**Why a16z is Betting $7M on Clipping | The Cap Table Ep. 25 🧢 w/ Clouted — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/a16z-betting-7m-clipping-cap-table/ Discussion on why a16z invested $7M in Clipping, exploring AI-driven brand growth, startup culture, and tech scene insights during New York Tech Week. ## Key Takeaways - AI-driven tools like Clipping are becoming essential for brand distribution and content optimization. - Tier 1 markets such as New York, LA, and SF are critical for startup growth due to talent density and cultural factors. - Authenticity and real experience matter in startup and gaming communities, especially when raising venture funds. - Agency work can be a strategic revenue source and a way to gather data for building scalable tech products. - Building distribution and achieving product-market fit remain the biggest challenges for startups today. ## What the video covers - The video features a conversation about Clipping, a viral engine for consumer and entertainment brands leveraging AI to optimize brand identity and content. - Hosts and guests discuss their presence at New York Tech Week and the importance of tier 1 markets for startup success. - They emphasize the role of AI in automating brand management, funnel optimization, and content distribution. - The conversation touches on the cultural differences between tech hubs like LA, New York, and San Francisco. - The guests share their backgrounds in gaming, music, and creative industries, highlighting diverse paths to tech entrepreneurship. - They discuss the challenges of building distribution channels and achieving product-market fit (PMF). - The importance of local market focus and talent density for founders, especially from Southeast Asia, is highlighted. - The video also covers the value of agency work as a revenue driver and data source for product development. - There is a candid discussion about startup culture, venture fundraising, and authenticity in the gaming and tech scenes. - Overall, the video provides insights into how Clipping and a16z are betting on AI to transform brand growth and startup success. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Introduction and Gaming Authenticity Debate 2. 02:27 Overview of Clipping and AI Usage 3. 05:39 Brand Distribution and Audience Signals 4. 08:28 Challenges in Building the Scene and Distribution 5. 11:29 Cultural Differences in Tech Hubs 6. 14:32 Content Creation and Hiring Insights 7. 17:27 Events and Community Building 8. 20:15 Product-Market Fit and Distribution Strategies 9. 23:14 Agency Work and Data-Driven Product Development 10. 29:21 Startup Culture, Fundraising, and Closing Thoughts Answers ## Questions about this video What is Clipping and how does it use AI? Clipping is described as a viral engine for consumer and entertainment brands that uses AI to optimize marketing funnels, build brand identity, and manage content libraries automatically. Why is New York Tech Week significant in this video? The video was recorded during New York Tech Week, highlighting the importance of tier 1 markets like New York for startup growth and networking opportunities. What challenges do startups face according to the discussion? Startups struggle primarily with building effective distribution channels and achieving product-market fit, which are considered the biggest moats and challenges in the current tech landscape. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A Just because you were top 500 on Overwatch or you said like ex-RO league player, you were never a pro. A pro is, like, the definition of a pro is someone who made a living by participating in a tier 2 or tier 1 league. You're lying for the sake of raising venture funds and being cool on Twitter. And anyone who is actually in the scene knows that you're lying. I know you guys are. 00:10 Speaker A participating in a tier 2 or tier one league. You're lying for the sake of raising venture funds and being cool on Twitter. And anyone who is actually in the scene knows that you're lying. I know you guys are. 00:20 Speaker A Welcome to the cap table in New York. Yes, sir. We are in New York. 00:24 Speaker A And if you don't know what the cap table is, cap table is your twice a week um everything update daily. Not daily, sometimes daily on Twitter, right? 00:31 Speaker A And if you don't know what the cap table is, cap table is your twice a week, um, everything update. Daily? Not daily, sometimes daily on Twitter, right? 00:41 Speaker A bring on people who are just doing it so much better than us. Yeah. Experts in the field. 00:45 Speaker A [laughter] Yeah. Everything tech, AI, startups, and whatnot. But, you know, a big part of the show because the fact that E is Jaden and I, we're all in tech, but, you know, we're still learning along the way, which is why we want to 00:54 Speaker A It's a fantastic name. But thank you so much for, you know, having us. And we're here in New York, right? because we're SoCal based, but we decided to come out to the east coast. 01:01 Speaker A bring on people who are just doing it so much better than us. Yeah. Experts in the field. 01:07 Speaker A You know, it's like we are also I guess we're kind of split between NorCal and like SoCal, but uh I guess we're all the transplants this week. I always say, right, you know, just as much as SF needs a culture week, New York has a 01:19 Speaker A Experts in the field. And we have on today Clouded. Yes. Yes. Clouded. We got on Justin and Eric. Great name, by the way. 01:23 Speaker A We are for New York Tech Week. Um we all came specifically for tech week. 01:26 Speaker A It's a fantastic name. But thank you so much for, you know, having us. And we're here in New York, right? Because we're SoCal based, but we decided to come out to the East Coast. 01:38 Speaker A [laughter] We're here on like we're here in like a business trip cuz a bunch of our clients in the community space are here and then uh we came we booked a billboard. I was like, "All right, we're going to 01:47 Speaker A Yeah. As they are also SoCal based. Yeah, we're also SoCal based. So, first of all, thank you for the glaze. You guys are amazing glazers. 01:57 Speaker A of fell. Oh, really? [laughter] But then but then that fell apart and then and then I was just like I still have the hotel on flight. And then these two I didn't even ask them. They were just like we should just go to New York. 02:07 Speaker A You know, it's like we are also, I guess we're kind of split between NorCal and like SoCal, but, uh, I guess we're all the transplants this week. I always say, right, you know, just as much as SF needs a culture week, New York has a 02:13 Speaker A World's Cup. It's the perfect time to come to New York. But you know what? Um, enough rambling and yapping. 02:17 Speaker A tech week, too. So, it's Exactly. Yeah, we're here for New York Tech Week. I don't know if Eric mentioned that. 02:27 Speaker A Yeah. Clouded is a vir viral engine perhaps for consumer and entertainment brands. Um I think you guys also utilize AI in a bunch of ways, right? Right. To optimize kind of the funnel and to build brands identity, content library, 02:41 Speaker A We are for New York Tech Week. Um, we all came specifically for tech week. 02:52 Speaker A Yeah, that's what we that's what we hope to do, right? I mean [laughter] I mean at the end of the day, right, it's like I guess I can go back to like the story of when I was growing up, you know? 03:00 Speaker A Eric and I were talking about it earlier, right? Yeah. Yeah, I know. [laughter] The story is we had no idea. 03:10 Speaker A day jobs and like startups, right? Eric's a creator himself. A lot of us come from like the gaming gaming space. 03:15 Speaker A [laughter] We're here on, like, we're here in, like, a business trip because a bunch of our clients in the community space are here and then, uh, we came, we booked a billboard. I was like, "All right, we're going to 03:26 Speaker A that, you know, when you're a great builder, when you're on to something great, the thing that you should be focusing most on is what you're building. And our idea with cloud is we're building out AI agents that essentially ingest your brand and run 03:36 Speaker A [laughter] do the first week of June." And then it was tech week and we're like, "All right, we're going to just—I was—I was supposed to be here for a client, right? Governance." Yeah, governance ball. But then that, like, 03:48 Speaker A So you give it your budget, you give your brand, you give it your goals, and then it spends and does it for you so you can focus on what you do best. 03:55 Speaker A kind of fell. Oh, really? [laughter] But then, but then that fell apart and then—and then I was just like I still have the hotel on flight. And then these two, I didn't even ask them. They were just like, we should just go to New York. 03:59 Speaker A Okay. Yeah, that's [laughter] I'm very h I'm very excited about this that we have our first Filipino guest on the podcast as you guys know. Talked about Yeah, I have. I've talked about and and you even mentioned you guys are 04:11 Speaker A New [laughter] York. Are you serious? Come on. No. Look, what now? The Knicks are in the finals. Tech week. Governor's Ball. 04:23 Speaker A first or first.5 Southeast Asian company uh in like speedrun and we've been trying to scout more and more people from our our culture from our scene to that come over uh but you know most of our team or our 04:35 Speaker A World's Cup. It's the perfect time to come to New York. But you know what? Um, enough rambling and yapping. 04:47 Speaker A like the you know the place to be right because at the end of the day it's like you know if you are super serious about like building in Texas you have to be in a tier one market right it's like I'll 04:55 Speaker A Yes. Clouded. What is Clouded? Do you want to give a little bit of a—I thought they should. You guys should hype man it. Hype man. You got to go laser. Okay. 05:10 Speaker A are building for a very very specific local market, I always tell local founders in the Philippines and Southeast Asia that you should spend some time in, you know, like cities where there is a mass density of talent in your space. 05:22 Speaker A Yeah. Clouded is a viral engine, perhaps, for consumer and entertainment brands. Um, I think you guys also utilize AI in a bunch of ways, right? Right. To optimize kind of the funnel and to build brand identity, content library, 05:32 Speaker A they want to occupy that space? That's a that's a really that's a really good question cuz like I I call myself a uh anthropologist. 05:39 Speaker A audience signals, all these great things. Essentially, it is the best way to distribute your brand, your company on the internet today. Or at least that's what they aspire to do and that's what they are in the process of doing. 05:51 Speaker A LA, New York and SF right LA is defined or the defining question is who do you know? That's like the main currency question in like LA. In New York it's where do you come from? What's your pedigree? like what stuff do you already 06:04 Speaker A Yeah, that's what we—that's what we hope to do, right? I mean [laughter] I mean, at the end of the day, right, it's like I guess I can go back to, like, the story of when I was growing up, you know? 06:10 Speaker A Uh Singapore is very very similar to New York because Singapore is like the finance hub of Asia. 06:14 Speaker A We're not—we're not going to go that far, [laughter] right? But ultimately, the root and identity of many people of our team is we're all from, like, the creative space, right? A lot of us are music artists, managers on top of our 06:21 Speaker A and like YC Batch right now, they have there's more Australian accents now in [laughter] I've been studying this. It's like you can you can look at like the recent like Founders Inc. like uh recap videos or YC recap videos and you can see so many 06:34 Speaker A day jobs and, like, startups, right? Eric's a creator himself. A lot of us come from, like, the gaming gaming space. 06:45 Speaker A the ways you started was throwing like a 20,000 person festival EDM festival in Manila. 06:50 Speaker A And one of the biggest problems we've always seen when it comes to, like, when you're coming up, right, is that a lot of people actually have a message worth hearing, but they never get the exposure and attention they do. So our belief is 07:01 Speaker A I mean the gist of it right was that uh what's this? We were we started a festival about like yeah 2 years ago because I just moved back from the US. I went to college in the US most of my life in the 07:12 Speaker A that, you know, when you're a great builder, when you're on to something great, the thing that you should be focusing most on is what you're building. And our idea with Cloud is we're building out AI agents that essentially ingest your brand and run 07:18 Speaker A Really? But Filipinos love EDM bro. Well, at least in America because I put the whole country on it. 07:26 Speaker A organic marketing campaigns for you across clipping, UGC, fan accounts, and paid ads as well. Yeah. 07:30 Speaker A The Philippines will will [laughter] say that by the way. It's like it's like uh like as voted by the people as voted by the people. First of all, check comments on some of my real but it's uh it's I 07:39 Speaker A So you give it your budget, you give your brand, you give it your goals, and then it spends and does it for you so you can focus on what you do best. 07:49 Speaker A or third spaces for people to like come together right because the inherent difference between a festival and like a club right is that festivals are more of a social third space than a club where people you know just go out get wasted 08:00 Speaker A One thing I want to highlight as well is, I mean, [music] we Philippines, right? 08:10 Speaker A wholesome whatever and uh wholesome to a degree. Yeah. To a degree. Something to a degree. And uh I wanted to bring that energy and that like like space back [snorts] home, right? And it's it all started with like my younger 08:23 Speaker A Okay. Yeah, that's [laughter] I'm very, h—I'm very excited about this that we have our first Filipino guest on the podcast as you guys know. Talked about. Yeah, I have. I've talked about and and you even mentioned you guys are 08:28 Speaker A But it was really difficult to like get that thing started, right? Because there was no distribution. There was no like I guess basis for a scene there. We had to convince a lot of like DJs to like come 08:38 Speaker A rent, like, what was it, the only Filipino company that is in Speedrun VC? Hopefully not the only one for long. You know, I think there's, like, there's more and more Southeast Asians in Speedrun. I think we were the first or 08:48 Speaker A people? Now the problem was we were a you know like we were like three or four people working on the festival because at the time we were still working on clouded's original version of the startup which we were building like AI 08:59 Speaker A first or first .5 Southeast Asian company, uh, in, like, Speedrun and we've been trying to scout more and more people from our—our culture, from our scene to that come over, uh, but you know most of our team or our 09:11 Speaker A we saw the rise of clipping. We saw the rise of like these UGC accounts. Uh you know, we saw that like the best funnel is to like, you know, take all these organic content once you test it out and 09:19 Speaker A company's roots are in the Philippines, right? Most of our team started together in our last startup back in the Philippines and then when we decided to do Take Two, uh, we were like, yeah, [ \_\_ ] it, let's do it in America, let's do it in 09:29 Speaker A things, but at the end of the day, when you have a uh even if you drop the best marketer or the best uh I guess someone doing good at like marketing operations into something that they have zero context or zero knowledge on, then it's 09:42 Speaker A like the, you know, the place to be, right? Because at the end of the day it's like, you know, if you are super serious about, like, building in Texas you have to be in a tier one market, right? It's like I'll 09:56 Speaker A ran right we ran a lot of like smaller shows up until that point and we had access to a lot of our artists data they share that too we had a lot of like market data from the Philippines and we 10:04 Speaker A take, you know, it's like there's, there's, uh, there's LA for certain startups, uh, San Francisco, New York, and arguably London and argue London [clears throat] and, uh, Sydney are for certain markets as. So at the end of the day, even if you 10:16 Speaker A from a fourperson team granted like only one person was like working in marketing We were able to run a massive operation uh to essentially sigh up people into believing EDM was a much larger genre than it actually was in the first place. 10:27 Speaker A are building for a very, very specific local market, I always tell local founders in the Philippines and Southeast Asia that you should spend some time in, you know, like cities where there is a mass density of talent in your space. 10:35 Speaker A [laughter] I I you invited a lot of my friends out too like like Jimmy Fred and all them. I don't know where my invite was but damn this year. This year I was at your turbo party like a couple 10:47 Speaker A Well, I mean, I like that a lot. Like, break it down, though, 'cause you—you mentioned five cities. What is each city the best at in terms of what you're building at? What, like, what is the best wedge for everyone to be building in if 10:54 Speaker A I was like you you you would have actually been at the end if we ended up meeting dude. 10:58 Speaker A they want to occupy that space? That's a—that's a really—that's a really good question 'cause like I—I call myself a, uh, anthropologist. 11:04 Speaker A I want to talk about his DJ career actually cuz we were dro we dropped that. He like the music stuff but like Yeah. Why are you in the music scene? 11:10 Speaker A [laughter] Okay. I fashion myself as an anthropologist. So this could be a TED talk in and of itself because, you know, every city in every city in, like, I guess these, like, tier one markets, right, are all defined by a question particularly 11:19 Speaker A you're building with your company like how are the marketing strategies similar how did it inform some of your strategy with clouded and kind of where does it diverge as well yeah so I think like the entire uh story 11:29 Speaker A LA, New York, and SF, right? LA is defined or the defining question is who do you know? That's like the main currency question in, like, LA. In New York it's where do you come from? What's your pedigree? Like, what stuff do you already 11:39 Speaker A very neurotic when it comes to my hobbies in that I always tell myself I set a start goal and an end goal in terms of like uh I want to get really really good at it then drop the hobby 11:49 Speaker A have? Yeah. And then in San Francisco, for better or for worse, it's what do you know, right? What, what future are you trying to build? 11:58 Speaker A get different perspectives on the world right and uh you know I always knew that in the second startup I wanted to be more deeper into like the music and like uh creative industry right and I was like what better way understand the 12:10 Speaker A Uh, Singapore is very, very similar to New York because Singapore is like the finance hub of Asia. 12:21 Speaker A you know? Uh, it's uh, so I was like, what is something that I am potentially good at, right, as someone who's like classically trained? It's like it's like DJing. It's like music, right? Yeah. 12:30 Speaker A Uh, Sydney is a lot more similar to, like, San Francisco. There's a lot of, like, really good, like, builders there. That's if you notice a lot of the Founders Inc. 12:43 Speaker A their vision for the world to be heard and seen, right? But I think the biggest thing that I've actually learned is that a lot of like I call it consumerf facing marketing is actually inherently similar across different fields, right? Yeah, 12:55 Speaker A and like YC Batch right now, they have there's more Australian accents now in [laughter] I've been studying this. It's like you can, you can look at, like, the recent, like, Founders Inc., like, uh, recap videos or YC recap videos and you can see so many 13:09 Speaker A actually like very very similar. So I started my DJ career uh about like a year or so ago and then my goal was to like play EDC. Uh so it's like working on that one. I mean I I I technically 13:20 Speaker A people from down under coming down. Shout out to all our Australian KB friends. Awesome. Oh, that's amazing. Well, I want to take a step back though. Okay, so you mentioned that you guys had started in the Philippines and 13:31 Speaker A mostly for tech week, but I randomly ended up getting booked for like this club called Marquee. 13:36 Speaker A Oh yeah. Pretty which is pretty fun. It's like thank you Mark for paying for my trip. [laughter] Uh but yeah, I mean it's like at the end of the day I realized that like whether you're a creator, you're an artist, 13:45 Speaker A whatever, you're essentially the CEO of your own company, your CE of your own brand and everything, right? And a lot of these artists, even founders, right? 13:52 Speaker A everyone that we work with rather than like just caring a lot about like someone doing the work in terms of like all these AI CMO type companies, right? 14:00 Speaker A Because capability is one thing, but the biggest thing the decision makers and these brand owners care about, right, is being seen in the way they want to be seen. 14:08 Speaker A Yeah, dude. I love the fact that you guys are mirroring each other right now. 14:12 Speaker A [laughter] So cute. Yeah. No, I think that's such an important thing I think and I like uh we know very well like just like working in the UGC space often times people want to um coach and curate and you know they ask 14:23 Speaker A like I think it's a lot of time the UGC creators who are like doing it for 2 months they get some success and like oh like let me coach now and it's like dude it's not the same like the best like 14:32 Speaker A every time like I'm hiring or maybe you as well like I always ask like have have you created content how long have you created content and I don't necessarily think they have to be like a Mr. beast. 14:43 Speaker A All right. Or like a Nick Devanni. But I just think you at least got to have some skin in the game though, right? 14:48 Speaker A For sure. Yeah. You need to be able to create. It's different than like I don't know. I always feel like reading off a script is much easier obviously than like creating your own content, creating your own brand, creating your 14:55 Speaker A own image. And a lot of people like they get lost in the sauce sometimes, especially around marketing. Um I I want to go back sorry, [clears throat] but I want to go back to this like festival strategy and marketing 15:06 Speaker A strategy. How did you actually do it? I know you kind of explained that like, hey, like we convince like people in the Philippines that to like EDM, but like what did you actually do? Like what were the thousands of how do you do that? 15:17 Speaker A I I love talking about this. So it's like we can kind of break it down to different buckets. So first of all it's we we ended up get like it's similar to like I guess like the US like that's why 15:25 Speaker A when I say like app marketing festival marketing a lot of these marketing tactics are if you look at the actual fundamentals of what they are right it's actually quite similar at its core in that we similar to like how there's 15:36 Speaker A like us you manage UGC programs right we ended up uh gathering like a 100 high school and college kids across like across different I guess like p center uh concentration of pockets so we had uh you know this university district that 15:50 Speaker A university district, this high school district, we had like essentially like five to 10 in each like major district in like the core regions of the Philippines. And we basically uh you know had had a coach for that to we had 16:01 Speaker A like uh we were looking at like whatever viral formats were working in like the US for all these like uh you know sad Asian sad [laughter] the sad Asian uh my people the sad Asians uh and then we we 16:12 Speaker A we had them iterate on it weekly, right? So very very similar to like how a lot of these like mag and then what uh and then what we did right is that the best performing videos then we ran a pod of like 300 clippers 16:25 Speaker A to basically take that best performing creative and then remix and redistribute that at scale right so now you have like a really low blended CPM and max reach there so the UGC people were for engagement and then the clipping was for 16:36 Speaker A the awareness side and then the best performing stuff we then automatically promoted to like paid ads right you started with the UGC And then you you clip the UGC. 16:46 Speaker A Y Oh. And then and then the winners obviously you put on the winners. Wow. 16:50 Speaker A That's really interesting. That's amazing. I've actually like I haven't really heard about people clipping UGC. 16:54 Speaker A I haven't heard that either actually. Yeah. I didn't know. Content's inherently a little bit longer. 16:58 Speaker A Yeah. Usually like it's like usually like a minute. It's like a minute 20 cuz like you're trying to showcase like a lot of footage of the festival, stuff like that. When we say clipping, it's more so like taking existing videos like 17:08 Speaker A like remixing them slicing together. I say clipping in a loose term. I call it more redistributing in that case, but trying to trying to standardize the verbiage for our kind of like when you're posting to trial rules, you like iterate a little 17:19 Speaker A bit as duplicate content. Wait, wait, so I'm curious. So you were talking about festival content, but what festival content were you using before the festival? 17:27 Speaker A We did other events, right? Yeah, we did like smaller like,000 person festival was essentially like I guess like the big the biggest event we've done. We did like so just to give people context on like terms and like 17:38 Speaker A the rave scene, right? So there's uh there's like smaller like local gigs, they're called shows. Then there's like larger 1,000 to 3,000 person shows. 17:47 Speaker A They're called massives, right? That's at like if you're if you're an oldie and like there, you'll appreciate this. And then, you know, it's only really a festival when it hits like, you know, like 6 10,000 person. So we ran gigs, we 17:58 Speaker A ran massives, and then we we built up a lot of like footage from that, right? 18:02 Speaker A And then obviously it's like uh you found PMF. Uh I like to think so [laughter] because there is a saying in the rave scene. 18:08 Speaker A It's like, you know, you lose money on your first three shows. So, people always ask the question, right? How little money did you lose for the first couple times? And we lost as as little money as possible. Enough to survive 18:19 Speaker A Zed, which is great. I mean, which is great, but at the end of the day, it's like you love Zed. I love Zed. 18:25 Speaker A Thank you. It's like I love Zed, too, dude. [laughter] You're honorary Filipino. Thank you. 18:30 Speaker A Uh but basically right one of the things that we also kind of did which is like you know we don't do that anymore but uh because we didn't have as much festival footage of like big festivals we actually ended up like clipping against 18:42 Speaker A like US festival videos. I mean [laughter] wait so when I say clipping it's like we actually were clipping against like us like like you know like long set videos like 1 hour boiler rooms the boiler room stuff like that and then 18:53 Speaker A we just like told people oh this is this is our festival. I was like [laughter] first of all we don't do that. First of all we don't do that anymore. we have enough footage of our own. Uh but you 19:01 Speaker A know we we we cuz at the end of the day right there was basically zero distribution of like rave culture and rave content in the Philippines right never reached the algorithm of the Philippines. So what's the only way we 19:11 Speaker A we take that we have other people you were kind you were laring for profitability. 19:15 Speaker A There you go [laughter] for the culture. That's good. Sometimes our our friends will be like post it up at like a really nice restaurant and we'll just screenshot the story. [laughter] Yeah. 19:26 Speaker A No. So I was like, you know, I never really say that is the festival. I say this could be the festival. [laughter] That makes sense. [laughter] If we all come together and the event and pay Justin $250 then 19:42 Speaker A I like I mean Eric has Eric has a lot to say about like this kind in terms of like I guess like destination making people feel something building a world. 19:51 Speaker A I mean one of the other things we did too is uh what we call influencer seating. So a lot of like influencers don't love posting on their own page. So what we'll do is we'll actually capture content with them and then run that 19:59 Speaker A through clipping because it actually effectively is like 1/5 the cost for brands and for our festival. It's like oh these people are going to go and we can like maximize there too. 20:08 Speaker A I mean y'all too as people who have like found PMF and like you know do a really good job in this gorilla like marketing tactic. I think a lot of founders are still trying to attempt that in their 20:15 Speaker A own way right. That's like I mean the biggest question for everyone is do you have PMF? How are you like what's your distribution? Like distribution is the biggest moat now. I mean like what is your biggest advice for any founders and 20:26 Speaker A people watching this that like are trying to replicate that success y'all have had? Yeah. And also on top of that hot take, do you think it's better for companies to try to do this all in house? You think it's better for them to go to 20:35 Speaker A agencies? You might be a little biased, but I do want to hear your I mean it's like we we always have we actually like so we operate on two sides, right? We have our managed service side and then we have our we 20:43 Speaker A have our managed service side and we have our tools side in terms of like a platform for people to like run this in-house. So I always say the answer is actually like very much subjective and I actually tell a lot of people right that 20:53 Speaker A our managed server side may not be for everyone especially especially because like we are specialized in like the entertainment consumerf facing and especially like the music scene right if you're trying to do like a B2B company if you're if you're finding what I call 21:07 Speaker A content market fit I often actually tell a lot of like founders or people that we try to work with is you should actually learn to do this yourself first you should actually try doing this in-house yourself first that's my hot tech 21:16 Speaker A there's going to be a lot of people especially especially in like the UGC marketing scene in general. Uh people who unfortunately don't have the comfort of venture money to experiment in terms of they're going to say like hey you 21:27 Speaker A should like hire an agency from the get- go. You should hire managed service from the get. I actually tell people if you're finding content market fit then you should really really really try doing it inhouse. And uh the only time 21:39 Speaker A you should really bring in a managed service, right, is when you've hit a certain point, when you've had content market fit, when you've had like uh I guess promise market fit, what you're selling, right? Because at the end of 21:48 Speaker A the day, marketing and especially managed service type of marketing, right, is what I call is anyone here Chinese? 21:54 Speaker A I'm Chinese. Okay, [laughter] perfect. Like there's this like Chinese term called like jao. It's like basically it's like uh I don't know what that is. 22:00 Speaker A Chinese basically like it's like Chinese for like po pour oil to the fire, right? 22:06 Speaker A in the sense of [clears throat] like a lot about like bringing on like one of like our manager services, right? Is [clears throat] that it's an it's a multiplier. It amplifies something you already have, right? So it's garbage in 22:16 Speaker A garbage out, great results in or great input in, great input out. If I'm 40xing or 100xing something that's like already at a 50, right, then that's a lot. But if I'm 40xing something that's like 0.1, then Oh, yay. 22:29 Speaker A Yeah. Oh [ \_\_ ] Okay. You know what? You know what? Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] That's pretty good. 22:34 Speaker A But it's it's it's ultimately it's like that's my actual like hot take, right? My hot take is that like we provide both the tools for people to do it like in house, white label on their own, but also like the managed service side as 22:44 Speaker A more of a multiplier. Obviously, it's like we make the most money from our managed side, right? But at the end of the day, I always tell founders that you should try to do it inhouse or at least try to learn the early stages because 22:56 Speaker A it's you doing it yourself that only then you'll really learn what you're doing. No, I agree as well. 23:02 Speaker A Yeah. I I have a question regarding um it's kind of related um to like the agency stuff. Um so you guys raised a seven million seat. I'm curious if there were any challenges as you were raising um to people I know you guys have like a 23:14 Speaker A tech team as one like a whole like you know you guys are building tech as well with the company but were there people like trying to pigeon hole you one is like an agency like oh this is just an 23:20 Speaker A agency like how will this scale cuz traditionally I know it's it's harder for agencies to raise venture back money because you know it's harder to scale that to the you know the size of a company that most people think and two 23:31 Speaker A uh so that's the first question like what did that happen in your raising process but two do you think that is going to be the way for forever or do you like we'll see venturebacked agencies over time because I mean I just 23:42 Speaker A feel like I have I mean both these two run agencies there's just so many agencies going around. Do we think that's going to become like a play and those are able to reach profitability oftent times a lot quicker than a lot of 23:51 Speaker A these AI companies that people you know B2B companies. So I'm just curious if that's something you think that can can happen in the future. 23:57 Speaker A Yeah it's like yeah three pieces to this right. first is that we did run into those issues when we were like kicking off like the fund raise, right? 24:04 Speaker A Especially because like when we did start, a lot of it was like very mental to begin with, right? Because the way this actually started was a lot of the DJs and artists we work with at the festival were like, "Holy [ \_\_ ] you guys 24:14 Speaker A are really really good at what you do here. Could you guys like do that for me?" Right? So, we ended up signing on a lot of the people that we work with like, you know, Elenium, a lot of like 24:23 Speaker A our DJ friends were like, "Holy [ \_\_ ] you guys are pretty good at what you do." Yeah. 24:26 Speaker A And then that actually what signaled us to just casually name dropping like one of the biggest [laughter] I mean it's I I do have a propensity for like uh like randomly meeting like cool people. It's like it's surprising to me 24:38 Speaker A that this is the first time meeting Eric for example because it's like I would have thought I would have met someone as cool as him. 24:43 Speaker A Like you guys were at the Turbo party so surprised you guys meet. You guys were at [clears throat] Turbo Party. 24:48 Speaker A Three Turbo Party. Three. I worked for Turbo. I was there at one party. I wasn't even there for three then. 24:53 Speaker A But going back it's like in terms of uh that stuff, right? We were pigeonholed because like at the time we didn't have a lot of like our uh tech pieces built out, right? Like our moderator for all of like the submission stuff, our like 25:03 Speaker A second brain for all that that data play stuff, right? But uh you know as I think there were three things that like uh let us like you know I guess it was like I I always say this is kind of like the 25:15 Speaker A longest fund raise I did. It took us three weeks. It usually takes me a week. 25:18 Speaker A It usually takes me a week but took me 3 weeks. I was like uh that's first world problems unfortunately. [laughter] But uh you know it's like I I think we we actually like onboarded like a really cracked like CTO after the first week 25:28 Speaker A while we were fundraising and then uh a lot of our tech pieces actually came together while we were fundraising because it all happened in flux, right? 25:35 Speaker A We literally killed the last version of the company to go all all in on this as we like ramped up, right? Uh but we were definitely pigeonholed into like the services space to like begin with until we really like uh I think it's a a lot 25:49 Speaker A of it is about like showing how the agency piece is not only a revenue driver but it's also how you get into rooms where you can actually get the data that you need to build out like the fun product because at the end of the 26:00 Speaker A day right a lot about like marketing is also getting like first party and proprietary data but if you can't get in to these places where the data lives aka like tier one artists tier one brands, right? Then you're never going to be a 26:13 Speaker A it's kind of chicken and the egg, right? Where you're never going to be able to get the data you need if you don't have a wedge into these like big companies too because otherwise you're going to be stuck doing two to 3K like campaigns 26:23 Speaker A that are never going to only not only get you the data that you need but also the revenue that you need to, right? 26:28 Speaker A It's like if you're if you're an agency doing like two to threek campaigns, great for you, but that's not the way you kind of like get to a certain scale, right? So once we like aligned on that built out all this stuff fund raise like 26:39 Speaker A fund raise went pretty nicely but uh even then right there is uh there is still kind of a tax done on like the AI native like services company angle. Uh but my contrarian take right is even if we didn't have this like longerterm AI 26:53 Speaker A play I do think service companies are going to be meta more and more especially as now that like the time to production for tech side has basically gone down to like it's minimal right it's marginal at this point 27:06 Speaker A it's uh we're going to see a shift in capital spending where the lines between venture and private equity are actually going to blur blur where it's like it's like a lot of people are going to be judged not not just by like the product 27:18 Speaker A that building, right? But because like [clears throat] essentially like technology is getting to a point where it's almost just as easy, if not sometimes even easier than consumer goods now, right? Because consumer goods you still have the supply chain stuff, 27:30 Speaker A you have to have the uh you know, all the shipping stuff. It's like like software production cost is like going down. So I would even argue that it a lot of traditional SAS is actually going to be probably valued around the same if 27:42 Speaker A not lower at this point compared to that, right? And we're seeing, you know, VCs like Sequoia, VCs like uh, you know, like the Slow Ventures guy, shout outs to them. Basically playing this like middle line between, uh, they have a 27:55 Speaker A thesis on like AI native service companies, right? And I only think that's only going to kind of like grow, but it's not going to be like traditional venture where you're going to get 40 to 50x multiples, right? 28:06 Speaker A Companies [snorts] in like uh, the VC space, P space, whatever, the private funding space, right? markets are now going to be judged based on their company fundamentals. So your gross margins, your uh you know I always say like labor cost and token costs are 28:20 Speaker A going to be very much like the same bucket of spending too. That's very much more traditional finance. 28:26 Speaker A It's time for actual fundamentals in venture [laughter] actual fundamentals. But I I guess what I'm trying to say is that just with many things it depends. But I do think that there are a lot of like really really interesting takes on 28:39 Speaker A traditional service companies that are AI enabled because AI allows traditional service companies to scale at a scale they never had before, right? I mean a really good example of this are the Corgi guys, right? Like uh because of 28:49 Speaker A because of AI, they've been able to essentially like underwrite and eat up as much of the insurance space more than ever before. And then when you when you unlock that like ability to scale, but also the power of a lot of stupid 29:03 Speaker A venture capital, then you're able to have a really amazing business. Shouts to Cy guys, by the way. It's like they're they're amazing capital allocators. 29:10 Speaker A They became a unicorn in like a week. I mean, bro, no, they're like they're their thesis was super super clear, right? It's like uh AI is going to unlock like AI is going to unlock ability to scale and 29:21 Speaker A build in the insurance space faster than ever before. And you know, so far they've been right. 29:26 Speaker A Yeah. And also more companies too. And there's only going to be more and more of these like you know there's uh Legora, there's uh Corgi. We're we're definitely going to see the lines being blurred more and more between like 29:38 Speaker A service companies and uh product companies. Mhm. For sure. Okay. I want to pivot a little bit because we've been talking a lot but we haven't talked about I think what is a really interesting background. If you're a gamer like you'd probably love this 29:48 Speaker A background. Eric's background. Yes. Like Eric I just want to talk about this. It's going to be crazy. I don't know if you guys I mean you played video games growing up. I don't know how much Eric did. probably chud maxing. But first of 29:56 Speaker A all, you worked on Treasure Wars like way back when, which is one of the biggest like PvP servers on Minecraft. 30:01 Speaker A If you've ever played I don't know if you guys ever played Minecraft. I used to play Treasure Wars. Like I was reading that I was like one of the biggest servers on [laughter] Minecraft. 30:07 Speaker A Like that's insane. 2015. I was ranked leaderboard on Badline. Oo, that's crazy. And then you were you worked at Internet Evil Geniuses, which if you've watched League of Legends or any like like CSGO, like huge like you were gaming brand ambassador for 30:22 Speaker A Discord. You went to University of Texas at Dallas. You were the ma mascot, which was [laughter] crazy. 30:28 Speaker A You were the mascot my mascot. No, no. And then you were the mascot. Am I reading this right? For the Cowboys. 30:33 Speaker A Yeah, the Dallas. [laughter] Exactly. I want to get to this. Uh, you worked at Complexity Gaming. You were I still can't believe you're the mascot. 30:40 Speaker A That [ \_\_ ] ridiculous. You had your own company. Then you worked at social media lead at Riot Gaming, which if you a lot of you people watch play League of Legends, now you're really deep into the gaming space. Yeah, 30:51 Speaker A I want to hear a little bit about your story. I want to hear about the mascot stuff too. How did you get into that? 30:55 Speaker A But like what led you to gaming? Why um why clouded now? Cuz traditionally when I think of clouded at least I don't think of like a gaming company, right? I don't think of a Riot Games or anything like that. Um so if you can just start 31:06 Speaker A from like the beginning like I I want to hear about like the Minecraft days, bro. 31:08 Speaker A Dude, the Minecraft days were kind of crazy. I mean shout out to not having friends in middle school and high school. Like I was just in my room literally playing Minecraft all the time and I just like loved building stuff. I 31:16 Speaker A think Minecraft was like a good example of like how startups are these days is like people that are passionate about it just see it as a platform to just build whatever they want and so I built my first server and then someone's like yo 31:25 Speaker A can I donate and I was just like running the [ \_\_ ] on my laptop and I was like okay sure I can figure out how to set up the version of Shopify for Minecraft started getting thousands of dollars 31:34 Speaker A like over the year and then I like literally middle school uh yeah literally middle school and then it was like freshman [clears throat] year of high school I was like proving to my parents I was like yeah I'm like 31:42 Speaker A getting my first paycheck bro like this is my first job was literally making Minecraft servers And I shut down my server because I was like, "Okay, I'm over it." Like it was like it had its peak. I literally massed mass like sent 31:52 Speaker A a message on Skype to all my contacts. I was like shutting down like Mysterio Realms. Um GG's like, "Thanks for everything." Um one of my friends who like inspired me to make that server was like, "Yo, like you want to work on this next big 32:04 Speaker A project with me?" And so we worked on what was called Mineia. We went out to Minecon. We scaled that. And then eventually that led me to like working on a lot of like Minecraft servers. 32:12 Speaker A Treasure Wars specifically. Dude, Minecraft servers print money. I actually ran it to someone last night that's like making 100k a month on Minecraft servers. Yeah. So, Treasure Wars, our best month, it was like Lachland's Minecraft server. Our best 32:24 Speaker A month, I think, printed 230K. Um, Vickar made a [ \_\_ ] ton of money on servers. And I mean, Hypixel was like its own little empire. 32:33 Speaker A No, Hypixel. Yeah, literally, it's insane. It's insane. And it's so cool because like honestly, like it you can just like create things. 32:39 Speaker A [snorts] And that's when I realized like, wow, you can make you can make stuff online and you can make money from it. So I almost didn't go to college and then my parents convinced me to go to college and then I was like fine. So I 32:48 Speaker A like put the Minecraft stuff on the side. I just like [laughter] a lot of [ \_\_ ] in kind the idea of like learning other perspectives from doing things. I was an RA orientation. I became my school's mascot because I was 32:58 Speaker A like sure like why not? Like I was lowkey like laring too because like [laughter] low key the cheer coach reached out and he was like yo I see you do gymnastics. I was like bro like I just like posted that I went to a 33:06 Speaker A gymnastics club because [laughter] of a guy and I was like I don't have gymnastics background experience but I became a cheerleader. I became the mascot. my senior year, the like Dallas Cowboys emailed him and was like, "Hey, this like mascot's doing Tik Toks." Cuz 33:17 Speaker A like I was just doing TikToks at the time as the mascot, getting millions of views. He's like, "Do you want to be our mascot?" I was like, "Sure, bro." I landed that in one interview. I basically my time at the Cowboys. I only 33:27 Speaker A was only there for a year. My whole goal was understanding how their social team uh 2022 to 203. 33:35 Speaker A Niners that year, I think. Yeah, they did listen to Niners fans. [laughter] We're fans. 33:39 Speaker A Yeah. I mean like look I can appreciate the Dallas Cowboys because like they built like an entire fan like empire and they understood how to market like the most valued sports franchise in the entire world. 33:50 Speaker A And so my whole objective there was just soaking in what that team does to market that and that's literally what I did as the mascot. And did you convince Jerry to pay deck? 33:58 Speaker A No. I Bro, I really interesting people bro like a mascot mascot's so interesting. It's like living a double life. It's like your Hannah Montana moment. But for me, it was always a side quest of having fun and I guess like 34:09 Speaker A being the face of a brand and like seeing that perspective of marketing, the biggest brand. 34:13 Speaker A Yeah. Yeah. It's [laughter] crazy. No, no. I mean, he makes a great point cuz I I haven't really thought about it like that. They they truly do have like a media empire, too, with the Dallas the the cheer girls. 34:24 Speaker A Even their training camp, they don't do their training camp in Dallas. They do in LA, bro. They do it for a reason. 34:28 Speaker A I mean, and like they've always been America's team. Yeah. It's branding. It's branded, not my team. 34:34 Speaker A I still don't understand how American football works. What? What? I'll be real. Sorry. I'm a I'm a I'm a You know how basketball works, though? 34:41 Speaker A No. Okay. You're a soccer fan probably. Soccer fan, bro. No, basketball for sure. No, no, I I like I like actual football. 34:48 Speaker A You like actual You like soccer? We call it soccer in these parts. The World Cup's about to happen. Literally. 34:52 Speaker A It's uh what's this? Fin Finally, it's going to have its uh 5 minutes of the spotlight in uh for for a while here in the US and then disappear again. But it's it's a great time. It's a great 35:01 Speaker A time. I'm a Chelsea fan. Okay, same. Oh, there we go. Didn't they just win recently? 35:07 Speaker A Yeah, it's it's better times. Better times. Um I think go back to your question. Why clouded? Me and Justin have known each other from the esports trenches. We actually met over Twitter. We met back in Dallas at Dream Hack. And um I think 35:17 Speaker A for me like I landed my dream job at Riot Games right after college. Um because I feel like a lot of kids are looking at this like if they're playing video games like I used to play League of Legends all the time. I was like, 35:25 Speaker A "Yo, Riot is like the place." It is. I like landed my dream job but I like 6 months in we already had grown our social audience 50% in the year of like what 2024 2025 for the BCT so North 35:34 Speaker A America Valerant and I was like okay I like I love this but like I know this there's something else out there and I think for me when I started my own agency so oh bro I mean I was like so 35:44 Speaker A bold back then basically like this one I'm not going to name them but this one esports company was like we're not going to you know pay you a higher raise like I was like going after like a director 35:52 Speaker A role they're like no so I left made my own agency signed their parent company for double my salary I WAS LIKE, "ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT." SO, I mean, esports companies, like, [laughter] they're just not making money though. 36:01 Speaker A Yeah. No, but that's not the point of esports. The point of esports is to burn VC money. [laughter] The point, dude, shout out Wait, did TSM sell their LCS spot? 36:11 Speaker A Did they Was it TSM? Right. I think I I think I I think I read that the only profitable um esports companies are like 100 Thieves cuz their merch side. [laughter] No, no, there's G2 is also profitable because they know when 36:26 Speaker A Solana was coming up and then they dumped all that Solana when it came up. 36:29 Speaker A So, it's like like shout outs to Purple. Yeah, it was so interesting. Like, um I was at Envy and then one day my LinkedIn updated to Optic Gaming cuz they merged and I was like, you know what, I'll take 36:37 Speaker A the rest I guess. Like you're at Envy. Yeah, I was at Envy became Optic Gaming. 36:42 Speaker A Envy's back again. It was in the VCT. So, I was like, wow, crazy. Um but yeah, why why clouded? I think like for me after like growing a lot of these brands and even doing content myself, I was 36:51 Speaker A like I loved being I mean I just have a PhD. I love like having my like hands on a lot of brands and so I saw cloud as an opportunity to scale that even further. 37:00 Speaker A So not like an agency side but building the technology that like really is going to be the next era of marketing. I think the past 5 years have been brands being like social first like Duolingo. You know you see a lot of these brands like 37:10 Speaker A spamming the [ \_\_ ] out of like short form video content. So you know these brands are hiring internal social teams. 37:15 Speaker A they're being social first and it leads to them, you know, like Dolingo, a lingo job. They made it super cool and they became like a trends setter for the past 5 years with Tik Tok. Now we're going to 37:24 Speaker A be in a distribution first era and I think it's going to be this idea of companies are already having this early adopter like advantage of like doing distribution. So instead of having just an internal team, you know, outsourcing 37:34 Speaker A it or leveraging tech to basically do clipping UGC. So you're scaling your content at the size of like, you know, hundreds to thousands of videos a week. 37:42 Speaker A And I think that's really like where we're going to be going for marketing. Yeah. I'm curious actually. Uh we also interviewed like Jason from Fix It, who also has a esports background. I'm curious if you guys think there's 37:53 Speaker A something to esports in the gaming community that I don't know suits them extra well for kind of this distribution and marketing side of things cuz you know, we can talk about this for for D. We we actually have like we actually like me, 38:04 Speaker A Eric and Jason actually had this like topic of like uh about how all the esports people from like the past era are now like uh have somehow found themselves in not just like the distribution space but also like 38:15 Speaker A startups in general. I think it's because we we all came from the gula. [laughter] We all get to look cool. But it's like uh I always say right a lot of people in the esports space are people who uh 38:27 Speaker A essentially like running your own esports project, right? Or especially people from the the collegiate esports space is basically was basically like running companies with minimal resources and trying to get as much public awareness as possible so you can get the 38:40 Speaker A resources you need from like sponsors, right? Which you know if you look at the parallels to like venture, right? It's very much similar in that you start with no resources. You have to convince all your friends to join you. You have to 38:51 Speaker A convince people that somehow you have you're in a cave with a box of scraps. 38:55 Speaker A It's worth something and hopefully convince a very like very generous benefactor to uh invest in you with minimal hopes of return. 39:06 Speaker A It's pretty similar. I think it's also that competitive part as well like in esports like they're just competitive to the max. I you know what's like also like like a huge parallel we see a lot of like successful founders and people just in 39:18 Speaker A the space they're either like Roblox developers [laughter] or I guess like now like servers in general how I best describe like joining cloud cuz so many people are like why the hell would you leave Riot games? I'm like bro 39:32 Speaker A like clouded to me is like building my Minecraft server all over again. It literally is like bu like startups are like the opportunity of like I prefer people over process not process over people. the amount of time I wasted 39:42 Speaker A trying to influence other people in the org to just do XYZ. I'm like, I'm I'm done trying to explain to people why this is going to work on social and if you just don't get that, like we're just 39:51 Speaker A going to build it ourselves. No, I mean, gaming is basically like like good gamers is like it's like a signal now for VC. Like people be flexing on [laughter] their like Twitter bios like, "Oh, I was ranked top 500 40:00 Speaker A over like being a math Olympian or something." It's like under math olympi is being like highly I have one call out though. There's a lot of these people in like the tech space right now who are flexing that 40:10 Speaker A they were like expro gamers or [ \_\_ ] First of all, you're not a pro gamer. 40:13 Speaker A Like like just because you were top 500 on Overwatch or or you said like exro league player [ \_\_ ] you were never a pro. A pro is a like a different pro is someone who made a living by 40:24 Speaker A participating in a tier tier one league. You're lying for the sake of raising venture funds and being on Twitter. And anyone who is actually in the scene knows that you're lying. I know. 40:34 Speaker A Gamers rise up. Yeah. Yeah. Y'all y'all never in your life were at LCS. Y'all were never [laughter] in Overwatch League. Get the [ \_\_ ] out of here. 40:43 Speaker A As someone who, again, it's like all of us came from like the esports space where we basically made no money. We fought into the goologs. YOU WERE NOT PART OF THE GOOLOG. [laughter] I was like, you're not part of the 40:53 Speaker A goolog. They're trying to they're trying to lar the struggle without ever being in the struggle. 40:57 Speaker A Yeah, dude. No. No. You were you were you were working your fancy fang internship. You were working your fancy fang internship [clears throat] while playing Arams and leagues on the weekends. And just because you had a nice rank doesn't mean you went through 41:09 Speaker A the sacrifices and the goologs we did. It's like it's like rappers who like grew up rich but they they rap like they came out from the streets. 41:15 Speaker A From the trenches. Yeah. [laughter] Facts. Oh, that that's a great point. I know that. Yeah. No, I just think like casting into like a larger like hottake topic. I I do think one of the things I heavily dislike 41:25 Speaker A about the valley indust nowadays and this is true of like a lot of like I call upcoming spaces because people now see being a founder as a badge of honor, right? So now it's like an alternative career path. You know, it's so much 41:37 Speaker A cooler to drop out of Stanford and your startup. So now you see all of these random larer kids in the valley present their credential performative tech bros. Forward being a founder. 41:49 Speaker A Being a founder is the new like McKenzie or the new Fang or the new it's like it's like it's what you're supposed to do. Like it used to be something that it was the path less travel. Now it's 41:57 Speaker A the path that everyone wants to travel is dropping out in ways. I mean I [laughter] I I always say this dude right it's like it I the thing I dislike the most are people who are founders for the sake of being founders because the 42:08 Speaker A whole point of a founder is to solve for problems and help people out right it's not to be a founder and you know honestly my my biggest turnoff on SF Hinge is when I when I meet a guy or a 42:19 Speaker A girl go on a date with them and they say like oh like why are you a founder and they're like oh it's like I love the it's like I love being a founder because I want to be a founder and it's uh and I 42:27 Speaker A I I love you know it's [laughter] like what worst hinge line. Hench had I was like, "What's your hobbies?" You know, I want to know you. I want to get to know you like what like like I want to know like 42:38 Speaker A you know what makes you happy. They're like user centered design. [laughter] No, bro. Like the SF party's like I'm not trying to suck, bro. 42:51 Speaker A Like dude, like like where's the alcohol? [laughter] No, there is there is like alcohol, right? But it's not even the good kind, you know? It's like it's like someone's like what drink do you want? A rum and like they're like rum and coke. I like 43:01 Speaker A first of all it's like high school [laughter] I was like uh unfortunately someone in the nightife scene I'm a gatekeeper as well but it's uh and then you know it's like you know I was DJing at this like 43:11 Speaker A random party in like SF it was like a YC like afterparty and then uh I don't think I'll ever DJ one of those again but it's like uh [clears throat] I I was like mixing right and then uh and 43:22 Speaker A there's this like one dude who like walked up to me and said what's the enterprise value of like DJing yo yo [laughter] bro it's probably high and going up. I think DJing is actually going up. Live events are are coming 43:33 Speaker A back. It's still going to come back. I just think like one of the things and they got mango parties and [ \_\_ ] We went to the mango. We went to the citrus fruit party. Citrus fruit. 43:44 Speaker A Unfortunately, I hang out in normal PEOPLE'S [laughter] we got invited. We were we were in SF for the podcast. We got invited to the citrus fruit party. But essentially, what is So, you know how SF has like all 43:57 Speaker A these like random themed parties, right? I think they're having like a banana party like soon ABG Maxing party will happen. 44:03 Speaker A So like we were with I don't know if you guys know Ununice Lie. She's like kind of popular in space. But um she was like yo like come to this like citrus fruit party with us and we were 44:10 Speaker A like okay I guess it's like 400 p.m. on a Sunday. Like all right let's just do it. 44:15 Speaker A We walk in and it's in theme. So everyone's wearing like citrus fruit colors like kind of like this. 44:20 Speaker A That's pretty cool actually. Yeah. You thought so. Like you would think so. You [laughter] would think so. You would think so. So we walk in. Obviously Jade and I are not in theme. I'm wearing like a black t-shirt. I'm like a tech. 44:29 Speaker A So you guys are from uh like you guys are like uh two B boys from LA basically. 44:33 Speaker A Yeah, we're just we're just two boys from LA just baring as tech bros for that or not even tech just citrus fruit people. I don't even know. 44:39 Speaker A And we walk in until the table at the main table is just cut citrus fruit. It was like oranges or something, right? It was oranges. 44:44 Speaker A That's I actually like that. No, no, no, no, no. It I'm making I'm setting the scene. 44:49 Speaker A I'm trying to be optimistic. Exactly. [laughter] I'm starting high and I'm going to end low. Okay. So we can start with the table. 44:54 Speaker A Those are the darkest darkest. you know, if you know Darkest Podcaster, um, if you don't know, then it's fine. It's a guy. It's a guy. Yeah. Pretty handsome guy, honestly. But, um, kind of. 45:02 Speaker A Anyways, we walk in, there's no alcohol. Like, that's the biggest thing. Okay. First of all, there's no alcohol. It's a party. 45:07 Speaker A It's at like there's probably like what, 20? No, probably way more. 100 people there. 50 people there. A good amount. 45:12 Speaker A Like, the ratio you said? It actually wasn't too bad. It wasn't too bad. I would say like 60 40 men to female, which is not bad. 45:18 Speaker A Oh, that's actually that's that's actually like That's really good for SF. That's like 30 70 30 guys, 70 girls for SF. 45:25 Speaker A It's not bad, but but so there's no alcohol. Jaden's like feeding the [ \_\_ ] out. Like [laughter] he's like, "Yo, like there's no alcohol." You know, my mom my parents watch this podcast. I think I'm an alcoholic now. I 45:35 Speaker A was [laughter] like, "Jay, do we need to talk?" I'm like, "So Jaden's like feeding like Jaden's like looking in Dorcas's like closets for like alcohol and stuff like we can't find it." And so we just start talking. No, no, but did 45:43 Speaker A didn't he see like a half empty white claw? And he was like, "Yes." [laughter] So like, like that pretend like that Poppy like that like cut. But it's cuz it was so like I needed something like a rabbit animal, right? Like a rabbit 45:54 Speaker A animal. And it's not cuz you're not you're alcoholic. It was just the party was so lame. 45:57 Speaker A And so he's like, "Bro, I need to be drunk for this." He grabs like a white. 46:00 Speaker A He's like, "Yes." [laughter] By the way, the people that host the citrus parties, I wasn't there cuz I had a fever. My bad. However, I want to go to one. 46:09 Speaker A Mango party. [laughter] Now that I actually hear the concept, I think it's a great concept because it's amazing. 46:14 Speaker A You know what I'm thinking? Like like you do like you know like an oldfashioned you have the orange like the peel and honestly we're roasting. We're glad they invited us and we want to go to the mango party. We miss the mango party. 46:25 Speaker A We were there sound great. There's other fruit. We're doing a banana doing a banana party. The issue with the party wasn't like the theme. Like I think that I think is really cool that has themes. I I like like themes like in LA we've 46:36 Speaker A tried to throw some theme parties. It never works out. We've never tried that in our [laughter] throw banana party because a lot of like the Asians in the tech scene are like yellow on the outside and white on the inside. [laughter] 46:48 Speaker A Is that what you're saying? I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell. I just think it's a provocative fruit. 46:52 Speaker A Yeah, it's provocative. But essentially the problem was like every time we would talk to someone, it was like an NB. I would felt like I was in GTA with like [laughter] every single time cuz the first question in SF is never 47:03 Speaker A like, "Hey, what's your name?" It's always like, "What are you building? What are you doing?" [laughter] It was always, "So what are you working on? 47:07 Speaker A what are you building? And it's like, how much did you raise, you know? And it's it's that and it's also like you find out like a lot of those people are like just laring like they're not talking. 47:17 Speaker A They can like, you know, I realized, right, again, we talk about this a lot in the house cuz we come from a scene aka like the music scene and like the gaming scene where it's such a small space that if you do lie and 47:28 Speaker A misrepresent, people will talk about it. A lot of people and it's very like you know, it's like misrepresenting even by a little is seen as inauthentic and fake and like the excommunicado, right? Then I realized in the startup 47:43 Speaker A scene, which is like I guess like not necessarily upsetting, but I mean it is upsetting, but it's like it it's like you can just lie, huh? 47:51 Speaker A People lie about revenue all the time, users all the time. Are you saying it's a griff? 47:55 Speaker A It is a griff psychology. It really is. The thing is like I think like the everyone in SF and like the tech people that like us us that we talk to they're always like why do you guys live in LA 48:07 Speaker A [laughter] like I'm from LA it's home but also at the same time it's like dude like we also care about our like home we're from the Bay Area we moved to LA. 48:18 Speaker A So here's the hot take I have right a lot of people say you have to be an SF and we do have an SF office. I I spend weekdays, Mondays to Thursdays in SF and I spend a week. 48:27 Speaker A Oh, that's kind of sick. [laughter] Shout outs to like uh shout outs to like Frontiers like I told him about that. 48:36 Speaker A I said I wouldn't mind doing that. So do literally but I I always say right that as a founder the found the company actually cannot perform if you are not in your best state and you optimize for what puts you in your best state. If 48:50 Speaker A you're a social individual and you like having a normal life, then uh then you should uh then you should go to where normal feels for you, right? For a lot of people, SF like being like in, you know, like the boiler 49:02 Speaker A room of like of like constantly being on that grind, that is normal for people. 49:06 Speaker A If you're someone who enjoys that double life of like culture and deep work, New York's that place. If you like uh if if you like uh if if you like being in the social jungle, then LA is that place for 49:16 Speaker A you. It's different strokes for different folks. At the end of the day, it's like what is best for you and what gets you in your best mental state is where you should be. 49:24 Speaker A Yeah, I agree. And uh I guess like that said, it's uh you know, I my co-founder, right, like uh my co-founder Adrio, who's Singaporean, and you know, we have this we have this like thing in the I think 49:34 Speaker A it's more of a me thing where every time I quote someone else, I say it in [laughter] their voice. So, uh so he's Singaporean, right? And it's uh and I I like to think I have like a I have like 49:42 Speaker A a great like voice impressions of many people. He does. He does. But, uh what's this? He he has this thing right where in SF the first thing people ask is like uh what are you building what's your revenue uh what's this or like yeah what 49:55 Speaker A are you building what's your revenue who did you raise from they they try to decipher a lot about you because that is how they try to like figure out hey how could we work together right everyone's trying to like a lot it's actually not 50:07 Speaker A done in like bad intention is that they're socially inept [laughter] I'll be like a lot of them are actually good people at their core I'm actually like rather than race beating I'm actually saying here like they're all these people are actually just trying to 50:18 Speaker A be helpful. It's just it's just like no one taught them properly. They never got bullied in college. Uh this is why I think people should actually go to college to get bullied for a couple years to an extent though. Don't you Oh, 50:30 Speaker A I was going to say but in New York it's the actual opposite, right? Sometimes, even as much as I love New York, my co-founder, Adriel, this uh is not the biggest fan of New York because a lot of 50:40 Speaker A people here tend to beat around the bush about what they're doing, what they're like like, you know, stuff is until like the last part of the convo. Oh, what do you actually do? First, they ask it's like a bunch of stuff about like where'd 50:50 Speaker A you go to this weekend? It's like it's it there's there's pros and cons to these things, right? I personally enjoy the New York vibe a lot more, but that's because I'm like a creative at heart. Yeah, Adri startups are measured by their velocity 51:05 Speaker A and [laughter] if the time to conversation and time to collaborate is much longer then you cannot compress the time to the next stage of your company. 51:12 Speaker A [laughter] Yeah, that's well like I mean I I think like SF is like it's the it's the tech climbers LA like you have that in terms of like like the entertainment industry. Everyone's trying to be an actor climbers singer 51:27 Speaker A artist for sure. In New York, you're trying to heal your inner child. Yeah. [laughter] I actually, this is where we should be, guys. We all in New York. 51:33 Speaker A I think to an extent, I also think New York has a lot more of where did you go to college? Where do you work? 51:38 Speaker A And what? It's like that finance. Yeah. It's the more like traditional kind of path. Wait, one more. 51:42 Speaker A Climbers everywhere. Yeah. Just climbs every climbing our own way. Yeah. For sure, right? Um, wait. I actually want Eric does a good impression of one of our good friends who's been on the podcast, [laughter] Arlin. Do you do you guys know Arlin? 51:54 Speaker A Yeah. Yeah. I took him to his first ra [laughter] I took him to stay in bloom. Uh talking about that with Eric Zoo. 52:02 Speaker A Yeah. [laughter] So basically they facetime me in the car there. I know I was there. I WAS I WAS THERE. I was I said hi to you, dude. What the [ \_\_ ] do you mean [laughter] after? Anyway, it's like uh so you I I 52:17 Speaker A always tell to a lot of these like younger founders, you know, I I am their rave uncle and because a lot of them like end up like I guess giving up a lot of their like childhood or college 52:25 Speaker A experience. You know, I I was very similar to them. I was working on my first like VC backstar when I was in college. But I had like older sense who like showed me that it shouldn't just be all it should be all building but also 52:36 Speaker A having fun, you know? So I was like I think these young kids [clears throat] are way smarter than I ever was at their age. But if there's one thing that I can show them, it's a good time. and like uh 52:44 Speaker A as their like unk we brought them to stay in You're not that old man. Come on. You're you're kind of Asian. [laughter] I think Eric has a great time on his own. Eric was Arland though. It's like a lot of [laughter] fun too has a lot of 52:57 Speaker A fun recently though. Recently recently. Yeah. But it's like we took him we took them like uh we took uh Arland to his like first rave there and then I taught him the first lesson. You're on your own. [laughter] So uh so basically it's 53:08 Speaker A like you know stay in bloom we have a bunch of like clients there like we've we've done some like uh shows with Davin in the past and stuff. So I was like I'm doing my ramp cuz I go to raves not I 53:16 Speaker A mean I go to race to vibe but I also go to raves to sell B2B Sass. Okay. We are not the same. It's like uh so I went I went I go to raves to sell B2B SAS as a fire. 53:24 Speaker A Yeah that's the [laughter] thing. It's like I go to Rav to sell B2B SAS. Like that is actually like half my like GTM motion. So I had to go back I had to go backstage to go meet some people do a 53:32 Speaker A couple demos right. I was there for work and I I told the kids first lesson of a rave, you're on your own. Find your find your way back to the meetup spot. Have fun. 53:39 Speaker A Aka find your rave, babe. Find your rave, baby. I I I like the I I I I hope they do whatever they do, but I am strictly professional on the rave scene. 53:45 Speaker A Unfortunately, is my work environment. There we go. No, I mean like can you do the Arland? 53:50 Speaker A Yeah. So like uh you know Arlland from the Zomio. Yeah. Like he he was in LA for the first time with us and he was just like bro like I I [ \_\_ ] love LA, bro. Like oh [ \_\_ ] Like [ \_\_ ] SF 54:02 Speaker A [laughter] could never [laughter] [laughter] I I I think I know what this is. I can't say the line I want to say. 54:27 Speaker A He says it so well, too. I know what you're talking about. Okay. Um I mean we're over time. We are over time. 54:33 Speaker A Over time for surely. Yeah. Um close it. Yeah. So like you know closing out this you know the podcast and what we have a lot of young founders and people trying to make it make it in life, right? And 54:43 Speaker A you know you guys are all very old. Um but I'm going to focus on you two right now, right? [snorts] What is [laughter] like what is like an ending statement that you want to tell the young founders and people [snorts] 54:51 Speaker A in the scenes watching this? Mhm. I mean I was I was striveor back in my day, dude. Back in my day I was a strive too. I think the biggest thing that a lot of people in the startup scene tend 55:02 Speaker A to do and even myself to a degree is that you tend to make your entire work your personality and you know I do think that is like you know when you're younger you could do that right but then 55:12 Speaker A when you get older you start to realize that being a young founder is no longer an identity that you can have and you tend to a lot of people tend to like you know realize like hey I'm no longer that like 55:22 Speaker A child star like I can no longer like you no longer have the excuse or the the excuse or like the privilege of being able to say I can make mistakes and come back uh or I can say like a lot like or 55:34 Speaker A you can do a lot of questionable [ \_\_ ] because you're young, you lose that like you know pass, right? 55:39 Speaker A So I always tell a lot of like younger founders because I've made you know a lot of mistakes when I was like younger too. It's that like uh a have a life outside of your work. It'll help make 55:48 Speaker A your work better and second of all don't get cancelled. There we go. Classic. Yeah. I think my advice is like I spent so many times of like my early careers like trying to prove myself right to people. I was like I was just taking 56:00 Speaker A advice from people that would never do the things I was going to do anyways. So like don't take advice from people that are too scared to do the things that you're going to do anyways. That's like what I would say. And then work hard, 56:09 Speaker A play harder. Like you know I think for clouded like the best employee benefit is like free tickets to raise. Like we'll we'll grind it out during the week and then we go to a rave. 56:17 Speaker A They go have fun at the raves dude. EDC was like backto back sales calls. No way. I like I was uh I go to like we go to raves to sell B2B sauce. 56:27 Speaker A True. Well, dude, well, thank you guys so much for coming on. This has been the Cap Tables interview with Clouded. You can check all the stuff out in the description below. And you know, keep in mind, we're on X, we're on LinkedIn, 56:38 Speaker A we're on YouTube, we're on Tik Tok, we're on Instagram, we're on Google, we're on Founders, Inc., we're on that's about it. 56:44 Speaker A Everything. GitHub, we're [laughter] on GitHub. We're on It's public. We're on No, we're not kick. Topics: a16z Clipping AI brand growth startup culture New York Tech Week venture capital content optimization gaming industry tech entrepreneurship --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/a16z-betting-7m-clipping-cap-table/ — the same content, without the markup. Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back. Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/