Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
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?
00:13:56 · Carina Hong
[00:13:56] S2: Right. It's not the end of the day to be rejected. I think that is a very, very crucial lesson. A lot of things can look very grim at the moment. I think this is one thing is I think entrepreneurship is for those who are daring. Like... And and I also have a lot of respect always when I look at founders who like the company went nowhere because there's really not a lot of, I think, reason why a company would work and another company would fail. Like, execution is something that has a lot of randomness. And like every day, there are days where it just feels like this, like, local, like, minimum, like, things are just going so badly. And that definitely got amplified a lot. The feeling is very intense during the fundraise. We started getting a lot of rejections, right, in the first initial round. One thing that you asked about whether there was an approach that I sort of had that was a change. When I realized that I don't have to die over this hill, I said like this one thing is not what I'm gaming for, then I sort of look from a zoomed out perspective. There are a lot of other ventures that are also really great firms. And I think that after I realized that, it was a lot both, like, less stressful. I was more carefree. And it also, I think, sends this sort of, like, energy of, know, the company is really valuable. And I think that that sort of confidence coming from within. So I think that's one thing. But despair is something that is, I think, on the other hand, a bit less beneficial to a process.
00:15:25 · Ravi Belani
[00:15:25] S1: Yes. Yes. Okay. I wanna move to talking about AI. It is an industry that I've never seen move as quickly as as... It's the fastest moving industry I've ever seen in my life. And I'm curious about how you plan for what to focus on in an industry that is moving and changing so quickly. Can you share your thoughts about that?