Date: 2026-10-13 (6:00 PM EDT, ~10 min) Attendees: Michael Houck (michael@ryevalley.co), Emil Barr (emil@flashpass.school), Michael Fanous (CEO/co-founder, Nyne, michael@nyne.ai) Granola: https://notes.granola.ai/d/4ad92f85-29c7-4202-834a-a56ef0939f5b
Context: GovGrid buyer discovery call, same push as Mode Mobile and DataCow. On the call Michael introduced Emil as co-founder/CEO and himself as CTO of the venture. Emil’s engagement, not a Rye Valley-owned business decision. Not a Megaphone client call.
Summary
- Nyne: data and RL environment company procuring operational data for leading US AI labs. Says it is not a broker, works directly with labs at multi-eight-figure monthly capacity.
- Pitch: tens to hundreds of TB of state government data across 15 to 20 states via existing agency contracts, AG relationships, and lobbyists in all 50 states.
- Nyne’s answer: not a fit. Labs want an exclusive license plus an ownership attestation. Government data cannot be copyrighted and has no sole owner, so GovGrid cannot attest exclusivity. Labs are getting more formal as they track toward going public, few one-off exceptions, and are stringent on anything government-related. Default DQ.
- What Nyne does want: workflow data (the full chain of events), from US-facing operating businesses with 20+ people and a lot of digital history.
- Debrief: the other broker (Mode Mobile) had the opposite reaction to the same pitch. Emil thinks the exclusivity point is contestable (“we’re the only ones that have gathered this data”), especially once data is transformed or extracted. Michael’s read: Nyne is locked into formulaic intake criteria. Consensus: treat it as a volume sales process and keep booking.
Decisions
- No new decision. Keep running the buyer sales process at volume.
Action items
- Michael: book more buyer discovery calls for this week
Notable transcript excerpts
Fanous on the core objection:
“I just don’t think the labs are going to want it. They’re going to want an exclusive license and you guys can’t give that attestation because you’re allowed to consume it, but it’s not yours to exclusively license.”
Fanous on what they buy:
“They need to see the whole flow, the whole like chain of events, the whole trajectory that sort of occurred. That’s what they care about.”
Emil in the debrief:
“I think we can say, hey, we’re the only ones that have gathered this data and we’re the only ones that have it. We’re going to give you an exclusive right to our data… Especially I think if we transform or extract it.”
Michael in the debrief:
“They have very formulaic structured data responses that they want. And so I think this is the first time we ran into a case where they’re like, we just don’t go outside that basically.”
Full transcript in Granola: https://notes.granola.ai/d/4ad92f85-29c7-4202-834a-a56ef0939f5b