speaker-0 (00:00.312)
David, welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast. Everybody, I'm your host Deandre Hericus. For the second episode in a row, will not be joining us. He is currently out of office. But this is an awesome conversation. I've been looking forward to it. I've known David for a little over a year now. You're deep in the world of Indianapolis, in the world of the startups and so forth. I would love for you to just introduce yourself.

speaker-1 (00:21.774)
So thank you so much for having me, Deandre. I'm Davide and my motto is like from Napoli to Indianapolis. So as you can hear from my weird accent, I'm Italian. My name is an interesting E at the end of the usual David that you always hear in Indiana and Midwest. So yeah, I'm very glad to be here. I think it's a way kind of to celebrate my third year.

in this amazing city, Indianapolis, in this amazing ecosystem, the Midwest, so glad to be here with you.

speaker-0 (00:53.354)
Absolutely. So whenever you were in Italy, were you also in the startup space or what were you doing before you joined G Beta?

speaker-1 (00:59.982)
Very, very interestingly, I never worked in Italy. So in Italy, I was just like a simple student overwhelmed by books, by theory. In Italy, it's very, very theoretical the way you approach the world. so I think there is talk about startups and workforce. I think in Italy, unfortunately, there is kind of a skill gap.

between what the workforce requires, so what employers require versus actually the skilled strategy school because it's very theoretical. in Italy I was just a student.

speaker-0 (01:43.466)
Nice. And so what actually brought you to, whenever you moved from Italy to the US, now did you go directly to Indianapolis? Was that your first stop or where did you go along the way?

speaker-1 (01:51.744)
So there was kind of some steps between Italy and the US. So I did this very theoretical study in Italy about business, but like studying from books, studying frameworks, which sometimes I bring those frameworks my day to day life. Sometimes my friends say, hey, stop talking about business. We are just humans. So I studied in Italy. Then I did my master degree in France. And that's where my world review opened up.

I did the master in France and I've studied in both Madrid and London because it was a multi-campus experience. And then they offered me the opportunity to have a double master's degree in the US. And this master's degree also allowed me to do some work experience within the master. So I worked for Kraft Heinz, which is this big CPG food production company.

speaker-0 (02:43.246)
Absolutely, yeah. Catch up in Buster, man. If you grew up here in Indianapolis, you definitely had some hot dogs with some Heinz.

speaker-1 (02:51.758)
I don't know if, like I was working procurement so I was actually like purchasing, helping to purchase those materials, streamlining the tenders so that like the buyers could actually finalize those purchases at a big scale. I don't know if it was only serving Europe or worldwide. So I don't know if the eggs and the tomato that I purchased also was served on your table or only on European table. So I need to double check that.

speaker-0 (03:19.182)
Yeah, no worries, man. Well, the goal of today is really, I would love to learn more about what you guys are doing at G Beta, or Generator, broadly. So I'd love you to dive into the company at large for background, for those listening. I was a startup founder. I got my start going through it. I think I was the first or second G Beta cohort, led by Sarah Aubrey, who was great, and learned how to put together a pitch deck. And I still use the same lessons I learned in that initial startup accelerator.

incubator program to as I'm teaching other founders on how to raise capital how to structure structure your pitch deck executive summary etc. So I just love to get a kind of more broader view of what is generator what is G beta and what are you guys doing here in ending? Yeah

speaker-1 (04:01.646)
So as kind of to give the segue with my story, I studied two years in South Carolina and then I moved to Indiana for Generator. And Generator actually was also present in South Carolina when I started to look for jobs. So that's a good way to say that Generator is present in 50 plus communities in the US. We have over 400 accelerators and we have both free accelerators.

called G-Beta and also Invest Accelerators, which actually give equity, sorry, give investment and we get, back some, we take some equity. The G-Beta, which is the former product I mentioned, is fully free. There is no fee, no equity because basically the, the economic corporations and other founders pay us to provide the program for free to founders.

And so we are lucky in Indiana to have Indiana Economic Development Corporation that for a lot of years has allowed us to serve founders in Indiana. I'm super glad that you mentioned Sara Obrey, Jeff Zantz, Doug Upplegate, they were the first ones that kind of started us in Indiana. And then now we have our local team, me, Ty Choker, Camilo Lozano, Emil.

so kind of very happy to provide support to founders and as I said it's free, no fee, no equity and it's a seven week program where we try to kind of connect them with local stakeholders, mentors, investors, ecosystem partners such as Glassboard and also we try to give them some know-how on how to approach customers.

and investors and how to effectively communicate with them the ROI return on investment to investors and ROP return on purchase for customers.

speaker-0 (06:07.284)
Absolutely. I think the work that you guys do at G-Beta, if I really were look back, it transformed who I was as a founder. I appreciate that. So any early stage founder looking to get their start. You have this really interesting product idea. Maybe you're coming from industry. Maybe you're coming right out of college, which is where I was. I think I was still in college. Actually, I was in college when I went through it. But just getting the foundations of what it means to be a founder.

I went through that process. funny enough, think I can tell the story now if I've been quite quiet about it. funny enough, we originally, so with All-in, we originally went through the G-Beta program. We ended up raising like $350,000 out of that. We went on. We raised another $400,000. Then we were kind on growth mode. Then we're going out for an $800,000 round. And within that round, we actually applied for the Las Vegas accelerator, generator program, and got in. But we had one problem.

Our current investors on the cap table were not happy on the 6 % common equity or whatever the common equity split was for Generator at the time. And so we got in, accepted. And I think we're less than a week or two out. again, I felt so bad. And I think I can talk about it now, today, and hopefully laugh about it. We had to turn it down. We hadn't signed paperwork, but we were there. We were already going there.

and we had to say no to going through like the proper investment accelerator. But it is cool how you can bring a company in, you can give them the foundations, you can get them networked, give them mentors, give them access to service providers or connections to advisors who will eventually potentially become investors or also just investors like at demo day, example, give them all the tools they need to start being successful. It's on the onus of the founder to take that and leverage it. But then also you have that next step up with the generator accelerator programs that actually invest.

$100, $120, whatever it is today, into the company. think it's amazing. It really is that full roadmap. And the fact that you guys have partnered with the economic development corporations to bring that to founders all around the country is incredible. So I'm curious on your side, one, what are some really interesting startups that you've worked with? And two, do you have any upcoming programs that a startup founder could look at joining in the near future?

speaker-1 (08:21.646)
Yeah. And I love to hear kind of your journey, Generator, like, and you were kind of transitioning from the free accelerator into the investment accelerator. I usually say that our G Beta is kind of like, like, it's building the car, like the fundamentals of that car and like learning how to start driving. And then the investment accelerator is like putting fuel in the car and like, and going 100, 100.

miles an hour which I don't exactly how it translates because in my brain is like kilometers an hour.

Okay. And I'm curious, mean, because of how, like, I know you serve lots of founders, so how your definition of founder has evolved when you were a founder, so like first hand versus like now that you are more kind of seeing all those founders like entering the doors of GlassBorg. I don't know if you want to cover it now or later, but that's something that your, what you say about you being a founder, like the question came to mind, so I'm curious.

speaker-0 (09:24.82)
No, totally. So basically the question is, how has my perspective on being a founder changed from both when I started to where I got to with All In and then ultimately now coming to be more on the side where I'm having conversations with hundreds of founders in a given quarter and like what's been my perspective? I think the biggest piece of it was when I first started All In.

speaker-1 (09:39.694)
Exactly.

speaker-0 (09:44.832)
I'm a junior in college, right? I don't know a thing about anything. The term entrepreneur had never been in my lexicon. fundraising and pitch decks, I didn't even understand that. So I was just really, really green. But fast forward, you go through a G-Beta program, you start to get your initial checks, and you start to kind of understand what it means to be successful in the world of startups. And think the number one thing I focused on was just learning, right? And not just learning on.

how to raise money, but more importantly, you learn that you have to constantly be having conversations with your customers, and that's how you get to product market fit. But I think also learning the art of being a founder, I always tell people that whenever you're pitching, it's absolutely a performance. And the better you perform, the better the outcome of their performance. So that's kind something I learned while I was being, going through, when I was a startup founder, it was very hyper-focused on just getting to the next stage of funding, getting to the next stage of growth.

all the things go to market sales, fundraising, customer success, et cetera. I think as I more generally and anecdotally look back after having conversations with founders, going through G Beta, the cohorts that you brought through, all the founders we have conversations with through Glassboard, I would say I'm reading the book, the 32 letters that Rockefeller wrote his son. So it's really cool. If you haven't read the book, I highly suggest it. You can read it like one letter every morning. It's like one to two pages, which is plenty for my ADD.

The passage I read, passage, the chapter or letter I read this morning was all around action and how the only way you can be successful is if you take action. And so I think the biggest change for me as a founder and now looking back on other founders is that the founders who are successful are relentless at taking action and don't get planning confused with action. I think that there's times where you can start to make a plan. You can get obsessed with the plan, but if you get to the point where planning

starts to feel like progress you've started to fail you actually need to go out and Take action and what what's the outcomes of that right first outcome of actually taking action is you're going to fail good, right? What's the opposite reaction of failing you're gonna start to succeed and so the only way to be successful is to actually start to fail so you can figure out where to where the stove is hot you don't go that way you try this direction and then once you start to find Actions or motions that start to be successful then you indicate on those even more

speaker-0 (12:11.33)
but it's only as a result of the actions that you take. And so I think that the, answer your question, the founders who are more successful, the things that I look back on, how we got all in acquired, even though that was a messy road to begin with, like the fact that we even got there was because we just were really relentless on taking action and just trying things and failing often, but also finding success in that process. So I think that's in general what my response would

speaker-1 (12:34.126)
I love to hear that and I apply the feel faster, feel forward mindset in all my relationships. try to really say to founders, just do it, experiment. You cannot know what is the right route until you actually try to go in several routes and maybe you hit the door with your full face in nine out of ten doors and then the tenth door is gonna...

open up and I feel what you were saying about the performance in all those pictures to investors. think you're trying to do all these prints and some of them are gonna, you're just gonna have nothing in your hands after the meeting and you feel it's wasted energy, but instead it's like reps that you're putting in your picture, in your performance, and then you're gonna do a great show when it's, I think it's all serendipity. You're gonna do best.

when you're meant to do your best, when you're in front of the right investor, the right customer. And so I feel like that it's a great mindset to bring to the table. And something that also I think is important is that some founders focus on this like fail fast, fail forward, mainly with investors. I want them in the program, I want the founders to do the effort towards the customers. I always say like,

Be investor ready through customer focus. It's interesting that, of course, the headlines and also the big numbers that you mentioned with your fundraising are the ones that people want to hear about. at the end, and tell me if I'm wrong, you got acquired because of your customers, because of your technology, because of your distribution channels, because you have proven that your supply, that your technology was desired by the market.

And the market is made by people which are like consumers or people that work in a business. So like buyers in an organization. So I feel it's key that the founder like, yes, think about strategically how to go to the next step. And of course, a big fundraising round is helping them to go to the next step. But also like the customer focus is key because then between one stage and the other stage, you need to prove that you got to a certain amount of like new customers.

speaker-1 (14:58.754)
you reach these like demand milestones, market milestones, however you want to call them. So I think it's like feel forward on the customers. I think to answer your question, like the most successful startups versus like the ones that you don't make it through, like there's a level of like customer obsession. Just to complete my background, after Kraft Heinz, I went to work for Amazon for Mr. Jeff.

I was actually in a startup within Amazon, which was called Amazon Pay. So we're like the FinTech competitor to PayPal. And so like that customer obsession, in all your decisions, have the customer at your table. I was actually saying this to a startup this morning. Like when it comes to the marketplace, like there's a buyer, there is a seller, and they were actually like selling some physical product, regenerative inputs for soil.

So Biochar and others. And so there is this marketplace where there is, of course, a supplier, a seller, and then there is a buyer. And it's the buyer that opened the wallet and put the money on the table to purchase, to enable the transaction. And so I think Amazon is a marketplace where they have lots of services for the supplier. There's Amazon FBA.

And there's lots of like care for the supplier, but at the end they're obsessed about the customer and the customer is the one to pay. And so me as a consumer that goes into Amazon, I feel like it's a platform I trust because they are obsessed about the customer, which is the person actually is like paying for like to purchase the product and enable all the flywheel of transactions on the platform. So, so customer obsession is something.

speaker-0 (16:54.19)
No, course. And I think that it's, it kind of goes back to the point I was making on planning versus action. And I think that a lot of it is like, there's a bit of friction when you go and talk to a customer.

It doesn't always feel good. It's not always like a good outcome. Like they could say it sucks, which is like friction. And you might not want to hear that it sucks from the customer all the time. And so you might make some really elaborate plans on what you're going to be doing when you go out, like how we're going to go talk to customers. We're going to go and find the list of customers, or we're going to kind of talk about our strategy on how we're going to go about getting customers. But I think there's a little bit of a hesitancy. This is earlier.

stage. You don't actually progress unless you get better and better at getting in front of customers and having conversations. ultimately by that, having them drive your decisions forward on where the product goes, where the company goes, etc. To your previous point, absolutely. The only reason we raised any capital is because we had traction. That was it. And halfway decent team and all the things that's included with that. But the traction was really what got people across the board. But it's the actions that you have to be okay with getting in front of the customer.

and then not liking the product, or they don't buy and we have a low conversion rate, or how do we optimize for that? And think maintaining love for your customer is also extremely important. I found that it's sometimes possible to start resenting the customer. Like, they didn't like the product that I made, or they all are like this way. because you start to deal with the same kind of archetype of person,

And I think as you are doing even founder-led sales or your product, you maybe have a higher churn rate than you would like to. And people are coming in on your intercom system and saying, I want to cancel my subscription. It's those moments where you have to realize that that's signal from the customer, but you have to still love them and not just feel that where you're constantly getting rejected kind of thing. And I think that's always a good point. If at any point you're a founder and you realize that you've fallen out of love with the customer, then it's probably time to consider if you want to keep going.

speaker-0 (18:55.71)
and how do you develop that love back. But to continue down the road with G Beta, I'm curious, do you guys have any upcoming cohorts and what's that all about?

speaker-1 (19:05.902)
Yeah, so by the way, what I'm saying about what you said about the customer, I love the conversation, we can continue it for hours. So back to our programming in Indiana, we are trying now to launch, we are launching a program. It's gonna start early June, so we're recruiting for the whole May in a very intense way. Actually, the early part of May, and it's a program that brings us together, us and Glassboard, because Glassboard is one of our amazing.

mentors in the program is at G-Beta industry for Smart District Manufacturing. And we are trying to look for who's your company. So companies in Indiana and with founders, with at least one founder that is based in Indiana. And it's, and as always, as G-Beta is, is a seven week accelerator for startups and University of Lafayette innovators in Smart District Manufacturing, IOT, heart tech, data intelligence, materials, energy supply chain, cyber security, work for...

workforce management. And so as I say in the beginning, we're looking for founders with early market traction, looking to acquire more customers and also approach investors, but also university affiliate innovators with strong patented or patent pending technologies ready to explore commercialization and funding pathways. in this program, want to bring those like industry for innovators and help them as a thinking partner, accountability coach.

execution body coming back to the point of like they need not only to think but also like execute and and so and and like walk walk and talk I think it's it's how US people would would say so so yeah it's like doing strategizing fundraising but also like take action on the market taking notes taking rejections and learning from from those I call this process like sales discovery like they are not doing customer discovery like customer discovery is like

assessing if there is a problem and if a solution can fit the problem. I call it like more sales discovery, like try to understand if there is willingness to pay from the customer and getting the hard notes from 90 % of the customers until they find the early adopter archetype and they can double down on that use case and start some sales.

speaker-0 (21:24.052)
Absolutely. and to your point, think there's so much about if you're doing it the right way, you're having conversations with the customer, you should know how they want to buy it from you. When we say talking to customers, you should have ... I just had the original founder, if you've ever heard of Yale in August, home, or Lox.

It's one of the largest consumer lock companies for your homes and doors and access security and so forth. The founder of August Locks just so happened to be in Indianapolis for the Final Four. And we were going back and forth on him being on the Hardtick podcast. And so he said, hey, I'm just actually going to be in person. Why don't I just come on by? And of course, Grant wasn't in person. So I was like, man, this might be really technical. And I'm not going to be very prepared. We're going to do it anyways, because this guy's here. And this is a guy who truly built one of the largest

most well-known consumer lock companies in the world. And now, absolutely has been a part of that and had built strong relationships with Amazon, with Walmart. The platform that Walmart uses to drop off packages to people's homes inside their door, that was actually August Locks. That was him. He helped design that entire program. Actually, originally brought it up to Amazon, started working on deploying it through Amazon. Amazon, at the end hour, told him, no, we can't actually use you guys. We're going to use your competitors.

I guess he walked right across the street and goes and gives it to Walmart, and months later now it's been launched. Anyways, he's now launching another lock company called Doma, which is a very fascinating company, where he's making what sounds to be the smartest smart door you've ever heard of. think he's probably a little too late stage for it. smart? So smart that it's like reading your face ID, and it opens for you, and it closes for you. I think it's going be revolutionary in the space of accessibility tech. This guy has

speaker-1 (22:59.502)
How's my

speaker-0 (23:09.27)
Silicon Valley, he's done well.

speaker-1 (23:14.05)
Claude with doors, like Claude applied to Claude chat with...

speaker-0 (23:16.714)
Effectively, there's like six products in a door. But the things that he did to validate the product, for example, was he actually, like, before he ever built a prototype, he was building it with conversations with the largest door manufacturers in the country, or actually in the world, rather, on he's actually making an add-on to doors that you and I would buy, more luxury style doors, maybe for your front door, of course. And he was talking with them for the OEMs.

Like, hey, how can we actually build this product to be conducive to the way you're already making your doors? Right? And so that way he doesn't launch. He's made this incredible add-on to doors. But as it turns out, the largest door manufacturers in the country who would be his target customer say this product could never exist inside the door, creates a ton of sales friction. As it turns out, he had product market fit potentially, but he didn't because he wasn't talking to customers early enough. In this case, he was. And now his entire solution, and he said the first thing that I did was talk to those people before we started building the product.

And so that's just kind of another anecdotal example of what it means to kind of consistently talk to your customers beforehand. I don't even know how I got on the topic, but I thought it was a fascinating story. Again, give a real life example of what it means to talk to your customers. That's what it means. You're literally designing it alongside with them, and that way you actually know you have a customer. And I think to that point, with the founders that you're looking for for the industry 4.0,

At what stage are they really at? Is this idea stage? Is this I have, you know, I've got a little bit of traction, I've got a pitch deck. Like, what's like the gauge of founder that you're looking to have within the program?

speaker-1 (24:51.982)
I think your point is spot on and I love anecdotal episodes so probably I can share actually some anecdotes of the exact stage that I would love the founder to be in. So just to be broad, take a step back, we would like founders, so category A, founders with early market traction, which means that our founders, they're like talking to customers.

and I've already some anecdotal stories of how they are interacting with those early customers, early adopter. I always struggle to make one or two examples because, I mean, all these startups are like my kids, like my children, I know. It feels like I don't wanna like, no, I don't wanna pick one over the others, but I try to do some examples. Yeah, I have in the back of my heart, but I don't, I...

speaker-0 (25:43.95)
You're allowed to have a favorite child. Everybody does.

speaker-1 (25:49.986)
I refer them to all feel like my favorite child, my favorite children. Anyway, that's category A and I can make an example. I'll break the rule and make an example that is very anecdotal for you to understand what means early market traction picking an hardware startup. The second category is like university affiliated innovators that have a strong technology. So just repeat founders with the early market.

traction, talking to customers, alloys, like pilots or found or like universal innovators, maybe with no customers, but they have a strong technology. like there is clearly economic mode given by their IP. And we had on this, had great collaborations with the University of Purdue, like the OTC.

Office of Tech Communication was super nice and introduced us, lots of founders for the previous cohort, which was an agriculture cohort. And now out of the five founders, we got three founders from PoorDue and they have strong patents to PoorDue. So if you give me a second, I'll make the example on both categories. So I would say, and I'll make some hard tech examples, so it's going to be like very relevant to...

to the podcast. So on the first category founders with early market traction, two examples come to mind. The first one is a company that scans, that is able to scan trucks when they come back to the main warehouse when they need to park at night. And so through this smart sensing and physical AI, they're able to kind of capture what is the status of the truck. So if there was any accident or the status of

of the vehicle, of the wheel. And when this guy came to my cohort, he showed me the picture on the deck with the first cameras and sensors installed at his first customer, at his first warehouse. And I said, OK, of course, it's not like meaningful traction, but he's on the field. He's trying to sell. he, because he was able to install

speaker-1 (28:16.64)
on a customer facility on this like fleet management warehouse, meant maybe he already had 10, 20, 30 sales conversations where he got 29 nos and probably that one was the first yes after lots of nos. So already having something deployed, even if it's like with one early adopter, it's already very meaningful. Another example in this first category to come back to your

design partner, like the door example, we had this company that is producing very advanced lens for medical devices, for aerospace. And this company, like when they got into the program, they were still trying to launch to market their lens, their optics manufacturing machine, which is like very high technical. And they were fundraising for that because

for hard tech, need to go through fundraising because you're like, you need to actually have the capital to put live these like super complex production machines. But they were already partnering with some lens companies that could not produce these very specific high-tech lenses. And so they were basically those high-tech lens companies were outsourcing to this small startup that is Indianapolis.

Actually not in Indianapolis. They are from Ross Hallman and now they are in Bloomington. I picked the wrong... The first one is in Indianapolis. So those guys are basically... They couldn't use their own production machine. They couldn't do things at scale. But they did things at scale. So they were closely partnering with those like...

with those like lens manufacturer to help them to fulfill that production gap that they had to produce this very specific one-time high-tech lenses for very specific use cases. And so of course this big lens company, you don't want to kind of put together an infrastructure to produce these ad-hoc one-time lenses, which maybe they were like smaller contracts. And so they were outsourcing it to this startup that you don't have the capacity to produce them at scale, but

speaker-1 (30:43.266)
they could start to work to be the designing partner of those big lens companies. And also in this case, it shows that, okay, need to, like, you need to, of course, find capital to finalize this big and complex lens machine. But in the meantime, you can do lots of things that don't scale. You can work closely with the customer. can be a design partner. You can be helpful to the customer. And even like,

Coming back to the example of these cameras in the warehouse to track the trucks coming in and out. This guy was able to be on field, was able to observe what were the pain points of the fleet manager when he was analyzing those trucks. And so when he was deploying the solution to further capture what were the core features that...

this person needed because of actually fun enough, this guy was not even technical. So he needed to prioritize the top features that this fleet manager needed. Because of course he took to him some time to put together the hard tech piece, software piece and the solution. I call it like, I mean, it's, I don't call it, it's the Pareto principle. Like there are 20 % of features that brings the 80 % of outcome.

So as a founder, of course, you need to be resourceful. have low resources. Focus on the 20 % of features that are actually solving 80 % of the problem of your customers. Also in your communication, 20 % of features delivered 80 % of ROI or ROP, return on purchase. So focus on those because you don't have the capacity to nail down your whole product roadmap. You need to focus on the first bits.

that are actually producing all the value for the customer. That's the first angle, founders with early market traction. The second angle is university-affiliated innovators. I got a couple of examples that come to mind. There's a patent from Purdue that is useful to a lot, like that's a useful technology for everyone in Indiana, in the Midwest. They basically, it's basically a camera that they can put behind vehicles. And so this camera is able to scan.

speaker-1 (33:07.712)
all the roads in a very quick way compared to, and also in very economic way compared to the traditional methods, and they're able to figure out all the potholes that there are in a city. So, even for smaller cities, they're very good for smaller cities because they don't have so much capacity in terms of economic capital to deploy, find people and services to scan all the potholes in a city, able to...

to feel the path of gap that there is on the ground. So I think this kind of is clearly as a clear tangible impact. And this founder also has had market traction. I think in this case, he was fitting both categories. But I think it was a patent that was clearly so tangibly helpful that made so much sense to recruit in the program.

We were lucky that the founder already got traction with some cities in Indiana. And another example, I do like two examples per category. The second example on the university affiliation patent side. I can, I'm probably gonna mention a company that is slightly more hard tech for ag. It's kind of basically produce a

plant compound for the gut to serve to, is a plant compound that enables the gut of animals that we eat to be healthier. we poultry with swine, with swines. And so if their gut is in a better status, we're eating healthier animals. And so we get more nourished by a good food. And of course there's a lot of like,

production behind a plant compound from a very specific plant that can support the gut of animals. that's kind of a... It's actually... This guy is close to patent actually, he's not patented yet. But of course there is a level of deep tech there that can definitely serve the world as humans indirectly by helping animals to feel...

speaker-1 (35:33.506)
healthier. So these are two examples of which category that I would like to bring to the table.

speaker-0 (35:38.638)
is perfect. I love it. One of the things that you brought up that I thought I would like to talk more about, or I just thought was important, was doing things that don't scale. I completely agree. What does that really mean? It's actually doing something that a large company probably just couldn't do. That gives you the strategic angle with the company. One of the mistakes that can happen sometimes for founders, it certainly happened to me, I've seen it happen in other cases as well, is when

founders will try to position themselves as a big company. You know, like, let me CC my entire team. And it's like a bunch of fake emails. And it's just literally just them, right? And that's actually the worst way to compete with a large competitor. One of the best ways is they need to know that you're nimble. And usually the early adopters that are willing to use your platform at the startup and early stage actually want the flexibility and the access to you as the founder or the smaller team to really solve the problems that they have.

that they couldn't otherwise just go and get for the large enterprise conglomerate who would never bend to them because they're just a small incremental revenue number for them while to you as a startup founder, you're customer number one, two, three, four, five, whatever it is, 10. And I just want to kind of speak to that on. So what that means is you can actually go about getting those customers differently as well. And it sounds like in some of the companies you've talked about, obviously traction is extremely important, the propensity they either want to sell and you

take activities and go out and do the thing is important. But how you go about that can actually be a little bit different than the larger companies do. And so just kind of keep that in the back of your mind when it comes from a go-to-market perspective. I feel like that's where I developed a lot of that on the go-to-market side is there's so much like take advantage of like behavioral sciences, different ways that you can go about it where when you get larger, maybe you couldn't do it, but you could certainly do it whenever you're smaller and do it because it's actually a huge advantage that other people can't. So you kind of differentiate yourself there.

No, David, this has been fantastic. I think we got through most of the docket here. One of the last questions I always love to ask on a podcast is, what advice, and you've already dropped so many pieces of advice, would you give to someone who's also running an accelerator program? I was going to ask the Harbor founders, we've done plenty of advice there. What makes an accelerator program like G-Beta successful?

speaker-0 (38:02.1)
And what would be your advice if someone wanted to start one on their own?

speaker-1 (38:07.598)
Starting Accelerator on your own is it's very, it's a challenge. Like it's definitely a long road, kind of a founder's journey, but like on the accelerator side. like, so yeah, probably I'll, I think probably Accelerators, the real value to provide is, I call it like being the second wife of a founder.

Like you need to be there for them. need to be on a text base. The same relationship that the founder should have with the customer, like on a text basis. And like the customer should really like trust you. I feel the same with the founders. Like I need founders to really trust me and also like trust the process that we bring a generator. There is a key part that I love founders to focus. And I think probably summarize.

our like what I tried to deliver to them at the end of the day, which is kind of a table that I hope they can always have in front of their mind, which is called like financing and milestone. And so it's a and I hope all the accelerators and I think all the accelerators have the goal, at least like the main one, Techstars or Combinator, they all have the goal to make the founder fundraise. But what's the purpose of that fundraising?

So I would say at two levels, strategy level, execution level. At the strategy level, you, like the thing we're trying really to make clear is that the financing, those big rounds comes from what do you need the money for, first of all, and do you actually need the money? So like look first of all at your cash flow, see your burn rate, see your runaway, and then like also have on the other end, like what are your...

demand milestones, how you're going to approach the market in terms of distribution channels, customer acquisition channels, supply, which means how you build your technology, your product. If it's hard, of course, it's even more difficult game than shipping software. And so once you have figured out, how much is the inflow, outflow in my bank statement? So let's forget about the profit and loss statement, income statement.

speaker-0 (40:18.51)
Finally.

speaker-1 (40:31.648)
Influence outflow in your bank account. And then like the milestones that you need to get in order for you to serve as a company, to serve your investors, to progress and provide value to you, to your customers, to your employees. Once you influence outflow and milestones, then you start to combine them together and try to understand, what are my financial needs? And now can I, like, how can I actually...

get the money to match my financial needs. And so that's what I like to do on a strategic level. And I think all I actually should do is really try to plan the top line, how you're going to drive and grow the company, and what are like, and only fundraise in relationship to that. So that's the first piece. And the second piece, as you say, is the execution. I didn't want to mention it first because I want to add an additional original piece.

The execution is key. mean, once you have that master plan, it's not something that you need to have on paper. It's something that you need to execute on. so like have like, I call it like OKRs, objective cure results and actions. Like have those objective and cure results clear on a yearly basis, but then like action, action, action. And so like each week gather with your team or in my case, gather with the cohort and establish, okay, like this week, sorry, the past week.

What has worked? What was a challenge? What was a failure? and, and was, it worth to iterate on that failure? Is it a micro failure that is worth like trying again? Or is a micro failure should inform decision to look somewhere else. And then like once you establish what work in the past week, then establish your plan, but in a written way in front of your co-founders and in my case, the whole court and then like execute on that plan.

And so then after a year, you can look at this kind of, you can look at your overall objective and your results, see how much you need them. And also you can see how much you're on track on the financing milestone piece. So it's kind of, I call it like top down and bottom up. So like top down, you have this like one monthly session, one each month session where you establish your top down goals. But then like on your day to day, it's like bottom up execution. Like you quickly look at what you established top down, but then like.

speaker-1 (43:00.558)
you execute every day, you bang your head on your door. Like it's so beautiful to get nose. I found fascinating to take nose because it means you have tried. like also for accelerators, make founders get nose. And there should be a culture of accountability to get nose. You know when sometimes you're with your friends and I don't know, you.

I don't know, you make the challenge, okay, we approach like three more, three new people and who gets the highest notes gets free dinner. Like something like that, they can create like really an accountability to get as many notes as possible because then out of 10 notes, you're get for sure a yes. Maybe 100 notes, you get a yes. What's your statistics about like the notes and the yeses when you were a startup?

speaker-0 (43:49.534)
It always just depends on what you're selling and what angle you got the no from. But no, I completely agree. Ultimately, it comes down to action. You got to make a plan. got to take it to action and then execute as consistently as you possibly can. You don't have to just go ahead and burn it at both ends every single, like for a week straight and then just kill yourself. Just incremental progress every single day executing on the OKRs that you have and then look back in a quarter and see what happened.

speaker-1 (44:17.612)
Yeah, and just like, I think you raised a great point like...

You should get the know, but then it's so important that after the know, you ask yourself, okay, what was wrong? How can I improve? The know, it's unless you really understand the value of the know and you get the learning from the know. Sometimes I dance, I do salsa and bachata dancing.

in like around before on the app or is now I just want to use them to do a bunch of the workshop and I like to try new moves and sometimes they fail and The important thing for me is like understand. Okay, why? Did the move fail? I'm happy to fail as long as I understand why did I fail doing that move or I try something new with the cohort? Maybe it doesn't work. I try to reach out some investors and that's for me. Okay, why?

Like it's not just important to know, but it's important to why behind it knows like focus on action. Then the outcome and then like analyze the root cause behind the outcome. Like I was mentoring the NSF Corpse, which is a great program offered by National Science Foundation, different universities and they have the rule of the five wise when you mentor a startup or when the like also for the founder itself. So like ask yourself like

Why 10 time? Like for some you see the know, why do you even know the cost was unhappy? Why was the cost unhappy? Because that a bad day. Why did a bad day? Because maybe they had another problem in their manufacturing plants that was related to your solution. OK, very interesting. So why are they struggling with that pain in the manufacturing floor? And maybe then you're going to discover that maybe they don't care about the problem that turns over your solution. Maybe they care about

speaker-1 (46:19.566)
something completely different. For example, like some, some, some, I get some sales pitches about people that want to sell me solutions to get better accelerator. And what I really need is for example, what I really needed now, I think a bit less, but what I really needed in the first two years I joined the accelerators, like how to find more founders. So everyone was trying to tell me how to run better accelerators, but what I really needed is like how to source better, higher quality founders in a quick way because recruitment time is very tight. And so.

Like it's very good to understand what is the person struggling with in a deeper level because that's where you actually can elaborate a solution that is really fitting their needs.

speaker-0 (46:59.166)
Absolutely. Everybody, this is the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Deandre Hericus. Davide, thank you so much for being on the show. Bye-bye. Awesome. Thanks. See you guys next week.

speaker-1 (47:06.03)
Thank you so much.