[Music] - Wow. (audience applauding) Folks, folks, folks, Hold your... Is this on? Hold your applause, please,
because the real guests of honor are yet
to come, so that's when you need to
applaud. Good evening, everybody. My name is Raghu Sundaram. I have the honor of
being the dean of Stern and the even greater honor of kicking off tonight's
program. A few words of introduction to the sponsors of this program and the context of this program. At Stern, entrepreneurship, innovation have always been at
the heart of everything we've done
for over a hundred years, in our very DNA. For the last several decades, we've produced a huge
range of entrepreneurs that have transformed the
industries they've worked in, some very
openly, some very much more quietly, but still quite ferociously. To those who follow these
industries, the list of names reads like a
Who's Who, from Bill Berkley and Ken
Langone through Andrea Bonomi, Lorenzo
Fertitta, Liz Elting, Peggy Yu. Entrepreneurs have been
the very face of Stern for several decades. Today, we are at a point in time where entrepreneurship
has become more central to our activities than ever
before, a point in time that
is absolutely bristling with challenges, but also
because of that, bristling with opportunities, and at a point in time
where the pace of change makes the need for nimble
leaders who can think and move fast greater than ever before. At NYU, as a university,
across the university, we work with more than a
thousand aspiring entrepreneurs across our 16 colleges
and two global campuses in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi. Amongst the many ways we
foster entrepreneurship here at Stern is through
programmatic innovation, both in and out of the
classroom. Two examples of that innovation are the co-hosts of today's
program, the Entertainment, Media and
Technology, the EMT program at Stern, and the W.R. Berkley Innovation
Labs. The Berkley Innovation Labs
prepares the entrepreneurial students and
alumni to launch and lead
transformative ventures. This year, 244 teams entered the Entrepreneurs
Challenge. In a few short months, the
Innovation Lab will award $300,000 to NYU
startups on this very stage, in this very
room. Teams in our programs have gone
on to be acquired by Amazon,
by Airbnb and Twitter, and have appeared and done quite
well on a program we all know well,
Shark Tank, where Vengo Labs, the maker
of high-tech vending machines, secured a $2 million deal in
2016, and Keen Home, makers of a smart
air vent, walked away with $750,000 in
2015. The other co-sponsor, our EMT
program, provides students with
a global perspective of the entire spectrum of the
media and entertainment business. The program offers more
than a hundred courses taught by distinguished faculty and industry thought
leaders and practitioners. Last year, 4,400 students
from across the university took EMT courses here at Stern. One of EMT's most
distinguished faculty members, a man I'm proud to call my
colleague, is Greg Coleman. Greg is the
Executive-in-Residence at Lerer Hippeau, which is a preeminent
early-stage venture fund that has invested in
such notable companies as Casper, Glossier,
Warby Parker and BuzzFeed. At Stern, Greg teaches the
popular class Digital Marketing and
Innovation. He brings to the course more
than 40 years of experience in advertising and
media, spanning executive roles at
Yahoo!, the Huffington Post and at
BuzzFeed, where most recently he was
president. Greg was also one of the
earliest members of our Tech MBA Advisory Board and has been hugely supportive of our attempts to
integrate ever more closely business, entrepreneurship and
innovation, including through the
Creative Destruction Lab. Thank you, Greg, for inviting
Mark Cuban to campus. Mr. Cuban embodies, in
every sense of the word, Stern's driving principles of
innovation, of entrepreneurship, of
technology. We are thrilled to be spending
this evening with him. Our thanks, again, to the EMT
program and to the Berkley Innovation
Labs for sponsoring this program. Professor Greg Coleman. - Thank you very much. (audience applauding)
Thank you. Wow, we have a full house
tonight. (audience applauding) So, Dean, 40 years of
experience. Did you really have to do that? - You know, I was impressed. - My God, that's a lie. It's 10 years of experience (audience laughing)
is what I've had. Before I make any formal
comments, I would like to ask
Sara Kim to come on up. Sara is our.
(audience applauding) Come on, let's give her
a round of applause. (audience applauding) Sara is one of my two teaching
fellows. Lucy Zhang is here, as well. There's Lucy. (audience applauding)
Round of applause. Sara is gonna introduce Mark. - Good evening. My name is Sarah Kim, and I'm an MBA Langone student here at NYU
Stern. I've had the pleasure of being a
student and teaching fellow, as Greg
mentioned, for Professor Coleman's
Digital Media Innovation class. This past semester,
we've been lucky enough to have some incredible
speakers, including Jeff Zucker, president
of CNN, who came to speak to us after
CNN sued the White House. We've also hosted, (laughs),
yeah. It was great. (audience laughing) We've also hosted Jonah Peretti, CEO and founder of Buzzfeed, and Kara Swisher, renowned
journalist and founder of Recode. Tonight, I have the
privilege of introducing someone who needs no
introduction. (buzzer rings) (audience laughing) You may know him as your
favorite investor on ABC's Shark Tank or
as the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks. He's also been a lifelong
businessman. Some lesser known facts about our guest tonight. At the age of 12, he was an
entrepreneur selling trash bags. He also took on the challenge of
managing a Dairy Queen for the day. He also set a Guinness World
Record in 1999 for the largest single e-commerce transaction when he
bought a Gulfstream jet for $40
million. (audience laughing) He did this after he sold his
company Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for a cool 5.6 billion. I don't know about you guys, but I don't think back
then it was very common to be making online purchases. Clearly, he was ahead of his
time. He also may or may not have been
quoted to say that he wanted to speak to NYU Stern students
and illustrious alumni as part of his impressive
career. (Mark laughs) I'm thrilled to help you do that
today. (audience laughing) Ladies and gentlemen, please
join me in giving a warm welcome to the incomparable Mark Cuban. (audience applauding and
cheering) - Thank you. Where do you want me, Greg? - You'll go right there, the far
one. (audience applauding) - I gave Mark an NYU jacket, but
he said he's an Indiana man (audience laughing)
so he wouldn't. - Go IU. - Which I respect. - Okay, thank you. - We have to do that. Mark, thank you so much for
coming in. One, I'll tell you Mark and I are on the board
of a company called ZergNet. Actually, the CEO, Reggie
Renner, is here with us tonight, as
well. When I asked Mark at the end of
one of the board meetings, I said,
hey, I teach this class at NYU. Would you be interested in coming to talk to the school? He takes his phone out and he says, "Hold on," and he
looks. I said, you're not looking to
see when the Mavs are playing
the Knicks, are you? (audience laughing) He said, "Yeah, 'cause then I
know "I'll be here." (audience laughing) You have lots of friends that figure their calendar out. One way, I see when I'm having
spaghetti and meatballs at home
(Mark laughs) and I know I'll be there. Other people, when their
ball club is there. Before we go into our Q and A, we're gonna do a fireside chat
now. Then we're gonna hear a little
later from some students that
will have some questions. Then we have three amazing
presentations tonight, five-minute presentations
that Mark will hear and he'll give some feedback, which will be a real
treat for the students that will be presenting. - I'm gonna rip some people
apart. (audience laughing) - But what I'd love to do is
let's put, I just wanna share with you, for those of you that are not in
my class, I did have the chance this year to get some pretty cool
speakers. (audience laughing) Mark, why don't you take a look? This is the only thing
I tried to rehearse. We had the head of sales for
Twitter. - Wow, Greg, that's a great
list. (audience laughing) Okay, moving on, moving on. (audience laughing) - The class had the
chance to meet with people that are the movers and shakers in the digital world. We had the chance, if
you take a look up there. As Sara mentioned, the morning
that we had Jeff Zucker come, Jeff came
at six o'clock at night, he did, he sued the president of the
United States for taking Jim Acosta's
credentials away. He gave no interviews during that day, but he gave our
class the full speak, inside and out, of what the lawyers said,
how he made the decision, how they served the papers. It was a moment in time. Then one of the other
highlights, as ya heard, Kara Swisher, unbridled. - That's her. - Her comments about tech
titans, at least they can't take it with
them. That was her generous point of
view about people, Mark Zucker and
the rest. Let's go right into this. I started off talking about
ZergNet, Mark, and talking to Reggie, the CEO. One of the things that I found
out that I think this class
would be very interested, the school would be very
interested, is that after watching Shark
Tank, Reggie cold emailed you. - Yep. - He cold emailed you with what
he told me was a pathetically long email. Apparently, you read it and you
responded. - Yep. - You got hit on by
somebody from the outside you never met before with a long
note. For those people that are afraid
sometimes to take a chance, what happened
when you saw his note? - Well, first of all, he went to
Indiana. (audience laughing) Or from Indianapolis. I get hundreds of emails, business-related emails a day and I get pitches every day. mcuban@gmail. (audience laughing) I'll read the first paragraph. If you say something of
substance that catches my interest and I
think is differentiated in some way, I'll keep on reading. That's exactly what Reggie did. He said, "We've got some
technology that," I won't go into the whole thing, but it caught my attention. I started asking some followup
questions. Very quickly, my BS meter is
really good. Based off the answers, I can
tell if it's real or it's nonsense. We just kept on following up, did my due diligence, and we
didn't meet until long after I invested in
him. - Oh, wow. But Mark also comes to
every board meeting. Occasionally he'll have to call
in, but you make every single one. - Of course, yeah. - How many boards are you on
where you will spend that kind of time? - Only three or four, not that
many. I really limit it because
it does take time. Fortunately, I'm in a great
position where I can dictate (laughs)
kinda where and when I wanna go. That's very beneficial. But I don't do a lotta meetings. I don't do a lotta phone calls. I try to do everything via email
because it just makes me more efficient. Now if you wanna write
me a check, I'll show up. (audience laughing) If there's some issues
that I need to address or need to help you with, I'll
show up, whether it's a Shark Tank
company, Reggie's company or much larger
companies I'm invested in. It works for me. I've invested 25, $30 million in companies where people cold
called, emailed me, and in a lotta
cases, I still have never met them. - Wow. - I've made a lotta money off of
those. - Wow, well, ya made a good
investment in Reggie's company. - He's just getting started.
(Greg laughs) - He is. I wanna go back in time to a
company that I used to work for called
Yahoo!. - I remember them. - That had a very
(audience laughing) meaningful role in your life. - Yep. - I think everyone here knows
that Mark and his partner Todd Wagner sold their company to Yahoo! in what was it, '99? - '99, yeah. - '99 for $5.6 billion. - In stock, not cash. - I wanna talk about that. When I got to Yahoo! in April of
'01, two things happened. There were about a dozen people
left from the Broadcast.com
acquisition. This is about a year after you
sold it. I remember my boss at
the time, Tim Koogle, asked me would our
Southeast regional manager like to be running
Broadcast.com. I'm like, oh, my God, this is
such a horrible thing--
- What a mess. - to hear about after
all of that happened. It would be great if you could give everybody kind of a glimpse
of, remember, this was the heyday. The internet was booming and it was rocking and rolling, and valuations were different
than we look at them now. But if you could give us that
peek 'cause I have not heard
you talk about this much, about what happened,
how you were approached or how you approached them. Then I'd love to hear about-- - In terms of buying the company
or? Well, let me give you
the background 'cause people probably don't
know about the company. In 1995, the internet was just getting
started. As I kid, referred to multiple
times, I went to Indiana University,
where basketball is big. The way we listened to
basketball games in Dallas is somebody
in Bloomington, Indiana, would put a speakerphone next to
a radio, an AM radio, and then in Dallas, we'd have a table, a
whole lotta six-packs, and we'd have a speakerphone
there and we'd listen to the game. That's how we listened to the
game. The internet was just starting
to happen. I set up my own little Netscape
server, Mosaic server, all this stuff. I was getting into it
'cause I'm a tech guy. All of the sudden, it's like,
wait. We've gotta figure out
a way to use the net to listen and eventually
watch stuff online. That sounds like so nothing now, but back then, you had to have a
PC. You had to have a modem. You had to download TCP/IP
software, which y'all probably don't
even know what that is. Then you had to log in. Then you had to have
enough bandwidth available to actually download or stream
something. Now back then, we didn't
call it streaming. We called it internet
broadcasting, or netcasting. I said, okay, let's just go for
it. I took money from a company
I had previously sold. We started this company called
AudioNet. That's exactly what we did. We went out and locked up the
rights to everything, hundreds of radio
stations. We created Pandora, Spotify. We had hundreds of radio
stations by 1997 and 1998. We had police scanners online. Then we started getting into
video, and we changed the name to
Broadcast.com. Then we started doing
live broadcasts of video. We did corporate videos. By the time we started talking
to Yahoo!. Well, in 1998, we went public. It was the largest one-day jump in the history of the stock
market, opening day price jump in the history of the stock
market. It was a good day. Yahoo! happened to be
a small investor in us, so we had a relationship with
us. To really, to give you some
context, we dominated streaming. Not a little bit. We started the whole streaming
industry. We built the streaming industry. Our market share was enormous. We were doing everything. We had all the radio stations, all the TV stations. We even, Lionsgate movie studio, we had bought 10% of Lionsgate just to get access to their TV
and movies to stream them online. Then Yahoo! came along and it just made sense. They were a destination. They could drive even more
traffic. Broadband was starting to take
off. I remember we did a survey
for in-office media. We controlled 97% of in-office
media. It was crazy because people
didn't have radios or TVs on their
desks, but they had a PC and they had access to
faster internet speeds, broadband, in their corporate
office. It made perfect sense. They made a bid on us. It was great. We thought, this is going to be
great. Not less than a year later, the internet stock market
crashed, and they freaked out. Again, in context, YouTube, this was before YouTube. We had people, businesses and
individuals could upload their own content
onto Broadcast.com. We indexed it and did sorts
and searches by keywords. We had hundreds of radio
stations. The digital laws were different. We had a CD jukebox. We did hundreds, thousands of
live events, we did corporate events. We were killing it, dominating. It made perfect sense. The market dropped. They didn't know what to do. Their board at the time said, we were actually cashflow
breakeven. They didn't support us any
longer. They just kept on pushing
people to the corners. - It was horrible. - They screwed up. - Mark, one of the things that
you did, and would be great to hear from
you about what the hunch was, instead of just holding
onto all of the stock that you got from Yahoo!, you
did what we call a collar, you
collared. - Hedged it. - You hedged it. Tell everybody what went through
your mind because that was a big
bet with huge dollars. - It was actually pretty simple. Hedging stock. Yahoo! paid us in Yahoo! stock. I was smart enough to recognize,
I guess, that what goes up could go down. But it wasn't that big a step
because I was worth more than a billion
dollars. How much did I need? I was telling everybody just
find me a way to hedge it so in the
event, look, if the stock price goes up and I leave something
on the table, so be it. But I liked that being next to
my name and I wanted to keep it. (audience laughing) I sold calls, bought puts and
effectively hedged it so that by the time. There was a period of time
from when I'd done that. The internet stock
market kept on going up. I told people I'd hedged it. Goldman Sachs, the company,
had told people what I'd done. I remember going on CNBC,
the business channel, and the guy going, "Boy, don't you feel stupid? "That Yahoo! stock has kept on
going up "and you had this hedged." I'm like, yeah, I feel so stupid riding around in my G5
that I bought online. (audience laughing) Not to sound like a crazy,
greedy capitalist, but, yeah. (audience laughing) I just didn't wanna screw it up. So I hedged it, and then
the internet bubble burst and I was fully protected and
actually even made a little bit more
money. What I learned was you just don't need to be greedy. I was very, very blessed,
I was very fortunate. Look, I didn't plan the
internet stock market to go up and I didn't plan it to
go down, so I was lucky in terms of
scale. I didn't wanna screw it up, and so I hedged. - You didn't screw it up. One other thing from that time, when I arrived in April of '01 with Terry Semel, three weeks after I started, Todd Wagner shows up
to wanna meet with us, but not with Jeff Mallett,
who was then the president. We're like, what does he wanna
talk about? We knew about the deal. He was like, "I'm an activist. "I demand that you fire Jeff
Mallett," who was my boss. I'm like, wow, this is a
really nice environment that I've gotten into out here. (audience laughing) Even after you had done your
thing, there was still an ache to make
sure that Yahoo! itself was on track. Do you know what that was about? - Yeah, they were screwing
everything up. Look, they had an opportunity to
dominate streaming media. They also owned, at the same
time, the patent to cost-per-click. Now, Google's entire business to
this day is built around pay-per-click,
rather-- - And Criteo. - They had the entire
patent for pay-per-click. Had they just said, "Sorry,
Google, "you can't use it,"
there would be no Google. Instead, they said, "Yeah, $133
million "and give us some stock." They were just too
nice, which blinded them in a lotta respects. I remember walking in
with a $32 million sale, saying, okay, we're gonna do
streaming. We're gonna sell all
this company's content. It's worth $32 million for us. It's gonna preempt these
other potential competitors. I forget if it was
Jerry or Tim or whoever, said, "No, we don't work that
way. "We don't preempt competition. "We just leave it open." I'm like, okay, it's time for me
to go buy a basketball team. (audience laughing) They just didn't see these
things. It's a lesson in your
businesses. Everybody's always
trying to kick your ass. You have to figure out how to
kick your own ass first. Seriously, because if
you're not brutally honest with yourself in your own
business about what your frailties are, someone else is going to find
them. Yahoo! didn't get that. Yahoo! just thought, ya know
what? We're just gonna continue moving
forward and we'll just compete
with everybody else. We have no other problems. Didn't quite work out for 'em,
did it? - No, it did not. Then we gave it a good go. From '01 to '08, we-- - Terry tried.
- We raised it back up. But they did slip on a big
banana peel. I wanna pivot right now. Purple and yellow banana peel
for Yahoo! for you that know their colors. - That was another thing, wait. We sell to them, right? Our office is in Dallas. The way we ran our
business, it was just like lean and mean. You invest in your product, you
invest in your customers, you invest in
your people. We had open offices. You don't need fancy stuff. They immediately came down-- - I bet. - And just redid all the
furniture in purple and gold. I'm like, it's cool, that's
my high school's colors. (audience laughing) But why are we spending this
money? Got a whole new office,
a whole new building. I'm just like, why are
we spending this money? - Well, one of the ways. The pivot is. (audience laughing) - The moral of the story
is you spend money. - Reggie knows how to spend
money. - Or not to spend it, right?
- Right. One of the things in my rules, when I look at companies to
invest in, if someone walks in with swag, here's my coffee mug with my
logo, here's your T-shirt with my
logo, I don't see anybody wearing a
T-shirt with a startup's logo, do you? - No. - Would you wear some other
startup's logo polo shirt? Hell, no. Hell, no. It's just a waste of money. Put your money where you're able to differentiate yourself and
add value that separates yourself
so you can get ahead. Don't waste it. - We talked about a company's
frailties. Let's talk about individuals. One of the question that I've
asked all those amazing speakers-- - Amazing.
- That I put up there, is what is your thing? By that, I mean what is it that you love to do
more than anything else? What do you think that you're
best at? What makes you click your heels? For example, I'm a connector. It started early in my life. I don't know, but I love to
connect really smart people. I like to connect you with NYU
here. But as you think about your
career and in your early days, what is your thing and when did
you understand what it was? - It hasn't changed. My thing is learning,
learning whatever's new, and applying it in ways that
other people aren't thinking of. I got fired from a job selling
software, started a company. Within six months, this
is the early days of PCs, I recognized that, okay, we
need to connect PCs together. Back then, you walked around and
you had your 5 1/4 inch floppy. Who would need to connect a PC? We started writing software
for local area networks, became a systems integrator. $30-some million run rate, and sold it to H&R Block. Then got to the internet. Let's look at this internet
thing. Someone's gonna need to put
audio and then video on there. Great. Then after Yahoo! did Yahoo!,
I'm like, you know what? I'm looking at these big screen
TVs that cost $30,000 that are high-definition television
sets, and I'm thinking, you know what? Eventually, they're gonna follow
the price performance curve of traditional consumer
electronics and they're gonna come down in
price. I started the first
all-high-definition TV network called HDNet. Then I'm looking and
saying, okay, ya know what? It's like 2006, 2007, and
traditional television and cable is going digital. I'm saying, you know what? There's gonna be a lotta storage
space and first access digital space
that cable companies aren't used to
using. So let's take a movie production
company that we created and let's make
it available for day and day
distribution where people will pay 20 bucks to the cable company to watch
this brand-new movie, and we
get to keep 10 of it. We had 2929 Productions. We started producing movies. Lo and behold, the first movie
we created was a documentary called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the
Room. (audience laughing) Got nominated for an Academy
Award. Then we didn't really create any
good ones after that, but (audience laughing) by being first, leveraging
digital storage, we were able to take advantage
and make a lotta money. Then the NBA with the Mavericks, just doing those types of
things. It's what I like to do now. Now I'm going through and
teaching myself neural networks and doing the
same thing with machine learning and GANs and this and that because AI is going to have more of an
impact than the internet did. AI plus new types of chip sets plus 5G is going to change
things far more than we've ever seen anything
change. Understanding where and how to
apply it is going to be critical,
but just as important, knowing how to segregate and
separate the bullshit is as important
because every email y'all are about to
send me is gonna say, "I have this AI
solution "and we're using algorithms." Yeah, of course you are. Then what? What really makes you different? What really sets you apart? But if I didn't do that work, if I didn't sit down and do the
AWS machine learning tutorials, if I
didn't go on YouTube and take the NYU Introduction to Neural
Networks or whatever, I'm not gonna know it,
I'm not gonna be able to apply it and I'm not
gonna be able to be first. That's fun, that's fun. Knowing I get to kick the ass of
some 22-year-old NYU graduate, that's
awesome. (audience laughing) - Are there any big companies
that get the future right now? Of the telcos that are diving
into 5G, do you have some other companies in the tech space? Is that where you're also
learning, or are you seeing an
incredible groundswell of early-stage activity? - The big companies are
trying, but it's difficult. It's more smaller lean and mean
companies that are able to try different
things and apply new types of sensors. I've got one company,
Genestesis. I didn't know this, but
every organ in our body emits an electrical impulse. There are now sensors that
capture those electrical pulses. There are ways to capture
them into a WAV file. Who knew, an old-school WAV
file? Well, what Genestesis
did was go to Mayo Clinic and other hospitals and use
these sensors and capture tens of thousands of outputs of people's
hearts into a WAV file, and then ran 'em through machine
learning, and were able to discern, with
starting 92 or 3% accuracy, now up to 95
to 97%, five different heart
ailments just based off of what's recorded in this WAV
file output from a sensor. Now that's critical because when
people, as you get older. There's this old show, Sanford
and Son. I'm coming, Elizabeth. It's the big one. Because as you get
older, there's something you think is screwed up with
your heart. You don't know if it's a heart
attack, you don't know if it's just a
misbeat, whatever is it, but
it's hard for hospitals to discern, so you have to run
every test. With just this little bit of
innovation using machine learning and
sensors, that's all changing right now as
we speak. There's big companies
and little companies. But I'll tell you the
thing that's most important and one of the things I wanted to convey here that's changing. How people perceive
entrepreneurs is changing dramatically,
and how entrepreneurs are contributing to society is
changing right now as we speak. I see it on Shark Tank. Companies coming on Shark Tank
now, particularly from younger
entrepreneurs, have a social component. You don't wanna buy something
unless you think the company is
contributing. Even more so now, a
lotta people were saying, "You know what? "If you're an entrepreneur and
you happen "to get rich, that's bad." Entrepreneurs, people
particularly in my generation, have kinda segregated themselves into, okay, just get
me all the money I can, into, okay, there can be such a
thing as compassionate capitalism. Really, it's falling on you guys
now to set the message. If you are going to be an
entrepreneur, having a social component is
good. Being a compassionate
entrepreneur is better because when you change things, when you can hire people. I had to go back through the
companies that I control now and I said I
wanted to make sure that nobody who
works for, in particular the arena and the
Mavs, is on public assistance because it's wrong. I think it's wrong that somebody who works for me doesn't make
enough money to be on public assistance. That's the type of attitude I
think that needs to change now with
entrepreneurs. That's now becoming part
of your responsibility. I think that's critically
important. Guys like me, women like me, can
look and backtrack and backfill in
where we've made mistakes. I've made plenty, and
I've learned from 'em. But it's your opportunity, and I
think it's critically important
to recognize that you are gonna set the tone for
how people perceive
entrepreneurs going forward. If you introduce compassion and you look at the needs of the
people that work for you, right
from the beginning, I think you're gonna
have stronger companies, less turnover and better
results. - You've done a lot of cool
things. Everybody here that's in school is gonna graduate, and at
some point in their life, they're gonna get their
ass kicked in business. They're gonna get fired,
they're gonna have a boss that they hate. In your case, you've
done a lotta cool stuff so you can talk about it, what
was the biggest lump and learning, and
how did you get up off the floor, if ya got
up off the floor? - When I got to Dallas, I
was a bartender at night. I moved in one of my buddies
from Indiana. I said, ya gotta come to Dallas. I'm like, I'm there. My car would only get so far. Had a Fiat X1/9 with a
hole in the floorboard that guzzled oil every 60 miles. I went down there, and this
place called The Village. It was the world's
largest apartment complex. We had six guys in a
three-bedroom apartment. I didn't have my own room, I didn't have my own drawer, I didn't have my closet. I had a pile and I had one ratty
towel that I stole from Motel 6. That was it. I was looking for my career. Got a job at a software store. I didn't have a tech background, so I was teaching myself all
this. Because the way I look at tech is somebody invents it, and
everybody else is tied for second place
in the ability to learn it. If I work harder and
faster to really dive in, even if it means reading the
manual, just diving in, then I can
get a headstart and I can-- - How old were you during this? - I was 24. Sleeping on the floor, working
in the software company, learning, learning,
learning, learning, learning, getting better at what I was
doing. Then one day, because
I was dying to get out of that rat hole that I lived
in, I had the chance to go
out and close the sale that would have got me
a $1,500 commission. I went to my boss. His name is Michael Humecki. I said, boss. One of my responsibilities
was to sweep the floor, wipe down the windows and open
the door to open the store. I got this sale, ya gotta
let me close the sale. He goes, "No, you've gotta be in
here "to open the store." I'm like, Michael, I mean. "No." I made the executive decision to
go out, pick up the check,
thinking if I hand this guy a $15,000 check, of course
he's gonna change his mind. (claps hands)
Fired me on the spot. Here I was living in a shit
hole, excuse my French, just this
ratty place with a Motel 6 towel. Sorry, Motel 6. (audience laughing) Really didn't know how
I was gonna get out. I decided, okay, I'm a lousy
employee. I went to one of the companies
that I had been talking to,
Architectural Lighting, and I said, look, I need $500 to be able to
buy the software you want. I promise you that even
if it doesn't work, I will wash your car,
I will walk your dog. I don't care what it
is, I will do whatever it takes to make it up to you. They gave me the $500. That allowed me to create
MicroSolutions. Six months later, I
was out of the rat hole and my company turned into a
real company. That's the one I sold for $6
million when I was 29, 30 years old. - The word balance. Obviously, you're wired
a little differently than some people. - Some people think that, yeah. - Just a little bit. But how do you find a center, how do you get
balance, how do you spend time with your
family? How do you do that to make all of this stuff worthwhile? - Two different things. I was at two different points in
my life. I waited. I didn't have a family. When I was 24, 25, I went seven
years without a vacation. To me, I was balanced, a
lotta people disagreed, 'cause I loved every minute of
it. Yeah, there was hardships and my
back was against the wall. I'll give ya a story, your
back against the wall. After Michael Humecki fired me, H-U-M-E-C-K-I. (audience laughing) But I don't hold grudges. (audience laughing) We had started this
company, MicroSolutions, which, just what it's named. It just is what it implies. We would hook PCs together and
LANs and this and that. One day I get a call from the
bank. We were small, four employees. We finally had $84,000 in the
bank, which was amazing for us. We were maybe six, eight months
old, I forget exactly what it was. We were small. We had one of my buddies who
helped install the computers; we had a
guy, partner, Martin Woodall;
and a receptionist. I thought I was using all the accounting principles I learned
at Indiana where I would go through the AP, the accounts payable, and then
one of the other people would sign
it after checking it, put it in an
envelope. Then the receptionist would then take the printed out check, lick
it, put it in the envelope,
lick it and mail it. Easy, breezy, right? Get a call from the bank. "Um, we had a bunch of these
checks "totaling $82,000 where somebody "whited out the payee "and put in her own name, Renee
Hardy." Not that I hold a grudge. H-A-R-D-Y. (audience laughing) And cashed it. Literally, this woman, Renee
Hardy, if you ever run into her,
she's a little bit older now, took 82 of our $84,000. I remember calling the bank. You just let them white out a
check and put their own name, and you
cashed it. This old-school Texas banker. He goes, "Son, leave it alone. "You don't have a pot to piss
in." (audience laughing) I had two choices. I could get mad or I can just
get over it and go back to work. (laughs) I'm like Boss Hogg, how could you do this to us?
(laughs) You guys don't know who
Boss Hogg is, nevermind. (audience laughing) I just went back to work. We called all our vendors
and yada, yada, yada, worked our way through and paid
back the money that the checks
were supposed to pay. But shit happens. In terms of balance, I dated. I made it really,
really, really clear that I was in love with
MicroSolutions. (audience laughing) I would never leave it alone
forever. The girlfriend was like,
it's me or your business. I was like, what was your name again? (audience laughing) No balance. But once I got to that point
where I didn't have to stress about
that stuff and I'd sold multiple companies and things were well, then
I started really dating and started a family. Now my three kids are nine, 12
and 15. Now things revolve around them. It was worth waiting. I'm a little bit more mature. Sure, not a lot more, but a
little bit more mature in terms of those
things. It made me smarter. Now I can focus on balance
and put them first, but I waited. For those who are trying to
do all at once, it's hard. I'm the wrong person to ask. - People are starting to throw
their hats into the ring to become the next
president of the United States. Do you know anything about that? - Well, I'm here to announce
that. (audience laughing) The definition of bad parenting
is running for president when you have
three kids, nine, 12 and 15 (audience laughing) because the doxing and
everything. Look, it's an interesting time. I've been very vocal, I'm
not a fan of the president's, but I'm not gonna get into the
why or how because all that's pretty
obvious and I'm not changing anybody's
minds. But the reality is I think it's time for a change. Obviously not just from
him, but just in general. Regardless of what I do, I think watching Kamala Harris come out
there, she was amazing. Watching what AOC is doing. There's people who wanna break
things 'cause I think the system is
broken and we need people who will
break things. But I think what's happening
right now is people are first establishing themselves
within one or the other party. Yet, the two parties are, I
think, responsible for a lot of the
problems that we're having because
everything is so partisan. I think there's gonna be an
opportunity, whether it's me, somebody
else, whoever it may be, either from a party or
independently, to go out and lead with
solutions. I'll give you a perfect
example, healthcare. How do we measure the success of the Affordable Care Act, the
ACA? By number of people who are
insured. The greatest lie ever told, what does insurance have to do with healthcare and wellness? You can have all the
insurance in the world, and most people don't have
enough money to pay the deductible. Yet we're standing up there
saying, "Keep the ACA." Okay, it was a great effort, but
insurance has nothing to do with wellness. To me, an entrepreneur,
like somebody here, has to come up with solutions, fix those problems. GDP. I think income inequality is one of our greatest problems. It's horrible. It's one of the reasons why I
went back to my companies and made sure
everybody made at least $15 an hour, if
not more, made sure no one was on public
assistance, got the help that they needed. Again, compassionate capitalism. But we tried to gauge the
strength of our economy based off of GDP. GDP is total. It has nothing to do with
bringing up the bottom or helping the
bottom, yet no one's gonna say anything
about using GDP as a measurement or
coming up with alternatives. That's for y'all to start
thinking about because if you can't measure it, you can't evaluate it,
you can't find solutions because everybody's gonna gauge
you based off of GDP, and GDP is the worst possible measurement. The number of people insured is horrific, it's one of
the greatest lies ever told. There are solutions. If I come up with them, and I'm working on them, and I
think there's better ways, then, all
right, there's something to do. If I don't get the solutions, then I don't wanna be somebody
that just stands up there because
it's typical. Here's what I believe. Here's what I'll do. Here's what's wrong. Here's why everybody else sucks. Here's why you should elect me. To me, that's just not
the way this country is going to go forward. That's not gonna bring people
together. But if you walk in and say, "Forget insurance. "Insurance is part of the
problem. "Insurance should not
be part of the solution. "Let's come up with a better
answer." All right, I think people will
listen to that person. - Mark, the last question that I
have, and then we're gonna get some
really good questions from the
audience, which is that a lot of this team is gonna be graduating in
the not too distant future. We have a lot of second
MBAs in my class this year. They're getting out in May. We have a lot of other students. Not everybody is wired like you. We understand that. But in terms of your point of
view on people, whatever their thing
is, taking a chance. As I do one-on-one
meetings with my students, and some of them are
in jobs that are okay, but they're not really doing
anything to get out of it. We have a special chat
when that takes place. But I think my last question is, from an advisory standpoint, what kernel would you give
people? 'Cause as far as we know, this is not a dress rehearsal. - The same thing I told myself, the same thing I tell everybody. One, you're 21, 22, 23 years
old. You don't have to figure it out
right now. Don't try. You spent all this money, sorry, (audience laughing) paying to learn. Now it's your chance to get paid
to learn. You don't need the perfect job. You just need to go
somewhere where you'll learn and start to be exposed
to different ideas. Now it's not like when Greg, 40
years ago, was graduating. - Oh, Jesus Christ. (audience laughing) Wow.
- And me five years ago. (audience laughing) It was like, get a career. The pressure was get a career. It's go work for IBM or General
Motors and get a pension. Those days are gone. People can't even pay
their pensions anymore. You're a free agent. You're always gonna be a free
agent on the market. You guys are the Kevin Durants and LeBron James, where you're
always out there and can go find a better situation for yourself. Do what's best for you. What have you got to lose? When I started my company, after
I got fired by Michael Humecki, (audience laughing) (laughs) how bad could it be? I would lose my Motel 6 towel? What have you got to lose? Yeah, I understand there's
pressures from student loans and
there's a lotta conversations we can have there, but you can get a job that
doesn't have to be perfect. You can learn at that job. You guys have the pedigree,
you have the brains, you have the initiative to go
out and try the next job. The good news is the economy's
good enough that it may not be perfect, but
you can go job to job. Don't look for the perfect
answer. Just look to get the
experience, look to learn. Because all these different
exposures, all the different things you
learn, learning how to learn, that's what's gonna get you
excited and juice you for something that
you love. Because once you find
something you love to do, that's when the magic happens. Because when you're able to find
something you love to do, then you
can start focusing on how can I be great at this. Like Greg found out he
was a great networker. I like to play with technology and try to do things first. Whatever it is that you
find about yourself, then you can try to be great at
it. It's rare when people quit
things they're great at. Trying those things. That's how I advise people. Don't stress. Just go out and try different
things. - Our friends that graduated
from college that thought they had the
perfect job were mostly incorrect 'cause you just don't know-- - You have no clue. Are you the same as your
22-year-old self? (Greg laughs)
- No. - I am, but that's a
whole different story. (audience laughing) - Why don't we do this? Let's line up and we're
gonna get some questions. My class, hopefully you'll
ask some questions, too. - Bring it on. Which class are you in? - [Steve] Actually, I teach
these people. My name is Steve McCarthy. I'm a metro coach and judge
at NYU Competition Stern for the last 15 years. - Cool, great. - [Steve] First, an observation
and a question, Mark. Observation. In 1995, I look back, I
think the Indiana team was really pretty good. They were decent. They knocked out of the
NCAA the first two times in those two years. What made you wanna think of
that? By the way, do you give Bobby
Knight any cash or money on the side to
be part (Mark laughs)
of your entity? - No. What made me think about it? (Steve laughs) I'm a basketball junkie--
- [Steve] So am I. - Since I was a little kid. - [Steve] I was a quick
Caucasian point guard way back when.
- There ya go. - I'm sorry, we're short
on time, so thank you. - [Steve] Quick question, quick
question. What do you think of Magnolia
Pictures? - To what?
- [Steve] Magnolia Pictures. Why do ya do it? You didn't sell it in 2011. What's the value right now? - Magnolia Pictures is
a distribution company, film distribution company we
have, which, by the way, distributed
RBG, nominated for an Academy Award. Great movie. - Woo! (audience applauding) - We like to give filmmakers the
ability to do cool things. Now we don't produce films. We take them when they're done and find innovative ways to
market 'em. That's why I have Magnolia
Pictures. - Let's go over here. - [Daria] Hi, Mark, my name is
Daria, and I'm an MBA student here. - Hi, Daria.
- [Daria] Hi. I wanted to know what industry
you think still requires a lot of
innovation. - All of 'em.
(Daria laughs) Seriously. Look, one of my dad's favorite
sayings was ya don't live in the world you were born into. Everything changes all the time. You know what's better than
change? Creating change. Whenever I see something that's
done the way it's always been done. Like when I got to the NBA, my whole goal was just to eff
things up because everything was
done the exact same way. They thought they were in
the business of basketball. For 50 years, they thought they were in the basketball business. No. When you go to a basketball
game, you don't remember the
jump shots, the dunks. You remember who you were
with, the fun you had. It's one of the few industries
when that ball is in the air
at the end of a game, everybody holds their breath. If it goes in, you're hugging
people you've never seen before. You can take any industry and
look at the way things have been done and try to come up and innovate. Like I said, with just
the nature of capitalism right now and all the
changes that are required, every industry needs change. There's a unique opportunity
that I don't think any generation's
ever seen. - [Daria] Thank you. I'll be emailing you. (audience laughing) - [Joshua] Hi, Joshua Spodek. I teach leadership and
entrepreneurship here. You talked about the changing
role and perception of entrepreneurs. There's a big culture,
a lotta students come in and they wanna be on Shark Tank. They wanna follow the model of
Shark Tank, even when their businesses
really ought not to go in that direction. - What do you mean? What you talking about, Willis? (audience laughing) - [Joshua] Some of them
are more community based or they should be a nonprofit
or something like that. - So what? - [Joshua] What you guys
do is amazing television. Do you think there's
sometimes a tension between the roles that you're
presenting for people and sometimes the best way to learn something different? Would you say it's the
best way to do everything? - No, no, there's no one
way to do everything. But look, the beauty of Shark
Tank is you get to see, for people
watching, they get to get exposed to two
things. One, every single person in this
room has had that one idea. You get all excited, ya get that
feeling in your stomach. You Google it. Then all of the sudden,
it's (gasps) no one else is doing it. Now ya don't think that 20
companies have gone outta business, that's
why they're no longer on Google. (audience laughing) But then you go to your
friends and they're like, what about this idea? (gasps) "That is so cool. "I'd buy 273." Then they stop because then you
have to actually do the work. Watching Shark Tank, you get to
see people who came from all walks of life, from all around the
country who didn't stop and went through certain
experiences that are common to all
entrepreneurs. That's why I do the show,
because it presents that. Now in terms of whether every
business should come on, no, of course
not. Like you mentioned nonprofits. We don't do nonprofits
because it's not gonna work really well for me to say, that's the dumbest idea I've
ever heard, and it be a nonprofit, it's
not good for the brand. (audience laughing) But for a service, a product, it depends where you
are in your life cycle. If you can benefit from one of the five of us and our
experience, and you think that we're able to
help you, and you think that there's value to the capital we can provide,
then yeah. There are rarely going to be
times when it's a business
we can't contribute to. If it is a business we
don't know how to do, we'll tell you. Yeah, it's worth coming on
always. - [Joshua] Are you looking
to evolve in other ways as the role and perception
of entrepreneurs change? - No, because we're trying
to encourage entrepreneurs. I'll sit on Shark Tank all day
long and ask people about diversity
because, look, I learned a tough
lesson with the Mavericks where I wasn't paying attention and I missed a lotta bad things. But what I did learn along the
way is I had 40-year-old white guys trying to sell to Latina
moms Mavericks tickets. That was stupid. I always thought that you
treated people equally. You don't have to treat people
the same. Treating people equally doesn't
mean treating them the same. It means looking at them for who
they are and being able to take advantage
of the unique skillset that they bring. That is the type of thing I try
to convey on Shark Tank. If you watch, you'll
see me say those types of things 'cause those
are the lessons I learned. By coming on Shark Tank, working
with us, hopefully we can convey those
lessons in this new universe. It's the same with social
impact opportunities. You'll hear me ask all the time, what are you doing that
has a social impact? Because people aren't
gonna buy your product or your service unless
there's an authenticity in what you're doing and
what you're giving back. Yeah, I think that even
in this day and age, we can play an every bigger
role. Now maybe not Kevin. (audience laughing) There are exceptions,
but I think generally that we add a lotta value, and I
think moving forward, we can add even
more. - [Joshua] I'd like to
keep going, but thank you. - Thank you.
- Thank you. - Before we go to the next
question, I'd like to acknowledge Sam
Craig. Sam, could I ask you to stand
up, please? (audience applauding) Sam just retired this year. He ran the EMT program, and he
hired me to teach here at NYU. Thank you, Sam, for such a great
job. (audience applauding) - [Kyle] Hey, Mark, my name's
Kyle. I'm an MBA student here. I'm not sure if you remember me. - Love the overalls. - [Kyle] Thank you, thank you. I had the opportunity to
present my brand to you a few months back. During our conversation, you
said you used to wear overalls
all the time in college. - I did, yeah, yeah. 'Cause ya know why I wore
overalls? Because I had a pocket for
vodka, I had a pocket for mixers.
(audience laughing) - [Kyle] Exactly. That's what you said,
so you're consistent. - See? - [Kyle] My question to you is-- - The truth is always that way,
ya know. (audience laughing) - [Kyle] If you'll accept a pair of Hoosier logo, a pair of
Swoveralls with my investor deck. - Wow.
- Sure. (audience laughing)
- Better than an NYU jacket. - Those I'll accept. Come on, bring 'em down. (audience applauding) Wow. Whoops. Thanks, Kyle, appreciate it,
buddy. - Smart move.
(audience laughing) - Did I say I went to Indiana? - Over here. - Here we go. - [Man] How you doing, Mark? What I wanna know-- - I hope you're on radio or
something. (audience laughing)
- [Man] Yeah, I am. (audience laughing) What I wanna know is that-- - Are you related to Barry
White? I just got. (laughs) (audience laughing) - [Man] Yeah, that's my cousin. (audience laughing) No, what I wanna know is how do
you pick an industry and dominate in
it? Don't just play it, just go in
it and dominate because without
dominate, nobody pays attention. - First of all, if ya have to
ask, then you don't know. That's why I said in terms of
what your first job is. You just gotta find something
you love and just dig in. Find a niche that you start with and just expand from there. It's not like I can just tell
you this is the industry. Well, I will. If everybody asked, "I need a
job, Mark. "What's a way that I, as an NYU
student, "can make money right now? "I need to get paid." All right, I'm gonna tell you
exactly what you should do. (audience laughing) That's what I learned on
television, dramatic effect. (audience laughing) Alexa, if you've ever used Alexa and all the different Amazon
devices, developing skills on Alexa is a huge opportunity. It's like writing the simplest
HTML code. Super simple, yet 99% of the
people who buy the devices
don't know how to do it. Businesses, car dealerships, individuals and homes. I've taken the time to use
blueprints and teach myself how to write
skills. I set it up for my kids so that
if, my son's name is Jake
Cuban, so that if you walk in the door, and I
do this to embarrass him in front of his friends, Alexa, who is Jake Cuban? It goes, "Jake Cuban is the fart
master." (audience laughing) But just stupid shit like that. But it's the same concept
because in businesses, this is what's new. People are so in tune with just
trying to keep up and run their own
businesses, they don't pay attention to
what's new. Now what's the extension from
that? Well, as people start using
voice-activated devices more and more and more, what
about voice-activated SEO? You know Amazon, probably
the smartest company in the world, is pushing you to
order and do everything. Well, how is SEO working? I'm learning, I'm figuring it
out, how SEO is working. Why aren't y'all? Because if you're that
person that walks in and says, "You know what? "In your business, here's
five different places "that you can use Alexa. "Here's the devices, here's
how ya use Alexa, show. "I'm gonna script out
all the commands for you. "Then I'm also gonna show you
how "to use SEO so that when someone
says, "'How do I order Mavericks
tickets?' "there's already a script,
there's already "connected to those keywords,
and they come to me." That's what we're doing. That's a unique opportunity that
you can spend an hour a
night teaching yourself. Within three weeks, you're the
expert and you can go charge 30, 50, $75 an hour. Then you send me my
$25 an hour commission. (audience laughing) - [Man] Thank you.
- Thank you. - [Adam] Hi, Mark, I'm Adam
Licker. I'm an MBA student here-- - Hi, Adam. - [Adam] I had a question for
you about television and entertainment. I'm not curious what you're
watching, but how you watch. Are you a cord cutter? What services do you subscribe
to? Then also, do you have any
predictions on what the media business is gonna
look like and what the old-school
companies, like a CBS or that ilk, needs to
do to survive the next five
to 10 years and beyond? - Sure, I use everything. There's not a service I don't
use. There's not a platform I don't
use it on because, like I said, I wanna
stay ahead and I wanna be able to kick your all's ass. That's one. Two, in terms of transition,
obviously traditional television's dying
quickly. I just read something that for 18 to 49, ratings are down
27% in just two years. There's a challenge there. The unknown question for
traditional television is as people age, like as Greg
gets older, (audience laughing) does he revert to traditional TV or do you stay with streaming? That's part two. Now the bigger question. Sorry, Greg. I get the same shit all the
time, too. The biggest question in all of
that is 5G. Because 5G changes everything. I've been trying to convey to those industries that
5G with zero latency and much higher speeds is going
to cut the broadband cord. For those of you, like you might
order your internet first thing when
you move into a new place or whatever,
not anymore. You're not gonna wait
for the cable to come in. You're just gonna order 5G and it's gonna be wireless,
it's gonna connect with your phone and everything
else. Maybe you put your phone
in the little holster that connects your apartment or
house or whatever it may be. When you have zero latency
available like that everywhere,
then apps will change and how you consume all
types of content will change. It can be a lot more interactive
'cause of the zero latency, so
we'll see more of that. These are all the types of
questions that I think we don't have the
answers to that will impact all those
outcomes. That's what I pay attention to. - [Adam] Thank you. - [Alexander] Hi, my
name is Alexander Heyman and I am--
- Alexander Hamilton? - [Alexander] Alexander Heyman. - Heyman, okay. - [Alexander] Heyman,
like hey, man, what's up? - Heyman.
(audience laughing) - [Alexander] Today I
wanted to ask you about how to make passive income. I'm a musician and that's
what I wanna do full time, but on part time-- - Seriously? (audience laughing) No, not the musician part, go
for it. The way you make passive income is to start with a whole lotta
money. (audience laughing) - [Alexander] That
wasn't about my question. - Go ahead. - [Alexander] I have a set of
money. I wouldn't say it's-- - Oh, good for you, good for
you. - [Alexander] Set aside--
- Good for you. - [Alexander] I've done a
(Mark claps) couple successful calls
and puts on stocks. (Mark claps)
I was wondering what your method to investing
and diversifying-- - Couple things.
- [Alexander] Your portfolios? - When you're looking
at investing in stocks, you always have to realize
whoever you're buying from is not an
idiot. There's a reason why they're
selling it. Chances are, they spent
a whole lot more time than you have in trying
to figure out why to sell. Now that's not to say you can't
make money every now and then 'cause it's not easy to beat the
pros. The pros can't beat the pros. Typically I tell people two
things. One, if you have any debt, pay
it off because that debt, paying off
that debt is a guaranteed return. If you're paying 19% on your
credit card. Now if you pay it off within 30
days, more power to you. Most people can't. But if you pay off that
debt, you just made 19% on your money. Second way to do it, you buy
toilet paper? You buy toothpaste? Get that 30% off, buy more of
it. Seriously. Stacks of toothpaste.
(audience laughing) Razor blades in particular. I bought all the razor blades
I'll ever need for five years. I got my 40% off, I made 40%. - Do you have a plane for those (audience laughing)
kind of items? - I have a big closet though. - A little cargo plane somewhere
that-- - Where I store it all? But seriously, just being a
smart shopper. If you know you're gonna be
buying $5,000 worth of these things, and you can save 40% on those
things versus how you otherwise might
buy it, that's a return that's passive
income. Most people just don't
think of it that way. Paying off your debt,
being a smart shopper and taking advantage of bulk or whatever it may be is two. Then three, just SXP funds. Really low-cost mutual funds. At your age, you just put 'em
away and forget about it. - [Alexander] Yeah, I have
T-bills. - There ya go.
(audience laughing) You're way ahead of the
game, congratulations. - [Alexander] Thank you. - What's your latest hit so I
know? - [Alexander] I'm working
for Kendrick Lamar's engineer over the summer.
- Cool. - [Alexander] I'll be
releasing my song very soon. You can check it out on-- - Under what name? - [Alexander] Under Heyman,
like hey, man, what's up? (audience laughing) - There ya go.
(audience applauding) - [Alexander] My song is
about never being in debt and always paying your credit
off. (audience laughing) - Guys, we have only time
for one more question, so I'm sorry for those of
you that stood in line. We have time for one more
question on this side. - [Rashiv] Hey, Mark, thanks so
much for coming and talking to us.
- My pleasure. - [Rashiv] My name's Rashiv, I'm an undergraduate student
here. My question is I heard Reid
Hoffman saying that in order to scale,
you gotta do things that don't scale. Like when he interviewed
Airbnb, he's like, "Okay, don't try to make
a three-star experience. "Try to make like an 11-star
experience." That sounds awesome, but all the
craze right now in startups is agile,
lean. Build an MVP, get feedback, build it a little bit more, get
more. How do you reconcile those? How do you build something
amazing, but start, and then other people-- - You ask your questions 'cause
it's all, you ask your customers, it's all
relative. If you have a great experience, then they're gonna be happy. 11 is great, like, oh, my God is
great, but if ya can't get to 11,
just ask your customers. Whatever it is you're doing, just be better than that. Airbnb can talk about an
11, but if you've used Airbnb, I think they rented out my old apartment. You've just gotta put yourself
in the best position to succeed by
taking care of your customers. Just like I told that
first customer I had, I'd walk your dog, whatever, you just gotta have that
attitude and go out there. But you do have to have
customers. There's never been a
business in the history of businesses that
succeeded without sales. Customers will tell you by
whether or not they spend money with you. - [Rashiv] Sounds good,
thanks so much, Mark. - Why'd you wear a suit? - [Rashiv] I forgot my
Indiana jersey at home. (audience laughing) - That's fast. (audience applauding) - That's good, I give him
credit. - Okay, I'm gonna get in
trouble. We're gonna do one more. - [Mahmoud] Thank you so much. Mark, I'm an NYU graduate from-- - Everybody else can sit down
'cause we can't take anymore. - Go ahead.
- Thank you. - [Mahmoud] My name is Mahmoud. I graduated from NYU School of
Engineering about a year 1/2 ago. - Thanks, Mahmoud. - [Mahmoud] I have been
working in venture capital in New York since then,
and my technology knowledge has helped me out a lot in that. Now I'm in the process of
setting up a venture fund. I have two questions basically. A lot of the students
here, they're all from other parts of the world, not
America. Eventually because of
immigration laws and work laws and
everything, a lot of them will end up going back to their home countries, essentially. - That's unfortunate. - [Mahmoud] Do you have any
advice for people who are in this room who have acquired a lot of
knowledge and learning from here
and now want to go back? Then the second question becomes
that how important is venture
capital, essentially, and doing anything about
your learning there and taking it back to
the industry or whatever? - Well, the first thing I would
do is really talk to every
single person you know that's eligible to vote, and kick 'em in the ass
and make sure they vote. (audience applauding and
cheering) Because that's the only
way it's gonna change. But that's your way to help
control your own destiny. Get out there and volunteer. You don't have to be an eligible
voter to volunteer for the
candidates that you support or you think really help. In terms of venture capital, I'm not as big a fan of vulture
capital as a lotta people. (audience laughing) I'm a really big fan of sweat
equity. Because once you take money from
somebody, everything changes, right,
Reggie? (audience laughing) It's just different because when it's your baby, and even
though you might be capital
constrained, you get to call all the shots. Once somebody else comes in, everybody's got their own
opinions. If you can do it without taking
capital, that's always the best bet. If you need to go out and get
capital, friends and family. Once you get friends and
family, or if you can't get friends and family, then you
have to start getting, like the last
gentleman was talking about, MVP,
most viable products, and moving and starting to
create sales. Because if you can get a company that's generating sales,
maybe even profits, then hopefully you don't
have to raise money, but if you need to, you have-- - [Mahmoud] The question I was
asking, would you have advice for a
person like me who's going back to their
country again in a few years, setting up a VC
fund that taps into the ecosystem of innovation here to the
benefit of the industry there? - Look, anytime you get to
leverage your networks, that's something
Greg is great at, then take advantage
of it. But it depends on the country and it depends on the laws and it depends on the
cultural norms there. It really is individualized,
so I'm not really the person to speak to that. But good luck.
- [Mahmoud] Thank you. - Great, so thank you for the (audience applauding) questions. Now you're gonna see three of
the best presentation from NYU. - Cool. Now we need everybody to
go du-du-du-du-du-du-du. (audience laughing)
- We're gonna take one second. They're gonna move these chairs
around. Somebody's gonna do that. Oh, yeah, oh yeah, we're
gonna give you a gift now. - Cool. - Come on, let's give a gift and a big round of applause. (audience applauding) I'm doing a selfie here with
you, Mark. Gonna get a selfie with the
whole crew. My class knows this is
our signature selfie. Oh, I forgot my selfie stick
that (audience laughing)
somebody gave me. - I would not do a picture
with a selfie stick. (audience laughing) - Come on, everybody
has to at least pretend to be clapping. (audience applauding) Thank you. All right, let's get ready to do
this. We're gonna have somebody who's gonna be doing the
announcing. - Mm-hm.
- Yes. - Yes. Oops. Hi, everybody. I'm Cynthia Franklin. I'm Director of Entrepreneurship at the W.R. Berkley Innovation
Labs, and I also have the pleasure of
teaching the Startup Lab, which is
an undergraduate course here at Stern. I just wanna shout out to Startup Lab students
that are out there. Thank you very much, many of them are wearing the ideas never sleep garb. They are helping out, so thank
you very much, students. (audience applauding) Normally I'm quite witty and
funny, but I've been told I
have about 13 seconds, so I'm just going to do a
seven-second commercial. That is to invite
everyone here in the room who is an NYU student, alum, faculty member who is
interested in starting a venture or who's
already in the process of starting a
venture, we'd love to work with you. That's what we do. To the last question there, or the next to the last question regarding MVPs, we have
a bootcamp this Sunday in this very room on concept
testing and prototyping. It's not incongruent. You can do both. We work a lot with that at the W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs. It is my pleasure to introduce three teams that we've had the
honor of working with over the years who have come out of the, a lot of programs at NYU because
NYU has a lotta resources, but most
notably the 300K Entrepreneurs
Challenge, which is the single largest
entrepreneurship initiative that my team puts together here
at Stern. First up will be Josh Sakhai of Ephemeral Tattoos. Go for it. - Ephemeral Tattoos. (audience applauding) - Can I borrow your clicker? Hey, Mark, hey, guys. Thank you for having me. - What about Greg?
- Greg. I didn't even see you, you look
so young. (audience laughing) How are ya? I'm Josh. - That's a great one. - I'm the co-founder and CEO of
a company called Ephemeral, and we're
gonna talk about tattoos. Tattoos have become this massive
part of our culture. Right now, about 90 million
Americans have tattoos. Most people I've spoken
to who don't have one have thought about getting one because, well, they're pretty
awesome. But what isn't awesome (audience laughing) is the regret that comes with
it. Tattoos are permanent, but
people change. Your lifestyle, your
relationships, it's all gonna adapt as you
start to grow. Figuring out what you want for
the rest of your life can be really hard. Forget about removing tattoos. The only way to remove tattoos is with laser surgery. That's actually my friend
Seung's arm. He went through laser. Paid 500 bucks for one session. Left him with permanent scars. He was told to come back 10 more
times over two years. He didn't go back. If you wanna get a tattoo,
you've got two options. You can get one of those kinda
silly temporary stick-on tattoos that
maybe last two weeks, or you can get
something that lasts forever. There's really no space in
between. That's why we started Ephemeral. We're the team of Ph.Ds
in chemical engineering. We're creating tattoo inks
with different lifespans. These inks are applied by tattoo
artists the same way they would
apply any other ink, but fade away completely
naturally and on their own. The first product we're
launching is a four- to six-month tattoo. We're opening up our shops by
end of 2019 right here in New York. Now, Mark, you might be thinking maybe tattoos could be a thing
for me when I was younger. I wouldn't forget my
girlfriend's name. But I'm a little older now. - You wanna see my tramp stamp,
right? (audience laughing) - That's awesome. (audience laughing) Honestly, I think you've gotta
go to some Mavs games with some
ink. Imagine how pumped up
(audience laughing) they would be if you walked into the next game like that. I think they would go wild. In all seriousness, we see a
huge application in sports. Players and the fans can
support the teams they love. I think you'd be the best
guy to lead that effort. (audience laughing) We started off research on our
technology around four 1/2 years ago in a tiny little lab space, literally just one bench, up in
Harlem. Over the last four years,
we've taken the research through in vitro studies all the
way to early human studies. When I say early, I mean really, really early. Right now, the tattoo industry
generates around $2 billion, just
north of that in the U.S., but we think this market could be so much larger. We've spoken to around 500
millennials around New York and learned that
2/3 of 'em who don't have tattoos actually want one. The only thing holding them back is a lifetime commitment. Not even just opening the market to these new consumers,
but changing the way people purchase tattoos. Instead of getting three tattoos in their lifetime, we
think people are gonna be getting three tattoos every
year. They're gonna come to Ephemeral, fall in love with their pieces, they're gonna go away and
they're gonna come right back. A bit about the team. I was born and raised in a
Jewish family in Long Island that hates
tattoos. Came to New York to study
computer science at NYU. Now, obviously, I run a tattoo
company. (audience laughing) Our CTO and co-founder Brennal
was a former adjunct professor here at
NYU. He most recently came from the Open Innovations group at
Unilever. Our VP of engineering and
co-founder Vandan was actually Brennal's
mentee while he was doing his Ph.D at
NYU. They've worked together
over the last four years. A bit of company history. We started here at NYU. The first two years were
supported, thank you, Cynthia, entirely off of these super
scrappy, non-diluted funding,
competitions, grants, any free capital we can get our
hands on. NYU is a huge supporter,
so thank you, guys, for helping us get there. Two years later, towards the end
of 2016, we got our first lab space,
started to do some studies. Raised around 500K in
small free seed round angel and small VCs. Went through Techstars. Towards end of 2017, raised our
first round of venture. Mark's advice is good advice on
venture. This year, we scaled up our
studies. We're scaling up from
three subjects to 50. Should be opening up our first
shops. I think somewhere there
it says partnership with Mark Cuban, but we
can talk about that later. (audience laughing) Thank you, guys, for your time. If you wanna learn more, always feel free to shoot me a
note. Wanna get some tattoos,
you know where to go. Thank you. (audience applauding) - So when do you release your
product and what's kept you from
releasing it so far? - Yeah, so R and D's really
hard, it takes a lotta time. In our business, particularly, there's a long feedback cycle. If you wanna get a tattoo-- - Feedback on what? Feedback on what? What is the element of the
product that requires feedback that
you're uncertain about? - Good question. Watching the tattoo as it starts
to fade. One thing that's important to us and important to our
customers is making sure that your tattoo doesn't
look like crap one month in. It's gonna last six months, and
it looks like crap for more than 1/2 that
time, that's not a nice product. Something that's really
important to us is optimizing its fading
profile-- - That's crazy. First of all, no one's
gonna expect perfection. Just one line to remember, perfection is the enemy of
profitability. You don't need it to be perfect. You've already raised $3.3
million at what valuation? - Most recent price was on 12. - On 12. You've sold 25, 30% of your
company, depending on the earlier
valuations, right? You don't wanna have to raise
more. Why do you think it has to be
perfect in how it fades, as opposed
to just telling somebody everybody's skin type is
gonna react differently to the fade. So it'll effectively work
for at least a month. What's it cost you for the ink? - Ink is cheap.
- Right. The time is just the time
from the tattoo artist, right? They're gonna charge
that separately anyways, so why wouldn't you already have
opened your store and say, "Look, it'll
be great. "Based off of your skin type, "here's a little chart. "We're teaching our tattoo
artists "based off the chart. "You've got 30 days for
sure, and we're only "gonna charge you 10 bucks. "The tattoo artist will
charge you whatever, "depending on the complexity." Then we'll learn because people are trying it. - That's a great question, great
points. For a while, that wasn't our
problem. We were having trouble getting
the ink to go into the skin, stay in
there and heal nicely. Just now we started to
solve those problems, and this has started
to become our concern. If we keep talking to
customers-- - Wait, wait, wait,
wait, wait, wait, wait. So you're saying it didn't work. - Well, didn't work is
a little challenging. Let me clarify for a second. - It's very binary. (audience laughing) - No, to the extent that it
worked, we were getting ink to go in the
skin and go away, but it
wasn't lasting very long. It was lasting less than 30
days. Something we had to work on-- - So why didn't you come up with a two-week tattoo? - You can just get a sticker. - What's that? - You can just get one of those
stickers. - But still, you've got the
upside of it being able to be retained. Come back every two, three
weeks. The point is, like someone said
earlier, you wanna be able to get it out
there. As long as you set the
expectations the right way. You might not sell as many, but at least you're
going to get the feedback and as long as there's no threat of injury or threat of
complications, which it doesn't sound like
you're concerned about. - No. - Then why wouldn't you
just start doing it? I'm sure the differentiation is
based off of skin type, right? - Sure. - The ink and the skin type, which is gonna be a variance
anyway, so you can't promise a specific
amount of time anyways. Why wouldn't you just do it now? - These are great points. - Well, that's why I'm here. (audience laughing) You didn't answer the question. You've talked around it. - At this point, we haven't even
gotten the ink to look that great. - Well, that's a problem, right, because that's not what you
said. You said that you're going to
50. Either it works or it doesn't
work. Does it work? - Define work. (audience laughing) - Do I say that looks like shit or I can live with that? - It depends, but it doesn't
look great right now. - What's even worse is if you
said, oh, I thought it was gonna fade. If that-- - That's not the issue at all. - That's not the issue?
- It's going away. - It's gone, gone?
- Yes. - What does it take for you to
get from two weeks to four weeks to
six weeks? 'Cause that's the uncertainty from an investor's perspective. How do you solve that problem and what is the solution? - Engineering. That's exactly why we're doing
the labs. Slight changes to the
formulation, slight tweaks. - Is it engineering or is it
chemistry or? - Engineering. - Engineering. Explain that 'cause
that part I'm uncertain in dealing with inks. - We have two more presentation. - Okay, sorry. - You're starting to fade away. (audience laughing) - It's a great idea. - Very short presentation. - It's really a great idea. The challenge from my end is
that you've already raised $3.3
million. You've gotta be able to show me
that you can effectively use that $3.3
million to get to a sellable product. Now I'll say it again, perfection is the enemy of
profitability. If you can get to the point
where it's not a perfect product, but
because it's so differentiated, it does
solve. Like the henna tattoos and
everything, people know it's a henna tattoo. Really, for a drunk at 12, you
went out, you go to NYU and it's two in
the morning and your friends are getting a
tattoo, and you don't want a
henna 'cause you'll look like a bum, but you can do this and it lasts for a month or two
weeks or whatever, and you're getting
the ink and you're going through the
whole thing, yes, people are still
gonna say yes to that and they'll pay a premium for
that. In this particular case, you've
gotta know what business you can be in, as
opposed to the perfect business
you're looking to solve and the problem you're looking
to solve. Again, you can introduce this
and solve that late-night problem and
temporary, at least I got a tattoo. I saw what it was like, I know
what it's all about. Charge a premium for
that, and then work on your chemistry in parallel. I think it's a great idea. I think you've already
raised too much money for me to get involved,
but you know my email, and so you can keep me updated. - Sure. Thanks, Mark. Thank you, guys. (audience applauding) - [Cynthia] Okay, ladies and
gentlemen, please welcome Kobi Wu of
Visuwall. (audience applauding) (Greg grunting) - Don't do that to me. Don't do that. (Greg grunting) It's great to be back. Thank you, everybody. I graduated here A15 from the executive MBA
program. Cynthia, thank you for inviting
me. I did not win, Josh won that
year, but that's okay. We're here today. Very excited to introduce you
guys to Visuwall Technologies
and introducing it to all of you, as well. Very simply, we are a data-driven marketplace that is
paving the way for programmatic
outdoor, one storefront at a time. As you know, the face
of retail is changing, or maybe you don't know that, but you can see it if you're
walking down the street. If you go down any
street in Your Town, USA, you'll see a lot of vacancies. Those vacancies are staying
empty for 24 to 36 months. Landlords are making no
money during that time. It's painful. But it's a huge opportunity that's been hiding in plain
sight. What we do is we take a vacant
storefront, we put a big pretty picture in
it. Media, eye-level media. You've seen it before. It looks great. But we're doing a little bit
more than creating just a
billboard at eye level. We have computer vision
technology that's sitting behind every
picture that's telling you how many
people are walking by and the
level of engagement. What do I mean by engagement? ♪ Cardi B I run this shit like
cardio ♪ - We're gonna talk about
it for a little bit. ♪ Diamond district in the Jag ♪ - Turn it up, my team. ♪ Certified, you know I'm
gang, gang, gang, gang ♪ ♪ Drop the top and blow the
brains ♪ ♪ I said I like it like that ♪ ♪ Oh he's so handsome, what's
his ♪ - All right, all right. Cardi B and I, we decided that that is engagement, those heads
turning and for as long as they were
looking. Granted, I slowed it down, but
you know that you saw two eyes
looking at that picture. That's very important analytics for any brand, and not for
nothing, landlords, as well. Visuwall is basically a
marketplace that allows an advertiser, a
media buyer, a brand director, whoever, to go
onto the platform, find the location, assess the media rate
and plan their campaign. Production for us is turnkey. You just deliver the artwork to
us and we take care of the rest. Then there's a dashboard that
actually gives you your analytics in real
time so you can see what's going on with your campaign in real time, by the second, by
the day, by the hour or at the end for a
nice neat and tidy report. The analytics that we're
providing to you, like I said, it's computer
vision so we're able to tell you the
brand if it's a man or woman walking
by, your approximately age and
whether they're smiling, happy, sad,
neutral, disgusted, confused, what have
you. It's no secret most New Yorkers are disgusted or neutral. (audience laughing) The way we deliver our artwork
is simple. The media can be a vinyl cling that's adhered to the
interior of a window. You could take over the full
landscape of the window. We call those scapes. It's window sill to window sill. There's sheets, which is four by
six, which is the standard
side of a bus shelter, so you're very familiar with
that. We also have a shadow box where
you can display an actual product in the
window. You just pop that sucker in
there and we take care of that for
you. Then the third is kinda the
vision of where we're going. Digital screens in a storefront
window, which allows us-- - Let me interrupt, sorry
to interrupt, I apologize. - Sure. - Not all those in the previous
slide were digital screens, right? They were--
- No, those are static. - Those are static, just sheets. Okay, got it, okay, sorry. - You're moving to the digital. - I'm moving in digital. Digital allows us to sell it, sell the media now instead of
static, where it has to stay put for a week, two weeks, a month. Now we can sell it by the
seconds, so 10 seconds, 30 seconds, or even a 60-second domination. Overall, the synopsis of our
benefits are we're providing incremental
revenue to the landlord. Thank you very much. We're providing demographic
and traffic analytics that people on both
sides of the marketplace find super valuable. Not for nothing, we're
increasing curb appeal. Doesn't it look so much better
than just that brown paper that's peeling when it gets cold and it looks
nasty and you don't know what's going
on inside and you're actually kinda
wondering what's going on side,
but then you're like, no, no, no, let me just scurry
by. Anyway. To date, we've done very well. Since we left Stern, we have
worked with some great brands. We even have Uber, adidas, Marie Claire on the hopper. Hopefully up in window by March. Our landlords have provided us
properties across New York and Los Angeles. We've got about 80 on
the platform right now. We're looking to expand that as
we grow into our broker strategy. We are probably going to see
about $300,000 in this first quarter. Thank you. (audience applauding) We're excited about
that because, of course, that's exceeding 50% of what it
took us 12 months to make last year. We're gonna be in Chicago and
Miami by the end of this year. We will be expanding
to additional markets, like Seattle, Boston,
Philadelphia by the end of 2020. By the end of Q2, you will see a new marketplace and
dashboard which allows all of you all, if you have a
property, to list it yourself. Basically, we're like an
Airbnb now, if you will. We've kicked the door
in, in terms of retail, in terms of beauty. We're now kinda looking at
sports and entertainment. We feel that the journey to arenas in order to see a game or to see a concert is the
next thing to go after. If you know anybody. (audience laughing) - But why, why? - Because. - Because, that's always a good
answer. - Because is a great answer. No, if you're on your way to the
arena, brands are excited to
present their messages. - You're just talking about
better traffic availability? - Absolutely.
- Got it. - It's a concentrated group of
folks that are on their way to the
arena. But not for nothing, the brands
that are in the arena now have
an opportunity outside. We can expand that footprint. Anyway. (audience laughing) Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to speaking
to anybody who has an arena in their back
pocket or a team franchise. (audience laughing and
applauding) - Do you have something, Greg? - My first question is measurement, attribution. I get it, domination and
surprise. The brands are gonna ask you to
measure. I see you have the dashboard. But it has to, at some
point, convert to something. How far down the funnel are you taking your customers? Or is it way, you're keeping
them way up top, branded plus? - We are absolutely looking
towards digging in a little bit deeper. With the introduction to the QR code reader on iPhones, people are starting to find ways to implement that in windows, which we're finding helps with
at least that click-through engagement. We've geofenced all of our
locations and we can understand
who's in those locations from mobile devices.
- Good start. - We can deliver ads directly to
those mobile devices. Tap that ad. If you see it, it'll
take you right through to whatever dedicated page-- - Hold on, hold on, okay, okay. - Now you're excited?
- No. - No.
(audience laughing) - You have to explain to me
exactly what you're doing from a
computer vision perspective because a lotta people say
there's computer vision, but just putting the little
camera, like you have there, isn't gonna
give you computer vision and
it's not gonna give you accurate demographic information and it's not gonna give
you an accurate count. You gotta tell me exactly
what you're doing and how. - The sensor that's actually in
window is looking at the people that are directly in front of it. It counts out to 30 feet. We have another sensor that
would move across a hundred feet. - What technology are you using? Because, again, and if
you just don't know, you don't know, but
there are different ways, using computer vision,
there are different ways to count what goes in front of
you. Most of them fail
because once you go from, it double counts and triple
counts and quadruple counts. (crosstalk) Walk back. Four people, it's hard to
separate. There are very specific
technologies that do that, a couple of which are a couple of my companies
that I have patents with. - I know about one or two.
(laughs) - That's why I'm asking
specifically. - A, I'm open to using some of
those other technologies. - It's expensive.
- It is. - Put aside the camera,
you need the connectivity because if you want it in real
time. Where I was gonna go with this, you don't need it. - What, the computer vision? - Yeah, you don't need the
demographic information. What makes this work is, I think it's a great idea,
but what makes it work is you just use sheets, which
are cheap. If you're selling to, if
you're going to a brand. First of all, you've acquired
property. Like you said, there's a lot of
empty real estate, so it's a great
opportunity. But what makes it work is you
don't have to make a capital, would make it
work good is not having to make any type of capital investment because by doing it this way,
put aside using displays, you have to have power, you
have to have connectivity, you have to pay by the bit or ya
have to pay for the setup fees, you have to monitor it,
you have to measure it, you have to confirm the
accuracy. That complicates it
dramatically. - It does. - As opposed to, and put aside
the music. The cost of a sheet, like one of the sheets you have
for, what does that cost? - A couple hundred bucks. - At the most. Even customized and everything. Being able to say to a brand, "Okay, on the way to the
American Airlines Center, "or going down Fifth Avenue in
New York, "for $27,000, we already know,
generally, "there's 26,000 people walking
by "on any given day. "This is the cheapest way for
you "to get access to those people. "Everybody else has got
this huge capital cost. "We're lean and mean. "We'll give you a beautiful
graphic "that makes you stand out. "We can change it as often as
you want. "Pay me." Now your way, you've complicated it because
you feel that there's such a need to
provide demographics to get everybody
certainty on how they're seeing that
you've jacked up your costs
dramatically. Rather than taking the
path of least resistance, which is always the best way because you can iterate, you can
learn, you can take care of your
customers much more quickly, and you're
spending all this other ancillary
money to do the technology. If you said to me, "Mark, "if you wanna see my companies, "you can go to markcuban.com. "I went through and
looked at this company. "Alissa's Cookies would be
great. "Because all your inventory's
perishable, "I have this inventory that it
takes us "three days to get the sheet
made up," or maybe one day if you go to a fast print place. "We can have it up. "For a thousands dollars, you
get it up "for one day to promote your
brand." That's easy money. - It is. - Then you do your split with the real estate company-- - The landlord.
- Property management company. Boom, boom, boom, you get to go everywhere immediately. You don't have to make sure that
they have power and all that other
stuff. Why not keep it simple and just
take the path of least
resistance to more money? - Okay. (audience laughing) - We're running out of time
'cause we have one more group. - Real quick, how much
money have you raised? - 550,000. - Don't raise another nickel. - Don't want to. - Seriously. It's a great idea--
- Thank you. - If you simplify it. Just go where it's easy
for people to spend money and you don't have any capital
costs. Window meet sheet from customer that paid me X amount of
dollars, depending on the traffic and how
much inventory I have available
'cause then you can vary it. If you're selling
everything on Fifth Avenue, as an example, raise your
prices. If you're not, you lower 'em. They can be variable pricing. Do it that way and it's easy
money. - So scrap the technology part-- - Yeah, who needs that shit? - Oh, (laughing) okay. - Seriously because
it's gonna be incorrect no matter how hard you try. That diminishes the overall
value there. - Hm. - Good luck.
- Thank you. - Thank you. (audience applauding) - [Cynthia] All right. - Who's my next victim? (audience laughing) - [Cynthia] Actually, you
still wanna come up, Chris? (audience laughing) Christopher Mitchell. - Wait, Christopher, before you
come out, first of all, I was remiss. Sunday nights on ABC, Shark
Tank. (audience laughing) I'm gonna tell you, this
is exactly how it works. We know nothing when people walk
in. On TV, you see it for 10
minutes. We get in there and we might
grill 'em. If it's a silly deal, it
might take 20, 30 minutes, but if it's legit, something
like these companies, it could go on for two hours. - Wow. - Then they edit it down. What you're going through, it's not just me. There's five idiots up there
(audience laughing) and we're all grilling you. Congratulations. - [Kobi] I feel for those guys. (audience laughing) - Me, too.
(audience laughing) Go ahead. - [Cynthia] Christopher
Mitchell of Geopipe. (audience applauding) - Hey, everyone. Perfect. Have you ever thought
about what it would take to create a perfect copy of New
York, San Francisco or Paris
that you could explore in your computer? I'm Dr. Christopher Mitchell and I'm excited to introduce
you, and you all, to Geopipe. Creating detailed virtual
copies of the real world is a core problem across many
industries, worlds that can be used for
visualization, simulation and interaction. While raw data about the world, everything from photographs to
laser scans to maps is readily available
today, it's still expensive and time
consuming to turn this data into usable 3D
models. Geopipe aims to be this missing
link between data acquisition
and data presentation. For example, consider autonomous
vehicles. They need to be trained in
virtual copies of real cities, virtual copies
that show where every single curb, lane, tree and street sign is. But creating those models today can take huge teams of
artists months of time. Geopipe aims to solve
this by understanding what's in the world,
not just how it looks. Similarly, for video games, you
often want to take a game and set it in a
real world, but creating a model of an
entire city can take a team of artists
months. Geopipe can create a
model of an entire city in less than an hour. Finally, consider an architect. Even for extruding and modeling, a plain white model of a single
block can take an hour. If you need to add detail and
color and expand this to an entire
neighborhood, the time can spiral out
of control to months. Geopipe allows you to
get a model of a city at any level of detail, at any
scale, in about 30 seconds. We're working within what in
2020 is estimated to be a $17 billion
space of 3D mapping and 3D modeling. Then within this, about
7 billion will be spent specifically on creating
3D models of the real world for automotive applications,
training simulations, for entertainment and for
architecture, engineering and construction. My co-founder Thomas is rarely
seen without a Star Wars T-shirt, and I really love trains. But more relevantly, we share a
passion for distributed systems and
algorithms. I'm Geopipe's chief science
officer, chief executive officer, excuse
me. I got my Ph.D in computer
science right here at NYU. Although Thomas almost came to
NYU, he's at Brown. He's in the last month of his
Ph.D, also in computer science. We have exactly the skillset
necessary to solve this problem, and we've
spent 15 years working together
building teams and solving big problems. We've also collected an advisory
board with expertise across business, entrepreneurship and academia, and we now have a team
of four working with us. We consider one of the coolest
parts how it works under the hood. We start with raw data about the
world, that same raw data that I talked
about that's pretty readily available, everything from photos
to laser scans to maps. We get this data from
a variety of sources, public, private and government. Then we pass it through our proprietary algorithmic
pipeline. As cliched as it is, we do use deep learning and computer
vision techniques, and I'm happy to go into
as much depth as you like, to examine this data
and understand the shape and facades of every building, the locations of trees,
the number of lanes in roads, where sidewalks
are, where water is. Then we go one step further,
turning this enriched understanding of the
world into detailed immersive 3D
models. We allow our customers
to access our models through a simple,
easy-to-use web interface called Contextsnap. They simply select an area that
they need, the level of detail that's
appropriate to their application, and then
they can download those models to use in the software that they
already love. We also allow customers who
would prefer to take our models and put them
directly into games, simulations and VR
experiences to use our Unity SDK and our API to stream those worlds directly
into their applications. For example, our Unity
SDK allows you to fly, drive or walk through an
immersive copy of a real city with
every detail reproduced. - This is every detail being
produced? - We're getting there.
(audience laughing) Happy to talk more about that. We bootstrapped ourselves with
about 400K in non-diluted funding
over the last two 1/2 years to a first fully functioning
product. We've worked with customers in
the architecture space and
in the gaming space. We've had dozens of
free and paid customers. We're working on bringing an
additional $200,000 of potential annual
revenue through our pipeline to prove
product market fit this year. Thank you to Techstars, to the Berkley Innovation Lab and to other places that we've
been able to refine our company
and our business model. We're in the process of
expanding the coverage, getting more
customers, building our team, getting to ever higher levels of
detail. We're in the process of closing the final chunk of a 500K
pre-seed round. If you're as excited as we are
about understanding and analyzing the
world on a massive scale, we
would love to speak to you. We are Geopipe. (audience applauding) - The demo that you gave us--
- Yes. - Didn't have all the detail?
- Correct. - Is that where you're at, and you're in progression to get
further? - That's exactly it. - Your real challenge is
processing speed and the time it takes
to process everything? That's your cost and that's
your time consumption? - Almost all of our
budget goes to R and D. We have models we can produce
now that are already good,
more than good enough, for architecture, engineering,
construction companies. - Those are physical models
that are printed out? - No, these are virtual models. - Only virtual, okay. - They can look at them on a
screen. They can print them out, but
they mostly use them for virtual
applications. - When you say what's good
enough, 'cause that's the question. Because if it's good enough
right now, then you have a product.
- Exactly. - If it's not good enough, like
what you showed earlier, then there's
different types of challenges. - It is good enough for
architecture, engineering and construction. We've had those as customers. - Did anything you showed
us show us the level of detail that represents
what you can do right now? - Yes, everything in that is
what we can do right now, and good
enough for that first set of customers. We're just reaching the point
where we're good enough for gaming and entertainment applications. - Then I'm guessing, and
tell me if I'm wrong, the challenges now are capturing enough data for your models, or having the right data in your
models so that you can create it with
the least expense possible in the
least amount of time 'cause you're saying you can do
it in an hour 1/2. - Right.
- Right. What's kept you from getting to the higher end production? - Yup. It's simply the R and
D time to implement-- - But what are you R and D'ing? That's what I wanna get to. - We, my co-founder and
I, both have expertise in this area, and we've-- - I know, you told us.
- Planned out, yes, (audience laughing)
exactly what we need to do. We know what additional
computer vision techniques we need to extract more
information from the data we already
have, for example. - Right, okay. You're creating the
libraries or you're using third-party libraries? - We're creating the libraries. - You're creating libraries that
can take a picture, extract the data that
you need to be able to re-create it, and
you use other sources of data into your
model to be able to find what you
already know? - Right.
- Right? You'll take satellite, not
satellite data, but you'll take actual data
mappings-- - Could be satellite data. - Yeah, but those are typically. Okay, could be whatever data. Then you need to be able to
extract more from the computer vision to
get more discreet data. Then you need to have
the processing power. Writing those algorithms to extract more CV, more
data from computers, from pictures, is gonna be time consuming
and it's not easy. Otherwise, you've already done
it, right? - Right. - How long, when, how many more
Ph.Ds, how many people? - Then if I can add to that.
- Please do. - How are you gonna make,
what's some easy money that you can make along the way to help your burn and help
pay some of the bills? - To answer your question first, that's why it's good that we
already have customers whose needs we're
meeting, in terms of the level of detail, because those are customers who are already paying us and giving
us money. - How are you charging them? - We are charging either
on a monthly basis, depending on the number of users at those companies that
are on the platform, or on an annual basis. That works well. - You're saying these are the
locations and the destinations
we've already created? You have access to those models? - Right. - You pre-configure certain
destinations and you say, "Here's the level
of detail "that we have. "Does that fit your need?" - Exactly. - If it's like a game
where it doesn't have to be too detailed, then you've
just saved 'em a bunch of coding
time, and they just download the model and they input it into Unity or
whatever? - Correct, right. - Why not go bigger with that? Because that seems to
have a decent size market, to Greg's point. - Yes, and that's exactly
the point we're at now, of expanding our marketing
efforts to get more people, that product in front of more people. We do not wanna fall into the
trap of letting perfection be the
enemy of actually making money, so we're working on getting
people to just use that plugin for
free, get them hooked, and then get
paid. - How many people do you have
working on the CV algorithms and that
side of it? - We have three people working
on that. - Okay, three people. You wanna use the 500K
in your pre-seed round to do what? - We wanna hire two
additional backend engineers to work on exactly that, as well
as a sales and business lead to keep getting it in front of more
customers across the enterprise. - Are you working with any of
the processing manufacturers, like
Nvidia or the new Google stuff? Who are you working with there? - We're working with Nvidia,
we're in their Inception Program. We work with Google to
get access to their cloud. We've gotten several
hundred thousand dollars of credit that saved us from
having to spend money on servers. Well, AWS and Azure, as well. We're also looking to work with
some of the companies that have more
data than we've been able to
get our hands on now. - Have you written this at all
to custom? If I understand it right, you
have three major sellers. One is selling it because you
have to get people to trust it. Two is your extraction
algorithms because you've gotta get
into the detail of it. That's just, like you said, that's research and development. Then three is your
processing speed and time because that $200,000 in credit is very dear to you because that
bill can be enormous, particularly as
you test everything, because
you're gonna be doing all your limits and all that
kinda shit. It takes a lotta time
to try to get it right, a lotta trial and error. How are you gonna deal with that
problem, and can you write it
to specific processors, like some of the new ones
that are being developed? - Yeah, so, in fact, we
don't have to write it for specific processors. - I know you don't have to, but
you need to get it to the point where
it's so fast that someone doesn't have to pay
you a ton of money or it doesn't
take you as long to test. - Right, but we're using things
like TensorFlow where we let somebody
else spend the R and D time on
actually giving us GANs that we can use to look at a three-dimensional
point cut and understand this is
a tree versus this is-- - No, I understand using
TensorFlow and then it's already on AWS and you're doing all that. But where I'm trying to get to
is, in terms of potential investing, is if you can do it much faster. 'Cause Google's not gonna
optimize to you. None of 'em are gonna optimize
to you. If you get to optimize to you, for your GANs, whatever,
or your neural networks, then you can have multiple
processes running at the same time,
one feeding the other, and you can get shit done a lot
faster. Is that an opportunity? - It is an opportunity. - At what point in time do
you get to that opportunity? - We're already going after
that. When we generate these cities in about an hour, that's about, generally, four dozen processors
on-- - What does it cost you? Assuming you didn't have AWS for
free, 'cause you're gonna run
outta your credits here any minute, what's it
gonna cost you per minute? - About $15 an hour per
computer. Just running the numbers, it
takes us-- - So $60. - Yeah, it takes us a few
hundred dollars to generate out an entire city. Then we amortize those costs. We then resell those models. - As you get more discrete
detail, that's gonna take more
processing-- - That's gonna scale up,
absolutely. - Look, I like the idea. I don't really know the industry
at all, but obviously if you're able to
create unique CV algorithms that allow
you to get to the level of detail to
re-create from external data points
and train your models very quickly so you
can bring in new cities and new destinations,
that's a unique opportunity. - We think so. - For your pre-seed, what's the
valuation that you're working for? - We're raising that on $4
million cap. We have circled 400K of that so
far, and we're raising the final
hundred K. - 500K more or 500 total? - 500 total. We have 400 already, getting the
last 100. - Now I'll negotiate with
you 'cause I'm a shark. Yeah, reach out to me,
you've got my email. - Excellent, will do, thank you. - Wow. (audience applauding and
cheering) Thank you.
- Thanks very much. - Thank you. That was pretty cool. So, Mark, thank you for coming. - My pleasure, thanks for having
me. - People are gonna go to dinner. Maybe next year in 2020
you could come back. - Right, I'll call you
from the White House, cool. (audience laughing) (audience laughing) - Thank you, that was so good. [Music]
