Yaza Funding (2022)

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think's going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is peter sisson he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called eyaza prior to that in april 2001 he had founded a company called wine shopper raised 46 million bucks from kleiner perkins and was acquired by wine.com in 2000. he then went on to found mixonic in 2004 telio in 2005. another company called line two in 2012 before getting involved with a entrepreneur in residence at start out growth lab and then eventually founding yaza in 2018 we're going to focus on that today peter you ready to take us to the top i am indeed all right so you were like the original you were like the original garyvee you just sold too early well you you know it's always a decision that involves more than just yourself unfortunately and and when you're investors and you might not always be exactly aligned on timing you've got to kind of deal with it understand that all right so talk to us about yaza what's the company doing is b to c or b to b it's uh it's speed of c i mean and it's most basic form it's it puts authenticated videos onto maps and so i mean the best way to think about that is is right now when you post uh you know memories or what have you onto facebook or instagram they go into a feed and scroll away what we do is we record the video live and place it on the map where it happened and in a sense authenticate it to make sure that it hasn't been uh faked or de-faked or altered in any way and the idea is to create a place where you know that everything you see is true yeah so is the play long term here for reporters when the next rocket is the hits the israeli embassy and local people shoot video they come to your site and find authenticated videos quickly to use for pr or just more like consumers wanting to share their trip in the mountains with their family i think both i mean what i mean think of it more like uh all video whatsapp with maps so like whatsapp you couldn't really say it's for a particular group it's really whoever resonates with the video aspect and the mapping aspect both the examples that you give are are perfect and where we're actually finding a lot of residents right now is with realtors because you can place these videos at individual properties and what they're doing is they're doing house tours uh and recording themselves doing the house tours so they can put their personality into it they can talk about potential and then that house tour lives at that house and then their customers can do a lot of the touring virtually in a sense without them actually having to get in their car and drive there interesting now i mean the way that i do this currently is you go on snapchat and there's videos that are plotted based off location with a big heat map so you know there's videos available how is this different from that well the biggest difference is that it's not ephemeral i mean snaps you know original value proposition is that everything goes away and that was part of how it started and and i don't think they can ever violate that core value problem because it's really a place you go to hang with your closest friends um each of the social networks kind of lives in a in a along a spectrum right and and snap didn't eliminate facebook and facebook you know didn't eliminate twitter or whatever i mean all of these things coexist because they each kind of reflect a different aspect of human behavior a different reason i mean if you want to be jaded and snarky you go on twitter if you want to sort of showboat a little bit i guess people tend to go on facebook instagram is a little more for visual expression snap is really about you know it's really about connecting with your closest friends it's not really you know broad social broadcast type of app and there used to be foursquare there used to be something that was location-based that was very much less about the person but more about the place and that's what we are we're a a location-based social network and with foursquare having exited this consumer space more or less and focusing on becoming a sas player um that's kind of left that door open for us well but the thing is like they did that for a reason uh is because the b2c play was just not working they just it wasn't getting the traction they needed so and now obviously jeff and that team is killing it on the on the b2b side being the alternative to google google in terms of a map api um but but for you i mean i guess how are you measuring success on this thing is it number of videos per month or per day or a number of user sign ups what's the critical metric right now yeah and and to respond to your prior point timing is everything right and it's all about the ecosystem being there i mean the things that were at this stage we're like eight weeks into launch we're still very much learning so we're looking mostly at engagement rather than growth we haven't run any traffic to it we haven't this is actually the very first podcast the first publicity that that i've been doing about the product and so what we're looking for is engagement because if you can find a pocket of of ravenous users people that use it every day um those are the people you want to study and then find more like them and you know out of our beta about a third of our customers and we're still talking about low numbers here yeah hello are we talking like 10 or like 100 or a thousand or no less than a thousand but you know the hundreds yeah basically um you know about a third emerged as daily active users um and they're using it an average of four sessions a day and that's that's what you want to see if you don't see any pocket of high users um then you start to worry yeah and but we've kind of found that now we're real really just trying to figure out with our limited resources as a startup where do we focus on positioning this and how much you know we can't really just let users figure it out we kind of have to walk them there because there's a little bit of behavior change involved okay i mean that that sounds to me like a lot of friction on a b2cf you can't afford to put touch on every single install right so why can't you solve the onboarding problem via the product ui i think we can in the long run i i think one of the things we're considering doing is having the problem we have now is if you if you have no content on the app which you won't um there's a ghost town problem so we've created a yaza channel which is where we put in content that we sort of feature but um one of the things we're going to try next is actually having it sync your camera roll videos into yaza's mapping system and then also run it that would be dangerous for me no no no way would i ever push that button well the one thing you know the thing about yazoo that's safe is that everything is is tightly controlled down to every piece of content you can pop up a list to see exactly who can see it but i have thousands of like little videos on my phone from all kinds of things some i want everyone to see discover them as you're walking around the world the problem is maybe there's one or two videos i just would not it would not be a good thing for people to see right and i wouldn't want to have to scroll through thousands to pick like which ones yes or no i either want them like one button all on or just i'm not gonna do it at all to avoid the risk i mean i feel like that's something that most consumers would they'd feel that same pressure yeah i think that's a valid point that but when they're imported they're only visible to you and so it's really just moving that all those big files off of your phone and into the cloud and then we'll keep an eye on them for you we'll run them through an image classifier so we'll be able to tell you exactly what's in them so you can search for those moments based on the silly stuff that maybe you did because the image classifier looks not just for you know objects to recognize but also certain actions like human actions so i mean in the end the whole problem in in our mind is that video is just cumbersome and difficult to use and much like you said it just sits there nobody's really using it because it's buried in your phone and you can't find it through search and it's not put into an interface that's natural with you to interact with it but i mean i can i do that right now i do that right now on my phone though i open up my camera roll and i go to location based like i do i do all the time and i'm like i know i took this thing at the dallas airport but i don't remember when it was i don't want to scroll forever so i opened the map view i click dallas and boom i find it very quickly again i just don't see how this is i'm trying to figure out what use case you're trying to go after you're like what mousetrap you think you're delivering that no one else has well the first and foremost is the fact that we can guarantee the content is authentic i mean the only way you're gonna if you're trying to i mean deep fakes are a huge problem right and it's getting harder and harder to tell what video is real and what is not right but peter that's only like news outlets wanting like i know all the things on my phone are real i don't need that's gonna affect elections we've already seen it affect elections and we're gonna see it get worse it's only so the the security issue and the the preventing fakes issue is a problem that is going to be ten times bigger in five years and we're sort of we're we're planning for that we're saying there will need to be a place where the content you have total control over the content it's in the stewardship of a public benefit corporation which is what we set up the company as so that we have an obligation protect your privacy and not monetize it in certain ways and it's going to be a place where you know that everything you see is true and so that's kind of the idea is that there needs to be a place where you know that it's not going to replace these other services but there needs to be a place where you know that something is true and in the stewardship of a company that you can trust because i i don't want all my video memories to be left in the hands of advertising platforms and that's basically where we're at now either that or they just sit on your phone so just be clear though peter like accurate videos are critical and any kind of like consumer stream where i can see everyone else's stuff like a facebook news feed or instagram feed i want to know which what's real or what's faked i get that use case i also get the use case that reporters reporting on a real time story right want to know if this user-generated content from someone there on the scene is a real thing or a fake thing i get that use case neither of those use cases or cases you told me earlier on that you want them to be used for right you didn't tell me that you're going to basically give reporters access to this so they can find things to you know use in press reports and you didn't tell me that i'm going to be able to see a feed of everyone else on yaza and all their content you said it's for me personally to look at so one's like a b to b what's that messenger think of it as like a message that's it's it's a it's a communications app yes okay so if it's a whatsapp messenger play though i know everything i'm sending is real and if i'm texting my mom on whatsapp i'll she has no incentive to send me deep fakes like that's the truth question is not a question i ask in a medium like whatsapp it's when i ask in a medium like a facebook news feed sure no i understand that but there has to be a place where you can exchange files where you know that they're accurate whether you're exchanging them with a reporter whether you're exchanging them with uh uh you're shopping for real estate in italy and you you don't have time to go there is that the use case really it's it's a real estate use case i get i get how all this makes sense if it's a consumer trying to i'm trying to find a place in new york right now looking at videos on in new york i know they're real videos they're not shopped they're not doctored with some fancy cat program they're real things from the realtor posted exactly no i mean that's what the market's kind of telling us i mean we do i do believe that some of these other use cases will will rise up as customers get introduced but real estate is where it's just everyone we talk to is like both on the buyer's side and on the seller so how do you plan to make money on this thing uh we'll do subscriptions i mean uh for people who have a lot of video uh and they want the advanced camera just think of it as like dropbox model will charge you know five seven dollars a month for extra memory and then you'll get a more powerful camera for editing and and stuff like that and then in the long term i think there's a lot of analytics uh in a dashboard that will build so that on an opt-in basis a realtor or whoever's looking at will be able to say okay this many people looked at the video at this house this many people looked at that and sort of get a sense of what's resonating with people and sort of bring a lot of the online dynamics to the offline world and sort of measuring foot traffic and things like you raise some capital to get this thing going how much have you raised uh just a tiny bit right now we are with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in precedent money that we closed last year okay so 150 000 bucks and when when did you start writing the first line of code for this uh for this particular iteration uh a little over a year ago what about for the whole business well we i mean we've been kicking around a lot of things ever since pokemon go came out i was i was thinking you know i studied ai at stanford and i really really was interested in our augmented reality and you know with pokemon go i thought it really had tipped in the mainstream and we were going to see more investment and funding in you know other applications of ar but we built an alpha app for ar and what year was that that was uh the fall of the same year as pokemon go so you started 2016-ish okay so you you created this company back in 2016 and you gray some seed money 2018 and kind of been toying around with different different ways to get into the space basically yeah exactly i mean it was basically built an app and then tested you know how accurate can we do augmented reality can we stick it to the side of buildings because we didn't want to do indoors we want to do outdoor augmented reality which is more challenging we'll see we've learned that the ecosystem isn't there yet with gps and the other ways to position it you just can't put it accurately so peter i assume today i assume right oh yeah so how are you i mean you you've been working since 2016 you only raised 150 grand so i mean how are you paying yourself your team et cetera how are you buying yourself more time so everybody has kept their day jobs uh except me but for the most you know i've been doing volunteer work uh working on building an incubator for minority founders which i worked on but you know i think a new kind of bootstrapping is really coming out of this side gigging and and side hustle trend and so a lot of you know all of our our people there's four of us involved the three of them have full-time day jobs and then they work on this nights and weekends and that gives us infinite runway to allowed us to experiment with some of these different technologies before we started taking money from people yeah i mean it does get an infinite runway but the flip side to that is like they they have in other words if you quit your full-time gig and you have to make a startup work you're going to make it work because your food on your table and your kids and your wife and your spouse depends on it right uh if you have a full-time gig on the side it's like oh like peter put this thing in trello he really wants me to develop this new thing for yaza but like i'm tired after my full-time gig like i don't have time to develop this thing so it's hard how do you motivate a team right that's not on your payroll that has full-time you know all full-time gigs you have to pick the right team right you have to find people who are as passionate about it as you are and who will work for stock and that's something i've been able to do with all my companies just managing to find the right people and sell the right vision to get people excited um you know once you get to the space where you're raising like a series a or a larger seed round then of course we'll bring people over um and that that after we close our next financing uh that's probably what are you raising now yeah we're just uh kicking around like a uh a seed so that was pre-seed technically now that we're launched but really pre-major traction yeah uh we'll probably do a seed round and trying to figure out whether we do a small one or a bigger one so somewhere between half a million and maybe uh 2 million we're looking at but i think we'll probably do a smaller raise now get a little more traction to get the value up a little bit and then raise the rest after that very good we'll follow along closely peter let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh actually it was not a business book but it's a about leadership it's the story of uh ernest shackleton and his expedition to the south and now he kept his men motivated when they were stuck on ice for more than a year number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um right now uh i always you know my hero has always been steve jobs so i'll just say following him in his rest number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um slack number four how many hours of sleep are getting every night uh four to six okay fair enough and uh uh how old are you today today i am 57 57 older entrepreneurs and that this is a prime of 50s 40s 50s prime and a lot of entrepreneurs i talked to so nothing wrong with that um last question here take us back to your 20 year old self what do you wish you knew um how to see the future fair enough guys peter cission building yaza a video application right now of real estate agents are using it to post videos a real time and authenticated from you know their listings that buyers from around the world can see that listing and know that the video is real he sees a bigger play in the deep uh excuse me deep fake space and video validation space coming from success back in 2001 when he sold his company wine shopper to wine.com mixonic work on many other tools including supporting the start out growth lab peter thank you for taking us to the top my pleasure you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from these ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you want more shows like this make sure you subscribe right now we're trying to get 10 000 youtube subscribers by the end of september here 2019 and it would mean the world to me if you clicked now to subscribe additionally i've got two more great interviews for you if you want more data points from the world's leading sas ceos click and watch one of them right now