The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:13:33 · Harry Stebbings, George Sivulka
[00:13:33] S1: So we're sitting in that lab. We're like, hey. There's a great company to be had here. Let's give it a shot. What now? Because I heard... I mean, and I saw pictures of this wonderful bedroom. Unable to make... Right. You made me feel like such a diva when I saw that bedroom. Unable to make $300 rent sneaking into Stanford dining halls for meals when you weren't studying there. Yep. George. [00:13:57] S0: I had no comment. Off the off the record. [00:13:59] S1: Raised two rounds of financing with clothes hanging behind him on Zoom. Take me to the next step post that I'm gonna do this in the lab.
00:14:09 · George Sivulka
[00:14:09] S0: So I was on a PhD salary. You know, you're you're making, what, $38,000 a year. I think 42 if... At the at time if you if you had the Stanford graduate fellowship, which I had. And I said I was gonna go on leave. And I actually originally went on leave and said... Told my adviser, I'll be back in a year. You know, this coronavirus, just, like, give me some time. And I didn't have anywhere to go. Like, there was, like, a logical next step, and I wanted to work on this company. So I asked my friends who were renting out a house in East Palo Alto to let me rent a room, the cheapest room they could possibly find. And they were all fully booked, and it was, like, I think, over $1,000 of rent. And they said... I I think it was actually, you know, 500 or $600, not $300 to give my my broke self some credit here for not being able to afford the rent. But they said you could rent out the master bedroom closet. And so I bought, I brought in, like, a mattress from the dorms, and I had a folding table from Home Depot nearby. And I would basically rotate whether the mattress on... Was on the floor or the folding table was on the floor, and that was... I just sat there and worked all day. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day. Go to sleep, wake up, do it again. No weekends. Know, it's just kind of like I turned into almost a monk where I was just obsessively building heavy. I was training models at the time. So I'd wake up in the middle the night, check on them, you know, continue to use my GPU because I didn't wanna spend any money.