Metafact Team Size (2022)

hello everyone my guest today is cigar call he is the co-founder of meta before starting medes cigar worked as former news editor for new zulu international a crowdsource news wire agency based in paris prior to joining that he worked the london-based media agency barcroft media as a staff photographer and their editorial department again now building metafact.org to detect misinformation in real time cigar you ready to take us to the top yep all right deep fakes how are you going to prevent video deep fakes so with these fakes uh it's actually much easier than uh you know detecting misinformation that comes in the form of text and images to some extent because the big phase you know the algorithm is such that you are able to detect it it's just that the you know the build time of the technology is time consuming and it will take financial resources to develop that but then if you ask me the honest reply would be it's much easier than making detection tools for you know our normal day-to-day tech services as a compared to the defense that's the bigger part of it so tell me more again about about kind of how you're building this right and what you're building um what is the company pureplace sas company uh sorry is the company a pure play sas company uh yes it's a sub company okay yeah yeah so so help me understand kind of who you're selling to right on average what are they paying per month then are these enterprises smbs or mid-market uh so our primary target market is uh you know media agencies other newspapers television any media agency that dribbles for news the idea is uh to give them this services so that we are able to create a knowledge base out of that and then provide those services at a higher price to businesses and enterprises so that's the business model that we have applied for meta facts keeping in mind the idea was simple uh taking an example of kaspersky when it lost with sunday wires the initial idea was to provide free access to its customer base so that they understand what sort of malicious you know why this is where out there and then once they had that knowledge base up that's wherein you know they developed the tools to counter those and then sell it at a premium price so that's what we are actually doing and the other understanding is that at times maybe we are not able to detect misinformation that is online because it can be also offline and that's also where the journal is part of you know our service has come into have and that's the reason we are looking at journalists as a primary customer but then money-making customers are going to be entertaining and your current customers when you look at on average what they're paying per month what's the number uh so as of now we just have uh beta customers so we are not charging them anything because we have still there revenue yeah okay how many beta users do you have uh as of now we have five okay so five beta users and how did you find them uh so it was during the test phase so when the idea came to us and then we started working on the idea that's where we reached out to these different media houses both online offline how did you reach out to them though was it an email a phone call you walk up to their office door uh so somewhere from my own network because i worked as a you know i worked with news file agencies and all so i did have my own network and that's uh how i established so basic initial was uh you know called emails to them reconnecting and everything and the ones who showed interest that's how you know later on we just followed up with that so when did you start this when was the company founded uh the company was founded in 2017. okay so what have you i mean how are you but you're pre-revenue right so how you've been paying yourself for the past two years uh so it's uh we sort of still bootstrap but then we had applied for this one program in south korea through hanyang university and this was for uh early entrepreneurs who were trying to solve a pressing issue and we you know based weatherfact out there and we won the first price so we got a funding of twenty thousand that was uh equity free uh twenty thousand dollars uh that was the first funding that we got after that uh in mid 2018 we applied for an accelerator program that was based out of ireland through ndrc uh it's a collaboration between the irish government and enterprise ireland and again we were one of the first outside startups to be selected for that program and a funding of 3000 viewers so so far this is the funding that we have raised and the rest of the money was your friends and family so okay so how much total have you raised to date all in uh it round about this uh between 60 to 70 000. okay so and what's your team size look like today how many people just you yeah oh no we have a demo so how have you paid six people over the past two years on just seventy thousand dollars uh one of the main factors being that in india you still do have uh people uh you know so the prices for hiring a tech guy in india is much cheaper than hiring a big guy from outside what does it cost there to get a junior engineer uh in dollars for a month uh if the person is giving me let's say 16 hours a week i'll be paying him somewhere between 400 to 600 for a month okay so for a month that's 15 hours a week right so that's a total of 60 hours in a month you're spending 400 to 600 yeah okay so i mean this is like four or five bucks an hour when you divide it out uh almost yeah interesting i mean so what's your i mean as you're obviously you're investing in growth right as you build up towards your beta launch and then eventually your paid launch what are you burning per month right now in terms of total capital so right now in dollars it would be uh somewhere around about 800 to a thousand dollars so we work on uh watson's platform so we don't have to pay anything for the platform that we are using because we are getting uh credits from the other g partners for them so that's where we are saving a lot of money actually because the platform is available to us almost for free and we can use their services whichever we want so cigar when you when do you turn on the beautiful magical moment pay me now paywall so our estimated idea is that by end of september we should be in that position by end of july we will be uh sending out the first uh updated beta to our customers i mean the ones who are testing it and once we are happy with the progress of it that's when we come out and we'll be you know plotting the seller what gives you a confidence that you're gonna be able to build this i mean do you have a technical background are you developer i know so uh my technical my background is not in that i mean though i did my you know software engineering long back but then that was not something that i still get updated with but then my experience comes from the user generated content so eight years of you know previous eight years has been in that space for me so i understand how the content is generated what sort of content is out there so the initial idea for us with metaphase was to have some sort of a validation tool that will just validate the user generated content so that we are sure that if the person is sending in a video or a photograph the newswire agencies are confident that this has come from the same person but then uh it was during the same time that we got in touch with ibm watson we started using their platform and we saw the use of ai in this and how much more we can you know do with that so what we basically are trying to do right now which not many others are doing in this field at least in india is we are not just looking at the content that has been generated in this information space but also the comments that are coming so we are looking for hate speech yes cigar sorry i'm going to cut you off but i mean look i think people when people look at this business they're going to go okay it's a technical business yes or no do we believe that this is something cigar can build and if you don't have a technical background they're going to say okay does he have a technical co-founder right like again why should people believe that you're going to be able to build this what's the tech muscle inside your company we do have we don't have the tech co-founders so yeah i mean my experience comes from a different space but then they do have a tech co-founder in this because we do understand the importance of that did you guys split it 50 50 or how did you have the equity conversation uh the equity conversation uh since the initial fund uh money came from the other co-founders so he has more equity but then uh the split is almost uh we can say uh 80 20 but then his uh equity will be dissolvable once we raise funding so he has 80 right now and you have 20. yep okay got it very good so he's basically said okay if you help build this thing and we go raise additional capital then i'll give you more you'll go up to 30 i'll go down to 65 and we'll give an investor five percent exactly very cool all right cigar let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i do have photography books but not business books number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh mark i mean facebook is quite interesting though yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh we are not using online tools because we were using google docs for them uh somehow we are not comfortable with that so most of the conversation happens offline for us what do you mean you're not comfortable with google docs uh it's just that one of the accounts was hacked in between while we were using google services so it's just that you know we don't trust it that much as of now since you know we are at a very critical phase so far we have a lot of problems by the way if a pre-revenue six-employed you know bootstrapped company does not trust google i know i know number four how many hours of sleep to eat every [Applause] four night and what's your situation married single kids um with three kids three kids and how old are you uh 40 last week last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh how important coding would be [Music] guys they are building medefact.org to help detect deep fakes his technical co-founder owns 80 he owns 20 they are pre-revenue today testing with five news outlets as beta customers will see if the payroll works when they turn it on in a few months cigar thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every 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