- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JCGE80FV0W22BH3MKF72DGE7 (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Ben Ornstein: And so that was your AI, I guess. Leo: That’s so strange. He’s never done that before. Ben Ornstein: Oh, OK. Read.ai for meeting notes. Leo: No, no, that’s my guy. Ben Ornstein: I’ve just never. Did you record? You recorded the meeting. No, no. Leo: It joined the meeting, so I allowed it to join and record. Oh, that’s so weird. It’s never done that before. Ben Ornstein: Thank you for allowing it, though, because I needed that guy, and the reason I need guys, I turn this into a text based case study afterwards. And yeah, you’ll have a chance to review this before it goes live to add edits and don’t push it live when you give me the go ahead. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Okay. Leo: All right. Ben Ornstein: Do you have any questions before we get going? Nope. Okay. Leo: Um, Leo, can you please briefly introduce yourself and your startup? So I’m Leo Ramirez. And I am My background is I attended Stanford, studied computer systems engineering back between 92 and 96. And while I was at Stanford, I started working at Apple initially in sales on campus. And then I became a software developer the summer after my sophomore year. And they kept me on as an intern throughout the next two school years and summers. Had an open job offer to go work at at Apple after I was done with school, but a company in Austin called Trilogy attracted me to come here, and I’m from Texas, so it was nice to come back and be closer to my family and friends. I’ve been in Austin now for 28 years, and Trilogy and a company called Coremetrics, which was a web analytics firm, you know, followed by, by my experience with some microsystems and Oracle. Um, and I came over through that acquisition. So, you know, collectively, uh, through those, those companies, um, I’ve done everything from software development to marketing sales, um, pre-sales. So supporting salespeople, uh, I’ve been a partnerships manager and I pretty much, I really, really excel in, in partnerships. Um, I’ve worked in, different industries from financial services to insurance to technology. And while I was at Sun, and of course, I’ve done a lot of work in big data before big data was really a thing. I’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world, especially through my work at Coremetrics, but also at Trilogy and Sun. And then while I was at Sun, I co-founded my first nonprofit, which was an economic accelerator for economically distressed regions along the Texas-Mexico border primarily. And a few years into that, I co-founded a nonprofit called Mini Donations. That company was a micro-giving platform and social network for good. So today you see a bunch of places that say, hey, round up your purchase in your style. Well, I was the one who was pushing that shit. Many years ago, and everyone told me I was crazy, and now everyone’s doing it. It never really took off. So if I sound a little bitter, it’s because it never took off. And it’s then, just as an aside, that probably has nothing to do with, or maybe it does, because actually this may impact your platform. As a Latino, it is really hard for us to raise You know, we, as a whole, and I’m part of the Stanford program through the business school and in partnership with an organization called the Ladino Business Action Network, LBAN, who was started by a gentleman named Professor Jerry Bores, who is a professor emeritus at the business school. He wrote a book called Built to Last, which is a staple in the business world. And, but his research found start businesses at a rate two to four times greater than every other ethnic group. But our businesses tend to stay small. We don’t know how to scale our business. And part of the reason that we don’t scale our business well, there’s two big reasons. One is, we don’t understand just the concepts of scaling. How do you scale your people? How do you scale your products and services? How do you scale production? But also, how do you have access to capital? Help you, you know, in that growth. And when I was working on both that first accelerator and cast, and then many donations, I didn’t know how to raise money. And when I was trying to ask people, you know, for for capital, you know, we struggled a lot. The first company got a lot of government funding. And that’s it. We got we didn’t get really any donations from from anybody. And then many donations was primarily self-funded, but we did get a couple of donations. But in our whole time from 2008 to 2014, when I shut it down, we only raised about $125,000 for ourselves. That's just not the kind of capital that was needed to help us make the huge impact, global impact that we wanted to have with the organization. So in 2014, I pivoted. And I say this is important because in my journey between 2005 with that first nonprofit and today, a lot of other companies very similar to the stuff that I was working on came about and I tracked all of them. And every single one of them had, I'd hate to say it, white, leadership, and they were getting funding up the wazoo, right? And I kept like saying, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? And I hate to say, right, I don't want to say, oh, it's because I'm Latino. I just, I hate the thought of that. You know, I always, there's something else about me that must be wrong, right? How I pitch, I'm too wordy. My, my decks aren't good enough, right? I never ever, cause I look white. Right. So unless you know my last name, you wouldn't know that I'm Latino. Um, and, and, but as I, over time, I started to learn more and more about how difficult it is for, uh, for Latinos and other people of color to raise money. Um, I then started to think, hang on, like this, this really sucks. This explains a lot. Um, and, and so flat kind of flash forward, I think I said in 2014, I had to wind down Um, that's when I, I started and cast. Um, uh, so in December, 2014, I started working on the business plan by the summer. I was starting to do pitches to angel investors, but at that point in time, they'd been so burned and 98 and 2001, um, that, uh, that investors, you know, just, they wanted more, uh, of a, of a basis. To invest in. And at the time, all I really had was a plan. I had no code written, I had no demo. So I couldn't raise any money, a lot of interest, but couldn't raise any money. And as luck would have it that that March of that year, one of my best friends, Brian Acton, sold his company WhatsApp to Facebook. And so he was an instant billionaire. And of course, I'm sure you know, that's a $19 billion acquisition. So, so I, I called Brian and I said, Hey man, like I’m having a really hard time raising money. And, but I, and he’s like, okay, so why didn’t you call me before? I’m like, I don’t want to be that friend. Like I now have a rich friend and I’m going to ask for money. Absolutely not. Why would I do that? Like, dude, like I’m one of your best friends. Why wouldn’t you do that? So we had this back and forth and he goes, dude, how much do you need? I’m like, uh, three quarters of a million dollars. Fine. Just like that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Like, okay. Leo: So that was my seed funding, which I got in September of 2015. And then the following year, as we were growing my team, I went back to him and said, Hey, it looks like, you know, we’re going to hit a trajectory. We finally wrote our first version of the product. We need to hire a few more people. You know, would you be willing to put in a 1.5 million and he goes, okay. So just like that, like within nine months, I had $2.25 million from just one guy, one angel. Yeah. Um, and he's the kind of angel who, who like, because he's a friend, he said, dude, like you're going to make a lot of mistakes. This is the first time you've ever run a for-profit, uh, company and, and you don't know what you're doing and that's okay. I know it's okay. Cause I've been through there too. He's like, and if I lose all this money, I don't care. Like, I can, like, I mean, the guy could make a million dollars a day, right? So, um, so he's like, it's, it's not the money for me. It's, it's, it's the helping a friend, right? So go figure it out, go experiment with your team, experiment with your market, experiment with the products, you know, make mistakes, learn from the mistakes. And God knows we made a lot of mistakes, uh, that, that year in 2016, um, we had, we had a sexual harassment accusation, and we investigated, ended up firing the guy. The woman quit, her best friend quit, and killed my culture. And it really, really set us back big time. I also made mistakes in hiring too soon. I trusted a co-founder too much. Turns out that during this investigation, he was undermining my leadership. So late that year, I had to fire a co-founder, one of my three, there were three co-founders. Um, so that was fricking hard. And, um, uh, when we finally right side of the ship, Um, uh, I went back to the well with, uh, with Brian and he invested another $500,000, um, to help us kind of move forward, uh, from, from all of the issues we were having. We acquired, not acquired. We were able to close a couple of businesses as clients, um, and just kind of learning. How to use it, what’s not working. But we never quite recovered because we spent so much money with overhiring, so much money with, like our first version of the software was written on Ruby and Rails. Then we dumped it all and rewrote it in Python with a team that was domestic versus foreign. So we spent a lot more money than we should have. They didn’t write it to spec. So I’m, even today, still dealing with the repercussions of bad decisions they made when I told them exactly how I wanted it done. Um, so long, long story short, when we finally looked like we were going to be doing pretty well, um, we hit a big snag and, um, in the form of the pandemic. And, uh, so during the pandemic, I had to make a decision whether to keep the company alive by, by, by myself funding in it. Cause by this point, Brian had said, I’m done. Like I said, I’m going to help you. To the point where you have a product, you have some clients, you’re making some money, and then you got to go figure it out from there, right? Yes, I have all the money to help you. But this is a lesson that you have to learn the hard way, you know, if you need more. So I was able to raise another $125,000 through a few other angels. And that helped. But I also had to spend some of my own savings to keep the company going because back when I was working on many donations, we came up with this new concept that's never been done in charitable giving. And it was a portfolio. So think of traditional charitable giving is like investing in stocks, right? You pick a stock, how much you want to invest, you put the money in, you want ROI, right? You want to make money off of that. And when you donate to a charity, you typically pick one charity, a certain amount of money, and you want social ROI out of Well, what if you could invest in a portfolio, right? Like a mutual fund, but instead of stocks and bonds and annuities, you invest in nonprofits that someone has curated for you. And so let's say you have your own portfolio and on your birthday, you say, hey, instead of giving me a gift, why don't you donate to my portfolio of my favorite causes? And you pick the percentage that goes to every single one of those in your portfolio. So that innovation had never been done before. And we now have provisional patents on that and a couple of other innovations that we have. And when you're talking about philanthropy and nonprofits, these technology companies are all pretty much fricking the same. They're all boring. They do the same thing. It's just different lipsticks on different bulldogs. It's the same damn thing. They're taking old approaches to how people give and then slapping technology on top of it and saying, look, I got the next shiny thing. And every single one of these companies just keeps coming up and just not doing great. The market doesn't, doesn't grow substantially and it's just lacking imagination. And, you know, Steve jobs has always been a, um, someone that I look up to in terms of his, his business, not maybe his personality. Cause I hear he was kind of an ass. I'm not, I'm a servant leader. Um, and I'm a, I'm a highly sensitive, you know, leader as So I'm highly attuned to my team and their needs and their desires to grow. But how jobs approach innovation has always inspired me. And I'm always thinking outside the box and applying best practices from other industries to the world of philanthropy or really anything that I work on. And so we developed a lot of really interesting innovations We reinvented ourselves from a workplace philanthropy platform to an influencer analytics or influencer marketing analytics platform powered by philanthropy. So the idea is that influencers create portfolios of their favorite causes, so like education and the environment and homelessness. They pick the best and brightest organizations. They tweak those portfolios to ensure that every time a fan donates to the portfolio, their donation is optimized for social outcomes. And that's what we're doing now, but that pivot occurred earlier this year. And I did that pivot all alone with a software development team out of Pakistan, who themselves struggled with a pandemic, and I lost my entire team. So I've had to now find a new team recently. And just now, we're finally getting around to trying to sign on some influencers and seeing where this thing goes. With our innovations and the software we have and the team that we have in place, we have a pretty decent valuation. Not great, but when I did the 409A about two months ago, I thought it was going to come back at like 2.5 million or 3 million. So basically, Brian's investment, and that's it. And some others, but it came back at 10.7 million, which is pretty decent. And that's with pretty low estimates with our revenue potential. So my intention is to sell the company in the next one to two years, because my real passion is something that I've been working on for 19 years, kind of in the background. It's another company called Kismet, K-Y-Z-M-E-T. And it's a platform to help people forge and maintain more meaningful relationships with others. It's powered by AI, just like NCAST will eventually, but this is a fully AI-driven platform that learns through your behaviors who you are, what your skills, traits, interests and values are, and can then use what it knows about you and someone else and find your common ground. I think, as my co-founders have said several times, and I keep believing the more and more we see our country and our world broken and hurting and desperate for understanding and respect, I see that if we we, this could be the most important app ever built. It's a bold fricking statement, but I really, really believe it. I think so many of us have relegated ourselves to battling each other online. And it's so, it's so cowardly, right. To, to, to, to wage battle that way. Um, as opposed to let's have some coffee, let's, let's see where you where we have common ground. I don't care if you're complete left-wing, free-hugging liberal, and I'm MAGA, right? We can sit together at a table. We can find the things that we have in common. We love dogs, family, traveling to Belize, whatever, right? I believe that if we establish those types of relationships in person, we have a greater likelihood of solving the divisiveness that we experience today. And that's the core of Kismet. And our beachhead will be for conferences and events. So take your profile and then say, I'm going to go to South by Southwest. And you give the profile to South by Southwest, whatever you wish to share, and it'll generate a schedule for you. It'll share your profile with panelists at a session so that they understand who's in the room and how they might want to orient the conversation around the people that are in the room. It'll be on the lookout for people with similar intentions. So you go to a conference and you want to raise money, you want to find a co-founder, you give it the intentions, and it'll be in the lookout for other people with similar intentions. And when it finds you, it'll say, hey, you know, go talk to Ben. Ben and you have these things in common. These are the three prompts that you can use to open the conversation. And by the way, I found a bar down the street and they've agreed to give you all a 10% discount if you walk in the door. So we want to enhance people's conference and event experiences first. And then being able to take Kismet away, like after you leave the conference, take it home and find common ground when you're on a Zoom call. So build a plugin so you know who's in the room and what you all have in common. Or you go on a date and you want to know what the two of you have in common. Um, and that, that's really all it's a, it's a matchmaker for life if you will. Right. So that's what I'm working on now. Um, we're, we're not ready to raise money yet where we're taking the, it feels like you all are pursuing a run, uh, like a lean, um, approach by doing these interviews. Um, uh, cause that's what we've been doing. We've been talking to potential clients, asking open ended questions, um, just to help us figure out like, are we on the right track? Without leading them on to what we're working on. So that's the long ass history about who I am, what I've done, where we are, and some of my fundraising journey. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: No, it's an amazing story, a really cool journey. I'm trying to figure out how to orient the rest of this, because I have a bunch of questions related to the fundraising. And I could probably answer most of the questions because the well Let let's try to I guess briefly answer a few of these questions Yeah, you know and if my answers aren't aren't useful or repetitive, I mean you can Leo: do with it what you want Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Ben Ornstein: So when you were raising the funding you kind of already told me about the fundraising journey What was the total amount of funding that you raised for it for I guess we'll orient this around MCAS All right, so it Leo: was 2.75 plus 125. So that's 2.9 million, is that right? Ben Ornstein: 2.9, and then you said you got like a 10.8 million valuation? Leo: And yes, we got a 10.7 409A valuation recently. Cool, awesome. Ben Ornstein: That's just helpful to include in that answer. And you have no problem with me sharing that valuation, right? Leo: I can not include it if you- Yeah, I don't include the valuation right now, because I'm in discussions with a couple of companies already about potential acquisition. They probably won't close for one to two years, but none of them have asked us for the valuation yet, and I don't want to kind of let the cat out of the bag. No problem. Ben Ornstein: I won't include it. Yeah, of course. Leo: to use the money for when you were fundraising? Primarily software engineering and marketing, business development, and of course, staff. Makes sense. Ben Ornstein: How did you decide which investors would be a good fit? This is an interesting question for you. Leo: So before I talked to Brian, I had been doing a lot of networking work through my nonprofits since 2005 is when I really started to massively grow my network here in Austin. And so primarily through these nonprofit grant conversations we were having, some of those people that were giving grants were also potentially interested in investing. So I kept a tally of those individuals who were obviously, they got philanthropy and I figured they'd love a platform like ours. So that was one set of individuals. Was also eventually accepted into the Capital Factory Accelerator here. But before we did, I was engaged in events at Capital Factory I met a lot of investors. And every time I met someone that I felt was a good fit, I'd keep a spreadsheet and just, and make sure I knew who they were so that when I was ready to fundraise, I could approach them again. I use AngelList as a tool. And now there's a new one, I forget, it's not new anymore. I mean, it's been around for a long time. Signal, I think it's called Signal. Signal's amazing. But I didn't use that until much later. But again, in the early years, it was mainly my approach was, let's go to some friendlies, people I've met before, especially people who are friends, who I can make mistakes in my pitch, and they'll give me a pass, they'll give me feedback, and then maybe they'll give me money. None of them did. But I kept track of who said yes, who said no, who said maybe, those are the worst. I love the yeses. Well, actually I got no yeses. I got a bunch of noes. And then the maybes were like, eh, I wish we'll think. I was too green to know any better, right? That maybe was a bad thing. So I kept a lot of hope and most of these individuals never turned into investors. And then of course, that led me to Brian. And then that was just kind of easy money, right? From that point forward, after he cut off according to his goals for us, I thought through the list of my closest friends who I felt might be able to contribute anywhere from five grand to 25 grand. That was kind of what I was looking for. So I found one friend at 25, and then a couple, sorry, one friend at 20, and then a couple of friends at five. And then I found later, one of my other good friends had invested in Jewel. And so right as the CEO was being let go, he was able to cash out. So he did really well. And I've been talking to him for a number of years, but his wife wouldn't let him invest because he had had other bad investments before, but now he had, he was flush with money. Um, and so we said, yeah, like I can help you this time. Uh, and so that's how we were able to get another a hundred thousand, um, at that point. So, so that was the kind of in-cast, uh, journey. Um, I haven't tried fundraising sense. I like, I kind of feel that fundraising is not, I don't want to, I don't want to build a company on other people's money unless that other people's money is client money. So I have no business taking other people's investment money anymore unless they can show them that this new direction has legs. So that's why we have this newfound focus of like, hey, look, continue to keep the lights on. And I keep putting in my own money into doing that. We have a very, very low MRR. And as we get more money coming in, coming in from clients, we can start paying ourselves again and we can start to grow back the company again. So that's been the journey with Encast. Something I didn't mention is I became a certified facilitator coach for an organization called the Alternative Board. So it's an international kind of organization of CEO and owner peer boards. They meet once month and for four hours. And they basically come to the table with one issue that they want to present and get feedback on. And then everyone provides feedback. And it's an amazing program. And it also taught me a lot about how to coach and mentor other CEOs and business owners. So that led me to then go through the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative Program, which is now called LBAN Scaling, the LBAN Scaling Program. And LBAN stands for the Latino Business Action Network. And that's the nonprofit that's partnered with the Stanford Business School. So I went to the second cohort of that program with NCAST, and I loved it so much that I've now mentored 13 cohorts and over 20 Latino entrepreneurs, ranging in, I mean, everything from granite to transportation, to consulting services, to human centered design, like I've, you know, nonprofits, like I've seen so many different companies and I've learned, I think I've learned so much more from them than they've learned from me because seeing them solve the same like HR problems and say the same sales and partnership problems has allowed me to see new and innovative approaches for solving my own issues whenever I encounter them. And I've done a lot of fundraising assistance with them as well. So, I mean, maybe if you want to have a later conversation, I can talk about some of the experiences of some of the companies that I've worked with and their fundraising. And because they've raised private capital They've raised loans, bank loans, SBA loans, government grants. They kind of run the gamut of different types of funding. My approach to assisting them with fundraising has always been pretty consistent because fundraising follows a few very basic tenets. But the one that I believe in the most is just knowing who you're talking to and what their motivations are. When I was working with many donations, I came across this book called The Seven Faces of Philanthropy. And in that book, they described seven different types of people. So there's a socialite that likes to see them and be seen. There's a devout that give because it's God's will. The communitarian, they want to feel like they're part of something, part of a community. You know, the repayer, which is like me. So those are the people that feel like, hey, the world has given me so much, this is my way of giving back. And there's a couple of others, you know, like I've listed four, but there are three more that I'm blanking on right now. But what that taught me, this is me kind of applying a concept from one thing and applying it to something else. So in fundraising, I'm like, what are the philanthropic motivations of people? But when you're raising money, for a for-profit, you have to also understand what are the individual motivations. It's always, you know, I want to make more money, but how do you get to their hearts, right? Fundamentally, like what's inside that's motivating them, it's exciting them, and it's about storytelling. And if you tell the right story to the right person, and you basically take whatever concept you have and apply it to their life, if you knew something about them, that could connect your idea to them, then they're much more likely to engage. They may not donate, but they may want to assist you in some way as an advisor. They may connect you to their friends who may be better matches. But really, that's the biggest lesson. Know who you are approaching, know who you're talking to, and customize the message to them, right? Um, so I take that very similar approach and of course, you know, follow the fundamentals and have the right KPIs and, and, uh, have a short deck and blah, blah, blah. Right. Um, but, uh, so I, that's kind of been some of my experience on the fundraising side, not just with my own fundraising, uh, but also assisting, uh, many, many other CEOs over the years and theirs. Ben Ornstein: That's awesome stuff. And, and I, you started going into this a little while ago, you were talking about the, the amount of investors that you reached out to, the nose you got. And if you think about a funnel for Encast, like how, how, how many people did you initially reach out to? What percentage of those became first, second, third meetings? And what percent of those, the subset of those like kind of became ended up in investments, you know, rough numbers. Leo: I probably talked to easily over a hundred people. Yeah. Um, or reached out to easily. No. So I easily reached out to hundreds of people, um, through, so what I didn't mention was I also use LinkedIn and I use its filtering capabilities to find investors that I thought would be good matches. Um, my hit rate with Encast was really, really poor because. I didn't yet know this concept that I just explained to you before, that I shouldn't waste people's time if they've not invested in something like, like, like my company before. Um, my belief is that like everyone should invest in my company because I'm going to change the world. You know, everyone wants to change the world, right? No. Um, and so I, I, I was facing investors that I should not have been chasing, uh, for, for a while. So I would say I probably reached out to a good 500 investors within Cast. The vast majority of those were just emails and LinkedIn messages that were just cut and pasted, cut and pasted, cut and pasted. Hey, I'm da, da, da. And my emails were usually really, really long. So I'm sure most of them didn't even read it. My hit rate from those was probably one to 2%. The hundred that I mentioned earlier, those were were targeted. Those were people that I knew, that I'd met. And for those first meetings, I probably would guess that I had a 30 to 40% hit rate in interest for a first meeting. And then of those, I probably had a 25% hit rate in second meeting. And in total, there's Brian and five other investors. So, you know, I've got six investors out of the hundred that I reached out to, so a 6% hit rate, you know. So in sales, they say, what, 8% is decent. So I was close to that, I guess. Ben Ornstein: Yes, I mean, 6% of that, that's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I've heard numbers that are less, so that's not bad. Leo: But again, I lucked out that one of those happened to be a billionaire. A billionaire best friend. Billionaire best friend. That's one that, uh, yeah, that you don't, you don't, you don't hear that one very often. Ben Ornstein: No, that's the first time I've heard that one. That's for sure. Yeah. That's a good friend to have. Leo: Um, I'm sure, you know, he, he now runs a signal foundation and signal messenger. Uh, so I'm trying to get everyone off of WhatsApp on the signal because WhatsApp is evil with Facebook and signal the nonprofit, uh, that my buddy runs, you know, he's doing it. Ben Ornstein: I didn't realize He was the founder of Signal. Leo: Yeah, well, so there was a guy named, what's his name? Marlon Martinspike. He was the CEO of Signal Messenger, which was part of Open Whisper Systems, I think it was called. So after Brian left Facebook in November of whatever year, he left a billion dollars on the table. His golden handcuffs were four years. And he earned 20% per year, but the last year was 40%. And, and he, he left after three years because he just couldn't, he couldn't stand Zuckerberg and Sandberg and, and what they were saying they wanted to do to WhatsApp, you know, he's like, I built this because I wanted, he, he feel that it's people's right to have private encrypted, you know, conversation, specifically private conversations with each other, right. If they choose to, and the encrypted part is, is a, is a so that you don't have people snooping. So after he left Facebook, he decided to actually buy the Signal Messenger software from OpenWhisper Systems, but he didn't want it to be taken over by a for-profit entity like Facebook did. So he created the Signal Foundation, he donated $50 million, he hired the entire team from Open Whisper Systems. And then he made himself the chairman. And Marlon kept running the company up until about, I think, two years ago. He left. He brought in a woman named Meredith, who is the president and now the face of the company. And Brian is just behind the scenes because he just doesn’t want to go to conferences. He doesn’t want to do talks. He doesn’t want to meet with anybody. He just wants to be head down, continuing to build software. Because even though he doesn’t have to work, He loves building software. And that’s what he does every day. What a cool story. Ben Ornstein: He’s an amazing guy. Leo: If you ever get a chance to meet Brian, he’s a sweetheart. He’s down to earth. He looks like your regular old Joe. We have a podcast that we’re running. Ben Ornstein: And just from what you said there, and I don’t know if he even does podcasts. Nah, I don’t think he’d do it. Leo: it. Okay. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Well, he sounds like, no, it’s all good. It’s all good. He sounds like he would be just an amazing guest. Um, but yeah, I totally get it. Leo: I’ve tried, I’ve tried to get him down to South by Southwest for a panel. He’s like, talk to Meredith. Um, I tried to get him to come to capital factory, you know, to speak, you know, it’s like, we’ll pay for it. It’s like, I don’t want to leave my wife and kids, you know, I want to play frisbee golf. I want to do, you know, I told my son this yesterday. He said to me after the acquisition, he goes, dude, what I realized, and I should have realized this a long time ago, time is the most important asset. We have a finite amount of time on this planet. So every moment that we’re not spending doing the things we love with the people we love is just is a waste of time. So, so now that I have more money that I know what to do with, um, I’m, I’m taking advantage. I’m taking care of my health, you know, spending time with my wife and my kids, um, because I’m not going to get that time back ever, you know? So that was a really, really important lesson, uh, to learn from him. And I’ve applied it to my life. I shared that with my son, um, you know, as he starts high school and is looking to go to college and, um, I think it’s really, really beautiful words to live by. Ben Ornstein: He sounds incredible. And I do agree. Absolutely. Time is everything. What did you emphasize in the pitch to investors when you were fundraising? When it wasn’t Brian giving you the money. Well, so Brian was an easy conversation. Leo: I mean, I could have just told them like, hey, I’m building a porn site and he’d give me the money, which I wouldn’t do, by the way. But speaking of, did you hear about the Wicked dolls? No, what is that? You know the movie, it’s coming out, right? Based on the musical Wicked. Oh, yeah, of course, yes. Yeah, so my ex-wife sent me a message, because she knows I love musicals and I love Wicked. Wicked’s great. And she said, she’s like, hey, have you seen this? And basically, Mattel created these figurines, right? With Ariana Grande, and I forget the name of the lady who plays Elphaba. And they had these figurines, and on the back of the box, they had a website where you can go, where you were supposed to be able to go learn more about the movie. And the website is supposed to be wickedmovie.com, but they put wicked.com. And wicked is a porn site. Ben Ornstein: Oh no. Oh, that’s so bad. That’s a bad fuck up. Right? Leo: So you can imagine all the parents like free, like, wait, 18 plus, what I have to say that I’m 18 plus. Oh my God. The shock. Oh, anyway. Um, I don’t know why I deviated. Sorry. I have ADHD. So, um, Brian. Oh, so, um, the, The pitch, the problem I think I had with fundraising was that I did not emphasize financial ROI enough. I didn’t have a well-fleshed out financial model. I didn’t know what my CPC was going to be on my campaigns. I didn’t know what my customer acquisition cost was going to be. I didn’t know my lifetime value. You, I don’t know, all these things that everyone’s supposed to have. I focused entirely on heart. I depended on telling a story that would inspire people to give, because as I shared earlier, I believed everybody should be investing in my company. I don’t care if you only do real estate, if you only do oil, if you only do whatever. This is so important to the world. You have to invest in this. And I can convince you through my storytelling. And I couldn’t. I was wrong. And I really haven’t, at least for NCAST, ever had to make the financial ROI argument to any of my investors. Not a single one of them ever said, can I see your financials? Not a single one of them asked me to show them a business plan. All of them saw a one pager. All of them saw my deck, which is too long. It’s like 20 pages. Not a single one of them cared about my financials. One, they all knew like, well, it’s bullshit. I’m sorry. Yeah. So the ones that did invest, did invest because of the story. And because as early stage investors, as you probably know, most of them don’t really, they may really like your idea, but they know that if they invest in a good team, then that good team can take, like I always say, invest in an A team with an A or a B idea, and they’ll turn that into something special. But don’t invest in a B team with an A or B idea, because they will likely fail. Early days, it’s really about the team you have. And that’s what they’re really investing in. And that’s, that’s precisely what they invested in us. It wasn’t because necessarily what we were doing is because of me. Right. Right. So it makes sense, right? Ben Ornstein: You ended up with the investors that you were supposed to have because they believe in your story. Leo: Exactly. That’s awesome. So now as I’m, as I’m helping over the years that I’ve helped, you know, more people with their fundraising efforts, Yes, we emphasize story at the beginning of the deck, but the rest of it is very business centric. Like this is how we’re going to go to market. These are the people that we expect to have as our early customers. This is how much money we expect to get. This is how we expect to grow. And an investment of X will result in 10X invest now, right? So we put that story in place. We still emphasize the story. At the beginning and it flows through the entire pitch, but there’s much more emphasis on financial ROI because that increases your chances of reaching not just the investors who are supposed to invest because they’re connected to you and the story, but the investors that are also looking for an ROI. And they may say, oh, the story’s okay, but holy shit, what an opportunity, right? Um, so instead of, you know, six investors, I could have had 12 or 20 had I done a better job at, at the financial side. So I’m, we’re not making the same mistake with Kismet when, when we decided to raise money. Um, we, you know, I’ve learned my lessons after all these years and, um, and this time I have, you know, two white co-founders, um, which helps, um, one and one of the woman, right. So we can tap into. Some funds that invest in women-led companies. And she and I are co-CEOs. And then my other co-founder, Ross, I’ve known since I worked at Trilogy, you know, 20 some odd years ago. And, you know, we were roommates for a couple of years. I was the best man at his wedding. And he is a super ridiculously talented software engineer. He worked at Google. And so I have a really, really good team. So I’m confident that we are able to tell the story, stone the team, and the potential ROI from what we’re building that we’re going to be raking it in. But anyway, so that was the long story, or the long answer to your question about how I pitched this and what I’ve learned. Ben Ornstein: The details are amazing. Because that’s what makes these special. So I appreciate it. And you talked about the challenge, but challenge fundraising, but maybe you could talk about a bit further, like what was the biggest challenge that came up during fundraising? I was the biggest challenge. Leo: Oh, that’s an interesting answer. I, to this day, I hate, to this day, it killed me to hear no. Despite all the no’s I’ve gotten, it never sits well. And it sets me back. And I know everyone tells me, it’s just the nature of the beast. You’re gonna get more no’s than yes’s, way more no’s than yes’s, just get used to it. I haven’t been able to get used to it. I don’t think I ever will. And because I’m also, like I mentioned, I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m a servant leader. I tap into other people’s energies. And the no is negative energy, which naturally just brings an empathic person like me down. But I get myself out every time, every single time. And I have an optimist. View of the world, optimistic view of the world, which allows me to take a setback and turn it into strength. So every no results in learning, and that learning results in improvements to our collateral, to my pitch, to how I better segment and and speak to people that I want to work with, whether they’re investors or clients or partners. But I’ve been the limiting factor to the success of my companies. I fully put the blame on me, even when I’ve had bigger teams. That’s part of the journey that Brian told me about in the early days. You’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going to learn. And he’s been right. And those lessons have been really beneficial to those that I’ve mentored because I’ve really been able to share my vulnerabilities, my feeling of imposter syndrome. That’s been another issue that I’ve been bringing to the table. I have major imposter syndrome. And I’ve had to learn, like, hey, the person sitting across the table from me, I don’t care if they’re a billionaire. I don’t care if they’re a president. I don’t care if they’re a mayor. I don’t care who they are. They are a human being. Ben Ornstein: So how can I take this human being and inspire them? Yeah. Right? That’s the best answer to that question I’ve gotten yet over these 80. Leo: I love it. Ben Ornstein: Oh, wow. Thank you. No, thank you for your vulnerability. I think you and I are very similar, because I’m the same way. Leo: I’m overly empathetic. Ben Ornstein: all about optimism and positive energy. And it kills me when you get those the negative energy and those negative people. So that’s really cool. Leo: Have you heard of it? It’s really cool to hear, by the way. Ben Ornstein: Have you do you know of Andre Agassi? I am. I mean, massive tennis fan and tennis player. Leo: So I I’m like so I have like one celebrity crush and it’s Andre Agassi. That’s a good one. And and I like and, you know, the sexual way. Ben Ornstein: But I got it. Leo: But he I mean, like, I’ve loved him since he burst onto the scene as a teenager. I followed I watched every single match I possibly could. The only Grand Slam final that I didn’t watch was the French Open from in 1999. And, and I just watched it two days ago. Yeah, because I’m listening to the to to his book for the first time. And Um, and what was so what’s been so amazing, like, there’s so many parallels in his life to mine, that like, there’s certain moments, I just start crying. You know, because I’m like, Oh, my God, like, that’s so amazing. And he’s such a kind and sweet and like family oriented guy, exactly who I saw, you know, when when they’re interviewing him, but but it comes out even more so like just the types of things he does for his friends and his family and those closest to him is just a remarkable human being and highly empathetic. And, you know, he leads with his heart. And if he’s not in it, he doesn’t win it. He has to be on. And all the people he loves have to be OK, or he knows. And I’m getting to this point where he just just won his seventh Grand Slam at the Australian Open against Rafter. That was literally what I was listening to just as I was getting home. And you can see the progression of his realization. In fact, Gil, his coach, his trainer, told him, you lead with your heart. And if your heart isn’t in it, if the people you love aren’t well, then you don’t do well. And that’s been a consistent pattern. All the times he got into the final that he could have won, his heart wasn’t in it for some reason or another. Something was going on with someone he loves or something that happened, right? And I feel the same way about the work that I do. I think before I have a meeting with someone, I try to get myself into the right mode. Who am I meeting? What’s the purpose? How am I going to connect with this person? And how can my passion inspire them to potentially do something really special with me? And so hearing this audiobook has reinvigorated me in so many ways. So you being a big tennis fan and player, if you haven’t read the book, I would highly encourage you to read it because I think you’d really enjoy it. Ben Ornstein: I think I definitely will. You’ve inspired me to get that. Leo: It’s called Open. And the audiobook is really good. I wish he read it, but the guy that reads it is actually really great. Ben Ornstein: I’m a big audiobook fan, I agree. The ones where the author reads it or says it themselves. Leo: It’s funny because Sampras had his number for a lot of their career and he hated Sampras at the beginning and then it became You know, Sampras Soul, of course, ended with more wins than Agassi did, but there’s so many times that Agassi could have pulled it out had he had his heart in it. But I remember every single time they played, I’m like, fuck you, Sampras! Like, don’t be my guy! And so I hated Sampras. But Agassi talks about him really respectfully and lovingly after getting over hating him. Yeah, now that’s awesome. Ben Ornstein: I definitely gonna have to read that. Anyway, sorry for that. No, no. Leo: But as a tennis fan, I appreciate it. Ben Ornstein: Do you have time for we have a few more questions? Yeah, sure. Okay. Um, you’ve already given some good ones. But is there any other piece of fundraising advice that you’d want to give other founders? Leo: I mean, the primary one is prepare yourself for now. Always, every interaction, can result in an enhancement and an improvement in your fundraising. So take every yes as validation, but not ever treat it as perfection. So just because someone said yes doesn’t mean that you can’t learn something from the experience. So what wasn’t said or what was said that was negative, it still led to, you know, positive results of getting an investment. And I think that fundamentally gets down to listening. Because we tend not to, most people in sales, I think most founders looking for money, they, and this is natural, kind of a natural human trait where we have an agenda, and as someone is speaking to us, all we hear is what we want to hear. And so everything else is being filtered away. And in the things that we’re filtering away, waiting for the opportune time to jump in and say, they just said something that aligns with what I wanted to say, and I’m going to go talk about that, you may be missing something even more important in the words that they’re shooting at you. So I think it’s really important to be an active listener and to primarily let them talk, to be curious about what it is that motivates them, kind of back to my earlier point, because I think that’s something else that is critical to finding fundraising is understanding what are the motivations of the person that you’re talking to. Because that weaves into how you shape the conversation and that increases your chances of getting a positive result. And with every yes and every no, you have to ask the person if they’d be willing to connect you with at least one other person who might be interested in investing. Yeah. Um, you should always get at least a name, um, you know, from, from them, unless the meeting went really bad, they’re like, fuck off. Um, but they usually don’t, right. Usually people want, you know, are respectful. And a lot of the times they’ll, they’ll give you a name. Um, but I think that ending a conversation with a thank you, um, with a, you know, if you know anybody, please let me know. Um, and if best case, get it on the spot, um, and then just follow up sometime later with a email or text, just thanking them for their time. Always thank them for their time. Oh, and one last thing that one of my mentors told me as I started my networking kind of journey, she said, you know, Leo, every single meeting you have, I want you to ask the person you met with, what can I do for you? Ben Ornstein: Is there anything I can do for you? Leo: That’s great. That doesn’t happen to most people. If you go to an investor, you go to a partner, you go whatever, everyone’s always trying to get something out of them. You become remarkable. Who wrote the book, The Purple Cow? Is it Seth Godin? I think it was Seth Godin. I think that’s right. He says in the book that you should be remarkable. You should stand out. That’s the purple cow in a herd of black and white cows. How can you be the purple cow? Someone that you want something from, what can I do for you? Is there anything I can do for you? Is one way to be the purple cat. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Leo: That’s great. So even if the rest of the meeting doesn’t go great, leaving that with that question, leaving them with that impression of someone that, you know, like, hey, maybe Leo knows, maybe Leo knows, you know, friends who might be good fits for me, even though he was not. Um, and, and I do that a lot. So before I leave a meeting, I get a better idea of what they’re looking for. I usually ask them, um, like, Hey, I’m, you know, I’m sorry that we’re not a good fit for you, but, um, let me know what your criteria are. And, um, and I just had this kind of running. Uh, database in my head. Um, or when I meet someone and they say, Oh, you know, if I’m working on this new concept that we’re looking at, I know exactly who you should talk to and I put them together and I just I just hope that some magic happens, right? So I want to be helpful to others, just like I hope they’re helpful to me. So I think that’s another important thing to share with founders. Ben Ornstein: That’s a great one. Leo: Is there an investor that you would recommend other founders work with? Well, not Brian. And I just say that because he hates investing. He only has five. One of them is mine. The other three are in India. Another one is in the US. But he’s told me repeatedly he hates having investments on his balance sheet, even if it’s not a lot of money. Just the thought of him being on his balance sheet just sickens him for some reason. So he prefers to give it away philanthropically. They’ve got billions of dollars in their foundations, and they’re helping all sorts of wonderful causes all over the world. So I really love and respect them for that. So I wish that I could say like, oh, Brian would be a great one. Anybody in particular? There’s Brett Hurt here in Austin. He runs a company called Data.World. Out of all the people in my life and all the investors that I’ve ever met, he is probably the best angel investor that I’ve ever known. He’s also a servant leader. He’s had several successes, including Coremetrics. I used to work for him at Coremetrics. He became a donor to many donations. He’s always been an advisor and a mentor and a friend. He’s always been open to me, connecting me whenever I ask. I try never to take advantage of that friendship because we’re first and foremost friends. But he and his family office have dozens of investments. Many of which have done really well. And Data.World is looking to transform how organizations leverage not just big data, which was what they initially started off as a social network for data geeks, where you can get to know each other, you can upload, let’s say, data sets that are really messed up and you got to clean up the data, or you have data sets that need to be normalized, or you have disparate data sets that you want to find commonalities, you know, between. And then now they’ve grown the platform to be more kind of AI-centric. So they’ve raised a lot of money for the platform. I have a lot of friends working there. And so, I mean, I’d happy to make an introduction to Brett in case he’s someone that you might want to interview as a founder and an investor. But yeah, he would be the one. Ben Ornstein: Amazing. Yeah, I would love to chow with him. Leo: He sounds like an amazing guy. Ben Ornstein: We’re always looking at our ETT at Read. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any resources you would recommend other founders, books, podcasts, newsletters, anything? Leo: I’m on the TLDR newsletter. My ADHD for my ADHD is a perfect way of consuming high-level subjects and summaries. And for things that interest me, I dig deeper and I’ll go and read the article. I also have dyslexia, so I can’t be reading very long things for too long or I start seeing weird things in what I read. So that TLDR newsletter really helps me to hone down what is most important. And I subscribe to the regular TLDR newsletter and the TLDR our AI newsletter, because I’ve been doing a lot of AI work the last couple of years. In terms of books, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown was outstanding. That really helped me with the vulnerability piece. I’ve always been that kind of person where I’m vulnerable and vulnerability begets vulnerability, and that’s a lot of what she talks about. But a lot of people don’t know that, so that that can open up some opportunities for leaders. Again, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown. Atomic Habits has been incredibly beneficial. Having ADHD, it’s really hard to prioritize because everything is important all at once and it becomes really overwhelming and anxious inducing. And I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs have ADHD. So that could be, I found that book really good at helping me have a framework to prioritization. And especially when you’re working on a startup and you’re working on so many different elements of the business all at once, having a framework like that, I think could be really beneficial. The Purple Cow by Seth Godin, like I mentioned before, I found that really transformative. Running Lean, I forget the name of the artist, of the author, but my co-founder with Kismet told me to read Running Lean before we started working together. So we would be speaking the same language. But that was outstanding. And in fact, we’re taking their recommended demo cell build approach to Kismet. So we’re not building a whole bunch of real code. We’re just going to showing off a couple screens and concepts, getting someone to pay for it. Then we’re going to build it. And then we’re going to deploy it. And then we’re going to learn how people use it or not. So that one has been really good. I’ll go through. I can send you some other books that maybe are not coming to mind right now on my Audible. Actually, let me just do that since I’m on here. Library. Audiobooks. Let’s see. There’s an interesting book called Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris that I listened to a while back. And it talks about the story. It eviscerates Stanford, like the Stanford family, Leland Stanford Sr. And But basically it gives you a history of the birth of venture capital and how Silicon Valley, in many cases, poisoned how business is done. It was really eye-opening. I had no idea all this was going on. And it connects to state government, California, federal government, you know, Hoover, It’s awesome. And very enlightening. That was okay. That was okay. Attraction, I just started, so I can’t give. That’s by Andrew Chen, right? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: By Gina Wickman. Ben Ornstein: Oh, no, that’s not the one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I’m thinking of… Leo: There’s a book I haven’t started yet called Super Communicators, which someone recommended to me. The Art of Letting Go was also recommended to me. Stop Overthinking and Stop Negative Spiraling. Daily Motion, Enlightenment Now, Greenlights, The Root, Alchemist, The Big Myth. There’s one big one that I’m trying to remember. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Was a very good one. There’s Dare to Leave, Atomic Habits, Give and Take. That’s the one I was looking for. So Adam Grant wrote that book, Give and Take. Have you read it? Ben Ornstein: No, but I’m very familiar with Adam Grant. Leo: He’s amazing. OK. So when and if you read that book, you’re going to relate just like I did to it, I feel, just given the little you told me about you. Essentially, he breaks down people into three groups. You have takers, which are your stereotypical salespeople. You have givers, which selflessly give to others. Then you have, I forget the term that he uses all the time, but it’s someone that balances the two in the middle. He opens the book with a paradox. He says, the least successful people in the world are givers. The next most successful people in the world are takers. The next most successful people these mixers. And then the most successful people in the world are givers. What? That’s impossible. You just said they were the worst, but how can they be the best? But the difference between the successful givers and the unsuccessful givers is that the unsuccessful givers essentially spend so much time giving to others that they don’t focus on themselves as individuals and also on their passions and the things that they’re working on. And They also tend not to ask for help. They tend to say, you know, I don’t need anything, because they’re afraid to say, to be vulnerable, to say I need help. The most successful givers, they know when to say no, they push back, they stay focused, they are very, very giving, but they play the long game. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met 15, 20 years ago that are even just now coming out of the woodwork. And they’re working on something And they thought of me because I left a mark. I was remarkable. I was a purple cow back then. And we didn’t do anything this whole time, right? We never even talked. It’s out of nowhere. They’re like, Hey, Leo, I remember you working on philanthropy. I remember working in technology. I remember you working at a, or I like we used to play tennis together. One of my former doormates, you know, like we split, like we should play tennis again. He just thought of me. Right. Um, so, um, So that’s give and take. And give and take transformed how I prioritize things. Because I realized when listening to the book that I was one of the losers. That I was the too generous, too giving, of doing too many things. I said yes all the time. And when I started to push back, when I started to ask for more help, I’ve always been good at asking for help, but I’ve been doing it more. Um, when I’ve recognized stay in my lane, get more help, you know, to fill in where you’re weak, to strengthen where you’re strong. Um, cause even where I’m strong, it’s still not good enough. I’ll never be perfect. Right. Um, so I can always grow and learn. Um, that book was amazing. Absolutely amazing. Um, so I would, that’s the other one that I would recommend and that’s yep. Those are the books that I would recommend. There’s others that are on my wish list that I haven’t gotten around to, like Tribes, Should Have Read Forever Ago, and The Venture Mindset. Ben Ornstein: Have you met Tim Ferriss while you’ve been down there in Austin? Art of Gathering. Leo: I have not, actually. I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never met him. It sounds you, too. Ben Ornstein: It sounds like I don’t know Tim personally, but I’m a huge fan of his content, all his his podcast. I didn’t know he was here. Leo: He lives in Austin. Yeah, that’s cool. Ben Ornstein: Oh, yeah. He loves it down there. Okay. He talks about it actively all the time. He Yeah, I think if you ever get a chance to YouTube would definitely I wish I knew him personally to make an intro, but I don’t look at that. It’s like, can you introduce us? But I would love to if I knew him because YouTube would bond. I know it. Leo: I’m sure I mean, having living in Austin and all the people that I know, like I’ve got like, Six thousand people on my LinkedIn and most of them are in Austin, right? So someone is directly connected to him. I know 100% like I feel like you’re going to meet randomly now. Yeah, like I’m literally one degree away from from anybody who’s anybody here in Austin. You know, I want to talk to Robert Smith with Vista. I want to talk to to Tito beverage with Tito’s, you know, vodka or Don Pablo Joria or, you know, like Mayor Adler is a friend of that I’ve been working with on homelessness. Because we have an initiative called Finding Home ATX, which is looking to end unsheltered homelessness in our community. And it’s a $500 billion initiative, $515 billion initiative, or sorry, million dollar initiative to be exact. And we got $400 million in public funds. But my job is to raise $115 million in private philanthropy. And we’ve so far raised $55 million. The last two years have been a slog. Three years ago is we raised like $50 million and raising the 5 million have been hell for various reasons. So, but that has opened up my network as well. So within that network, I’m sure many, many, many people know Tim. So now I’m gonna go reach out and find out who so I can meet him. Please do. Ben Ornstein: And if you ever do, let me know I think it’s going to be one of the coolest conversations you’ve ever had if you do meet him. Leo: You got to talk to my new friend, Ben Ornstein. Ben Ornstein: There you go. He loves you. There you go. And yeah, so the last question I have here is, do you have any hot takes regarding the fundraising process? Leo: Hot takes. Expect it to take twice as long as what you think it will. Expect to raise half as much as you think it will. Expect it to be twice as hard as you think it will. Expect it to hurt 10 times as much as you think it will. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Those would be my hot takes. Leo: Those are great. Ben Ornstein: Those are great. Leo, this has turned into so much more than a case study conversation. I have really, really enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you. You too, Ben. Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. Leo: If you turn this into something that I could share, I think this has been a really valuable conversation with me, too, just to get it out. I’ve never talked about it in this way, to be honest, at least not to this depth. So if you turn this into a case study, or you can take this AI write-up and send it to me, I’d love to turn it into something that I could use with my friends that I’m helping. Because if I have these lessons that I hand off to people, just remind myself, like, hey, remember, Leo, you said these things, like, repeat these with those that you’re helping. That would be really, really beneficial. And of course, you know, if we could benefit from your platform, when the time comes with Encast or with Kismet, or I’m working with another friend on his executive team, a company called Heirloom, A-I-R-L-U-U-M. They’re in California, Los Angeles. I’d love for you to talk with him. His name is Dan Castro. He is one of my best friends. We call each other mano, like hermano, which means brother. And it’s funny because his high school teacher was a guy named, I find to say Edward James Olmos. It is Jaime Escalante. So Jaime Escalante had a movie based on his life called Stand and Deliver with Lou Phillips and Edward James Olmos from Battlestar Galactica. And he was a math teacher and he had all these Mexican kids who everyone gave up on and he turned them into really great at math and they went to college. And so my friend Dan was one of his students. My dad has a very similar story. He took these Mexican kids that people gave up on and he helped them learn math and stay in school. He then became one of the winningest math coaches in Texas history. He was Texas Teacher of the Year in 93. He was all sorts of national boards. He won a bunch of awards. He was a finalist for Disney Teacher of the Year and just an amazing human being and teacher. We have those parallels, right? So my dad happened to be like a time escalante. But anyway, Heirloom is an incredibly cool concept. It will, through generative AI, help you build a family tree. It will then allow you to own your node in the tree, to which you can add writings, lessons, videos, pictures, essentially a time capsule, right? The time capsule is actually an LLM. Oh, cool. So as you’re feeding it, it’s, it’s creating you digitally, which then, and then, then you enhance it by inviting other family members in your tree. You know, so my, my, I can say, Oh, you know, my cousin on this in Mexico, I’m going to ask him to, I said, I, I, we had an experience together. I want him to add to the experience. Like, what did I miss? What was his experience? Or you can invite friends to your pod, right? So you kind of build up who you are through your inputs and other people’s inputs. And then you can actually have conversations with yourself. Your kids can have conversations with it after you’re gone. You know, he built this because his mother had dementia. And as she was declining, he found that she would open up and they would take our ride. So he bought a really nice BMW and they would go on these long car rides and she would just talk, talk, and he was recording her the whole time. So he has her voice, he has her stories, he has her pictures, and he’s going to put them all into Heirloom so that he can then, you know, like speak to his mom again. That’s so cool. So that’s Heirloom. We’re just in the process of, actually today, hey, he is going to pitch to us. And just to give some feedback. And as we start to look into raising a $2 million round. So he’d be a good person to talk to, and could also possibly benefit from the platform. That’s really cool. Ben Ornstein: When we launched this, or when I post this, so each Saturday to our email newsletter, say like which new case studies have been added. So there will be a public link to 60,000 plus people that get to see that you are featured on there. So that’s like a public link that you can, they won’t be able to read the case study unless they’re a subscriber, but yeah, just something I wanted to note. Leo: Okay, sounds good. But yeah, just a one reminder, don’t mention evaluation other than I think everything else that I shared is OK. It’s our game. And you’ll run that by me before you publish it? Yes, of course. Ben Ornstein: I’m going to put this all together. You’re going to get a draft of it. Feel free to edit it, add context, remove things, anything like that. And then when you give me the go ahead, we’ll push it live. Leo: All right, sounds good. Wow, 30 minutes turned into an hour and a half. Ben Ornstein: I know, this has been amazing. Again, this is the most fun I’ve had on one of these. Ever. And I’m very grateful for you being so vulnerable, giving all your time, and I’m very excited to turn this into a meaningful case study. Cool. Leo: I appreciate your time, too, and for reaching out. So I hope we continue to stay in touch. I would love to. This was good. Ben Ornstein: I would love to stay in touch. I think we bond over something more than just like startups. I don’t know. It’s been a lot of fun. Leo: Yeah, cool. Let’s go play tennis. So you can whip my ass. Ben Ornstein: Hey, I would love to come down to Austin and play. That’d be fun. Leo: All right, man. Take care, Ben. Awesome. Ben Ornstein: Have a great one. Thank you. Have a good day. You too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Bye.