Triangle Tweener Talks

Transcript

Tweener Madness - MyMatR v ZW ML

00:00:23 - Scot Wingo
Welcome to the first ever Triangle Tweener Madness. All right, this is going to be a lot of fun. We have entrepreneur John Stark from MyMatter and he's going to walk us through a 10 minute pitch on the selection committee. We have to the left, David Jones from Bull City Venture Partners. Anil Chawa, independent angel entrepreneur and world famous, soon to be serial entrepreneur. I wish he was a serial entrepreneur. So exciting for him to start another company. And Nick and Shah from Front Porch Ventures selection committee, thanks for coming. If we're not going to do intros with the selection committee because every one of them has done a 20 minute meet the selection committee. So if you want to learn more about the backgrounds of our awesome selection committee, you can go to tweenertalks.com and either watch those on our YouTube channel or on the listen to the audio podcast and let the Tweener Madness begin pitch.

00:01:22 - John Starke
All right. Hello everyone. Good morning. I get to go first. My name is John Stark. I'm the founder and CEO of MyMatter and we manufacture and sell automatic sorting waste containers for public spaces. For the last two decades, 70% of our recyclables have ended up in the landfill or our environment. We're here at Raleigh, founded Gateway Location, and if you were walking in, you might see some waste containers out there that have trash and recycling both inside of them. And so this is a major issue with where a lot of organizations are trying to figure out how do we ultimately put waste in its proper place.

00:01:59 - John Starke
Saying putting waste in its proper place is a very sort of high level statement. What we've noticed is that a lot of people have these very specific pain points where there's rising costs, increasing regulation, there's a lot of goals, corporate sustainability goals that are coming down, and a lot of money is put into public facing education. So the opportunity, we sit at the intersection of really four areas within the waste industry. Now, the waste industry is a $1.2 trillion industry, but that includes trucking, that includes at home waste container collection. We sit really at the intersection of public facing waste containers, the waste data market, waste education, and then also away from home digital advertising.

00:02:48 - John Starke
And I'll explain how we get into that a bit later. And so what we have created is the next generation of waste container. These are supposed to be in the public areas and they're supposed to engage, educate and ensure accurate disposal all at the source. And so these devices are supposed to be able to encourage people to properly dispose of their waste, collect data, and then also make sure that it's going to its proper place.

00:03:14 - John Starke
A lot of problems is that people don't have the information about how to improve on their waste collection because they aren't doing constant dumpster dives. And with my matter solution, we are able to take a picture of every deposited item in real time. So the second half of our solution is that we have this data dashboard. Most waste containers are black boxes. You don't know what goes in them. You don't know when things are going into them. We're able to provide that information real time. So we know, based on our design of a dual input model, dual input model here, that we know what people think this waste is. So I could take this sprite can, put it into the trash side, and then the system tells me, well, you chose trash, but that was recycling.

00:03:59 - John Starke
We sorted that to recycling for you. So there's that real time feedback, and it's within half a second that you're getting that feedback. That information has now gone to the data dashboard. And on this dashboard, you get to see the picture of what was deposited. You get to get an idea of the breakdown of this. All this information goes into the can be go into calculated information, which is how much your waste container is being used, how much potential carbon emission reductions, how much potential savings are you getting from preventing the recyclables from going to the landfill.

00:04:36 - John Starke
So our three major value adds is we're reducing the cost of waste management. This is coming to like reducing collection fees, reducing contamination fees in actually capturing the value of the recyclables. And then on the labor side, we are optimizing where waste containers are placed to optimize footsteps. There are companies out there that optimize trucking routes. We optimize footsteps. In addition, we save salary hours for those who have to collect and analyze data.

00:05:05 - John Starke
We help organizations achieve their sustainability goals. They have to report their ESG numbers. They have to say, what are we actually doing here? There has to be waste transparency and not greenwashing. And lastly, improve brand awareness. People want to look better because that's gonna also drive their customers to want to come back and engage more with that organization. And so a great example of what we're doing right now is we have devices at RTP Research Triangle park, and we have a few devices there right now. Starting off with a strong pilot program where within the first three months we were able to determine that they're losing money because they don't have a strong recycling program set up. We've identified the value of the materials that are going into a few of the bins, not all of their waste containers because we have these strategically placed in the high traffic area.

00:05:53 - John Starke
And then also we're making these suggestions on how they can actually make their waste collection system more efficient and then promote that at rtp. So waste containers are more than you think. Probably the one out there is probably around $1,700. And that's just a standalone trash can by itself. If we're comparing apples to apples, this is a trash and recycling receptacle out there. You can see them ranging from 2 to 4k for the dumb waste containers. The smart waste containers vary in terms of smartness and they also vary in terms of size. But the standard one are big belly solar powered trash compactors. They do not sort and they range from about 6 to 8k. There are some solutions out there that are in the 20k area. So how we make money is really three, three different areas. We do waste assessments because it's not just here's your waste container, bye bye, it's what is the optimal location for your waste container.

00:06:51 - John Starke
How do we understand how waste is throwing through your, flowing through your facility? We have unit sales. I will tell you right now, not a lot of organizations want to lease waste containers. So we do unit sales because we want people to own their waste containers and then data and service contracts to access that dashboard, to access increasing levels of sophistication of data analysis.

00:07:13 - John Starke
That's a recurring revenue source right there. So this has been definitely an experiment for several years. And as we are growing and understanding, we're also recognizing this market is maturing. Five years ago, this market did not really exist, but now this market is starting to mature and I'm fairly happy with our traction, especially year to date. Last year, in 2024, I want to stress we brought this to market in June. We had an initial model in 2023, but in June of 2024 we brought this dual input model and the data dashboard. A full solution from there we've sold to these organizations and I'm happy to say that Raleigh Gateway is also getting a waste container in the next three months in our pipeline. Right now we've got a lot of. We just have a lot of different types of organizations, large corporations, municipalities.

00:08:04 - John Starke
We've got right now we've actually sold product overseas. But I've got customers right now that I'm trying to finalize quotes for for shipping product to Australia, Qatar, Dubai. So we have over 25 organizations in the pipeline right now that we're working through. This is the core team of MyMatter. I want to really stress that I am the only full time employee of MyMatter right now. I've got a great part time team, very tech focused as you can see here. One of the key things that I'm actively looking for right now is someone to come on and support with sales and marketing, especially the marketing side. But these guys have been really great. They're ready to come on full time. We're trying to get a little bit more traction though.

00:08:48 - John Starke
And then my advisory board, I've also got a great advisory board and what our big ask right now is we're getting ready to start our first round of funding. Everything so far has been self funded and the family and friends round. But we're ready to do our first round of funding soon. And so we're looking for introductions for cleantech people. But we're also looking for introductions to people who have problems. We want to solve your waste problem. Thank you.

00:09:19 - Scot Wingo
Thanks John. And you did that in eight minutes. So you under promised and over delivered. Excellent. Let's start left to right, each of you. We've got plenty of time for questions so let's kind of just get them out there. We're gonna go left to right and then back. So Dave, go ahead and what kind of question you got?

00:09:36 - David Jones
Great job. John, you're talking to. I live in Chapel Hill and I get this nasty gram on my recycling bin constantly. Cause I'm putting in the wrong thing. So if you can, if you can let me know that the styrofoam doesn't go into the recycling, you would save me a lot of nasty grams. Hey, will you talk a little bit about who you think the customers are? The customer is not a resident. It's not the consumer, it's not me, is it Today it's more an airport, a business.

00:10:08 - John Starke
Right now our customers are public facing areas and there's multiple levels to this that we've divided them into sort of corporation types, service providers. And we define service providers in the sense of Raleigh founded here as sort of a service provider. There's a lot of people coming to a co working space, commercial properties, they might have tenants and then also more government type of entities such as, well municipalities or even universities typically where we also might see longer sales cycle. The ideal customers, you know we're talking to some sports arenas, yes, Airports like, like the Denver Airport. But also we've got Disney in our pipeline and the focus there is for their backstage cast members. But ultimately they see a vision of Bringing it onto onstage is what they call it. And that would be very public facing in that case.

00:10:57 - Scot Wingo
Anil.

00:10:58 - Anil Chawla
Sure. Great job, John. I'm going to build on David's comments, both with a story and a question along the same lines. So we were running a company in downtown Durham about the last decade, so 2012, 2022. And I remember the moment, I think it was two years in, in our office space when we found out that in downtown Durham everything we put in the recycle bin wasn't being recycled. And it was a bit of a heartbreaking moment, a bit of a disappointing moment, but that actually leads to my question. I think at the high level, everybody can get behind this and get excited about this. I think the challenge though, for a startup oftentimes is people think it's a great idea. But at the ground floor, finding the folks that'll go out of their way to change their behavior can be a challenge. So I wanted to ask you more about breaking that complacency and specifically along the lines of the target customer, who do you see it right now as kind of like raising their hand, saying, we have a major problem, we need to solve this.

00:11:52 - John Starke
Yeah. So that's been a challenge in a growing opportunity or growing lesson essentially over the last few years. It's like, who is the icp? And it really comes down to it's not a specific title in a specific type of organization. It's titles in organizations who are the innovators who see that they've got a problem, they're driven by wanting to improve. A lot of that is actually sustainability folk individuals who have the title of waste diversion managers is a very clear title for us to go through. But there is that cultural problem where people are seeing, okay, well, why don't we just do more education, we'll put more signage up. And this is where that has been a barrier that is changing, especially as people are becoming more comfortable with AI. And now they see our solution is that marriage of technology and education. And so now we've got a lot of barriers breaking down because people can understand with our solution, we can provide that education and in real time to the user if they so choose. But if the depositor of waste doesn't care, we can still sort it. And that's the main driving force that people want to report on is where is that waste going?

00:13:04 - Scot Wingo
Like to David's point, if someone put Styrofoam in recycling, what would happen?

00:13:08 - John Starke
It depends what's the jurisdiction like? So we have to have a customizable and flexible product to tailor to those different customers. I've talked to Durham and they say, look, they don't really want glass in their recycling stream because it reduces their value of their plastic. So it's a matter of being able to hone in on those individuals who recognize, hey, we need to actually start looking at some technology, not just nasty grams, not just an education play.

00:13:35 - Anil Chawla
So quick, follow on with the focus on titles. Sustainability managers, folks that are being more innovative. What does that target market look like today and where do you see your first focus going to in terms of organizations that have that kind of individual?

00:13:50 - John Starke
So this is where it's a matter of. We've got individuals such as, as I said, like, you know, Disney, the Denver Airport, Thermo, Fisher, Scientific, Walmart. You have all these sustainability managers in these organizations that have property, that have area, that need to have waste in its proper place. Are you asking in terms of how big that market is?

00:14:09 - Anil Chawla
Yeah, how big. And given that diverse customer, prospective customer base, it sounds like you're still trying to figure out where to focus given that it's kind of all over the map. That title seems to be across many organizations.

00:14:21 - John Starke
Yeah.

00:14:22 - Anil Chawla
So maybe it's more of the size of that and kind of your initial gut on where you might start to focus given the numbers.

00:14:28 - John Starke
Right.

00:14:28 - Anil Chawla
There might be a lot more of one type of organization versus another.

00:14:31 - John Starke
Yeah, I think it's one of those situations where you see there's a lot of people in government organizations that like this idea, but they don't have the funding right now. And so they'll put into the budget maybe for next year. But then there are corporations, that which we are like sustainability managers and corporations are the primary type of organizations we're targeting because the sales cycle is shorter on that. And that's what we've seen so far.

00:14:55 - Nikin Shah
John, thanks again. Super interesting. Obviously it's a big problem building off the like, can you talk a little bit about the logistics today? What has to happen and who are the different stakeholders that need to buy in to make sure that this is a successful launch? And then two part question, I guess fast forward five or 10 years, like what's your vision for what this looks like from the stakeholders?

00:15:20 - John Starke
Yeah. So from the. So we are doing B2B enterprise sales and the challenge there is there are stakeholders. Our pipeline essentially is we get that champion on board and if that champion is also the power of the purse, even better. But we recognize that there are other people that have to get involved. So if the sustainability manager really likes this idea and if they've got funding, great. But they still have to talk to facilities to make sure that facilities is aware that their facility crew is actually going to be adopting this solution as well. Sometimes that moves smoother than others. It really comes down to. In some organizations, I won't name names, but they've got multiple different types of engagement, education, innovation that want to be involved. But then other organizations, we've seen that it's just been the facilities manager, the sustainability manager, they both get on the call and they say, yeah, we're good to go with this right now. So it comes back to. Once again, it depends. And we typically see the corporations are moving faster, but we are getting, especially now, a lot more inbound with some government entities who have had grants or who had budgeted for, for AI sort of waste solutions coming to us now.

00:16:36 - Nikin Shah
And then in the future. Kind of what is your holy grail? Like, how do all the stars need to align in order for this to be a big business?

00:16:45 - John Starke
So I would say we are getting demand actually across the world right now, which is sort of, it's becoming overwhelming. And a lot of the demand right now is people are looking to learn more because this is a solution that is very unique. There's one other automatic sorting waste container in Poland, but they do things differently than we do. And so for the stars to align, what we envision is that we've got a fleet of, fleet, it might be the right word, but customizable units in terms of their size, their appearance, the input hole configuration, solar powered, mobile, multi bin sorting. And then that's from a physical hardware side of things, from a data side of things. We have a more expansive dashboard that's getting into better understanding the types of brands that are being deposited. Hey, how many Coke bottles are made, Pepsi bottles that are being deposited in a specific area. So we get into more detailed consumer disposal behavior data as well as building customized AI models for, for specific organizations. Being able to know that, hey, at this amusement park or this airport, you see this very specific waste stream and we have an AI model tailored specifically towards that. So there's a lot more value we can generate with customizable AI models for organizations. And just the different types of waste streams we can also tackle. We've had some early conversations about red waste and hospital waste. That's another big challenge. And then also construction waste. So there's a lot of different types of waste out there. Right now it's focusing on the municipality, solid waste.

00:18:26 - David Jones
John, will you talk again? It's probably Too early to ask this question, but eventually you have to have some kind of ROI model, right? Hey, I sell this. It saves time. It cuts out a person. I don't know if it could drive revenue. Maybe it drives revenue, Right? Early hypothesis on that. Like, what do you think?

00:18:48 - John Starke
We've done some numbers, and we've also seen some results, especially with the deployed units. Right now, the question is, it depends. In the case of you've got the different ROIs can come down to you've got the material savings. As in the case of rtp, we recognize that almost half of their waste stream was metal cans, and that is. And aluminum's currently at $1,700 a ton. So, I mean, it's a matter of we can say this device could pay for itself within two years from just the aluminum cans alone. Potentially, it depends on the volume you're getting. Then you've got. All right, if you're an organization like a large corporation that has to do waste assessments and waste audits, and you've got a team of people going out there, half of their time is data collection analysis. We provide monthly impact reports that say, hey, this is what your waste containers did for you. And even if they have other dumb waste containers placed around, this is still giving a very detailed snapshot that can then be used to extrapolate and estimate the rest. So now you're saving salary hours there. There's also an area that we are starting to explore right now, slowly. It is this sort of digital away from home advertisement where an individual walks up and if you're at Lenovo arena, you throw something away, you walk away. And we're working with an organization now to figure out how do we get more fan engagement. They walk up to the device, they throw something away, they scan a QR code, and then from there they're walking back to their seat, or they're walking to go to get a hot dog. And they're still looking at their phone engaging with a waste container because they're signing up for more points to potentially get a jersey. So there's a gamification element we're tapping into as well. That's still a little bit on the new side, but that display screen. And as I said, this is the small demo version. The large ones have larger display screens. There's more engagement on those display screens that can come from there. You know, eat it, subway.

00:20:45 - Anil Chawla
Yeah. On the other side of it, I'd love to hear about the economic opportunity for my matter itself, the company so kind of unpacking the revenue model a little bit more. You mentioned on the slide. There's a cost of the container you mentioned also briefly, kind of a recurring revenue stream. Could you talk about that a bit more in terms of what the opportunity is?

00:21:02 - John Starke
So just in terms of numbers. So it's been interesting when we've been getting into this industry, we priced our waste containers fairly low originally and we've been raising our prices actually over the last year as people recognize they are starting to see that waste containers go from a cost center, you just buy them, you're done to a knowledge and value generating center. And so we're right now selling our waste containers in the 5 to 7 range, 5 to $7,000 range. This doesn't scare people away and it helps get our foot in the door because the initial dealing with customers right now is they don't know what this technology really can do. They haven't seen it. And so when they first get it, they get a few units and then as soon as those units are deployed, deployed, we're working to provide them impact reports and data to say look, if you had more, you can do more good with them, you get more ROI with more units. So we recognize that's how we're currently approaching customers right now. From selling those initial units, we can expect that these units, the price will probably most likely rise over time as we've noticed that some customers think that these cost a lot more.

00:22:14 - Anil Chawla
Well, and given that it runs software right, so is there a subscription opportunity just for the container itself to keep it up to date to get the latest AI?

00:22:22 - John Starke
So we've also discussed potentially having, once again, it's not a leasing thing, but it's sort of a, okay, you're gonna pay more for the, you're gonna pay more over time for a contract essentially for you're going to be locked into a contract for several years that says hey, you're gonna own the container, but you're paying more upfront for, for data and it's paying for the cost of the container. We've talked to a few organizations about that, but we haven't really found that customers want to spend a subscription for waste containers. They look at it as a capex expense right now to buy it. And when we see that the current data and service contracts, they're priced very low right now with the data contracts right now at only $100 per container, container per year. When we went to RTP and we, they thought we said $1,000 per container per year, they almost fainted because that's not what is currently in their mind because they don't understand the value we're getting them. When we can show them that we're saving you potentially thousands of dollars a year, that gives us more leeway to actually raise the pricing. What we definitely plan to do is also improve the dashboard to have additional tiers so you can go from the $100 simple, very basic access to much more advanced analysis. That would be more hundreds of dollars and potentially thousands.

00:23:40 - Nikin Shah
Switching gears a little bit. Can you talk about what it's been taken to build this and what's unique and proprietary to this trash?

00:23:48 - John Starke
So we do have a patent pending.

00:23:51 - Nikin Shah
This is design process manufacturing.

00:23:55 - John Starke
It is. It's not a design pattern. It's an. It's the industrial patent version where it says we have a unique process here on how we are disposing of waste. The intelligence really is in its flexible design. It's the sort box, the dual input hole and the AI model and how we make the decisions.

00:24:17 - Scot Wingo
Talk about that a little more so inside there. So I imagine if I'm going to build one of these, I've got a camera and I've got a brain and the brain being a chip of some kind and it's doing image recognition of these items to figure out.

00:24:28 - John Starke
Yeah, actually fun fact about that. We recently had the National Research Energy Laboratory come to us and say would you be open to an agreement to expand the number of sensors inside of here? Right now it's just a camera that is doing the vision recognition but there is also some plans for other additional sensors to be able to detect the different types of plastic from. From then just vision recognition. Did I answer your question with the Yep.

00:24:57 - Nikin Shah
And then where are you in the product development cycle? Is this Gen1, Gen2 generation that we've.

00:25:03 - John Starke
Got coming out right now? I say from a market perspective is Gen 3 is coming out. City of Raleigh Wake County Government Raleigh founded They're getting a gen a gen3.3 unit essentially that's got the bigger display screen and some other things inside to help improve stability.

00:25:24 - Nikin Shah
And then what are some of the hiccups you've seen in the field as you.

00:25:26 - John Starke
Oh man, lots of hiccups over the years that I've done this so any waste container can clog once again. I go to the ones outside here on the breezeway. You walk out there, you can take the pizza box, you can shove the ten pounds into the five pound box. That just happens because that can happen with any waste container. Our system has sensors like fullness detection sensors that can provide the feedback that say, hey, look, this container is getting close to full or it's clogged or it's overfilling. Come empty it out. We want to make sure that the organization also doesn't get dinged because they've got overflowing waste containers. The biggest problem we really ran into early stage was some AI model issues. One of the best stories I like to tell is we did deployed this at the BMW manufacturing facility and they were throwing in plastic Dixie cups. And at the time, we did not have that in our AI model because it wasn't in my waste stream. And we were told, okay, they need Dixie cups in the recycling stream. Like, great. We took all the pictures and within a week we gave them a new model and we solved the problem. So we had that adaptability really quickly. There, there is the problem of, as I said, so it's pretty much clogging. An AI detection are the two major things there. And clogs comes back to communication and sort of understanding. Is this a waste stream that's going to see a lot of pizza boxes, a lot of big styrofoam things. Okay. We make the holes bigger. We size it appropriately to the volume you expect and the size of the disposal packaging. And then the AI model that's just. It's when I first started this, it was. I started with dogs and cats, and then it went to trash and recycling. And as we've gotten our AI smarter, it's now recognizing that, hey, this is a plastic bottle. And we're getting close to the point of saying this is a Deer park plastic bottle that's got a cap on, that has a liquid level in it. Because that is the type of information that people want to know. Also from a cost perspective, like the Denver airport, they get dinged because a lot of their deposited items has liquid in it. And that drags up the cost because that's more weight, more volume or more weight that the hauling crew is taking away.

00:27:34 - Scot Wingo
So it sounds like these are connected.

00:27:36 - Nikin Shah
Right.

00:27:36 - Scot Wingo
So and you can remote into it. So you can, you can. So in the Dixie cup example, they said, hey, this isn't working for Dixie cups at the home base. You make change your model and you can upgrade it in the field.

00:27:47 - John Starke
Yeah.

00:27:48 - Scot Wingo
If it was a traditional physical piece, you'd have to like change out the hardware.

00:27:52 - John Starke
Yeah. So because this thing is a wi fi and cellular connected. And we strongly recommend get on wi fi because it saves money in the long run. But I have two units in a school in Saudi Arabia And I haven't had to go to Saudi Arabia. So this is where I've been able to remote in and we've seen some products that I've never seen before and this is like okay, good. We are now getting more data to have a smarter AI model about what people are throwing away.

00:28:19 - Scot Wingo
You talked about fundraising to the extent you know, what are you looking to raise and how much and any guidance on valuation thinking.

00:28:28 - John Starke
I don't want to talk about valuation at the exact moment now, but I would say that we are. As I said this has been evolving as the market has been maturing and now I have reached a point where definitely the demand for my time has far exceeded the supply. And so what we really need to do is solidify our core team, full time people working on this and especially someone who can handle the supply sale or marketing, more marketing side. And, and so we're looking to raise 500,000 in our first sort of pre seed round to help solidify the team, handle a little bit of overhead. The good thing about what we do is we manufacture first of all here in Raleigh, in North Carolina. I'm very proud to say that. And we do not have a complicated manufacturing process. It's essentially the equivalent of putting together a Lego or Ikea set. We where the most complicated thing we do is welding. And for those of you who know what MIG stands for, well, MIG welding is, you know, mig. Anyone can weld? No, it's a matter of, it's a very basic manufacturing process. So we don't have a lot, we don't need a lot of capital for building up a manufacturing line.

00:29:39 - Scot Wingo
All right, any last questions? Selection committee?

00:29:42 - Anil Chawla
I've got one for you, John. As an entrepreneur, when I was running my company and starting out your shoes, I had to kind of make up this arbitrary milestone in my mind to say hey, if we get to X for us it was 30 customers. This is working. I'm curious to hear from your standpoint what that looks like. If it's number of units or having the data subscriptions. Do you have that in mind yet of what that milestone would be?

00:30:04 - John Starke
So I would say this is working from a technological standpoint from a just user understands it, but from a pure customer like everyone's flocking to us. I think what it's going to take really is somewhere in the realm of, I don't know, maybe 20 more unit sales. And I'm happy to say that with 25 plus people in the pipeline I can meet that this year. So I'm very optimistic about that we are the snowball is getting bigger as it's rolling downhill right now and I would say from a 20 unit sale people are going to be able to see more of these and then we're going to have also more data that we can share with the world and say this is the good we're doing with this solution.

00:30:55 - Scot Wingo
All right, welcome to the second part of this round. We have with us Robert Fu and he is from Zwift. And our judges again are David Jones from Bull City Ventures, Anil Chawla, local entrepreneur and Nikon Shah with Front Porch Ventures. Robert, thanks for coming today. We look forward to hearing your pitch about zw. I'll give a little backstory of how I met Robert. I know a friend of a friend or a friend of someone that used to work with Robert and we write a lot of content about AI and some folks said there's this guy that was at Corning and he's working on this really interesting AI idea and got to meet Robert. So with that introduction, Robert, go ahead and pitch.

00:31:38 - Speaker F
Thank you, Scott. Good morning everyone. I'm Robert Fu, CEO of zw. We are providing pioneering AI and machine learning software solutions to the glass and asceratics industries focusing on enabling our customers to accelerate their innovation, optimize manufacturing process and maximize their profitability. The glass and ceramics industry plays a critical role in the modern industrial areas such as display panel like that and consumer electronics like your smartphone, optical fiber of telecom, semiconductors, constructions, automotive and aerospace including AI and machine learning industries. The market size of the glass and ceramics industry was about $650 billion in 2024 and will continue growing at the 6% of CAGR in next five years.

00:32:46 - Speaker F
So what is the problems we're solving? We basically would like to just talk about that. Glass and ceramics industry faces a significant problems and challenges. This is because number one, the problems in the R and D and the manufacturing process are extremely complicated. Number two, the existing technology tools are not sophisticated enough to solve those complicated problems, especially new material. Discovery has been extremely slow, very expensive and inefficient. Manufacturing processes are energy intensive with high CO2 emission resulting in serious pollution problems. I would say a high manufacturing cost and also the limited throughput. This leads to missed market opportunities, slow sustainability progress, reduced profitability and weakened competitive advantages.

00:33:58 - Speaker F
So what we really want to do this is our solution. In order to solve these complicated problems. ZW has created three pioneering AI products. ZMap provides trusted and fast AI Personal Assistant for scientists engineers to create effective solutions to solve their problems. Z FastQ provides instant and reliable contract manufacturing quotation in few seconds in few minutes. And Z AI provides comprehensive end to end AI solutions from the model development to the model deployment in production.

00:34:52 - Speaker F
Combine the three products together we aimed at to accelerate new material discovery by five times and reduce energy consumptions and the CO2 emission by 20% and reduce overall manufacturing cost by 25%. So what is the advantage of competitive advantage and I would say the value proposition for our customers? We basically combined decades of experience in the glass and ceramics industries and cutting edge AI machine learning solution. We also leverage customized large language model, deep neural network and advanced optimization algorithm together. Therefore we created this disruptive AI solution. They are highly reliable. Achieving greater than 92% of the reliability is compared to 70 to 85% typical operational AI solutions.

00:36:12 - Speaker F
They are secure. We basically provide say that they are super fast. ZMAP and ZAI actually ZMAP and Z fastq generate AI solutions in few minutes. ZAI provide end to end AI solutions including model development and deployment in production within two weeks. So they are also very secure because we ensure customers data security and also information security. By installing and customizing AI solutions on customers computer server. They are cost effective. We deliver over 10 times of return on investment and with only very low monthly fee of 200 to $400.

00:37:13 - Speaker F
And they are also very easy to use. Our AI software requires zero coding and have a very easy to use user interface and have no requirement for AI background. So to summarize our AI and machine learning solution are fast, reliable, customers friendly and cost effective. So let me just talk about our team. Our team has extensive experience in new product development, advanced manufacturing, sales and marketing and customer services in the glass and ceramics industry.

00:37:58 - Speaker F
We have utilized AI and machine learning in this industry since 2016. We have track record including contributed and generated $3 billion in revenue for our former employers and created more than $4 million business value for our existing customers. And our team actually has a great synergy because most of our team members have worked together in past 25 years at Quantum Incorporated. So this is a very strong team. So now let me just briefly talk about traction and validation. We have secured four customers and generated the initial revenue. Meanwhile we are negotiating with three more customers and engaging another five. So far our AI solution has delivered more than $500,000 in energy saving and $3.5 million in added throughput for our existing customers since mid of 2024.

00:39:16 - Speaker F
Our ambitions have shown more customers are engaging with us proactively indicating that the glass and ceramics industry is Adopting AI and machine learning more rapidly than before. So let me recap what we have covered. Today we are providing pioneering AI and machine learning to the glass and ceramics industry. We have a strong team, proven technology and a clear path to profitability. ZW has a clear path to have a faster growth. And therefore we are raising 100,000 to $150,000 of seed round to scale our marketing and sales efforts and expand our capacity. Meanwhile, we seek investors like you guys who share our vision to join us on this journey to transform the glass and ceramics industry together. Thank you very much.

00:40:32 - Scot Wingo
Thanks Robert. Excellent job and you came in under time, which we always appreciate. Nikin, do you want to take a first run at any questions you may have?

00:40:40 - Nikin Shah
Sure, Robert. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about who your customers are, their kind of value stream or their process and how your company is supporting them?

00:40:53 - Speaker F
So we typically have two kind of customers. One is that we call it keystone components provider like Corning Single Beam. Those companies actually provide materials for building up systematic products. And Corning's products typically is used for building up like a telecom system and all smartphone. Like when you just make that's a product or tv, those are glass. Actually so important that without those glass, without this key components, the products cannot be made. And those are type of customers we directly interact. Therefore we use either all these three products together to solve their problems. Another type of the customers is kind of like downstream. So if Corning and Single Bend have those kind of materials, sometimes they need to machine to the shape. Because Corning and Single Bend make a large size of the products. You have to machine that to the shape. Those companies is called like a CNC machine shop. And the 3D printing and also injection molding, they basically make these materials to the shape for the end customers. So that's basically the major customer we serve.

00:42:14 - Nikin Shah
And so for a raw material manufacturer like a Saint Gobain or a Corning, what specifically are you helping them solve? With either the quote manufacturer, the material discovery or on the manufacturing, what specifically are you helping them solve?

00:42:30 - Speaker F
So two problems actually give you some highlights. One is that in R and D, in new product development, new material discovery examples that smartphone today, the Carver, this is Gorilla Glass. If you see that actually has a lot of scratch. Why this scratch actually is generated because hardness of this material is not good enough. So we can really help companies like Corning or Single Bend to make this kind of a glass with a much higher hardness. So it can prevent significant scratch marks on the smartphone. So this is basically called New product development and all new material discovery, then the other part of these problems is in manufacturing. So energy intensive process actually spread everywhere. In glass and ceramics, we are able to typically save 10 to 20% of energy consumptions for those companies. It can help them to reduce the cost, that can help them to reduce the pollution like CO2 and so other material.

00:43:38 - Nikin Shah
Can you expand a little bit? How specifically are you doing that? Are you recommending a new manufacturing process? Are you recommending.

00:43:46 - Speaker F
No. Yeah. So typically it's not new process. Each like say melting process typically involved in 100 to 200 parameters. And once the customers measure that today they are using existing technology, modeling, simulation, traditional statistics is not good enough. They cannot really tackle this kind of problems. But using deep neural network, we can easily solve this kind of problems and provide a comprehensive solutions to the customers. That you can basically use this optimal control window to optimize your energy consumptions for your manufacturing process. That's basically one of the example similar token you can use to optimize your yield, optimize your throughput.

00:44:36 - Nikin Shah
Thank you.

00:44:37 - Scot Wingo
I'll come back and ask more questions.

00:44:40 - Anil Chawla
Yeah. Great presentation, Robert. I think what's compelling about you and the business you have here is that you come from this industry, you seem to know it in and out.

00:44:48 - Speaker F
Thank you.

00:44:49 - Anil Chawla
Is also of course the challenge. Maybe the opportunity in this particular event is for us to get up to speed, to understand. Exactly.

00:44:55 - Speaker F
Absolutely. Fully understand. Absolutely.

00:44:58 - Anil Chawla
So I'm actually continue to build on this line of questioning. It sounds like it's maybe two pronged in terms of what you provide the new material discovery.

00:45:04 - Speaker F
Yes.

00:45:05 - Anil Chawla
Out of these keystone providers and then downstream it's efficiency improvements in the manufacturing process. How recurring is the second piece of that in terms of if you get in there with your algorithms and your AI and you help these downstream providers improve efficiency, can you keep doing that over and over again?

00:45:23 - Speaker F
Yes. So what they typically do is that for large companies they typically will have more than 100 production lines. Now you have to do each one of them separately. You cannot have a one recipe for every say production line because every production line has their own fingerprint. But the algorithm we use are very similar. So to us, once we solve the first one, the rest actually we just need to replicate that. So scale up is much easier. That's number one. Number two is that I just like to come back to these new material thing, I think.

00:46:05 - Anil Chawla
Well, one quick follow up on the first part, if you don't mind. Even if there are 100 production lines, I can see there's Some opportunity there to go from 1 to 100. Once you've run your algorithm and your AI across 100, is there an opportunity to continue to improve those same lines?

00:46:20 - Speaker F
Absolutely. So what happens is once you basically optimize these production line for, let's say for energy, you also can really, really say that. Okay, now should I really change some knobs? So you ask a good question. Say hey, are you trying to make this new manufacturing process? No, that's typically not our customer want. But if you go to next step we can recommend, there's some parameters we will recommend them to change dramatically. Now for example, these burners actually use for melting glass, you have typically six or eight burners. Which one actually you should really shoot how much the flow rate this things actually is. You can basically have a dramatic change to that. But customers have to understand what is kind of the trial they run, what kind of risk they run into. So we can dramatically continuing making the progress in terms of cost, in terms of optimize the manufacturing process. I mean in these industry. So typically you change every 5% to 10% every, every year, just something like that. And then after like five years, you will see a dramatic change of their manufacturing process. I hope I answered your question.

00:47:38 - Anil Chawla
Absolutely, absolutely. And if you had a comment on the keystone.

00:47:41 - Speaker F
Yeah, because if you heard a lot of things, I just come back to the new material discovery. If you heard this. Oh, the AI. I'm sorry, the bio farmers, they basically right now use AI to synthesize and find out new drugs. See, that's a similar token because you're using AI, you can process very complicated data. The only difference between discover new materials and discover new drug is that our new material does not have to go through the FDA approval. That's the difference.

00:48:18 - David Jones
Great job again, Robert. I'll try to go a little bit around, but still digging into the product to make sure I understand. Sure. Is it standalone, all three of them? Like are they standalone? Do they integrate? Do you have to integrate into a manufacturing ERP system or something like that? And then maybe the second part to that, Robert, is will you dig in not too deep on the AI? Like is it, are you guys taking some of the data or are you plugging into an LLM or is it kind of your own data? Maybe go a little bit deeper on that.

00:48:53 - Speaker F
Very nice, very good. So the first question is that those three products are standalone as a matter of fact, number one and number three. Actually number one is a part of number three. The first part of number three, we decide to spin off that as a new product because scientists, engineers love that the number three actually indeed that we need to integrate with the manufacturing process. So in the production line, eventually you do.

00:49:22 - Scot Wingo
So you started out with this holistic solution and you started breaking pieces out because they became people just wanted to use maybe a piece of it. Is that kind of what happened? Yes, you came out with the AI and then people wanted the assistant piece.

00:49:34 - Speaker F
They can do two ways. One is that I call offline. So what we provide is if you think about the optimal control setup parameters, that's what we provide. If the customers say I don't want to fully integrate into my production line SCADA system and you also talk about the ERP system. So yes, we can dig all the data from ERP system. And so customers just need to type in to those control parameters. That's it, that's all they need to do. But meanwhile they will continue acquire these real time data. After a while our software will automatically tell customers hey, this is the time you need to update the AI model and our system will automatically update that for customers. So either way, if a customer does not want to take that much risk, we manually. If they say hey, I'd like to fully integrate it, they can fully integrate. So what is your second question?

00:50:36 - David Jones
Second question was just more is it you're using their data but are you taking that and you're constantly improving that and do you guys own that or.

00:50:45 - Speaker F
Well we don't own that. So what we do is that the first when we do the poc, the call it proof of concept. This is every standard enterprise software you do need to do the poc. When we do the POC customer will provide the data to us. They understand all the format is exactly same as what they used today. And we have a software we can process those data format. But once that is done, we will provide a training for like two, three days for couple of engineers of customers. They will know how to really use our software later on once we transfer to them how to update the data, how to update the model. And our support person will be online to support them.

00:51:27 - Nikin Shah
Building off David's question, can you talk a little bit about what was the starting data that you had independent of your customer and then what is the customer data that you're integrating? Are you leveraging their production run sheets? Are you leveraging their existing manufacturing data? Exist former products and what so existing data and then the model and then kind of how you interact?

00:51:53 - Speaker F
That's an excellent question. So what happened is that in deep neural network we Always use this terminology called a pre trained. So what is the model we started? We basically run our typical experience of the melting process using those data you can download from publications, papers and so on. And also their public domain that you can download the melting process and which is published. So you can do that. You use those data to pre train the model. Then when we get customers data you train that again it get much faster to complete.

00:52:33 - Nikin Shah
And can you maybe expand on how many different raw materials or different types of glass of ceramics are there and is there incoming material variability with regards to the manufacturing?

00:52:45 - Speaker F
Yeah. So typically for glass actually you got. We talk about a magnitude of 1000. So Glass actually is a small. And for ceramics you've got magnitude of 10,000. So this is basically the magnitude of the selection tool that you can select. And then of course each materials you have a different kind of component, meaning the compositions. Right. Different kind of raw materials. Mix them together, then add them together. You talk about this pool is typically about like 100,000 to 1 million type of amount of data.

00:53:23 - Anil Chawla
Maybe switching gears a little bit to talk about the market opportunity. I'd love to hear first off, you mentioned four customers. The price point seemed low per user, two to $400 I had down. But could you talk about the actual contract value there and then how many of these keystone providers are there and what does the long tail opportunity look with downstream?

00:53:42 - Speaker F
Very good. So in terms of customers we have a. I would say I give you two type of customers actually for glass and ceramics customers. Those customers typically as I said that they have more than like 10 to 50 production lines. So if we got one contract once we can deliver the result, the probability to get another contract for another product production lines are very high.

00:54:10 - Anil Chawla
That's a different user cost. At that point you're essentially I kind of understood from your presentation maybe there's a cost per seat.

00:54:17 - Speaker F
Yes. Per user.

00:54:19 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:54:19 - Speaker F
So just I guess I give you an example. So we basically charge them PoC project. So so typically run from 25 to 50,000 per PoC project. And after the project finished it depends on how complicated their process. We basically charge them for the AI 5,000 to $10,000 and per user.

00:54:41 - Anil Chawla
So an annual contract for a customer, what do you think that's going to look like once you have them up and running.

00:54:46 - Speaker F
If one production line we typically talk about 20,000. So then you can scale up and then if company like corning their procurement will came to us because we did exactly the same thing in their position to negotiate with the suppliers, say that, hey, I got like 50 production lines. How many seats you can give to me and so on. We can negotiate a bulk number. Typically we'll say half million dollars per year. Yeah.

00:55:12 - Anil Chawla
So sounding like six figure, maybe seven figure contracts.

00:55:15 - Speaker F
Oh, you zack them. Oh, yeah.

00:55:16 - Anil Chawla
And how many of how many Cornings are there?

00:55:19 - Scot Wingo
Well, you talk about, I think Corning, one corning facility has 50 production lines. I'm sorry, so Corning has a facility, a manufacturing facility that has how many production lines? Yes, how many?

00:55:30 - Speaker F
So I think I just say that my, from my counting, Corning probably have a 80 to 100 production lines across the whole company. Okay, across the whole company. I mean you're managing the size. The size corning sales is $10 billion or about 10 billion.

00:55:48 - Scot Wingo
So 100 North Carolina alone, I think there's like three or four facilities.

00:55:51 - Speaker F
Yeah, well, actually North Carolina has a lot actually. Wilmington Concorde, actually a major Corning fiber. And then they just got a new plant in the Durham here, I mentioned to you for the biopharma valves. And then they also have a cable manufacturer in the hickory. So North Carolina is Corning favorite place.

00:56:14 - Anil Chawla
So 80 to 100 lines across the whole company.

00:56:16 - Speaker F
Oh, yes.

00:56:17 - Anil Chawla
How many is that typical of how many companies of that Keystone provider? How many of them?

00:56:21 - Speaker F
So for large size of this, what you talk about is hundreds. Hundreds of companies.

00:56:28 - Anil Chawla
Hundreds of companies. Wow.

00:56:29 - Speaker F
Well, we're not just aimed at the US but also Europe and Japan.

00:56:33 - Anil Chawla
Are they of that size or is Corning kind of like a, I would imagine a bigger fish?

00:56:37 - Speaker F
So if we talk about the size of offered to like above $1 billion is about like 500.

00:56:45 - John Starke
Great.

00:56:45 - Anil Chawla
And then you have the downstream manufacturers, right, that you also.

00:56:50 - John Starke
Yes.

00:56:50 - Speaker F
So for small CNC machine shop and injection molding and those actually we typically sell one seat per customer. Well, you got like in US you have about like 30,000 companies like that and in Europeans three times. So you add them together, total is probably 120,000 companies. So yeah. So there's no marketing problem at all, market problem at all. It's how we can penetrate this faster that's very important to us.

00:57:23 - Anil Chawla
I mean, I have a corollary question to that, which is around the competition and you mentioned you had a slide about reliability and you mentioned that there are existing AI models. I would imagine given the importance of discovering these new materials, Corning companies like Corning invest heavily. So what are you really competing against and what is this reliability? How do you beat them?

00:57:46 - Speaker F
Yeah, we don't compete with the company like Corning because their Internal effort is much, much less than what we're doing. And this is not their core technology. So Corning's a major, we have been there for 25 to 30 years. That's not where their major competence. So we basically interacted with a lot of senior vice president and so on. They really want us to be there to serve for them. And it's extremely low cost. And so if you ask me what is our competitive companies, we leased about four competitive companies. So you know for example, one that's called C3AI. You heard that company, right? C3 was started very strong because it's spin off by all these Oracle senior vice president. So they get all kind of connections in the oil company. So in the oil industries they start very strong and they don't have the software like what we do. They basically provide a service. There are more service companies than the software provider. So I would say that I haven't seen any kind of companies focus on glass and ceramics. And we don't want to spend this at this time. Of course you can scale that up. But we haven't seen a company to do AI and machine learning for glass and ceramics companies. Companies similar to what we're doing. We haven't seen that.

00:59:21 - Anil Chawla
Just to press on that one more time, you mentioned 10x ROI 25% reduction in costs. These are compelling numbers.

00:59:28 - John Starke
Yes.

00:59:29 - Anil Chawla
And so can you help me understand why Corning wouldn't be investing more and why they wouldn't be in housing given they have the data? AI is very top of mind.

00:59:40 - Speaker F
Of course.

00:59:41 - Anil Chawla
Why are you not worried about it?

00:59:42 - Speaker F
So let's assuming If Corning hire 30 AI engineers, you know what the 30 AI engineers in your first three, five years to do? They will be sent to the plant to get experience. But they cannot integrate their skills easily with these sub manufacturing engineers and the environment. So that was the bill crabs. Well, I shouldn't say bill crabs. That was basically. That is just the phenomena happening in the large companies. And what we do is that we automatically integrate them together because we got both background of AI and experience. It takes a long time for the new engineers join large companies and then contribute and to generate ROI for their project. So that's basically what I would say you think about If Corning hires 30 AI engineers, how much it cost to them. So you talk about I should say 40 issue 4 is $1 million. So 4, 40 actually is what? So $40 million. Right. $40 million. How much really we charge them probably in one project most half a million dollars. What you just calculated and then we will be very productive. And that's what we did when we were in Corning. If there were companies like our company provide service, we will hire them. We don't want to.

01:01:14 - Scot Wingo
So it's an efficiency play. They can save money on scientists and labor.

01:01:18 - Speaker F
Exactly. So Corning would rather use their money to hire material scientists and engineers to do their core technology nowadays.

01:01:29 - David Jones
So two quick questions, Robert. One is you have four customers. How do you envision the sales process working? Is it a bag carrying guy and they have to go to Boeing and Corning and meet them. Who is the person that you need to get in front of that has budget to do this? And then maybe the second question is you're only raising 100k to 150k. That seems like a low amount. If you're in the scaling motion like why not raise more and what are you using it for?

01:01:59 - Speaker F
So right now actually part of reasons to be honest that we don't spend a lot of time on raising capitals. We don't even have a lot of experience in recent capitals. A bunch of capitals. I mean Scott actually gave me some coach. I really appreciate that. Our 98% of time actually focus on acquiring new customers. So how we got that right now is that we got a couple of our team members have been in the industry for a long time. We know probably more than 50 companies, C Suite people. That's how we basically get those customers right now. This is how we do that. But meanwhile I did bring this to Scott last time when we had a one on one as we do have difficulties. We don't have enough budget to do marketing and we don't have a budget to hire a salesperson if we got that just like what you said, he's not going to go to door to door but we will give him a lease in know how he does that. We need a good salesperson. That's the reason we can see our growth will be much faster than today.

01:02:58 - Scot Wingo
I told him to raise more too. But yeah they all they need is 150k.

01:03:02 - Anil Chawla
I think both these guys are carrying that right now.

01:03:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:03:08 - Speaker F
Yeah. So if, if this is basically what we're doing, we don't try to really light our investors to take a lot of risk risk and so on. But meanwhile that we really want to get more customers. So typically we would like to use our revenue to support this company at the end. I mean this is so at the beginning we have this kind of a mindset of course that if we get some money we can hire salesperson we can really scale up our marketing effort. Like we don't have money to do advertisement. We don't have money to put a set up a booth even in the industry show. So it is hard. But Scott told me you don't have to have a booth in the beginning.

01:03:51 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, just send a sales guy. Cool. Well thanks Robert. You did a great job. It's a hard concept because you're so deep into this industrial world. It takes a while for us to kind of get up to speed on it. Absolutely. You did a great job.

01:04:02 - Speaker F
I understand. Thank you.

01:04:03 - Nikin Shah
Thank you.

01:04:03 - David Jones
Good job.

01:04:04 - Speaker F
I really appreciate all the questions. Actually you guys are stimulated our my thought and one of my partners cannot be here. So Mish ornik and so he asked me to say hello to all of you. Thank you.

01:04:18 - Nikin Shah
Thanks for the flow.

01:04:24 - Scot Wingo
Okay, selection committee. This is the tough part. This is as an entrepreneur that makes investments now this is the part I don't like is having to pick one. So. So Dave maybe share some thoughts like so we're up. We had mind matter and then we also had ZW very two very different companies. But this is also the hard thing about being an investor is you never see. You rarely see two of a certain kind. Later we are going to have that kind of happened that we have two ed techs that kind of matched up together. So that makes it a little bit easier sometimes when it's in the same category. But this is actually the more normal thing is you're picking. Yeah. Everyone has finite dollars to invest and you have to make decisions and as investors you're trying to find those companies that are going to be the biggest possible and return the biggest results for your investors your LPs. So that thought Dave, any and also any feedback for the entrepreneurs that you can kind of share.

01:05:18 - Speaker F
Sure.

01:05:19 - David Jones
So as I put them both together Scott, one is a pure software company and you know that a lot less Capex needed like I know that space a lot better. That being said that one was a little bit more it was deeper into the manufacturing process. It was a little harder to get some of the I don't know maybe for us to understand whereas the first one very easy to understand.

01:05:51 - Nikin Shah
Right.

01:05:51 - David Jones
It's super simple. We get it. It's applicable to us every day but it's also to to make that one big if he is able to make it big it's going to consume a lot of cash.

01:06:01 - Scot Wingo
Right.

01:06:01 - David Jones
I mean it's going to heavy capex and going to need a lot of money.

01:06:06 - Scot Wingo
Okay Anil, any thoughts before we Kind of reveal which way you're leaning.

01:06:10 - Anil Chawla
I agree with what you're saying on my matter. As an emotional consumer, I got it right away and I got excited about it right away. But as soon as I put the business hat on, questions about will people break out of the complacency that we've had for several decades of having the trash bin and the recycle bin, what's going to motivate them to spend money? I thought John was very transparent and humble, which is great to see an entrepreneur. He wasn't trying to throw these big projections out. He told us that he's got to convince customers to spend $1,000 a year instead of $100 a year on the data. That does create the question mark around the business of what the opportunity is and of course the economics of having the hardware. On zw, my main question was on the market size, obviously. I also wanted to try to understand the business. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to. I think he did a good job of getting us in there in the time that he had and also got me more confident about the market size. But I think the fact that it is kind of deep in that domain leaves some confusion with investors. And you can either fall on the side of giving him the benefit of the doubt, go, okay, he knows what he's talking about. There's probably a lot there. Or you might stay confused and go, I don't get this business, I might not invest in it.

01:07:22 - Nikin Shah
Yeah, Nick, Yeah. And just to add, I mean, when I think about as an investor, it's this is their life's work and you know, what's going to drive passion. Also do they, you know, are these the right entrepreneurs to solve this particular problem? I think in ZW it was clear, you know, Robert and his partners have spent 25 plus years in the industry. They understand the problem and they see the opportunity. They obviously have the context and the network. And then on top of that, it's a software business, so easier to scale. I think with my matter, there's a lot of different stakeholders and regulations and while it's a great noble effort, I think there's still some work to be done in terms of how to actually get this to scale. Whether it's leveraging the technology that they've built and selling it to the larger waste management companies for sorting. It's just trying to. We understand that there's a big problem in recycling and trash, but where do you start? Solving that problem, I think is, you know, and to do it the way they're doing. Kudos to the success they've had. I just think it's going to be a little bit longer road, more capital needed.

01:08:30 - Speaker F
Okay, cool.

01:08:32 - Scot Wingo
And for the record, Robert, his initial slide deck was all industry and it didn't really help me get like, you know, down to like, here's how a production line works and stuff. And. Yeah, so it's one of those things that in a lot of times in this early stage, it does come down to the entrepreneur too. Right. You know, like, there's a whole jockey and horse thing. So at some point you've gotta, you've gotta trust that John. John's been at this a while and I've met him many. He's been in many pitch competitions and the guy doesn't have any quit in him. So I, I like that about him. You know, he's been, you know, I think he's been eating ramen for three years straight. I don't know how he makes his. I think he's on the other side of that now, but spent been. He's a grinder for sure. And then with Robert, you've just got to kind of trust that he's obviously super intelligent and knows this space and at some point you've got to kind of make that. So that's the other thing that happens in early stage. Whereas you guys, and, you know, you're kind of. You're kind of as an angel, you do early and kind of later, but you guys are a little bit later. And what's nice about later is you have more to grab onto. Right. You've got some more revenue and customers to talk to and that kind of thing.

01:09:31 - Anil Chawla
I would say for Robert, you know, one strategy might be to not try to. To teach us the whole thing.

01:09:36 - Scot Wingo
Right.

01:09:36 - Anil Chawla
To almost take the play of, like, trust me, I understand this and spend more time on. I've got four customers. Here's how I got them.

01:09:43 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:09:44 - Anil Chawla
And maybe a slide or two on the opportunity that we were asking about in terms of how many customers are there more.

01:09:49 - Scot Wingo
I think there definitely needs to be a TAM slide. Could be enough to kind of get you there. Yeah.

01:09:53 - Speaker F
Yeah, cool.

01:09:55 - Scot Wingo
Well, we've got a. You know, so the exercise here is as the selection committee kind of need to help us figure out what we're doing here. There has to be, you know, someone, Someone. Someone gets the prize and someone doesn't. Let's go alphabetical order by last name. So Anil, both by first and last name. That puts you in the.

01:10:11 - Anil Chawla
Always works it's the reverse Alphabet.

01:10:13 - Scot Wingo
As a wingo, I have a lot of appreciation for that. So where would you make your investment?

01:10:20 - Anil Chawla
I ended after they finished presenting. I pretty clearly fell in the ZW bucket. I do often invest in the sense of wanting to see something exist and I would want to see my matter exist. But I just wasn't clear again on the opportunity. Again I felt like there were a lot of hurdles to get there. Whereas with zw the fact they come from the industry, they know the problem, was very, very passionate about it. It gave me the confidence that there is a there there in terms of the actual problem. The fact they've got the four customers. And then as I mentioned I was concerned about market size. But when I heard there were hundreds of companies in that first bucket, that alone had me pretty excited given that the ASPs could be up in the six figures.

01:11:02 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. And the other thing for folks watching this isn't like a winner and a loser. It's just like which is the best of two great ideas. And this is the hard thing as an investor is it's impossible to know until 10 years in the future which of these is going to be the bigger one. But you got to kind of read the tea leaves and do your best with that. Mr. Jones, alphabetically, you're second.

01:11:22 - David Jones
I agree completely with Anil. Again, probably biased because we are software investors but I just think with 150k or some amount of money I think Robert is going to again he already has four customers, he's got a pipeline. I just think it's going to be infinitely easier to scale the business. Again, love what John's doing. I totally get it. If he figures out the path into waste management or into landfills or into something like that could be a the game changing company. But if I had 25k today, knowing what I know, I would put it in zw.

01:12:01 - Nikin Shah
Yeah, I would. I agree with Anil and David. I would invest in ZW domain expertise. Right. So founder market fit in these niche industries like glass and ceramics. You know, it's harder to find competition in these niche industries and it seems like they already have a good leg up based on their experience and their contacts and what they're looking to solve. So if I were to have 25k.

01:12:26 - Scot Wingo
I would put it in ZW today.

01:12:28 - Speaker F
Okay, awesome.

01:12:29 - Scot Wingo
Well I think we have ZW moves forward and thanks to my matter they did a great job and John and Robert will be moving on to the fabulous forum. So it will be keep watching to see what happens at that part of the tournament. Thanks, Selection committee. We appreciate this. Great questions and always good to see you guys and appreciate you guys doing all this for the community.

01:12:49 - John Starke
Thanks, Scott. That was great for having us.