Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
00:07:47 · Carina Hong
[00:07:47] S2: Yeah. Think so. So, like, no one really trusts, like, tasks that much nowadays. I mean, you see on, like, the news about our nation's, like, critical infrastructure. Oh, the railway is down or, you know, the... I think there is this Boeing seven thirty seven that kind of had to, like, re land because of a critical software bug. I mean, all of them have gone through testing. Now code review is actually at, like, all time, like, lowest for, like, you actually do the code review or not. There are a lot of companies, AI native organizations just skip a code review. I know for some part of my company, we don't have code review. We just ship. Now that's going to, I think, create some problem. And then when that problem is big enough, it stops the AI deployment altogether. So I think value there are roughly three layers of value. One is the direct value that this technology create. A large part is verified cogeneration, small part in actual verifying existing code, even though that small part is not small. And then the second layer is the amount of the number of organizations that is willing to deploy AI in really, really large TAM critical sectors. And that AI the enablement of AI deployment is value. And then there is this third part of, I mean, you're into the auto research, I mean, AI for science, it's like long horizon discovery, whereas agents are sort of functioning autonomously. And I mean, it's different it's similar to the verified cogeneration because but with that, it's more interesting because you can then play with data. And then that is going to, I think, drag AI out of the existing like information, knowledge extraction or exchange layer into more physical world, into also like some other parts where it's like material science, new molecules, etcetera are created. I think that's kind of the third layer is that coming out of the software layer into physical world, not just hardware, but like broader science.
00:09:33 · Ravi Belani
[00:09:33] S1: So this is so this is such foundational and impactful across multiple different areas, and so I understand the the gravity of it. I'm still curious if you can unlock the mysteries of how you closed the... There were two financing rounds within six months where you closed $260,000,000 as... And at the time you were 24, a solo founder. Is that right? Yeah. No co founders. And it's also, you know, people... It's also particularly difficult as a female solo founder to close capital, let alone without without... With just academic background. At at that point, you had... You didn't have any professional work experience. You were coming out of academia. Is
00:10:10 · Carina Hong, Ravi Belani
[00:10:10] S2: that During my first round of fundraise, my CTO came in, so definitely, I think, ease a lot of ease a lot of burden. I think the first seed round was really the idea of AI is going to change mathematics. There are other companies doing formal reasoning at the time, but I mean, I think a lot is spent on the right technical approach division. We were pretty sure that we would not use a Monte Carlo Tree Search type of search at training. I mean, search at inference, turns out to be the right bet. It's then adopted by like Cdance and other amazing player, a seed prover, ByteDance. And then I think the second round was more of the ability of transfer learning. We observed that the formal math prover that we have built got a lot of very high impressive scores on other software verification benchmarks, sort of to our surprise. And also with Putnam being perfect score, I think the sort of feeling that it will be destroyed by the bitter lesson, the dawp on that front has, I think, been a lesson. [00:11:14] S1: Mhmm. [00:11:14] S2: Even though I think it's a constant battle to try to stay ahead at the frontier. [00:11:19] S1: So you had these substantive milestone proof points that that were really significant. Right. Others get those substantive milestone proof points and still don't close rounds. Was there a a shift change in your approach on fund... Was fundraising easy or was there an inflection point where you changed your approach and that shifted how you closed the round?
00:11:19 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:11:19] S1: So you had these substantive milestone proof points that that were really significant. Right. Others get those substantive milestone proof points and still don't close rounds. Was there a a shift change in your approach on fund... Was fundraising easy or was there an inflection point where you changed your approach and that shifted how you closed the round? [00:11:37] S2: Yeah. So the first round was very difficult. I think that was just very, very difficult. It was an idea. My slide probably looked horrible. And then I think something changed at the second fundraise where I was very focused on building the company. When you focus on building the company, you don't give a lot of attention to the process. That actually ended up turning quite well. So sort of when you are very focused on just fundraising, you might tend to overthink things, will drag on process. Later on when you are just building the company, I think it became a lot easier. [00:12:14] S1: Can you demystify that just so we understand? So the irony here is that when you gave it less attention, it was it was more effective. Can you on... Can you can you can you give us... Can you share the details of the specifics of how that looked in in the process?
00:12:14 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:12:14] S1: Can you demystify that just so we understand? So the irony here is that when you gave it less attention, it was it was more effective. Can you on... Can you can you can you give us... Can you share the details of the specifics of how that looked in in the process? [00:12:28] S2: Yeah. I think the the second round, I basically decided that, like, look, we barely spent, like, a lot of money raised from the seed. We didn't have to raise. There were a lot of ventures that were very interested. So they reached out. Some even have sent, like, term sheets. So sort of we are preempted. This is called preempted in the process. If you're like not preempted, then basically what you do is you decide to not clear one's door, right? If you are preemptive, it's a bit like, hey, there's already this really attractive offer, and I am very actually interested in taking the offer. So then, okay, well, like, if we're going to talk, I will probably want to, you know, share by this date. Right? So I don't get dragged on forever because my other my other offers might explode. So I think one thing perhaps is a class about entrepreneurship, its fundraising process is is always to be preempted. I think that's that's a good tip. [00:13:22] S1: So... And did you engineer the preemption, did it just happen?
00:13:22 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:13:22] S1: So... And did you engineer the preemption, did it just happen? [00:13:25] S2: It happened. I think... I sort of saw it coming, I was trying to pull it off because I saw some sort of preemptive interest before even Putnam, before the milestone. And I thought that would not be a good idea because, look, when you're, like, you know, about to approach a milestone, you probably want to wait it out and not... First of all, it's very distracting, I think, fundraising. Second of all, it's just that you probably will have a lot more interest. [00:13:49] S1: Mhmm. And if you had to talk to the Carina pre seed, is there any advice that you know now that you would share with her about closing that really difficult initial round?