Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman

We have to sit up straight. We have lower, since this is not right. Admiral Rickover would not stand for this.

Um, okay. Uh, George, Nick, what are you working on?

So we are building a multiplayer programming game for teaching people how to code. So like Codecadmy, but actually, again, a game.

So how do you win the game?

So you just need more and more levels until you're an awesome developer. So you sort of get points somehow for it. It's like a bit competitive learning; like you learn to program, you'll get more points. We're competitive.

So there's multiplayer?

It's like write code to kill a bad guy. Yeah, so the first level you got your guy, you write code to move them around and you kill another guy. So it's like right in the middle; you're killing dudes.

Alright, so you're motivated?

Yeah, sort of.

You know, what is your name? What's the length of your name?

It's a string.

Okay, that's cool. Bin like I kill that ogre.

Yeah, what you do right away? It's not just badges, not judges. Um, is it launched yet?

It is actually! We launched it yesterday.

Oh well, the beta things move fast around up. Check it out. Did you launch because we told you you were gonna be in office hours?

Actually, no. We had just a coincidence. It is somehow fortunate, 'cause we didn't have time to prepare. The launch went crazy.

Yeah, wait, they were— I got home from the dinner last night and I get on a hangout with these guys and they're just at the server terminal control, seeing and restarting the server because it's under so much load.

How's it doing now?

Not much better, unfortunately. We can only serve a certain fraction of the traffic that we're getting, and that's been going on for 24 hours.

How did you start working on this?

Um, I wanted to learn to code about a year or two ago. I had been a semi-technical co-founder of my first startup, and I tried Codecadmy. I tried a whole bunch of these, and I just couldn't stay stick with it. It wasn't engaging for me. And so these guys, my co-founders, were like, "Hey, why don't we actually make a game?"

So you were the original guinea pig?

I was. They thought you can't keep motivated using existing stuff with like a game where you can kill people.

Oh, you know, I was— it wasn't just that; our first startup, the customers kept coming to us and saying, "We keep your— your company, your product because it's like a game." And we hadn't intended that at all.

And what was it?

It's a company to teach people Chinese characters.

I see.

And so we thought, well if we can do that inadvertently, what would happen if we actually made a game?

So how far can you learn how to program? By like how much can you teach people? Right?

'Cause I can remember the kind of crappy programming I did when I was in high school, where I didn't really understand what I was doing.

Um, so if you look at the stuff that's on, you know, Top Code or Hacker or how can you force people to learn advanced concepts when all they really need is like to have the right library calls?

Right, can you make advanced concepts produce advanced weaponry?

So the software engineering part of learning to be a developer, that's something we can add later, focusing on core programming for now because you get motivated enough.

So like, okay, now I want to build this app, but do you have to get through different levels?

Right, presumably you get more and more sophisticated.

Yeah, but you could get more and more sophisticated just by writing more and more code and getting access to the right library functions without actually learning any more about programming, right? Couldn't you?

How can you force them to learn more about programming in order to make more powerful weapons?

So you can have things like, okay, your code needs to run this fast. In this one, you need to learn how to use recursion. This is the only methods available to you.

In this one, you need to figure out how to do like anonymous function passing method here.

And generally, if you make the levels hard enough, which you're able to do when they have a reason to complete it, they try really hard and you can get them to do harder and harder stuff as the natural progression of the game.

Have you run beta users through this yet?

Quite a few actually.

What did you learn from it? Like, what went wrong?

Well, the first thing that went wrong was that we started at too high a bar because I had worked in a kind of a semi-technical role. My first startup, we assumed a whole bunch of prior knowledge that was totally untrue for our beta users.

So you know, we started out like, you know, writing for loops that you're like, "Oh, well that's simple."

Yeah, yeah.

And then we got people with no programming background, and they didn't even know how to complete a line, like nearly no concept of formal notation is the single biggest obstacle, correct?

Right.

What's the most advanced concept you're teaching now?

So, so far we have some dev levels where it was like, "Okay, you're going to need to figure out the targeting strategy for your tiller."

So you're going to fire into the center of a group of dudes, and your soldiers backed up with your artillery have to avoid your shots. That you have to make sure they don't chase into your line of shooting.

What era of technology is this?

Oh, it's a web game and you're doing everything in JavaScript.

No, no, what what era of like comedy fantasy?

So you're a wizard and you're casting stuff to control your soldiers and your heroes and that sort of thing.

I see.

How many users did you guys?

How many Apache helicopters or anything like that?

No, unfortunately, we don't have the Orion, SS magic.

Yeah, alright.

Keep saying do robots.

We could do robots. It's when fantasy you can make up anything, right?

How many users did you guys get yesterday?

So we maxed out the server at 15,000 people. We had 200 concurrent, but we really don't know because we were actually— people were just getting 404s.

Why not just spin up a bunch more servers?

We weren't architected that way. We didn't think we get nearly this much traffic.

We just posted it to Reddit.

That's it?

Yeah, we posted it to Reddit and we got swamped. Not even the main Reddit. We actually— people on the Reddit threads were just like, there were repeated things. They're saying, "You know, like, oh the hug of death, hug of death, hug of death."

And you know, 404 not working. So that's— they were scrambling all last night to do that.

Do you know if it's people that didn't know how to program before that are mostly doing this or if it's just people that want to play a fun game?

So the people that know how to program already, they're like, "Okay, when's it on GitHub? When can we— this is awesome! Let's get on here!"

I know like 20 people yesterday. Poehler made me like, "Oh man, I want to help out," and "When can we pull a link? We clone?"

Yeah, so we're thinking open-sourcing in the next couple months to really capitalize on the interest.

But most of the people, yeah, they're on the Learn Programming subreddit.

I don't only— programming! This is great!

And they beat all the levels, and we're like, "Crap, any more levels?"

We're just gonna focus.

I don't know anything about the gaming business. Like, do you know how to make games?

We're learning is this quick is the quick answer there.

Okay, 'cause I'm probably certain best practices in the gaming business and probably whatever they do would be the first would be the starting point.

Yeah, so if you're just wondering how much to open-source, I don't know how much they open-source things in their world, but whatever they do is probably the default thing to start with.

Yeah, we actually— that was the first thing we did when we started the company was we realized, wow, none of us are professional game designers. Let's find and talk to game designers.

And so we had, we've got this kind of core group of people that are advising us, just telling us when we've built sucks, but that it's been very helpful so far.

Hmm. Is there anything they told you that changed what you were doing?

They said make robots and said people understand robots.

They said make robots because when you have like controlling your units, Fiat code, people think, "Okay, that's natural." If you're robots, when you say, "Oh, it's a spell; you're a wizard," you're adding to the fantasy and, oh, it's a little bit hard to understand.

Yeah, see, okay, so is it robot snail?

Oh, oh, so that's it?

Sure, to change the art, right? The art is in all right.

Hmm. I know you guys now just gonna create as much content as you can while people are, yeah, we just finished the level editor.

So now the hope is that we can finally turn out three levels a week using our awesome live coding drag-and-drop thing, as opposed to like hard coding all the coordinates and be like, "How does it work now?"

Hmm. So growth first? How many people do you have?

Is it just you two?

No, we have one guy that's manning the servers right now. He's keeping it alive, hopefully keeping it— Scott, keep it alive.

This is the same team from the first startups. We've been working together for six years now.

How did you originally meet?

So I was his roommate, and I lived down the hall from my co-founder.

I'm Callie.

I founded her, yeah, college roommate.

Mm-hmm. Did you guys study? Were you guys programmers?

Yes, what— Scott and I did CIS, and George's the econ film guy.

Ice. And then we graduated, like, oh, let's not get jobs. That's gonna suck.

What are you talking about?

And then we did the startup, and then three months later you're— what? Crash?

I was like, "Oh, good luck."

The reason people start startups is because they don't want jobs.

Yeah, right.

No, sirree. Honestly, really, if we've— if we are looking at someone's application and they worked for a long time for a large company, that's actually bad to us.

Because like the best part of founders probably could not stand that— every months that IBM did me in was like, yeah, sophomore year, like, oh no more.

How are you guys going to make money with this?

So it's a recruitment model. Basically, the people that the leads that we generated through the coding challenges provide us with the opportunity to qualify people before we even get in touch with a potential company and possibly train these people good enough to make them valuable employees.

The recruiters we talked to said yes, absolutely, companies are interested in the developers on your site and we're interested, and so let me have something.

Recruiters famously say all sorts of crazy stuff.

Yeah, they do.

So yes, that's yet to be validated.

Yes, the other people in the space that we talked to also say the same things, people running coding challenges and doing placements and the boot— the boot camps and that sort of thing.

Yeah, we spoke to actually one Y Combinator company, and we asked him how he had done his recruiting.

He said, "We sent a group of qualified recruiters a spreadsheet."

I said, "How'd that turn out?"

He said, "Oh, he had 50 placements in six months."

So I said, "Okay."

Hmm. You're out of time.

Alright, nice job, guys. Thank you!

Okay, okay, guys. You guys, you know, guys, wait, wait, come back back for a second.

Uh, you didn't realize that, but that was your Y Combinator interview.

Um, you're in the next batch.

Uh, you are a plane, right?

No crap, sir.

I guess I'm sure we just sort of decided to do that on the fly.

I mean that was the first time I talked to them.

Hi, I'm Karen.

Hey, I'm Finbar.

We are making GiveIt100.com.

What is it?

GiveIt100? You can look at me.

Okay, we're making a video site where you sign up, you choose something that you want to get better at, and then you share a video of your progress every day.

So what would be a typical example?

Like, what's the most— is it launched now?

It's in private beta right now.

Okay.

So what do you anticipate being the typical use case?

Like, what sort of thing would people get better at?

The most common one right now is dancing.

The reason for that is because I made a video of myself learning to dance in a year, and I put it online.

It ended up— I mean, you spend a year learning to dance.

I did spend a year learning today.

What kind of dancing?

A robot dancing.

Okay, it's all robots today.

Um, Ron Code, you hear this? This is the new trend, robots!

So I ended up getting several hundred emails from people who said, "Hey, because I saw this video."

It wasn't a video of an incredible dancer, but it was someone who started off not knowing how to do it and getting better.

So is this video you put on YouTube and a lot of people looked at it?

Yeah, so was this what led to the startup?

Yeah.

Okay, so you made this video of yourself learning to dance, and then you thought if other people did something like this, it would encourage them to dance?

Yes.

What sorts of things are people mostly showing themselves besides dance?

Learning, and they are users.

We have invite-only beta, 50 people and 50 we have.

Yeah, it's like 4,000, 300 or so on a waiting list.

Yeah, there are— there's a 9-month-old learning how to walk.

There's a woman who's recovering from a multiple sclerosis exacerbation; she's relearning how to walk.

There's people who are learning how to ride a unicycle, learning a new language, learning how to code, learning design.

Why haven't you accepted the rest of the waitlist?

Um, well we're kind of just like ironing out some kinks in the product and getting it to the stage where we think it's going to be really engaging.

I'm not engaging in you know— well, is we gotta have some really awesome engagement stats.

Well if it's engaging enough, now you've got enough one out and ironed out enough kinks.

Sure, we have.

I think really the major things that I'd like to see personally are the kind of social sharing features because when we kind of open the floodgates and have lots of people come onto the platform, we want to kind of maximize on that.

And you know, if a lot of them come on and share and then leave, like they could have got a lot more people's come in by that point.

So they're not sharing it enough now?

Well, there's no way them to share it right now because it's totally a private closed beta.

Like nobody will see it.

Right. We really just were— we're kind of just experimenting on our first batch of people, getting their feedback, and then we're gonna launch in the next couple weeks.

Do they always make videos of their progress?

Yes, it's fitting! It's how it works.

We started off as a photo and video site, but then we cut out videos; we cut out photos because the videos were more interesting.

So how do people make videos of themselves learning to code?

Look, how much faster I can type!

Actually, there is someone who's learning how to touch type, but they sometimes talk into the camera to talk about what's challenging, what they're struggling with.

They'll show actual code; they'll show what they actually built.

How many views does an average video get out of like a potential 50?

So the view counts, we're seeing about a thousand views a day.

And we have roughly between twenty and thirty of our kind of small group of users are coming back to the website every day.

Twenty and thirty out of 50 come back to the website every day, so unique, the kind of unique visitors.

It's not like the same twenty to thirty every day; it's like people will kind of wait a few days and then upload a batch of videos at once.

So the videos are hosted on your site, not YouTube?

That's right, yeah.

But we want to use YouTube. We want to piggyback off of YouTube as a marketing channel the same way we did with my video.

So we'll take really compelling 100-day challenges and we will turn it into a viral video, put it up on YouTube and say, "Made with 100."

Seems like that would have been really important to test during the beta is will people share these on YouTube and do they get watched?

Well, I guess our test for it is my video, which has 3 million views and was shared widely.

You don't put it on YouTube?

Well, the video clips themselves are on our site.

That's something that you can go on every day and see the same people, every day— see their clips.

Sam was saying I should have tested putting it on YouTube specifically.

Oh, the clips? The type— that ten-second clips themselves?

I mean, I think like the kind of format that we have on the website, where you kind of have this gallery of ten-second clips and you can just kind of see them all and consume them all kind of in context and a sequence is like really powerful.

So you have a view with a page with a whole bunch of little—

That's right on it, right?

And you can see from the beginning to end the person's story.

That's the most compelling part!

Bassett, if you envision like Paul Graham.

I'm Paul Graham. I am learning to like pick which startups— I'm learning to pick which startups for Y Combinator for 100 days.

Then you see day 1, day 2, day 3, and then as you hover over each video it just starts playing.

So you can watch it for a second or for 10 seconds.

We cap it at 10 seconds because I have a short attention span, and I'm building this for myself.

What do you think will be the most popular things?

I don't mean the most popular things by number of people who do them. I mean what will be the most popular things for third parties to come and watch?

So that's a really good question.

Parties like people who are not the people who are practicing.

Like, what do you want? You've said you built a series on what do you want to watch.

Like, what are you excited about watching other people learn?

I want to see a good story.

I want to see someone who is struggling and is against all odds, like doesn't think they want to do it.

I want to see like Phil Libin at his 3:00 a.m. hour saying, "I'm out of money, and I just got an email from this investor."

And I want to see video of that rather than just hearing him talk about it.

I think like today— I don't think he would have used your system.

No, seriously, not for like starting a startup, maybe someone in this room.

Well, more for learning how to dance or something like that, right?

Um, but what do you think will be— not— I mean, what specific type of what genre of stuff will it be?

People learning how to dance. Do you think that will be the most popular stuff?

Will it be babies learning to walk?

I think there's some— we're seeing because the baby is learning to walk part actually sounds pretty exciting.

Like parents would love to be able to document their kid's progress.

I'll tell you the thing— if you don't have kids, one of the big problems about being a parent is the memories of the current kid overwrite the memories of the more recent of the sort of recent past.

No, like I— I'm so sad I can't really remember what my four-year-old son was like when he was three.

I see three-year-olds, and I think, "Oh yeah, I remember when he was like that," but only vaguely because my god, I got this four-year-old like jumping up and down in them on bed and on the bed in my mind, right?

I'm— they're very— if you wait till you have kids, I mean, I think there's going to be like a number of real kind of killer categories, which will be very interesting.

The children one is certainly very, very compelling.

When, yeah, there's kids like crawling, learning, they can open the door, and then like as parents hold his hands and he's kind of taking baby steps.

And you do how you tab videos that implicitly have these structure of like sequences.

But right, but they're not organized that way; they're just like on your iPhone, right, in chronological order.

You know, they're not like the series of the kid trying to say some phrase or something like that.

How good are the users at sticking with the whole hundred days of making a video every day?

So a good question.

So every user that we have, there's an average of 18 videos uploaded per user.

So I guess we have some people who actually are kind of earliest implementation of the product, was send us videos for our Dropbox every day.

So we have some people now who are actually up to kind of in the 80s.

Yeah, so was a guy beatboxing.

Who we've got him from day one through three, like 85 I think— and he's pretty awesome.

But it's like meet boxing?

Beat boxing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like a 1— Oh yeah, I like that.

So he like starts off and he's like not very confident, not very good, but you really see like over time the amazing improvement in him, and that's like—

We're trying to get our people like encouraging each other to stick with it.

Is the point of this that the community will make you be more likely to stir?

Absolutely!

So that's definitely part of it as well.

So we have these kind of commenting and kind of propping feature, so people say, "Oh, this was a really awesome day."

Actually, I think like our most commented on and most kind of liked video we've got, somebody learned to unicycle and one day she upload a video where she had kind of a bad fall and kind of fail.

We're never— it was like, "Oh, that looks really sore, but you know, keep at it, keep going, you'll get in there."

You realize you can— people make their stuff semi-private?

Yeah, there's a feature to make your all your videos private because a lot of people, they don't want to share when they're going through it, but maybe once they're good though, or they want a group of their friends to be able to see it.

Like, it's their kid— that'd be an interesting thing for us temple.

You know, the kid thing, the kid walking is very different from someone teaching themselves how to unicycle.

Don't be— don't like over optimize too early.

Like let it grow into whatever it's going to grow into; maybe it'll end up being kids or the big thing, or maybe not, who knows, but be empirical about it and don't— don't like wire in some outcome too early.

Alright, is it time?

Thank you, guys!

Alright, you guys, it sounds pretty good to you?

Mmm, you're right.

Andy!

Paul!

Hey, hi Sam!

You don't know how odd this is for us; this is the brother of someone we funded in the past, and except for having a beard, he seems identical.

It's very disconcerting.

Um, mmm, hopefully, that's a good thing.

Yeah, um, you meant— yeah. Alright.

What are you working on?

It says, oh, that's your username. What's the startup?

It's called Flexport.

We're the first licensed U.S. customs brokerage built around a modern web application.

A customs broker?

Yeah, whenever you import a product from another country, you have to clear it through customs.

What does a customs brokerage do?

Collect tons of documents and organize them and file them forms with U.S. Customs to clear your goods, to show that this is a legal product, and you pay the right taxes.

Is it one of these things where dealing with the government is so awful that you need like a specialized group of people whose whole job— which is also like a few old of license—

Oh, their head? They have to be licensed?

Oh yeah, heavily licensed and focused years, otherwise—

And so the government trusts them?

Yes! They're not gonna lie!

Correct, right?

You go to the government on a rubber stamp; the paperwork you go through an FBI background check as well to get the license.

I see.

And what do you actually do? You like file forms for this employee?

Like, so you— anytime you— there's based on what the product is, there could be like 120 different forms you have to file.

So we have to take the what the product is, determine which forms are needed, fill those out for the customer, file them electronically with the government.

So there are existing customers program?

Yeah, right.

And you're gonna somehow— you're gonna be an instance of software eating the world?

Yeah, you're gonna eat customs brokers?

Yeah.

Um, so what do you do? Like, is it somehow scalable? If you write software, like what do you do differently than an existing customer?

Um, well, first of all, we will use a fax machine and bloodless the cosmic.

Wow, alright!

So yeah, it's an online dashboard to allow you to organize all these documents and help you understand which documents are needed, and then we actually collect those documents for you instead of asking you to go get it, and it will file it.

I can just come to a website, type in what I'm importing and have it come in the U.S. and you'll take care of everything else?

Yeah.

Will the experience for users be as simple as a customs broker, or are they gonna have to do a little bit more work?

No, that way less work.

It's less work?

Oh, absolutely!

I mean, we do the work for you.

But doesn't the human customs broker like sort of interview out of people?

What they're importing? Like the person says they're importing—

We're not removing the human elements; are repairing you with a licensed customs worker.

We have customs workers on staff, and it's our location's tool, not like enable!

It's— it's sort of like Uber.

Uh, yeah, I haven't used that analogy.

It's kind of like teleporter for products instead of for people.

Okay, if— yeah, yeah, yeah.

How much does someone pay a broker to import like a million dollars of goods?

It's usually— it's not depending on the value of the goods, but it's like between 100 and 300 dollars per shipment, and there's 30 million shipments that enter the U.S. every year filed with the customs.

Customs entry? 30 million?

Yeah, and then that's just to be nice, Berg!

So really, I mean it— many of them use customs brokers?

Yeah, yeah, use a customs broker.

I mean you can have a big company will have a customs broker in staff?

Yeah, we drink like Apple at a certain scale, those guys?

Yeah.

You hire customs workers?

Or we'd like to make it so you don't have to hire a customs broker.

Because our software is easier to use than maintaining that division of your company.

You have customers now?

Yeah, we have three customers right now that are importing stuff.

Yeah, we actually have a waiting list of like 300.

The base wheel company in the world signed up.

We were a little scared of like creating an energy crisis, so I told him to hold off of it!

But we have a supertanker approaching that board in San Francisco right now!

So how did you get those customers?

Um, so I was in the industry for like 12 years.

I know a lot of importers.

Are you currently a customs broker?

I have an AK. I'm not personally a customs broker.

I do not have a customs broker license.

I have a customs worker that works for me, I said, and they kind of teaching me everything.

So you guys have— you already been doing the manual version of this?

So over the years, I've probably imported about a thousand containers and cleared them through customs.

Okay, my companies that I've worked with.

Worked for my brother's companies; one of them I still work for my brother.

So you do know how to do this yourself?

Yeah, sure.

Why has no one done this before?

Um, well why the existing companies haven't done it before is kind of obvious.

Yeah, if you go to a customs broker convention, web software— what's up— by 40 years probably.

Yeah, the wide— startups have done it.

Well, first of all, I mentioned it's highly regulated; hard to get a license.

And actually until recently, it wasn't possible to clear a shipment except at your local port.

So if you built a software startup to do this, you could only help people importing into the Port of Oakland unless you had an office in every port.

Really?

On 2007, you're not doing the clearing though; aren't you just matching them up with a customs broker?

No, no! We are a licensed customs brokerage; we actually do the clearance and file it electronically with customs.

Okay, so you guys are kind of the customs broker of record?

Yes, we also— it's not quite like Uber yet!

Yeah, I didn't quite get that analogy to be honest.

Hahaha. He have the same Morton sense of humor as your brother?

Do Office hours with him always a little bit prickly?

Um, alright, uh, so how are you gonna get all of the customs, all the importers just which to this?

Um, well, presumably they have these like long-stained relations with their custom brokers.

Yeah, and the kind of importers to a large degree have this figured out too, by definition, right?

They've been doing it; they know how to import goods.

Um, so, but every time you import a product into the U.S., it's public record that product and my last company actually sells that data.

We have— we aggregate every time you import something.

Yeah, we've collected 300 million of those shipping manifests and sell subscriptions to access it.

So we know every single— you have that Rosemary list?

So you have the customer list?

Yeah, we have every importer in America database!

So we can— Wow, that's very convenient!

Wow!

Um, so how far along are you? Have you got sort of this like a big press or a beta version that—

Yeah!

Um, MVP product; it's a web app.

You can sign up for it; we're not taking your users right now.

Um, but that's just a matter of me wanting to feel like everything's super tight.

Mmm, nice user experience, but it has— it has the functionality function.

Initial version is gonna have—

• How many shipments have you done with your first three customers?

How many inbound shipments have you done?

No, so the first clearance is happening in November.

So we've got these guys lined up ready to go, we've got the— but the first shipment— actually, the government shut down three weeks ago stopped us from— they won't take a new broker.

The guy who's like job it is to onboard us and was furloughed, but he's back to work's office and I filed the forms on Monday with the program.

I was hoping to have that done, be able to come up my wife's app and say, "Hey, through our first shipment already!"

But see you idiots in the government, you are actually slowing down innovation!

How much do you make? Did you have a sense of like on average how much you make per customer?

Yes!

Well, for each clearance, that gross margin should be— we have 75%.

It doesn't take a lot of time!

It's kind of— so you can be like really hands-on and hire a lot?

Yeah, but I don't do the process! It's done— clearance!

We're gonna charge $100 to do it, no matter the size of the shipment?

Yeah, pretty much!

It's actually not about the size, but like there's some things you might charge extra for, like clearance certain— if you want to do something that has— to clear with FDA, there's extra paperwork we might charge.

Actually, it seems that people would pay a lot more for like a 777 full of iPhones than you know, like one little—

Shitty— yeah!

Now they're gonna pay more in taxes to the government, right?

But as far as the broker, it's still just one forum.

Or was it?

Dudes, current brokers charge flat rates no matter what the shipment.

No, they charge more, and you know, I'm kind of looking a little differently.

Where the brokerage is just the way that we enter the much larger logistics space, 'cause once I'm your customs broker, I know everything about your supply chain.

So what would you see?

A freight, warehousing, inspection.

Sum up with trucks or something like that?

I someday I would like to be doing all those things, but our other brokers doing that sort of these services after you get it into the country?

Um, yeah, but I don't know that they look at it as like they're the primary way that they're gonna make money.

They would never go into it as a loss leader, for example.

And I don't know if I'll do that here.

I like— I don't like burn rates, but hmm.

So how much do you think you'll be able to make, like in— you know, once the thing launches?

Yeah, well the logistics globally is a 2.3 trillion dollar industry.

No, I just mean when you do the customs broker, I just like to say there were trillion—

Yeah, you know, really big markets are bad for startups, not good.

Yeah if you say a too big number, the investors just don't believe it!

I—you know what? It's really hard to say!

I mean, I've kind of modeled out and said like, okay, we can make about thirty million dollars a year in profit just being a customs brokerage.

If you get— say 1%?

I don't like to do that kind of analysis, but you know, each customer is probably worth maybe two or three thousand dollars a year, and I think we can get as many customers that the whole business is three billion a year.

Yeah, thirty million is one percent?

Yeah, exactly! The customs current business, it's about five linear, right?

Basically, the number you said earlier, the whole U.S. customs is about acrobat— it's about three.

Yeah, now I don't have exact figures for that, but based on the number of shipments that are cleared and what people charged for those shipment—

Are you gonna hire just an army of sales guys and go down that list?

Possibly!

My last company had an army of sales guys and it wasn't that fun to manage, but things that aren't fun are still sometimes— sometimes it's the way to make the most money.

So I'm not— you know, I have to do it better than I did the last time!

So it's more fun?

No, we gotta end!

Alright, boy!

Alright, interesting!

Yeah, alright. Thank you!

Thank you for coming!

Thanks, guys!

[Applause]