The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:05:23 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:05:23] S0: And Oh, that's... This is the moment where you're like, this is a friend, Jack. You know, the supportive one. Didn't believe in it, but I just... I'll give you 10 k [00:05:30] S1: or something. I really should've. I mean, that 10 k would've done very well. Anyway, we stayed in touch, and then he phones me up about six months later being like, Luke, we've just hit a million users. It's going incredibly well. We're looking for someone to lead growth. So that hackathon was a lot of fun. Met Matti. And, also, Philip, the guy who organized it, he founded Wordware, which is the largest raise from YC ever. I think it's about $40,000,000. So, yeah, that's a a great hackathon to [00:05:56] S0: do. No fucking way. Yeah. I didn't know that was the [00:05:58] S1: same Philip. [00:05:59] S0: I love Philip. [00:06:00] S1: Oh, yeah. Philip's awesome. And that's still my LinkedIn cover photo It's me, Matti, and Philip packing over this computer when we're 19. I've not changed [00:06:07] S0: it since. Met Philip recently, and he is fantastic. [00:06:10] S1: You have to have him on the pod.
00:06:10 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:06:10] S1: You have to have him on the pod. [00:06:11] S0: Yeah. That's a very good shout. There's couple of things I just wanna unpack, which is you very kindly scrolled forward seven years. Most of my American guests don't and they painfully tell me about their Stanford second year and third year and every class that they did in between. I do just wanna touch on one thing that Matthew also told me to touch on which is Fellas, which is the company you started before joining Eleven Labs. What are some of the big takeaways from that when you reflect on it and how it shaped how you think about growth and product building?
00:06:37 · Luke Harries
[00:06:37] S1: I mean, Fella was a wild journey. It's me and my friend, Richie, and we just wanna do a start up. So we applied to YC. We got into YC actually with an AI developer tool, and we quickly realized we were trying to do, like, browser based automation where you automate tasks on people's behalf. So, you know, you're sending an email and it, like, auto completes it. But this was back in 2019 before LLMs were really a thing. The transformer paper had just came out, but, like, GPT three didn't even exist. So we're going to YC. We tried building prototype, and we're like, oh, this just isn't gonna work. And a brief detour is as we realized this wasn't gonna work, COVID hit. And we were there trying to brainstorm the next billion dollar idea whilst also seeing this, like, impending wave of what everyone thought was a killer virus crossing across the world. So we set up a COVID testing clinic in San Francisco. We were, like, one of the first people to realize COVID was gonna hit. We're following the largely on Twitter. And so we're like, okay. How do we actually set up all this testing? So we set up a drive through COVID testing. We were very European. We were like, of course, we're gonna do it not for profit. And, like, this this is a pandemic. We found a company which... AutoMYC, which was doing testing of, I think, sepsis. They decided to pivot into COVID testing. We distributed all their first tests. And one key lesson which is probably a bit niche is, like, don't do beta tests for pandemic testing because we set up this drive through clinic. We just posted in Bookface saying, like, hey. We're doing the first, like, 100 tests for free. Just come through. We want to check all our operations came out. And we accidentally ended up with an entire car park full of San Francisco tech billionaires rocking up in, like, their Lamborghinis and Ferraris to get, like, the first COVID test. So that was a lot of fun. But we were like, okay. You know, not for profit. The pandemic was hitting. It turned out the company we partnered with took a different approach. You know, they were some of the first people to do these testing, did incredibly well. One of the fastest companies ever to a $100,000,000 in revenue, and that company became Curative. Fred Turner, incredible founder, and is now building one of the largest health tech companies in Texas.
00:08:46 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:08:46] S0: Absolutely fucking nuts. Yeah. I remember we had we had we had the Hirox founders on. [00:08:51] S1: Yeah. Hirox? Yeah. [00:08:52] S0: Yeah. And they made money by turning a coffee shop into a COVID testing center Wow. In COVID, because, like, Hirox [00:08:58] S1: was Yeah. [00:08:59] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Planning, and it was for not... They didn't do not for profit, and it was, like, a fantastic business for them. Yeah. Yeah. That is absolutely nuts.
00:09:06 · Luke Harries
[00:09:06] S1: So we did that detour, and then we were like, we do actually want to build a big business. So we started exploring different directions, and Richie had really struggled with, like, binge eating, his mental health. I think we actually spoke to you at the time about some of this stuff. And so we were just going really deep on this kind of men's binge eating, men's weight loss space, and we set up a digital CBT clinic around how do you help people who are struggling with these eating issues. But the tricky thing with digital CBT is it's great for lots of people, but it really only lasts about six weeks from a business point of view. You can help them get to a great place, but we wanted to have, like, a much bigger impact and build a much bigger business. And so that's when we were exploring, like, okay. What are the health tech business models which can really grow and really make a lot of sense? And it seemed to be kind of you needed a hardware piece or a medication piece, and we're like, none of these quite make sense until we read the GLP one paper the day it came out. So this is semaglutide, and we're like, wow. This is, like, the biggest thing in medicine since penicillin. So we, like, race. We set up a clinic. We're like, how do we help people get access to this fantastic medication which reduces people's body weight by 15%? And we managed to get to about 300 k of revenue, which was great, and then it kind of flatlined. And this was the first company I'd really started. I was still pretty young. And truthfully, I think I was just too impatient. I was like, oh, we're only on, like, 200 k a year of revenue. I want to have, like, much bigger impact to technical product. I think we probably need to, like, pivot b to b. And Richie was like, no, Luke. I think we just need to, like, focus as is. Like, the wave will come. And so I stepped back, joined PostHog, kinda moved on. But Richie has done an incredible job, and that company is now doing over $30,000,000 a year in revenue, helping thousands of patients. So that's been really cool, but, like, big lesson for me is, like, commit for the long term, be patient. And Ozempic had a much, much bigger wave after. We were actually quite early on.
00:10:59 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:10:59] S0: Fucking nuts. Also, importance of market timing. Yes. Like, if you'd done Valor five years before and Noah's hand pick... [00:11:06] S1: Oh, yeah. It wouldn't have been a thing. [00:11:07] S0: There's no business there. [00:11:08] S1: Yep. [00:11:08] S0: I totally get you. Fascinating. Dude, I have to then skip to another bit that you said there, which is that you were in the lake when he was pitching you with Matti, this is for ElevenLabs. And it's like, we're gonna be everything for one. This sounds bad. Like, I like a tight ICP where we can market to, we know which channels we're selling to, we can craft a product for them. How has a horizontal product offering worked so well when it is completely counter the narrative that we're always told?