YC SUS: Eric Migicovsky hosts founder office hours

All right, hi everyone. Um, my name is Eric Mikowski. I'm the course facilitator here at Startup School. Um, excited to do another round of online office hours with companies in Startup School.

So, office hours, um, for those that might be tuning in for the first time, are an opportunity, um, that we take at YC for the partners to actually spend a concentrated, a focused 20 to 30 minutes, um, with each startup, really to dive in and talk about a particular problem or a particular situation the founder is experiencing. Um, and help them brainstorm ways to solve that problem or figure out ways that they can work through and, um, and get past that problem.

So, we're going to be doing that in an accelerated fashion here. We've got a bunch of Startup School companies that have signed up through the Startup School forums to, um, do office hours, and we will do them in front of everyone who happens to be watching this.

Um, as I, as I talk to the founders, um, I'm really going to try to keep my advice kind of, um, focused in such a way that even if, even if you're tuning in and you don't have the exact same problem, hopefully you can still get value from, um, from these sessions. Really, in general, like one of the reasons why I like, I like doing office hours is oftentimes we as founders are really like stuck in our own world. We're working, working from home, we're working on a small team, working on a project, and sometimes we just like spin our wheels trying to solve problems.

Um, with office hours, it's a great opportunity to kind of like talk through your problems with someone else and potentially even figure out ways internally that you can, you can solve them just through the act of like saying them out loud and, and sharing them with someone else.

Um, so as you're, as you're watching this, if you're, um, if you have friends that are also working on startups, consider that maybe at some point you should just take the time to talk founder to founder through the problems that you're having. Um, might be a way to solve.

So, without any further ado, let me pull in the first person. Um, first up is Box Score. JC, this is JC. JC, can you hear me? Hi, good to meet you. Let me just, okay, here we go. Um, how are you?

Good, how are you? Uh, good to meet you. This is, uh, Jose, uh, from Box Score. Great to meet you. Why don't, um, why don't we jump right in? Start by, uh, what's the name of your company and what are you working on?

Uh, the name of the company's Box Score. Uh, what I'm working on, or what we have, is we have a beta that's live that had, uh, what it is is a futures gaming platform. So, what it really is, is we ask trivia about future, uh, events that are televised.

Uh, so mostly sporting events, but we also do entertainment like the Oscars and stuff like that, and people just answer what's gonna happen at the event. You know, who's going to win the match, who's gonna win best picture, all those type of things.

I don't completely understand from what you're doing. Let me ask a few questions. Is it a betting or a gambling site?

That's where we're going to end up, but we're not monetizing it yet. But yes, um, and you're gonna play it instead of playing it against the house, you play it against your friends. You play it in groups against your buddies, you know.

Okay, um, and what stage are you at right now with the company?

We have the game live. Uh, we had 240 plus users last month for the NFL playoffs. Um, it's a beta what we have right now, and we need to basically build the next version now.

Um, we believe we got proof of concept at least to ourselves. We prove, prove it to ourselves like, uh, that it can be a second screen during a live event.

Uh, so for example, for the Oscars, we just had a lot of people reaching out and being like, "Hey, like, you're late to scoring this or that." Like, it just, we felt the energy, you know, and like, and so we need to, and how many, how many users do you have right now?

Um, we have about 20 in the latest competition active users right now. But the truth is, is I've been doing it, the whole thing by myself, and so I've brought down the amount of content we...