The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:07:46 · Harry Stebbings, George Sivulka
[00:07:46] S1: we go. Did you feel like a disappointment? [00:07:48] S0: I think the answer is yes. I did. I felt, like, actually physically unable to do the things that I was wanted to do, or I I thought that I was good at things that weren't valued or weren't as important. All of my sisters are amazing athletes. They're all, like, know, six feet tall, and they're, you know, just incredible athletes. And and I was I was just knocked. And so it's kind of like the ugly duckling in many ways. Yeah. [00:08:11] S1: I heard that you built lasers. You cold cooled NASA. Can you talk to me about these kind of very cool early influences in your life and how it shaped you?
00:08:21 · George Sivulka
[00:08:21] S0: There's there's completely separate stories there, but I think How do you cold call NASA? This is actually a very good story. I wanted to be an astronaut. Like, that was my my number one goal, and I was I was hell bent on that. And so by the time I was, I think around 15 years old, I was going to high school in New York City, an all scholarship school where the alumni pay for everything. I was like... I was kind of tracking academically really strong, and I wanted a NASA internship. And they were offering them to college undergrads or or graduate students. And so, obviously, I applied and got rejected five times. And then there was a snow day in February where my school was closed. I I commuted into the city. I actually showed up in front of their New York City office, the NASA Goddard Institute for space studies, and I I demanded that they let me in. And the front door security guard was like, you know, kid, get the heck out. Like, what are you doing? You don't have an appointment? Like Yeah. I was like, I printed my resume out on the nicest paper. I'm wearing a suit. You've gotta let me up. And he kicked me to the curb. And so I actually sat outside. It's, like, a Hundred 10th Street in Manhattan, and it was snowing. It was, like, so, so, so cold. And I, I didn't know what to do. I started crying. And I actually called my mother because I was like, well, I'm gonna come home. And she's a salesperson. She works in medical sales. She picked up the phone and said, listen. No. You're not going anywhere. You sit your ass down, and you call every single number that you can get into the building. And so I sat on the curb, and I cold called every number on Google, you know, from from my from my old phone. And finally, someone picked up. It was one of the only people in the office that day, and they came down, met me in the lobby, and I basically pitched them on myself for two hours. Gave me an interview. I interviewed... Botched the interview because I didn't know anything about, like, kind of, like, linear algebra. I didn't know anything about physics. But I I memorized all of the titles of the posters on this professor's wall. Came back the next day. So showed up again cold and told them basically everything that I could possibly know about his specific research, he was impressed enough to let me work for him for free.
00:10:17 · George Sivulka, Harry Stebbings
And then they paid me the next year, and then I published internationally recognized research the next year. And and by that time, I think that was impressive enough to to let Stanford let me in, which which was a which was a a life changing moment. [00:10:29] S1: That is incredible. Yeah. That is also an incredibly heart wrenching moment thinking of a a little boy on the street crying. The advice of when to give up versus when to persist and fucking relentless. Me and you are both young. We've been taught you win by persistence and going for it. When is that true, when is it not? [00:10:49] S0: I think I have an unhealthy obsession with driving really hard. Yeah. I think I... You just can never give up. Like, I just don't think that's an option. You can look at every company ever and and some get to a $100,000,000 in in revenue in whatever, like, some span of time, which they probably... Their marketing team has hacked. And some, you know, end up taking really, really long periods of time. The only thing that actually changes is the rate at which you get there. And so sometimes things go in your favor, sometimes they don't. But if you're so persistent that you just continue, like, can you can bring a lemonade stand to a $100,000,000 in ARR. Like, there's nothing that's actually stopped. You can brute force your way as a founder. You screw product mark. You can literally brute force anything in the world. You just have to have that ship. You have to continue to to just pound away at at whatever is is is in your way.
00:10:49 · George Sivulka, Harry Stebbings
[00:10:49] S0: I think I have an unhealthy obsession with driving really hard. Yeah. I think I... You just can never give up. Like, I just don't think that's an option. You can look at every company ever and and some get to a $100,000,000 in in revenue in whatever, like, some span of time, which they probably... Their marketing team has hacked. And some, you know, end up taking really, really long periods of time. The only thing that actually changes is the rate at which you get there. And so sometimes things go in your favor, sometimes they don't. But if you're so persistent that you just continue, like, can you can bring a lemonade stand to a $100,000,000 in ARR. Like, there's nothing that's actually stopped. You can brute force your way as a founder. You screw product mark. You can literally brute force anything in the world. You just have to have that ship. You have to continue to to just pound away at at whatever is is is in your way. [00:11:33] S1: Yeah. Stanford was a big one for you, I imagine. It was a really big personal validation to get in. Correct? [00:11:39] S0: Yes. Yes. [00:11:40] S1: How did it feel when you got in? [00:11:41] S0: I was on to the next one. You know? Was like I was like, okay. You know, that... That's done. And, like, the next day, was like, okay. Well, how do I become the youngest PhD student in my school's history? It's like, yeah, it's not even a moment. I I think, you know, I was excited for a moment, but, you know, it faded very, very quickly. [00:11:56] S1: I spoke to Corey before the show. Someone who's known you since you were 18?
00:11:56 · Harry Stebbings, George Sivulka
[00:11:56] S1: I spoke to Corey before the show. Someone who's known you since you were 18? [00:12:00] S0: Probably even earlier. [00:12:01] S1: Take me to the founding of Hebiah then. We're at Stanford. We're doing incredibly well. We are the wonder child. How does Javier come to be in that situation?
00:12:10 · George Sivulka
[00:12:10] S0: I'm one of the youngest PhD students in the history of my school, and I actually believe that I was working on... You know, at the time, one one of the areas of research that was most interesting to me was meta learning, this idea of teaching machines to learn to learn. And June 2020, Sam Altman, OpenAI came out with the GPT three. And if you remember the title of that paper, it was large language models are multitask or meta learners. And I'm I'm sitting in in my lab one day. I'm playing around with this new technology, and I'm like, wow. They just stole the most important thing I could work out right right under from my hands. And I said, well, if I can't build the most important technology, how can I build the most important product? And I think those are two very separate things. Obviously, at the time, GPT three was not a product. And I don't even think ChatGPT is a really good product. It's like a calculator. It's got the technology in there encapsulated in very simple form, but it's not a product that, like, in Excel that lets you just build whatever you'd like with it. That's very human first. And Stanford always pounds into your head the idea, hey. You've gotta start a company where there's a lot of pain. And I had a lot of my students or a lot a lot of my friends would go into investment banking or private equity if they were really lucky, and, they would come back and and basically be the least happy versions of themselves. They've, like, lost 50... They just hated their lives. It seemed like there was more pain in financial services around processing unstructured data than anything I had ever seen. And I was like, well, there's a great company to be had here. Let's let's give it a shot.