. It's another take on annotating. >> Beautiful landing. >> And as you can see, he also I was going to say this before, but I figured I'd say it. He also did come up with the highlighter branding as you can see right here. Publish the annotation. Uh, so we're gonna we're gonna log in here. Uh, we're going to it's a CNN page about Dolly Paul. Poor Dolly Parton. It's about her her health struggle highlights a crisis that faces millions of American caregivers.

They're leaving their comment. Dolly Parton's legacy includes an unfortunate reality of caregiving, not taking care of oneself. Oh, that's just they're pulling that in from CNN. That's the article headline. >> Yes. >> Uh, so then we're moving down here. >> And they write a snarky comment. I guess I'm too young to know who this is. and we get to the article page like the permal link page. >> Um, is it okay? >> Going a little faster. >> Decent.

Let's go back here to >> the um >> to this page. >> Well, no, go back one. This is the feed page of all of them. The permalink page is this one. So, here the issue with this one is it just gives you the headline there. Then you have the comment. A bit confusing. What's going on? I think a better way to do this would to take a screenshot of the CNN pa CNN page and put that there >> and then underneath it put the comment and then you know you have the picture of the person Jacob there, producer Jacob.

I'm guess I'm too young to know who it is. And I like the fact that it has on the right hand who annotated it, how many annotations they have, how many followers they have. That's part of this. So, what this one got right is the social media profile on the right and the follower account and all that great stuff. The left, >> I would have put an actual screenshot of the CNN page or like a a thumbnail of it or something. >> I have to say this also makes kind of the argument for putting the comment up top because it's hard to know just from looking at this.

It looks like Yeah, it looks like this page is just a link to this CNN article and then a comment thread underneath it. Whereas so work to begin >> yeah a little a little I think that I like the other the annotated.wtf approach of making the comment the annotation is the star the link is here's what I'm talking about is the context. >> Okay so this is submission two. Uh let's go ahead and see what's next. >> This is you talking about the mosquito laser iron dome for mosquitoes to protect your backyard >> and then leaving a comment.

Need one of these but for hornets please. Who's Jacob's having some hornet troubles, I guess. So, he >> got it. Okay, so here we go. Taking and annotating a >> Oh, I like this. Hang on. Pause. Go back a little bit, Jacob. I want to highlight something on that screen I didn't notice. I like this. Did you see there's You can categorize. You're You're leaving a hot take. It's a fact check. You're steelmanning the argument.

You found receipts. It's an explainer. I like that very much that you can tag. Here's the kind for that. >> Yeah. Here's the kind of annotation that I'm leaving. That's a nice feature. >> Yeah. Plus one for that. >> All right, you can keep going. >> The page is a little bit clooy on the left and there's your main feed. >> What is >> I like the idea of a main feed, but yeah, it needs to be back. >> What is that 21 in parentheses before your at name?

I don't even know what that is. >> I think they're just pulling the tweet uh like metadata and some stuff's getting pulled in. >> Okay. Yeah, cuz that that that does not look great. That looks a little weird. >> Hey, listen. This is like a f V1, so that should be cleaned up a bit. Uh, but I do like ideas. Multiply when they're shared on the bottom left. >> I like invite to annotated. I would have made that put in somebody's email.

Um, and you can just invite them. >> Sure. >> Uh, I like people worth following on the top right. Trending topics on the right hand bar. All of this is somebody who understands that this is supposed to be a social network of sorts for people annotating stuff. So, very well done. >> Yeah. I also up if you look at the very top left [clears throat] uh the plans for a for you algorithmic feed like annotated would learn over time the kinds of topics and stories that interest you.

That's very promising that this could be another way to just source and discover what's going on >> in my feed. >> Fantastic. Well done. >> We have our third submission here. Annotated.com with just one N to set it apart. Uh it's by Churog Azerota. Uh he bought the domain. He actually bought this domain, Jason, annotated with one N in case people misspell it and still want to access the site. >> Great. Hijack my traffic. >> There you go.

So, yeah, you've got it wrong. You're learning something. >> Yeah. All right. So, he's on another CNN article. Trump's ambassador to Italy is cruising the Mediterranean on a $450 million yacht. That lucky so and so. >> Fair enough. Well, you buy ambassadorships. That's how it [laughter] works. When you get an ambassadorship, >> um, it usually goes to people who have donated a lot, but then you're responsible for funding.

I have a friend who who did this. >> You have to fund the actual embassy yourself personally, is my understanding. So, if you get Italy or you get Japan, look it up. >> You've got to pay for the maintenance of the >> embassy and the staff and the food and everything. So it cost you five or 10 million bucks uh out of pocket out of pocket or to your partners or whatever. So it's it's not a it's there's nothing free. >> It's a crazy system.

I you would assume the government is anyway. Uh so back to annotate. We could talk about that all day. I'm I'm fascinated. But the building maintenance, security, and salaries are taken care of by the sending country's government. But ambassadors are expected to host receptions, dinners, and other events, and budgets don't usually cover that. So you are right. the ambassadors are paying a lot for like when they have state dinners or whatever.

And anyway, anyway, let's get back to annotated. Uh, so as you can see, they've got the sidebar up. They're leaving a comment, a thoughtful comment about this Italy cruise. Uh, it's taking one last look. It gives them, you know, like sort of a moment to, hey, check up on what we're doing. Uh, now it's prompts signing into the annotated.com service. That's something new. We haven't seen on any of the others. And then here we go.

Here's how the annotated page look. kind of a kind of an x.com Twitter formulation on this one. >> Looks good. >> It does. It looks good. >> I kind of like this one best so far. Again, for the CNN, um if we go back, you know, you have the comment up top. It's very clear who what you see here, um is, >> you know, it's from Jacob because it's his icon. Underneath it, you kind of know that's um his comment. >> Then you have the quote from the page, Trump ambassadors, yada yada.

So when you do this demo, the fact that it's just highlighting the headline, poorly done demo, what you would want to do is pick a paragraph and comment on a paragraph, then it would be more clear what was going on here, but that's the fault of the user. Then below it, you have in the box the CNN story. I would have made that CNN box um have a thumbnail of the page, which you can do. There's many services that will do that.

And then you could have a little more of about the story >> there. Um but otherwise great and it has the date and the time and everything. You have trending sources on the right. Have home explorer profile saved. I mean and you can join the conversation. It's absolutely um solid effort. Solid effort. Regular listeners already know that if you've got a great idea for a new business, our friends at Northwest Registered agent want to help you bring it to life.

They're going to be the most amazing partner you've ever had. Even if you're not ready to form an LLC, you still need to take care of some basics. So, Northwest Registered agent is now offering free identity services. That means a free domain name, open- source website hosting, a business email, and a phone number, and everything else that's going to make your new startup look and feel like a professional company, all with no purchase required.

And you know, you can rely on Northwest because they've been helping people like you start businesses for nearly 30 years. If you have an idea you can't get out of your head, or even if you're already building something amazing, you already got started, Northwest Registered Agent is the best way to establish your new company. Learn more at northwestregistered agent.com/twistdommain. The problem here, uh, Lon, is with these demos generally is that the examples are bad.

And this is a good lesson to just highlight for founders. When you do a demo of your product, if you do a janky example, it's hard for people to understand it. So, what you want to do here is say, hey, in, you know, this article has the third paragraph. There's a really important to be point to be made that the ambassadors, let's say, have to pay for the parties. You highlight that portion and then you say, I didn't know that ambassador.

Really interesting >> concept here going on. So, whoever made the demo, it's great that you made a smoothless demo. Oh, it shows everything. But you got to remember my rule of startup founders presenting their product. Examples matter. Examples matter. Examples matter. >> Yeah. Like that Dwaresh article about agent civilizations. A lot of people were doing this with that where they were pulling out, oh, see how we phrase this one sentence in here that makes it anthropomorphized or whatever.

That's a good example of how people are really using services and platforms like this. >> Yes. Like that would be a better one to do. Uh we're going to do a video one. So they picked this week in startups episode. >> This is a recent VC round table. That's Shiel Manote. >> Okay. Oh, you mark the part you want in the actual Yeah. You put in the Oh, you put the time stamp in yourself. I guess manually. >> It's a It's a This one I remember this now.

This one it's a This is one of the more cluy ones I was talking about where that other one, the original one we looked at, WTF. It's very neat. It's like this little app and you just drag and drag and it is like using QuickTime or something. It's very intuitive. This one less so you got to really exactly find the time code you want. It's a little it's two extra steps. >> Correct. Okay. Uh good enough though. Let's see what happens when you actually hit continue. >> Yeah, I hit continue there.

Uh when you actually do it, what happens? And >> that's when you you type in your reaction. Shield is Oh, I missed it. Something about shield. >> Yeah, note is live. And you notice like when the note's live, you have to go view the note. It should just take you to view note. Like this is like a little UX thing. Why are we making the person do another click? It should say your notes posted. This is the permal link for it.

Invite people to it. That's an opportunity to move on to the next step. Here we go. You can share this note. Let's scroll up a little bit. >> Oh, and here's file a claim. Say if we were like, hey, they stole our episode of Oh, there we go. J Sheil is an absolute god on X. >> Great. Awesome. Um, all right. So, um, the first one's like an eight and a half, the second one's like a an eight, and this one's like a six, just in terms of refinement, design, etc. >> So, I don't know if anybody else is going to submit to this, but if you want to beat these three, we're going to do a round two in two weeks.

So, two weeks from whenever this is published, you got 15 days or so, whatever the next episode is, and then we'll review round two. After round two, I might do a round three, but I'll probably just pick at that point. Right now, if I was going to pick, I would probably give right now before round two, I probably would have given 80% to number one and 20% to number two just in terms of like, you know, a lot of good ideas there.

Maybe I would give 70, 30, 60, 40. I'm not sure, but that's where my kind of gut is right now. Lon, what did you think? Do you have a ranking here? >> Oh, I [clears throat] absolutely agree. the number one WTF Robert submission. It's been my favorite all along. Like we've been looking at these and and vetting them as they come in for I would say a few weeks now, close to a month. And that was one of the first ones I saw.

And all along I was like this is the one. It the the Chrome extension is so easy. Everything is just intuitive. It's really pretty. Like it really looks like it doesn't look vibe coded. It looks like a real professional website. So, that's that's always been consistently unless somebody is out there ready to top it, I'm ready to give the prize to uh to Robert. [laughter] >> Well, now here's the next thing. Um, I would like you uh to um maybe um when we get past round two and we get the last round of feedback, I actually want somebody to talk to the founders, see if anybody I think what I want to do is take this and uh incubate it inside of our venture firm and see if we can make it into a startup.

I think that's going to be my next step is maybe we could actually build this as a startup, start using it and I venture capital firms in their documents can incubate a company. You can actually form a company and like Sax did that with his was it glue his AI based version of Sachs uh you know so you can put a couple of million bucks in a $300 million fund let's say towards an internally baked uh company. In fact, I think Snowflake was an internally baked company inside of a venture firm, which is incredible.

Then, how does it work? Well, the founder of the venture firm might take 50% ownership. They might give, you know, 10 or 20% ownership to their LPs for having put up the seed money. And then they go hire a team and give them 20, 30, 40, 50% of the company. And as long as the investors got first bite of the apple and they got a reasonable valuation, everybody feels very good about it. So, that's what I'm thinking. That's where my heart is at with this.

I I think this could be a public service. >> That's one possibility. I think this could also be done as a social network. Just let it grow. If you lose $250,000 a year in server costs, just let it grow and see if it becomes the next, you know, Reddit Twitteresque kind of thing. And then there's a third option which is I've been thinking what if you put a bounty on a story and you said I would love for Lawn to vet this story in I'd love him to annotate this story.

Uh so it's my story, right? I I wrote a blog post. I would love to get Lon to annotate it. I would love to have this story in the New York Times fact checked for me. And then there's the final piece which is, you know, we have micro one that's doing uh data for LLMs. I think this eventually could have a data component where if you did have people commenting on objects on the web that were important, you could actually say to a large language model company, hey, here's every legal case that got published on the web today and we're just going to let lawyers publicly annotate them and give them some share of the money or some tokens or something. and you use like maybe you give that data to micro one to resell or to any of the data ones or you just make it a public service. >> Well, yeah, it's that vital context that so many LLMs are missing.

They have all of this they have all of this writing in them but they don't have that expertise layer of here's what this is an example of. Here's what kind of writing this is. Here's how this writing could have been improved. Like that's exactly what people are doing on annotated just for >> funsies. Correct. >> Uh all right. Well, this has been an amazing uh round one. Round one is now complete for annotated.com and we will go to round two 15 days, two weeks basically after this airs.

So, whatever day this airs, two weeks from then, the next episode of this week in Startups, we'll have this. So, if we do this on one Monday, it'll probably be two weeks and then a Wednesday, something to that effect. >> Mid mid to late September. We good. >> And uh listen, we did this once before. We did >> um and uh we we gave the money. So what was the first absolutely did it was live commentary AI providing live commentary on a podcast and we had personas like there would be like the Joker there would be fact check it >> most >> I mean it were proof of concepts but it wasn't like this project those the result of the first bounty was a lot of proof of concepts which are good a lot of good ideas but not a shipped product.

What I like about this time is we've now upped it a level. I think all three of these are kind of ready to ship, at least on the web. Maybe not on mobile, but they're ready to ship on the web. In fact, one of them is, or maybe all three are. So, now we've we've heightened the game here, and the tools are getting better. So, this will be our second bounty contest. You can look at all the bounties this week startups.com/bounty orbounties, either of those, plural or singular.

And you can go to annotated.com which explains the contest. All of these rules blah blah blah blah are uh subject to change and it's Jcal's money. So yada yada yada. >> Yeah, we're we're we decide how we want to do it. >> It's the worst nightmare of every founder. You've built a product, everything's working great. Then real users start flooding in and suddenly it all breaks. What a disaster. You need to get it back up and running and you got to do that fast.

You're looking like an amateur. That's why you need a partner like Sentry. Applications can break in many different ways, but Sentry sees everything. You'll get all the relevant details like stack traces, commits, releases, and even the developers who push that problem code in the first place. With Sentry, you're not going to be jumping around between different tools trying to figure out what happened. And Seir, Sentry's AI debugging agent, uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix.

It can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely. Try Seir and Sentry for free. If you're a This Week in Startups listener at century.io/twist, use the code twist for $240 in Sentry credits. Make sure you use that code. Make sure you use that URL, centry.io/twist, so they know your uncle Jcal sent you. >> Uh, I got time for an ask. >> You want to do some ask? All right, we're just going to do one.

I want to do this one. It's from a guy named Johnny Detail. He is living on the streets, Jason. He is a homeless man, but he wants to ask your advice on becoming a founder. Let's play that video. >> Well, come on, man. You guys putting me on here or something? >> I I mean >> Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. I just want to be right context here. >> Last month and a half and I have two startup ideas that are pretty much fully digitally built out.

Um, they have about 700 pages in total, uh, between the two of them. Uh, and, uh, they're ready to make some money, but the only thing is I'm pre-revenue and, um, I'm just getting started. So, my question to you guys is, what challenges do you think, uh, could be foreseeable in the future trying to raise money? Um, and how could I overcome them? And um what is it that investors are looking for whenever investing in two start a guy a founder with two startup companies that are both free for revenue and what are the odds of both of them being funded. >> Okay.

All right. Well, that's uh something I was not expecting. I thought you were doing a joke or a bit or something. Not a bit. We take the guy at his word that he's down in his luck. He's homeless. hopefully has a place to sleep, um, shelter, whatever. But he's written 700 pages. I'm assuming that's like a business plan, a deal memo, etc. That's not going to cut it in today's environment. Step one is to get yourself uh a skill that is marketable and get yourself safely off the street.

Hopefully, there are some places you can go. Uh, hope my team maybe can uh find some resources here for this uh gentleman. I would say job one is, and I I'm going to get mocked for this online, but I'm being dead serious. If you can use AI tools and get a job first and then get a small apartment and stabilize and be hirable for a specific skill, that would be step one before working on a startup. Because if you're not safe and you don't have food and shelter, we got to go with Maslo's hierarchy of needs here and get you shelter and get you food and get you a computer, etc.

I mean, maybe he's using the library. But what I love about this is, you know, uh the gratitude uh and the hutbah and the resolve of this individual. He's homeless. He doesn't have just one startup idea. He's got two and he's ready to raise funding. And I guess he's watching this week in startups. Probably got a mobile phone or something. Not sure how he's making money. Let's go with find a skill, something you can do that somebody will pay for.

Go online, figure out a way to make 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks an hour, drive an Uber, drive a Door Dash, whatever it is. Let's get you stable, safe, and fed, clothed, etc. Get you off the street, get you safe, get a career going. 6, 12, 18 months working, build up a little uh savings, maybe you get to five or $10,000, you got a little bit of cash in the bank, keep your expenses incredibly low. I'm taking this dead serious. >> No, I think it's I think it's a serious question.

I >> I mean, I'm I'm taking the person at good faith that this is like not a put on or something. Maybe I'm I'm getting punked, but I think >> this would not be >> safety, security, skill, >> you can get a job door dashing. I know it's like hard and arduous work, you you know, but you can make 20, 30 bucks an hour if you hustle. Uh, and let's get you safe and secure. Whoever this person's family is, if he has family, you know, some people don't actually have a lot of family, etc.

They're kind of alone in the world. People get estranged from their families, yada yada. But let's get this uh young gentleman a job safe. There'll be time for startups. Once you're safe and secure >> in your own place, you rent a room somewhere. Yeah, >> I wish him the best of luck. >> That was my thought, too. I think the answer to his direct question is how likely is it am I that I'm going to get funded. Not not very likely.

Just and not because of anything personal, just because it's very hard to get funded for your first startup. It's a moonshot. I would say, yeah, exactly what you said. The smart thing would be get a get a job, get a small apartment, get off the street, and then start building the future and coming up with the big ideas. Uh, I think that's the correct order of process here. >> I I think this person really has a chance to succeed.

I just want to put it out there. I think if you have the hutbah when you're down on your luck like this to be thinking, "Hey, man, I'm just going to be able to start a company." Like, that's a level of audacity that is super inspiring. I don't know how this person is down on their luck and homeless, but I'm not making any judgments here. I'm rooting for the person. And there is uh this thing called the pyalonian effect.

Remember the what was it? Pyalonian was a book or a play and then it became a movie play. George Bernard Shaw the the famous play. Most people know it better. My fair lady is the very famous version that was rewritten based off of Pig Malian. Same story. >> And there's like a con there's a condescending version of Pig Malian. Oh, I'm some rich affluent person. I'm going to take this person off the streets. I'm going to, you know, do uh, you know, whatever.

But the pygmalian effect was more of a a psychological effect. They did a study um, uh, on self-fulfilling prophecy. I remember this when I was at form uh, doing was a psychology undergraduate. The pyon effect in the this context, not the movie or play, but inspired by it is the expectation of the person can determine their own belief in themselves. Let that sink in for a moment. So if society expects this person to succeed and maybe people in the industry expect them to succeed, hey maybe they will.

Maybe they'll say, you know what, if people think I can do this, well, f yeah, maybe I can. I say I think you can do it. It's never been easier to be a startup founder. >> But let's also be realistic. Uh I'm I'm very concerned about the safety on the street of, you know, individuals who are homeless and the circumstance under which he got to be homeless. Could be no fault of his home. could be his own fault, could be anything in between.

So, yeah, >> I'm rooting for this person and um I hope that this feedback gives them some hope and uh continues for them to drive. Don't worry about venture capitalists right now. They're not going to fund you if you're homeless. You may get like a condescending thing here where somebody's like, "Oh, I would like to be the angel investor or seed investor who took him from homeless to a, you know, Y Combinator to a billionaire." I I don't want to get into that because I think that's condescending and not realistic long.

Yeah. >> A person who's on the street, the number one thing is safety, a job, and food and clothing and healthcare. >> Go get Go get the Walmart job. Do that for a year. Get yourself a little place. Get yourself stable off the street. That's when you start thinking about, oh, okay, now it's time for me to start getting my startup together. I I couldn't agree more. But the attitude is what impressed me that this is a homeless person.

They're not asking for a handout. It's not self-pittitying. They're not giving us a wo is me story. He goes right in to like, "And I've got two startup ideas. I need people to hear, not one." >> It's like it's the the speed at which we go from, "Hey, I'm living on the street. By the way, here's my companies." I I was impressed. >> Well, let me ask you this. When you were uh at the homeless shelter around the corner from the offices, did you run into this individual and identified you as homeless? >> I did not.

And that has not happened. >> The greatest story ever. This guy looks like he could be a startup founder. And Lon was walking to his car. He's got a nice car. I pay him a decent salary here. He's got a decent car. Going to his nice house. Got a house. >> Dog. He's doing great. He walks by the homeless shelter. >> Uh yeah. >> Guy says, "Well, there's a line because in the morning, >> come on in. We can help you anyway you want." He's going You went full hobos out.

That's why you he was making a place for me in line. He's like, "Hey, come you could come sit right here." I'm like, "Actually, I'm on my way to my job. Thank you very much." But that's okay. >> Actually, it's okay. >> I am not a >> It's a little bit of a wakeup call, folks, when when the home. But you got to admire my my uh my love of comedy that I immediately came in and told that story. A lot of people would die. Take that to their graves.

Not me. I couldn't wait to get on camera and tell. >> People think Lawn, you know, they see Lawn on with his custom suit and shirts. He's manicured well. But imagine him if he's wearing like a t-shirt from the 80s he's had for 30 years and he's wearing a pair of stained jeans and you could make this mistake. He could be hobo. I call it when Lon's in hobo style or when he's in >> um what was in the who's the guy in Homeland with the big beard like >> Manny Patinkin.

Mandy Patinkin. >> Yeah. When you're in your Manny your best look is Manny Patinkin. You put hobo style beard. >> He's got the big but he slicks the hair back. Mandy Patink. >> That's what I told you to do. You have to Mandy Patank in this. You got to get a little hair gel going cuz the beard with the hair gel and the suit. You look exactly like Mandy Patank. >> And he's got good looking from Homeland. >> Look at this.

I need to get a picture of Lon and him side by side. And look, >> he could be my dad. He's on the GLP. >> Yeah, he looks a lot >> and he's on the GLP one. Look how skinny he is. >> Of course he is. Yeah. Look at that. >> That looks like you. We should get you a pair of readers and see how >> I'll bring in a picture of Lee Harris, my dad. That that it's it's a very strong likeness. He could definitely be my father made if you take it. >> I think it's a good look for you with the slick back.

See, there is a slick back there. Look at him in the tie. I'm putting you in a tie on the show next week. I'm going to have a tie week for you. I want to see I'll I'll put my tie on, too. >> All right, let's uh Thank you for the question. Okay, great job everybody.