Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today, we are very excited to have Julian Weiser with us. So Julian is a dynamic entrepreneur, angel investor, and a mentor with a passion for empowering founders and building impactful startups. He's the CEO and co-founder of ODF, where he has helped launch over 1,000 startups that collectively raised over $2 billion.
As a creator of the Texts with Founders newsletter, Julian shares insights and strategies with the entrepreneurial community, helping founders navigate their journeys with actionable advice. He's also an angel investor, having backed over 150 innovative companies like Levels, Astroforge, and MagicSchool. And with a background in growth and product management, Julian brings a wealth of experience to the table. And today, we will dive into Julian's journey, his experiences with ODF, and his vision for
the future of entrepreneurship and innovation. Thank you for joining today, Julian. Thank you to you both for having me. I'm so excited. Thank you. So first of all, you are the CEO and a co-founder of ODF. Could you tell us what ODF is to the audience who don't know ODF yet? Yeah, totally. So ODF exists to help more people explore starting companies. We don't believe that most people should start companies. In fact, most people shouldn't start companies.
But we do feel that there are far too few great people starting them today. And if we can help more of those great people explore starting companies, and end up making a decision one way or another, that's a very positive thing for the world. Ultimately, we hope that some people who participate in ODF decide that starting a startup isn't for them or isn't for them right now. But then some of the other people who participate in it actually realize that this is the perfect
thing for them to be doing. And this is just a great thing for them to spend the next 10-15 years of their life on. And what we do with ODF is we bring people together who are at that exploratory stage, bring them all together so that they can then learn from each other, and learn from people who are just a few steps ahead of them. And through that, we help them find what I like to describe as the missing pieces.
And the missing pieces are, who might I start my company with? What might we build? Who might the initial customers be? All of these things that I think are the precursor to actually starting a company, you have to know what you're going to be building and who you're going to be building it with. So that's the goal of ODF, is to bring people together who are at the stage of figuring that out. Some people ultimately figure it out. Some people realize that starting a company isn't right for them at the moment.
And both of those goals or both of those ways that you can end up after participating at ODF are really excellent, because you're gaining conviction in whichever direction you decide is right for you. I see. Actually, I went to ODF 9, cohort 9. That was, I think, two, three years ago. And I met the great founders at the time. I really appreciate the community and all the dedication and help and support from the ODF team.
But I realized recently you changed the program. Because at the time I went to ODF 9, the program was about three months or so. And now I think you changed the style, I think, format. And it's now more like intensive two-week and so on. Could you tell us a little bit about the history and the cohort and things you learned so far? Definitely. So ODF has been around, hell, almost six years. It might even be our six-year anniversary now that I think about it, 2019. So we've been around for almost six years.
We've tried a lot of different formats over the years. We started out in person in San Francisco. And people loved it. And the goal was, again, bringing together people who are at a similar stage of trying to figure it out. And then, of course, the pandemic happened. And instead of us trying to just do a sort of Band-Aid or a duct tape solution, where we were thinking about, hey, can we do some virtual thing as kind of a stopgap measure before we switched back to in person?
We really wanted to make an earnest effort towards building something that could be really longstanding and digital. So we went digital with the pandemic, but with the intention that we could try and be digital after the pandemic as well. And to a large part, we were successful there. We did have a digital community after the pandemic and all of that. But we ended up realizing that a year after the pandemic was over, that people were just having such a strong pull to come back
to in person as well. So while the digital component was strong, it made a lot of sense to actually reintroduce that in-person experience, which was so powerful in the very early days of ODF. And so we launched it as a one-week, what we call an onboarding week to the community. And that's in person in San Francisco. People come from all over the world. I would say about half of the people who participate are based in San Francisco.
The other half, roughly speaking, half of that half come from outside the United States. The other half come from inside the United States, different parts of America, Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, New York City. And they come here because they want to explore building a startup with other people at the same stage as them, being in San Francisco, and then, again, just figuring out what's next. So we have that onboarding week, which is intensively in person.
We suggest that people should try to really clear their calendars for that time. And then after that onboarding week, we have the digital community, we have ongoing events. But that week is really meant to be a forcing function for making a lot of progress on the figuring it out stage. I see. Yeah, it's really, yeah, that makes sense. And then, and I actually have some friends went to the recent cohort and they say they're so satisfied and they make friend and yeah, that's, yeah, I hear
great things about the recent cohort. Awesome. And yeah, I was curious. I'm not a member of And yeah, I was curious. I'm not a member of ODF, but so I think, you know, for ODF, there are many like, you know, people joining want to join. So you got many applications, right? Then so what, you know, how do you like choose people to join the community? And what is the most important factor? Well, you know, things so to join the community? That's a great question.
And you're right, it is very selective. I think it's somewhere around two or 3% of people who apply get an offer and join the community. So very selective. And we look at things a little bit differently than maybe an accelerator or someone like that does. So, you know, accelerators, they're typically, you know, they want you to have co-founders usually, right? They want you to have a product usually.
And the reason they're doing this is because they're typically going to invest in your company, right? And they want your company to grow, grow, grow, grow. So that once you grow, and you do really well during the accelerator, you end up coming out of the accelerator having a demo day and fundraising, right? And the fundraising is really important, because that is follow on investment into the companies that these accelerators have backed. So that's really good for them.
It's really good for the companies because they need more capital to continue to grow, that sort of thing. With us, we don't look at, you know, whether or not you have a co-founder. In fact, if you have a co-founder, that might actually be a reason to not do ODF. There are plenty of reasons to do ODF. But the more things that you have in the sort of missing pieces column checked off, the more likely it is that you might not get as much benefit from ODF. So for instance, if you already know who you're starting your company with, you already know,
you know, where, who your initial customers are, you already know sort of how you're going to think about charging them or making money, you're already in San Francisco, like the more things that you have figured out, the less likely it is that you're a fit for us, right? Because what we're trying to do is bring people together at this very specific stage. So to answer your question very specifically, we look at about three things.
The top ones are timing, experience, and then spirit of service. Now timing is really important. Are you six months away from leaving your job? Well, we're really looking for people who are about three months away from leaving their job or less, and they already have maybe left their job. You know, I would say about half the people in any given cohort have already left their job, probably as much as two thirds have left their job already, and they're actively exploring starting a company.
The other third or one half, those are people who are hopefully going to be leaving their job. If the things work out the way that they hope, they'll leave their job in the next couple of months. You know, again, if you're six months to a year out, it's not a really good fit. The other side of the spectrum is if you've already got a co-founder, you've already raised a million dollars, well, then you're probably too far along, right? So there are people who are too early for us, there are people who are too far along,
and we really focus on that. And so the timing is really important, because if you don't have the timing right, then that person is not going to necessarily be able to be at the stage where they can benefit from each other quite as much, right? So timing. Experience is really interesting, right? Because we're not just looking at whether or not people have startup experience, or whether or not they have engineering experience, we're looking at sort of what could help them be a
good founder. And you know, depending on somebody's age, depending on where they're coming from, the things that they have that might point towards them being a good founder can be really different, right? So, you know, somebody could have worked at an in tech in Silicon Valley for 12 years, but they've mostly worked at big companies and they don't seem like they're actually gonna take the risks necessary
and be comfortable with the risks necessary to start a company, right? Well, maybe they're not a good fit. Well, maybe there's somebody who's been in tech for 10 years, but they've been at mostly smaller sort of growth stage companies, right? And they've kind of bounced around from a few and now they have some experience of maybe tinkering with side projects and that sort of thing, right? I would say that probably the worst sign,
you know, I'm speaking openly here. The worst sign is when you see somebody who's been working at a FANG type company for many, many years and they have no history of working on any side projects. That's a really bad sign because if they don't have any side projects that they can point to and they've been working in tech for that long, do you think that they're really gonna quit their job and go and pursue something when they could have had
some time to pursue a side project that maybe you could have led to a startup in the past? If they've exhibited no history of that, it's not a particularly promising sign. On the other end of the spectrum, there are these people who are very young, right? And they could be really phenomenal, but we have to look at sort of what they've accomplished relative to their age. And then the last question or the last variable
out of the three, timing, experience, and then spirit of service, which is frankly, is this person gonna be a good community member, right? Do they wanna contribute to the community? Do they think about more like, will they help other people or are they just trying to get as much value as possible? So that's really the three main things that we look at. And it's pretty clear sometimes when you talk to someone
whether or not their spirit of service is not a match, or whether or not their timing isn't a match. And we try to essentially avoid making these interview calls happen if we know that somebody is a year away from starting their company, we just send them an email and say, hey, thank you for your interest. But if you're truly, you're away from starting a company or leaving your job, you really should talk to us
maybe six months or nine months from now. I see. Yeah, that makes sense. And, but has that those three things, pillars change over time? Because when you started, I think, let's say ODF1, I think founders, you guys just invited your friends maybe people went and there's no like a qualification call or meeting, but over time, maybe there are some miss, how to say, yeah, some mistakes or something, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I think that the thing that we've made mistakes on in the past, and I think it's always a learning journey, is this hope that somebody will leave their high paying, well-compensated job when they don't really have much data that might support that happening. I think that oftentimes one of our mistakes, if we make them, is that we were too optimistic about somebody actually finding the missing pieces and quitting their job and starting a company.
And this usually happens with people who are more senior and who have been in tech and in their existing companies for quite some time. So I'd say that's the first mistake that we often get is that we kind of, we are on the side of this person's amazing community fit and they have a lot of really great experience. And they're telling us, they're swearing to us that they're going to quit and start a company
in the next three months. But there's just this little bit of kernel of doubt on our hands. And then it usually ends up being the case, right? It's wishful thinking on our part and on their part that they're going to end up starting a company. And then on the other side of it, I think that sometimes we don't do quite enough to make sure that someone is going to move fast enough. I think that actually looking at speed
at which somebody executes, whatever it is that they're doing is really important. So understanding that I think is one area that we've learned to ask different types of questions for. I see. Yeah. Going back to the three important things to join the community, you mentioned timing, experience and the spirit of service. I think spirit of service is pretty difficult to judge. Oh yeah, this person is give our mind on, not take our mind.
So what kind of things do you see, do you have any process to filter out like those kinds of people? Because when African upright in the community, so I can say, yeah, I can contribute to the community, but later on after joining, so yeah, he doesn't contribute at all. So how do you see it? Yeah, I think that there's sort of, if you think about kind of a filter, right? There are some people who just make it immediately obvious
when you talk to them that frankly they're jerks and that they're not gonna actually do anything very good. And usually you can kind of eliminate the worst people without accidentally letting them into a community, right? So I would say that, anybody that we were actually really, we've avoided most of the errors around this. And in terms of the people who do get in, I don't really ever have many concerns about the people
being like really bad community members. We don't have that issue really. Like the main thing is these people are kind of obvious and usually they don't really realize how obvious they are. There's like a lack of self-awareness there. And the other thing is you can ask a few questions that just kind of give people the opportunity to really share how they think about this. And if they can't articulate any sort of good thoughts
around community, around contributing to other things, then they probably haven't given it enough consideration or it doesn't come naturally enough to them, which doesn't mean that they might not be able to develop that over time, but it does sort of give you a sign that unless they really dedicate more time to developing this, you can't expect much from them. So usually it's actually the easiest question.
I think the hardest question to assess is the timeline because people are very optimistic about when they're going to quit their jobs. And I think the easiest one is spirit of service, the hardest one is timing, and then the experience one is also quite easy relative to timing for sure. I see, yeah, thank you. And I think you have seen over a thousand of founders so far through ODF or through your personal investment.
And have you found any interesting project of founders so far? Do you have any, do you remember some, oh, memorable founders or some? Yeah, what kind would be most interesting to hear about? In terms of maybe founder, let's say personality, or traits, this aspect I think. Personality. Or traits or impact wise. Yeah, you know, it's really hard because there's so many amazing people in this community to think of like very specific people.
I think that maybe I can talk a little bit about various attributes that I think are really, really incredible about various founders. So I think that in terms of bias towards action and sort of just moving very quickly, I think that Ryan Delkett Primer is one of the best examples of that. I think that the way he just reacts very quickly and is extremely responsive, he just unblocks the team and moves really quickly as a company.
And I think that you need that in order to be building the complicated business that he's building. In terms of building an incredible sort of internal organization in a very complex industry, I think that Grace, who is the founder of Kintsugi, which is a vocal biomarker company that actually can understand things like depression through listening to vocal biomarkers. They, I think that she's just done an absolutely phenomenal job of building a company culture
that sort of has the patience to do sort of the long-term game of building a healthcare company, but also the impatience that's necessary to be a successful startup. Let's see, who else? I think that Mike Shabbat from Traba has just done an incredible job when it comes to leading by example with sort of the cultural values of Traba. One of them that really stands out to me is this idea of Olympian's mindset, where they really think of themselves
as a high-performing sports team. And you can just see how he carries himself and just the way that the company operates, that the entire company is completely bought into this concept. And let's see, who else? I think Selene Haliwa is just an absolutely- founder and really inspiring to me because she's a solo founder she started her company you know relatively relatively young and as a solo founder you know building in one of the most complicated industries and I just find
the way that she's built her executive team and hired people it's just been remarkable and I think she's one of the most yeah I think she's she's easily one of the most inspiring people I know and the speed at which she moves it but I think that the thing that I find really remarkable about her is how she's built amongst other things how she's built out such an incredible team as a solo founder just thank you yeah and I think you have seen like you know like a many
that kind of like successful founders at the same time not like you know the things don't always go you know as we expected you know then some some founders don't you know not successful at some point but do you see any difference between them because you know from your article like a founders and momentum and you said you know most people think companies die because they run out of money but the reality is they run out of hope first the momentum is
everything so I quoted your writing in that sense do you see the difference between all these people these traits or personality or common things I see in successful founders and this is an ad something like that you know I think that a lot of startups go through existential moments even when they're successful so you know ultimately I think everybody deals with potential calamity potential collapse death of the company that sort of thing and I
think that it really comes down to a couple of things like do you actually really really truly care about what it is that you're working on I think that a lot of people you know say passion is overrated and you know you can go and build any type of great business and I think that there's largely two types of people there's people who really want to build for a specific reason they want to go and solve a very specific problem and there are people who just really
love to build and I don't think there's either of those is a bad type of founder but I think that you really need to understand what type of founder you are because if you're the type of founder who really cares about building it for a specific thing you know in a specific area and solving a specific problem well then if you end up getting tricked into being told by other people oh it doesn't really matter what you build just build a great business you
probably won't actually stick with it you know long enough to actually be successful because when something hard happens you're like I don't know do I really care about this that much you know I really actually care about that thing over there that I could be working on which is something that I care about much more than whatever business I've happened to you know pivot around into and then there are other people who just really love building great businesses
and I think that whatever they end up sort of finding that gets an edge or gains traction those people will be really motivated by so I think it really depends on sort of what what it is that actually keeps you going and then the other thing is I think you just need to have this this sense of if you keep going you can make it through I really think that a lot of this stuff is just punching through to the other side and it's really hard and don't get me wrong
like it isn't easy or anything like that and it's not painless it's very painful but ultimately I think that most of the time most companies deaths can be prevented the problem is they couldn't have been prevented necessarily weeks before the company's died but they might have been prevented months or a half a year or a year before the company died and you know by the time a company is a month or two from shutting down you know it's pretty much already dead right you
know you really need to you really need to as you were saying when you were quoting that article founders momentum you know the hopelessness is already set in by that point and it's really hard to get back from hopelessness so you know I think that as long as you can get to a place where you have a great support system you believe in what you're doing you really want to keep going and you believe that there is always another another card to play or something like
that then you have a good chance of continuing to push through now obviously some companies will still fail people work really really hard and try their damndest and they still don't succeed so I'm not saying that every company that failed didn't you know didn't try hard enough or something like that but I do think that the main reason companies die is because they lose hope and I remember the eye-opening moment that you know when I think I remember
you tweeted before about founders and momentum then Oh actually fun fact is like you know company don't die when they run out of money or something and then I thought oh that's really true even if you run out of money if founders have hope and can do something and we can run the company and do something that yeah I still remember that yes thank you for sharing great insightful know things with us so and at the same time so I was going to ask something
but yeah so at the same time you said momentum is everything right would you elaborate that part that is like a strong you know statement yeah yeah so I truly believe that momentum is everything and not all types of momentum are equal I believe that customer momentum is the most important type of momentum so customer momentum is the most important type of momentum for a very specific reason is that it transfers to other types of momentum so
think about it like this if you have customer momentum more people want to invest in your company right if you have customer momentum you'll have people who want to join your company as teammates because they'll say oh wow that thing's going really well and people want to buy it right if you have customer momentum you'll actually have more customers right because they'll hear about it they'll see that other people are buying it and people want to get things that
other people are getting because it looks like you know there is something worth getting right this is why you go to I don't know a farmers market or something and some of the stalls have just a huge line right it's because the the product is good right but it's also because there's a huge line right the these are self these are reinforcing things that are happening right so so customer momentum transfers those other types of momentum don't transfer nearly
as well what do I mean by that I was just telling you how the customer stuff can actually lead to investors into into hires right new new teammates investor momentum does not transfer in that way sure you can get some great investors and maybe that will cause you to have you know a couple additional customers right because maybe they'll introduce you to some customers or something like that but it's not as a direct align right or if you have great investors
that might cause some people to want to join your company but do you really want those people to join your company if they're only joining because some really famous investor invest in your company it's actually a bad sign right because they're not joining for the right reason they're not joining for the mission they're not joining because of the incredible customer love that you have they're joining because some investor put their stamp of approval on it right
same thing with with customers they hear about a fundraising announcement they download your product maybe they download it because you know they say oh I really had that problem right and and and I'm so glad that I saw this announcement because this actually solves a problem for me or they're just like I want to try this out because this is a really hot company invested in by a hot you know fund right so ultimately the customer momentum transfers and the
investor doesn't and the the teammates joining doesn't really transfer that much either that totally makes sense and and thank you for sharing that and I think many founders we you know as a founder we see many like like investment news oh we raised 5 million 10 million from XYZ like a really top-tier founders and I think some founders are how say like it distracted by them oh oh this is the right path or something that some people misunderstand but yeah thank you
for clarifying that and do you know I was just gonna say that you know oftentimes people get hung up on fundraising right and they got hung up on they got hung up on announcements and launches I think the reason that people get hung up on fundraising and are so obsessed with it is because they really like the validation of somebody who has invested in a successful company investing in them as well makes a lot of sense right oh wow these people they
invested in stripe oh wow these people they invested in ramp oh wow these people they invested in ramp oh wow these people they invested in ramp oh wow people invested in, you name it, right? Here's the problem though. When they invested in ramp, they also invested in a bunch of other companies that you've never heard of that have all since gone on to fail. Right? So that stamp of validation that you're seeking was stamped on
many companies that are long dead. So don't take that stamp and consider that the target or the goal you only want to be the next ramp or the next stripe don't think about, you know, whether or not you raised money. And it's from a cool investor who also invested in the great company because they invested in so many companies that went nowhere, you don't want to be that one. And I think that the companies that focus on who they raised money from and sort
of optimizing for fundraising and spending all their time on that ultimately have a risk of just being one of those companies that, oh yeah, I raised from this great fund, but my company died. I see. But that doesn't mean the startup shouldn't raise VC money, right? I think there are two types of startups. Like one is fundable, one is not fundable. Yeah. We should think about that. But after that, would you like a recommend, you know, what's your thoughts
on like bootstrapping versus like a VC or angel investment, you know, backed startups? So my friend, Heaton Shaw, he recently corrected me on bootstrap. He says, I don't like the word bootstrap. I like the term self-funded. So I'm going to use self-funded instead of bootstrap, though I always used to say bootstrap. You know, I think that there's this interesting premise sort of in the statement that you made, which was something along the lines of there's two types of companies
or there's, you know, there's fundable companies or not fundable companies. And I think that's true. But I think there's also sort of a level underneath that, which is, is this company fundable? Yes. Do you want it to be fundable or do you want to take funding? Right. There are plenty of companies that are fundable companies that. Don't need to take funding necessarily, right, so maybe we should think a little bit
more from the perspective of what's best for this business and what's best for me, right, as sort of the founder, you can you can go and raise money for a startup, but that has very different expectations, you know, and very different types of stakeholders than if you don't raise money. And I don't think there's necessarily a good or a bad way of doing things. But I think ultimately you're making decisions that kind of inform the next few
years of your life. And I think that oftentimes people don't necessarily give it as much thought before they make that commitment one way or another. So fundable or non fundable, I think that, you know, it's very true. There are a lot of companies that aren't fundable and they could become fundable, but you know, they're starting out. They're not necessarily fundable because they're too early or something like that.
I see, but in that sense, you know, I have two questions came up, but one is like, you know, what's your thoughts on like going to start up Accelerator in that sense? It's the same as it's not different like a funding or getting fund, but it yeah, the start up get fund, but at the same time it's Accelerator, so they push you eventually to raise money. So in that sense, if let's say the founder know, oh, we are a fundable company, but
let's say founders eventually realize, oh, we shouldn't be funded or something like that. That case happens sometimes. So, but they already went to let's say YC or famous Accelerator so that they take the VC path already. So in that sense, they, how to say, they have a pressure. Oh, once you raise VC money, you got to raise, keep raising and keep growing. And kind of we, the founders need to, how to say, deal with that, like a pressure.
And in that sense, how should we think about it? So I actually think this is not a big deal, to be quite honest, because I think it's a much bigger issue if you raise what's called a $3 million seed round and then you realize that you're not wanting to go and raise follow on funding. If you do something like YC, you know, they invest in so many companies, right? And they invest at such a high ownership percentage relative to the amount of money
that they invest. And they do that because they understand that a lot of these companies are not going to become huge successes. And that's totally fine. Like, that's why they have the Accelerator model. And I think this is a great thing. You know, I think I read something from PG recently where he said, look, we've baked it into our model that some people are going to go back to school after doing YC and
they're not going to end up starting their company, right? Or they're not going to end up building a company that goes the distance. So, you know, he and YC have built this in. So they're not expecting every company to be a success. But if you're a VC and you're only investing as a lead investor in a couple of companies per year, well, then you're really hoping and expecting that those companies are going to try and go the distance versus investing in hundreds of companies per
cohort like YC does. So I think out of anybody, YC is probably the most likely, at least from like a VC standpoint, is they still are a VC. They have this fund model, but they're still a VC. They're the most likely to be supportive of somebody who only raises the five hundred dollars from YC or five hundred K from YC and then ultimately build something that, you know, is is revenue generating, is a profitable business, but doesn't necessarily
go on to raise more funding because they don't have all of their chips or, you know, 30 percent of their chips, you know, on that one startup, you know, compared to like your relative to like these VC funds that are much more concentrated with their investments. So I don't think it's as bad for an accelerator. I don't think you're going to get quite as much pressure from an accelerator to take the VC route after the fact, if you realize that things have changed than you would
from a lead investor. And I do think that lead investors would encourage you to go and raise more money and to do follow on funding because, you know, I think we just have to acknowledge that that's sort of the way that the incentive structure works. Most VCs who aren't super who haven't been in VC for many decades, you know, they have a reputation that they're still building and they want to be able to report to investors,
their investors, LPs, that, you know, the companies are doing really well. And one of the best ways of doing that is talking about the higher valuation that the company is raising. So so you want to make sure that as a founder, that if you're not sure about whether or not you want to continue raising round after round, that you don't get in a position where the people that you're working with are expecting you to do
that. And their success is essentially determined by whether or not you do that. And you mentioned like a higher valuation, and I had that question, too, you know, something, you know, because founders are like a competitive creature, naturally, I think. So they try to raise at higher valuation. It's what I see from founders sometimes. But, you know, when they raise higher at the higher valuation, then the next round, it
might go, they might need to go through like a down round and some people like investors and I think you, you know, warning warns that, you know, you shouldn't raise that too much high valuation. So do you have any advice on or thoughts on like a variation, like a range, you know, or any like tips? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was talking to a really smart investor friend and they said, I don't think I've ever seen a company that raises five on twenty five, meaning a five million dollar
round at a twenty five million dollar post money valuation. I don't ever think I've seen a company that's raised five on twenty five for their first round do very well. And, you know, there's a couple of reasons for this, at least what they were thinking. I'll try and represent their their point of view on this, which was. When you're raising when you're raising five million dollars and you don't have a
product, you just have some co-founders, you're very likely to sort of increase your spend prematurely, build out a team because you have all this money, so why not use it? And ultimately, you end up usually burning through the money in the same sort of speed that you would, regardless of how much money that you had. So meaning you'll probably end up with twenty four months of runway no matter how much
money you have. And it's really hard to nail those first twenty four months. So you kind of run you kind of run into a situation where you might end up with the same amount of traction that you would have gotten with a million dollars, but having spent five million dollars. So you haven't shown that you're very capital efficient, which isn't a particularly great thing to show.
And then I think that the big challenge is now you've gotten a million dollars worth of progress for five million dollars and now you're trying to get. a valuation that's higher than your last valuation, which is $25 million. So really, investors are going to want to see you raising at an up round from the last round of financing. So you're looking at needing to raise at a $50 million, $60 million higher than that valuation.
So it makes it really hard to get to a place where you can warrant that next valuation jump. Versus if you think about it, you're raising at an $8 million valuation or a $12 million valuation. Well, then you always have the opportunity to go to that $25 million valuation for the next round. Or if you're making so much incredible progress after raising at $8 or $12 or $15, you might be able to just jump straight to raising at a $50 million valuation and doing a series A.
And this is, again, assuming that you want to take the venture path and build an adventure trajectory startup, which I think is a helpful discussion for people perhaps to hear. If that's the case, though, you really do a couple of favors for yourself if you raise slightly less money and you raise at a slightly lower valuation. And that's, again, you lower the bar for the next round. You give yourself the ability to completely knock it out of the park and actually skip a round.
So I know one company recently that raised a pre-seed round, a couple million bucks. And they were doing so well that they went out to go and raise, I believe it was somewhere around $5 or $6 million. But they were doing so well after raising that pre-seed and making progress that they ended up going straight to series A and raising, I think, at an $80 million valuation. And there's another VC that I really love. I probably shouldn't mention them by name because I don't know how much they like to talk about this publicly.
But they were telling me that they're one of the top VCs in true seed investing in the world. They told me that they think that really the best thing you can do as a founder if you're raising a true seed round is raise anywhere from $1 to $2.5 million, but anything beyond that for a first round. Unless, of course, there are outliers like some of these really big LLM plays or AI plays, it might make sense to raise more money.
But they felt that this was the sweet spot for a true seed round. And where was I going with that? They also often get founders maybe thinking, are they just saying this because they get a better valuation? Because the founders are like, well, if VCs say that, are they just trying to do something that's good for them and not for me? And the reality is, I think that they're actually doing something that's generally good for the founder when anybody is suggesting to raise maybe slightly less and raise at a
slightly lower valuation. Because ultimately, that step up is very difficult to make unless things go really well for you. But wouldn't you recommend, let's say the startup valuation, that light fair value is, let's say, assuming $50 million valuation. They shouldn't go too much higher. But would you recommend going lower than so that they can close the round earlier, like faster? Like, oh, I think we are okay with $30, $25 million valuation, let's say.
Fair value is $50 million, but let's go 50% discount. But we want to close earlier. Does that make sense? Or they shouldn't? Yeah, I think that the main thing you should optimize for is terms and partner. And I don't mean terms in terms of valuation. I mean terms in terms of everything else. For instance, what's the board setup going to be like? When you start to get into the $30-plus million valuation, there might be a board component to this.
Who's going to be on the board? What's the board structure going to be like? All sorts of things that go beyond the valuation that are worth considering. And then the other thing is the partner. Are these people reputable? Are these people who you would actually want to spend time with? There might be people who are very reputable or are good in some way that you just don't hit it off with. And if you really are going to be spending the next five to 10 years with this person, and they're a lead investor,
that really matters. So I don't think that the most important thing to focus on is valuation. I do think it's an important lever to consider. And the other thing is, if you have multiple term sheets and multiple offers, and they're different valuations, this allows you to negotiate terms with various investors. And some investors might change their valuation if you have other terms that are maybe a higher valuation than what they're offering,
if that means that they can win the investment. Thank you. Is there anything that you talk or share with founders during the cohort? I think you share about founders and momentum and those tips and lessons to founders, but do you have anything else? Yeah, we talk a lot about co-founders because co-founders are such an important aspect of starting a company.
It's fine to not have a co-founder, but I think that generally the worst types of co-founders are the ones that you get just because they happen to be the one who's around versus they happen to be one that's a really good fit to work with you. So we call those types of co-founders co-founders of convenience. And we think that they're really dangerous because sometimes it's just better being alone than just having some suboptimal match that you just took because they happen to be the only person that you had in your network
who was available at the time. And there's all sorts of co-founder pitfalls and mistakes that can be made. And I think ultimately, usually when you talk about co-founders or companies don't run out of money, they run out of hope. And that's what causes them to fail. A huge part of what causes companies to fail is co-founder disputes and challenges that actually cause people to run out of hope.
Because it's one thing for the business, the products to not be working very well and the customers to not be liking it or to be churning or something like that. That sucks, but that's doable. But imagine that's happening. And also you and your co-founder are just hating each other and really resent each other and are having a really hard time with your relationship. Now imagine the opposite is the case and you have all this stuff happening with customers and things aren't going well and fundraising is not working.
All this stuff is going wrong, but the co-founders still really love each other and still really care about each other and wants to help each other be their best versions of themselves. Well, that's ultimately the thing that takes a situation that might be hopeless if the co-founders were butting heads and really disliking each other and angry with each other and takes it and actually makes it a really hopeful thing.
Because now they're supporting each other through this really tough time and they have that optimism that together they can actually make something happen. So I think that's actually really important. The co-founder piece is probably the most important thing outside of the market that you're building in. Yeah. So related to that, I think you have many co-founders through ODF or you just introduced many co-founders to founders. So do you see any like common things in successful co-founders or if you have any signs, so yeah, those co-founders
fail. So do you see any tips or common things in co-founder relationships? Yeah, for sure. I think that most co-founders really, the obvious one is that they complement each other, right? They're not just overlapping skills. But I think the other thing is that oftentimes the most successful co-founders are very clear and very aligned on who the CEO is. If you don't have that alignment early on or there's a lot of ambiguity and it doesn't seem
like people are 100%, maybe 200% on board with who the CEO is, that's going to create all sorts of conflicts. So it's really important that that is something that people are very aligned on in the early days as co-founders. Another thing is we look a lot at whether or not somebody is coming up with the idea together as co-founders or whether or not they're bringing the idea and recruiting co-founders to it.
There's nothing particularly wrong with either of those, but it's worth mentioning that when somebody brings an idea to the relationship and they're very dedicated on essentially recruiting a co-founder to work with them, on a very specific thing, well, that is tough if the thing doesn't work out, because that might mean that the person who came with the idea is less in love and less open to moving off of the idea that isn't working, versus if you come together and you say,
hey, we have complementary skill sets, we really like being together, and we think that we would just enjoy working on something together, let's co-create an idea together, let's go explore an idea together. That is much more likely to be a success in the long run, because there isn't this sort of sense that we're dedicated to a specific idea. Now, obviously, there are some incredible counter examples to this, of course.
Some of the best companies have been started by people who essentially had a really deep insight and recruited a co-founder. So I'm not saying that that's not the case, but I'm saying that when things get tough with the original idea, it's much easier for the co-founders to pivot and co-create the next idea together when they've kind of come into it with this level of openness about what it is that we should be,
what it is that we're working on, we don't really know, we're gonna kind of figure it out together, and we're gonna kind of see whatever we end up pursuing is kind of a thing that we do together, versus something where you're kind of getting into it from this perspective of, you know, one person being sort of the owner of the idea or the originator of the idea. Yeah, thanks, yeah. And yeah, I think you already shared many things,
lessons about ODF, but so where do you see ODF in like five years, 10 years, or 20 years, so in the future? Well, that's a good question, because I don't think that if you ever ask somebody where it's gonna be in the next five years, it's gonna change constantly. So I'll tell you where it is now, but you're gonna have to check in with me in a year to see sort of where things go, because a lot of the things that are changing
how we operate are external factors, right? It's the external market, right? And I don't mean like other people building stuff in, you know, early stage startups, I mean like the world, right? We were a digital community for a really long time, exclusively digital because of the pandemic. AI, I think is really gonna change the way people build companies. So, you know, ultimately, I think it's hard to be super prescriptive about what the future looks like,
but I'll tell you a couple of things that I'm really excited about. The first one is that I think that now more than ever, in the next couple of years, you're gonna be able to do far more with less. And I think that really is gonna change the dynamics of how people think about who they're gonna start their company with, whether or not they need to start a company with another person, or whether or not they can be solo.
You know, how they think about fundraising, because do you need to fundraise for a lot of businesses anymore? I think that when the cost of creating things continues to go down, you know, you could argue that servers, like, you know, moving to cloud was a huge unlock, right? In terms of reducing costs. Well, what is essentially unlimited labor, right? Like, being now, like, you know, almost too cheap to meter, right?
With things like Cursor or Repl.it AI, these things are almost getting too cheap to meter. So you now have this scenario where the cost of actual, like, labor to build these things is continuing to go down. So that means that you might not need to fundraise where you might've had to fundraise previously. So I think that a lot of things are gonna change about company formation, fundraising structure, sort of how people spend their time.
I think that the way that university happens and the way young people sort of develop skills is gonna change really significantly. So, you know, do I think that most sort of junior software engineers are gonna have roles at startups anymore? I don't necessarily know. I think that you're gonna have to do a whole lot more to get hired as an engineer at a startup, and that you're gonna probably end up by going through the process of learning
outside of school and outside of, you know, college and all of that. You'll probably end up building your own things that make money. So maybe you won't even ever join a company as an engineer because you already have been so successful. So I think that, like, to very concretely answer what you're saying, I think that in the next five years, we're gonna see many of the people who do ODF fundamentally change how they think about
structuring and building companies, and we're gonna be evolving the way that we support them to match with that. And hopefully we'll actually be really the ones who are helping them kind of figure that out and developing new models for building companies based off of that. I think that part of that has to do with financing, how these things get financed. I think that financing still plays an important role,
but I think it's gonna be a changing role. And then ultimately, you know, there's another aspect of this, which is like how ODF kind of fits into the broader scheme of things. And, you know, what we're doing, you know, the company is called ODF, but it's a little bit of a misnomer because what we're doing is we're building all of these sort of standalone communities and products that kind of fit together and that overlap in really powerful ways.
So we have ODF, which we've talked about for, you know, the majority of this conversation, which is for people who are exploring starting a company in San Francisco, trying to find the missing pieces. Another thing that we do is a thing called Merge. And Merge is for people, usually people who are 13 to maybe 19 years old, who are looking for just a small amount of money, anywhere from $100 to $1,000, maybe even a little bit more than that,
looking for a small amount of money to be able to be unblocked on working on a project that they're really ambitious, you know, and passionate about. And the idea with Merge is that these aren't companies. These are projects where people are working on hardware or trying to develop something really novel. And maybe some of these won't become companies, but ultimately we think about the things that we do with ODF
and Merge as being sort of complementary and alongside of each other. We also have another thing that we're working on, you know, called Landing Club, which is helping people, you know, move from abroad to the United States to build startups. So, you know, when you look at all of these things and put them all together and you start to think about the future of ODF, not just ODF the program, but sort of that broader thing,
the goal is to really make things, which is both products and communities for people who make things. And, you know, we think the way that things are made is gonna change really significantly in the next five to 10 years, just how it changed really significantly in the last 10 years. So we really want to continue to evolve alongside the way these things that are changing about the way we make things. And that's kind of like the thing
that we're most excited about in the years ahead. Likewise, and also in that sense, you know, regarding the AI and the AI agent, let's say, and do you think the future startup founders need to have co-founder in that sense? Because, you know, let's say they can hire AI agent, AI agent CTO, like a COO, CBO, and so CHRO. And so do you think, I'm curious about the importance of co-founders in the future of startup.
I think the funny thing to say, which is probably not accurate, but the funny thing to say is, well, why do you even need founders? Or why do you need human founders? I think you could say, right? Like, do you even need them, right? Because, you know, you could kind of make the argument that, oh, like all you need is actually electricity and compute, right? And therefore, you know, just somebody who has capital
can afford electricity and compute. So you're just sort of going and telling me, everybody becomes a venture capitalist, right? Everybody becomes an investor, and they just tell the agents to go come up with an idea for a business. Obviously, that seems a little far-fetched, but maybe not. I do think that, you know, if you think about the perspective of co-founders, what do they actually provide? Sometimes it's a complimentary skillset,
but I think the main thing is that it's really, really lonely to build a company, right? So some people might empathize with robots or with chatbots, and they might be able to get that level of support from them or from a community like ODF. A lot of people who are solo founders have said that ODF and the community has been really helpful to them. But, you know, ultimately, I think of it as, are they gonna be replacing just the technical
or just the skill part of the co-founder relationship, or are they also gonna be replacing the emotional part of the co-founder relationship? And the answer is maybe. It's hard to say, but at the same time, a lot of people don't even have co-founders, and they're successful today. So, you know, I'm sure that some people will use AI instead of a co-founder, and I'm sure that that's already happening, though they probably, at least today,
don't consider AI their co-founder. co-founder, or AI isn't on the cap table, I should say. It's more of a tool that's being used in lieu of a co-founder. The same way that an AWS instance is being used instead of an actual literal server in your closet. Yeah, really interesting perspective. And I think we really want Julian's Chrome or AI agent we can reach out to, because, you know, I think you are helping many founders
and many founders reaching out to you and rely on you, you know, ask your help and so on. And two questions, I'm curious, how do you manage, let's say you are helping many founders, how do you manage your time, handling those messages? I think you receive hundreds of messages, I think from, you know, various founders from early stage to later stage. And second is, what's your personal motivation? Yeah, helping people, why do you love working with founders?
So I think it depends on the type of founder or the type of sort of stage that they're at. I really like helping people sort of in the figuring it out stage, because I think there's something just really amazing about sort of this idea that you're kind of at the cusp of a really sort of transformative moment in your life, right, where if you take a certain fork in the road, it'll completely change where you potentially end up, right?
Or if you shift sort of the trajectory of where you're aiming by just a degree or two in a positive direction upwards, then, you know, in the near term, it doesn't look like you're really changing where you're ending up, but you've extrapolated out a few years and that little shift in degrees at the beginning ends up having a really outsized impact on where you end up in the long run, right? So I think there's just something really magical
about that moment and something really fulfilling about helping people sort of figure that out or make progress there that I just really love. I'm also kind of, I'm definitely the type of person who enjoys being sort of like a mile wide and inch deep when it comes to ideas. You know, I love to take various concepts or various things that I've experienced or heard and apply them to things that are not seemingly,
at least superficially relevant to each other. And the only way I can do that is by just vacuuming up information and knowledge, right, from all of these incredible people who are working on such a wide array of things. And the cool thing is they have a lot of specific things to each of their business, like Glasp, for instance, has very specific things to your business, right? But there also is this sort of horizontal layer
of things that are very generalizable across businesses, right? So you get to learn about the business specific things while helping with the generalizable things. And it's just an incredible exchange of knowledge. So I find that really fulfilling. And then I think the other piece of it is, when people are a little bit further along and they have a company that's going, the thing that I really love is being there for people
when they're having a really tough time. And the reason for that is because I've had a lot of tough times as a founder and also just personally, I've had tough times. And I've always benefited from other people who helped me. And I always want to be the person who does that for other people. And especially if I can help them through something that I've already seen before, right? Or I've already seen another founder deal with before,
because that means that they don't need to try and evaluate this without prior data. I'm able to provide them data from past sort of interactions with the problem, right? So that's really fulfilling. And I believe you asked me a question before the question about personal motivation. Can you? Yeah, how to handle and manage your time? Yeah, because you have messaged many founders, I think, I guess. Sure, so I think that it's interesting.
I think with AI, there will be additional ways to help kind of like triage and give people support and all of that. A couple of things come to mind though. Oftentimes, I have people who ask if they can meet with me. And it's usually from the perspective of getting feedback for fundraising. And usually they'll want to meet for 30 minutes, I would say is sort of the default, right? Whenever anybody schedules time.
And I've usually found that the best way to do this is to not actually meet live when somebody has materials that they want me to review, but instead for them to send me the materials and then I record a Loom video reacting to the materials. And I think that the reason that this is really good is because I'm not with them. So therefore they're not steering me, I'm kind of doing a blind user test. And I'm also recording it so that they can reference that
and go back to it over and over again. And then what we'll do is I'll send that video to them, that Loom video, and they'll be able to go in and add comments and I'll be able to add comments. We'll be able to have a discussion back and forth. And it might actually end up taking me over a week of going back and forth on these Looms, it might end up taking me 30 minutes, right? Because I might spend 10 minutes on making the initial Loom
and then all of the back and forth. But ultimately I think that that flow actually results in better quality feedback being logged, better discussion around the feedback than one of these calls where the call ends up kind of just not going in the direction that's particularly productive. So trying to default to async is really good. But I think another piece of this is creating materials that do the work for you, right?
So that's where we're talking about AI and can we have an agent or can we have some sort of chat bot or something like that that answers questions for you? Sure, but I already do that. My agent is just like a URL, right? I just send people a URL about how to make a good pitch deck or how to think about investor inbound. Like so many people ask me, Julian, I have this investor, they just hit me up and they wanna meet,
but I'm not fundraising, what should I do? Well, instead of me repeating everything that I've written in this blog post, I just send them a blog post because I spend a lot of time writing the blog post, but I've probably sent that to hundreds of people since I wrote it. And every time that I send it to somebody, they're like, this is exactly what I was looking for. They don't need to get on a call with me at that point.
So I think that part of it is creating artifacts that make it so that people can interface with me without interfacing with me live. And then if people want to interface with me and I don't have artifacts or it's something specialized, like again, reviewing their deck, then we can do it async. Again, I'm not one of these people who's like async always type person or anything like that, but usually I try and default to the method
that I think is gonna be most helpful for people. And I think the async loom videos is the most helpful for deck review, as an example. And I think sending somebody a really thoughtfully written essay or blog post about a very tactical topic is much better than having me try and riff through it on a 30 minute call, but I've already documented it and written it down. That totally makes sense. And hope this interview is not,
you repeating the same thing, but hopefully it's a new aspect. No, not at all. You're keeping me on my toes. Okay, thank you. So yeah, two more questions and sorry, it's time is running out, but one is like, do you have any, let's say you gave us many advice, gave founders many advice, but would you add something else? Do you have any advice to founders you didn't talk about today? If you have any. Yeah, sure. I think that there will be a lot of forces at play
that kind of pull you sort of magnetically towards things that are unproductive. There will be forces that try and pull you into an investor meetings before you're actually ready to fundraise. There will be forces that pull you towards the allure of talking to press or trying to get press instead of actually launching your product and just getting into a handful of users hands. There are all these forces that will kind of pull you towards
things that seem productive, but aren't actually directly productive. And as long as you can avoid those forces and focus on the customers and focus on building for those customers, you're gonna be in a really good spot, but those forces are incredibly powerful. So you'll have to continually ask yourself, am I letting those forces pull me off the path that I really need to be on? And if you find that you are getting pulled off the path,
it's actually a really good thing because most people aren't aware and never developed that awareness to actually acknowledge it, right? I'm not a master meditator by any means, right? But one thing that they teach me is that everybody when it comes to meditation is that you're supposed to focus on the breath or at least one meditation you focus on the breath.
And then as soon as you realize you've let your mind wander to something else, you don't say, damn it, mind, you really suck. You say, okay, let's bring it back to the breath. And that's the same thing when it comes to getting distracted by all these forces that are pulling you in various directions. As a founder, you want to make sure that you're not beating yourself up for getting distracted, but you want to bring yourself back to the breath, return to the breath, return to the thing that you actually need to focus on
and then move on. Thank you. And I just read your today's newsletter also for young founders. And you mentioned like mentorship and then balancing studies startup and building networks, those things can be obstacles, distractions. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I think, I think specifically I'll just talk about that, what you're referring to there. I think building networks, everybody's like, how do I expand my network? And I think that there are good ways and good reasons to expand your
network. So for instance, I think when you're exploring starting a company, you don't want to start a company with just whatever random person happens to be available. You want to go and start a company with somebody who's a really good fit for you, who wants to actually go and build the same type of business as you and work towards the same type of ideal outcome, right? So expanding your network or spending more time with people and trying to grow your network to find that person
who's really aligned with you is a really worthwhile opportunity or a really worthwhile sort of thing to allocate some time towards, right? That's why we build ODF. The goal here is to make it so that you can plug into a group of people who are at a similar stage as you and figure out what it is that you're going to do. The other type of building network though is not building network in service of anything.
It's just sort of vaguely building a network because you think it makes sense to have a network. And here's the thing about building that type of network. The way that you build a great network of awesome people is by building things that are awesome, that cause people to be interested in you, right? And part of this is making people aware of the awesome thing. But there is this aspect of when you build awesome things, they generally tend to become more known to people, right? Similar to how when you start to
get customers, that also starts to get you more customers, right? Through referrals or that analogy of the long line at the farmer's market causing more customers to come to that farmer's market tent or to wait in line to go into that restaurant, right? So ultimately, if you do really great things, then your network will be a result of that versus if you're just going around trying to add people on LinkedIn, huge waste of your time because you're not actually spending time making
something that's great. And that's ultimately the thing that gets you respect, makes people want to send you great opportunities, all of that. Thank you for the sage advice. Thank you. Yeah, that's great advice. And this is the last question. So since Glasp is a platform where people can share what they're reading, learning as a digital legacy, we're going to ask you this question. So what legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for future generations?
That's a tough one. Not because it's a tough question, but because it's just a very emotional one. I think that the first thing I would like people to maybe take away from the things that I do is that I try to do things based off of what I want to see in the world, not based off of what I think other people would think is cool. I try and do what I think is cool, because I think that ultimately, if I like something,
there will be other people who would like it too. And I have to be really honest with myself, do I actually like it? If I don't actually like it, and I'm lying to myself and pretending I do, then that's doing no one any good. But I hope that people look at what I'm doing, and see that this is a person who's working on stuff they really care about, they really believe in.
And it gives them the encouragement to maybe not just try and do the thing that kind of looks externally cool, or they can explain to their relatives, or something like that, but is actually the thing that's kind of a representation of who they are and what they care about. So I hope that people see that and maybe can take some inspiration from that. I hope that people see what we're doing at ODF, and realize that there are different ways to build communities, and there are different ways to invest in startups.
You don't have to build another accelerator to build something really great for the world. I think ODF is great for the world. I'll brag for a second and say that I think it's a really positive influence on not just technology, but the world. I think that you can do things your own way and have a really important impact. And I think that I have this publication that I run outside of ODF, sort of a personal thing, called Multitudes.
And I call it Multitudes because I like this concept that we're so much more, typically, than what we actually show to any one person in the world. And I feel like sometimes we're kind of like putting on different masks to sort of fit a certain image that we want people to have of us at any given point in our lives, or in various aspects of our lives. And the reason I started this publication, and the reason I started putting out the things that I put on Multitudes, is because I decided that I didn't want to
have these different masks anymore. I wanted to just be me and put that out there. And I think that figuring out ways to really represent the whole self is really valuable. Because I think that that's the thing that's unique about each person, not some sort of kind of filtered down, diluted fragment of the person that you think kind of like checks the boxes for other people. So I think that hopefully people will look at that and see, okay, this is a person who
isn't trying to segment themselves. And maybe I don't need to segment myself as much either. Thank you for the beautiful answers. And yeah, I loved the publication too. And we learned a lot from you. And I'm personally grateful for ODF to exist in. And since I met a lot of great founders and you, and yeah, I love the community. Thank you so much for joining today. Of course. Thank you for having me. Thank you.