- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXWRT7EVQWBM77GN5WTC61SW (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXWRT7EVQWBM77GN5WTC61SW)
Transcript
[ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: just learn something new? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: I mean, it’s a white glove service, but like I’m building a consumer product with it, but like, that’s what I’m raising for. Like instead of like over engineering things and like, there are a lot of awesome agent tools out there, but they’re all so complicated. Right. Like as much as we want to say they’re the next generation of Zapier, they’re not right. A 30 year old marketing manager who has a comms degree looks at Lang chain or an 8n and has an aneurysm. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s no way it’s accessible for them. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: And it’s, I think it’s unrealistic, though, you know, people are pouring money into all these competitive, very similar tools, the Lindy’s, the then 8n, the all these, they’re just like, I mean, for me, I like, they’re challenging me and like I saw I’m like, you know, from when, when, when I was at launch house, like I always said I wasn’t technical, but it’s been five years and I would classify myself as very technical now. I mean, I’ve been a student of the game, um, you know, and it kind of all started at y’all’s house, you know, I miss that. [Michael Houck]: I miss that, man. [Michael Houck]: Do you still keep in touch with folks? [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Um, yeah. So Alex Moyer, do you remember Moyer? Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. Are my best friends, right? Like me and him talk three times a week, four times a week. Like, um, if I got 5 million in a seed, I probably hire him to run ops for me. So, um, but other than that, I’ve talked to Katie after, after horn or whatever, a few times, um, Andrew Schreiber, uh, uh, killed Gates a few times. Yeah, I mean, I still keep in touch every once in a while, but Jamie actually is probably one I talk to more than most. Oh, really? That’s interesting. Jamie and I, so like my whole shtick is like, I’m a big community builder, right? And, and so me and Jamie would like just go back and forth in the house and like, he’s called me a handful of times since then and been like, yo, I got a bouncing idea off you. You got it. You got some time. And I love relationship. I love Jamie. Jamie is an A1 person. And then you, you’ll get a kick out of this. Well, you might, I don’t know. Tell me, tell me. So I live in Detroit, right? And I live with your ex, C, she wasn’t a C, she was Aaron, Aaron, her ex, I live with her. And I lived through the divorce. I lived with her through that whole deal. Yeah, that’s and then through the whole like she was trying to tell talk to me about coming forward against you guys and all that stuff and I was just like I want nothing to do with this like Yeah, that was an instigator of any of this, right? Yeah, she hated Bretton that that made it I think a little challenging for she really did not like Brad She had nothing but good things to say about you. She didn’t have much to say about Jacob. [Michael Houck]: Well, she, she joined the company after Jacob was already like incapacitated basically. Yeah. She got you. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Yeah. I saw he did raise money again. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: They’re, they’re, they’re doing good. Uh, we, we’ve helped them out with a couple of things. Um, so that’s been nice, but, um, yeah, they’re, they’re crushing it. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, I reached out to see, but I, I, he hasn’t even looked at my message. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: So yeah, he’s the one guy that like we met like the first week that I was in the house. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: And he was like, bro, we need to connect. [Michael Houck]: And then we never did that. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: You’re like the hundredth person to tell me that he gave me like his focus and his energy for like a good half hour. [Michael Houck]: And like, we like we’re vibing and then it never came back. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That sounds about right. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, no, it’s sorry. I had to go through that with, with, with Aaron. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: I mean, She’s a tornado. She does she she’s she kills herself and does herself her own favor. So yeah, you know, it’s you know, she hates Brett. [Michael Houck]: She loves me, but she still disturbed my company partially. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: So you know, I’m, yeah, I never I don’t really have an opinion on Brett. I never went and we never a lot of FaceTime because he was in the LA spot when I was around. [Michael Houck]: Anyway, so yeah, why do you grab some time? I saw you ran pop up? [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Yeah, so I wanted to see, so one I want to open around. I want to, I want to talk to, you know, some people that are in this space, right? You’ve been helping startups for a while. And so what I’ve recently done is I’ve just started two test pilots in the AI space here locally in Detroit. I got into Codespace, which is an interesting new really keen on working with me and what I’m doing. I think I sent you my deck today. No, I didn’t. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: I thought I put it in like that. You might need to know like, um, do you have a little bit of time? Like I know I grabbed 15 minutes, but like, I don’t have a bunch of active access. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. Cool. Cool. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: I’ll, I’ll send it to you so you can look at it. [Michael Houck]: Do a little loom, like walking through it and doing my like kind of candy. Did raw reactions and thoughts. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Well, that’d be awesome. I’d really appreciate that. Um, and so I might be able to skip a pre-seed by getting a really good grant through avalanche. I just started talking with a Draper Gorn blockchain for, um, pre-seed. They have a Troy, Michigan, which is right here in Detroit office. David it’s his name starts with a B he he’s the third I mean, I know Tim really well. Tim’s a friend. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: I’ve never met him, but I know I’ve met Alan, who’s his partner through like one of their like networking things through COVID. And then David Rankin, who is their COO was a part of like this whole group that I was like a part of And like Jim Robinson, who’s one of David’s really good friends is one of my advisors. And so I’ve met him. He was like an early tech dude, beast. He like worked at Bell Labs, launched the first satellite for HGTV and like for us, he’s badass. He’s my investor, advisor capital kind of advisor too. He knows a bunch of these guys. He used to do like a founder’s meeting with Waz back in the day when he lived in like, yeah, yeah, he knows. Vitalik since he was 15, like he’s super autistic, like probably 180 IQ kind of guy. Like you can’t take him in public because you never know what he’ll say, but like super smart and very well connected. The thing I really love about everyone I know actually over at the Draper team, starting with Tim, is that they’re all super high conviction people. [Michael Houck]: Like they’re not followers and like, Oh, let’s see who else is going to be in the round or whatever. They’re just like, Hey, we like it. We like you. Here’s some money. Let’s go do this. Yeah. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: So, so that just started. I haven’t met with them officially. Um, but you know, that’s why I wanted to like reach out to you and, and, and just people I know that have raised capital. Cause this is my second venture, but I didn’t raise my first time. Um, and I’m at the point where I’m bootstrapped as hell. Um, and I need some acceleration. You know, like I’m getting motion, I’m getting tons of people who want to join this test pilot. Like, so I’m working in cannabis, right. I’m doing like an AI butt tender that routes messages, answers calls, eventually it’s agentic commerce. Like, and then we are using like, um, like an IM systems to track loyalty past, like the point of sale. So it’s like, you like something on Instagram, you get five loyalty points that you can put toward whatever. And then, um, we’re working on, um, phone, like instead of like apps, it’s like you text your local businesses instead of, Oh, that’s better. Yeah. That’s better. Yeah. Yeah. Like we text 90% of the time. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Why aren’t we texting our local pizza place? [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Like, Hey, can I get two pizzas? I’ll be there in 15. Like, yeah, I don’t want to, I don’t want those, these companies that are like, let anyone create their own app for their small business. [Michael Houck]: I don’t want an app for my local pizza place. That’s crazy. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: We’re about to be appless. Serverless technology and agentic UI is going to allow, and that’s a big part of my thing, is I don’t want to be a part of the compute play. I don’t want to be part of algorithms. I want to be part of data. I want to be a part of clean, human verified data, local infrastructure, and that’s the big play, like local LLMs that serve the municipality. Think Yelp, but on steroids plus And me and my co-founder, who’s just finishing up his commitment, he just sold his ERP company. Oh, nice. Yeah, they run the municipality of Spokane, Washington. It was like a family company. I think they did like five mil rev with four employees. They sold for like eight mil, and then they got some equity back to a company that’s trying to go public. Nice and me and him and he’s also um a nft og founder with pixel fox collection like they did like over 500 beef like it wasn’t anything crazy but like he’s very he’s a beast um and um we’ve done some like oh we worked with pudgy penguins we did their um we did their um uh courtney what was their ai assistant like if you call their 1-800 number for pango court And you like dial six you get like a real-time API that will talk to you and it’s like this disgruntled whatever and we have a bunch of awesome tools that we’ve made and We’re trying to like piece them together as tools for an agent to be able to use D to create content augment or aggregate content Or data just in general like all about data aggregation with all this generation of AI now, like it’s all boring shit data now, like about good data from humans. And I want to extend into like reviews and so much more, right? It’s a really big premise. So like, I want to go big with it, right? Like, I know that you guys have a good relationship, probably still with a 16. And like, I would love a soft intro for speedrun. Like, so like, but it starts with like you having confidence in me and not just take my word for it, you know, like, like, that’s part of the thing. You know, I love you. [Michael Houck]: So let me take a look at the deck. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Yeah, yeah, I would love your your impact. Your input. We got four minutes. [Michael Houck]: I’ll let you go. [Michael Houck]: No, but I’ll, I’ll give some thoughts. And then yeah, happy to. I mean, I can I can just text Andrew and be like, do you put an application for speed run already? [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Or I did like a while ago, but it wasn’t when this project It was like he posted something on Twitter and it was like, it was like broadly this, it was like, Hey, do you want to quit your nine to five, blah, blah, you know, drop an app. And I just like threw something in there and then they got back to me and they’re like, no, but I didn’t give a deck. I didn’t get nothing. [Michael Houck]: So like, yeah, I mean, if you, if you, if you put something in, I just let me know when you do and I can just shoot him a text and be like, Hey, you know, check out this guy’s app. Like I’m sure you get tons of applications. Check out this guy’s application. Might be worth it. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Might be worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want your blessing first. Right? Like, so like that, like whenever I joined these kind of like, I’m not a very transactional person, right? Like, and that’s kind of like my downfall, but it’s also like for my benefit because I’m a very relationship person in my career. When people like me, they want to see me succeed. So that’s what I want. Right. You already like me, but I want you to like my idea and you want to see like, you’re not an idiot. Right. I’m not an If you think my idea is good, then let’s bring it up the ladder. But if it’s not, I don’t want you to do that for me. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We’re not that good of friends. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: I’d be honest with you too. I appreciate that. But I got some motion here in Detroit. I’m trying to do this pretty hyper-local for a proof of concept. The one thing I’m really missing is just the gas on the fire, which is you know, a little bit of introductions and some capital. I mean, I have a team overseas that just needs money and they’ll start working, you know. And like, I just don’t have the capital to spend to spin up, you know, a 12-person team. But like, that’s the whole thing with venture. Like, if you have a good idea and a good plan, you can document it all and you show them that people will take chances on you. [Michael Houck]: We also have a pretty successful process we’ve set up, but we’ve helped a bunch of founders get connected to the right folks. Basically, you would drop your deck to us. My chief of staff and I would go through it and other information. And then we would find investors in our contactless personal CRM type deal. We would just send it to them and be like, hey, here’s the ask. Here’s the deck. Here’s the founder. Do you want an intro? And they’ll request it. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: What do you guys ask for that? You guys asking for just for for shits and giggles? You want like an advisor seat? [Michael Houck]: Like, what do you guys want for that? No, we just do it. It’s part of our like founding journey newsletter. Things we already make a bunch of money from the newsletter other ways. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: And so it’s just it’s something we do. Valid. [Michael Houck]: All right, man. Well, best way to go forward. Actually, I’ll send you the link for that form. And then the deck include that in there and then I’ll take a look at everything and give you some feedback and we’ll go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Amazing. All right. Sounds good. [ZACHARY HOLWERDA]: Thank you. Good to catch up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: For sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Talk soon. See you.