 And we're live. Hello and everyone, welcome to the first Small Empires Google Hangout live for season two. I'm Sam Sheffer, the Verge's social media manager, here with a bunch of fine folks. If you guys want to introduce yourselves, Stephen, go first and we'll go that way. This way, that way. I'm Stephen Green. I am the executive producer of Small Empires. This is my second year doing the show. Very excited to be here. Hey. That's all you get from me for right now. Hey, I'm Kirk Larson. I am the director of the second season of Small Empires. I am more excited than Stephen to be here. Yeah, take it away, part pick folks. Jewel, you go. Okay. I was like, I don't know which direction. Okay, I'm Jewel. I am the co-founder and CEO of Part Pick. And I think I'll probably be most excited to be here. Be back. Jason, where does that leave you, man? An interesting predicament. My name is Jason Crane, co-founder and CEO of Part Pick. And I'm probably the second most excited. I give that to Jewel. I give it to Jewel. Cool. Yeah, so for everybody tuning in, hopefully you caught the episode this morning. And we wanted to take some time just to kind of chat about Part Pick and field some questions. So if anybody has questions out there, use the hashtag Small Empires on Twitter and we'll try to get to them a bit later. Oh, and we are supposed to have Alexis Ohanian here today. I just want to point that out. But he is in Japan and it's four in the morning. It's the middle of the morning. Maybe the last Saki train is running a little late. Exactly. All right, so first order of business. How do we find Part Pick? Stephen, you found Part Pick. How did this happen? How do we locate these fine folks? Okay, I wanted to tell this story just because it was kind of important to me as we were trying to put the season together and starting to look at what kind of companies we were going to be featuring. I got to go out to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this past September. And the lovely Part Pick team was presenting on the first day. You guys were on the first day, right? Yes, we were. We were. Because we had to wait, I remember. So walk us through what that's like, the whole presentation at TechCrunch. I've seen the Silicon Valley HBO TV show and I see how nervous all those guys got before. Is it like that at all? Yes. Well, okay, so I watched the show too and there's no one fighting on stage. I remember that part of the episode where there was a fight. So none of that happened, which is great. But it was very nerve-wracking. I was very, very nervous. Like I'm sweaty. And I've done a lot of presentations before, but I just feel like the energy was really different there. It's like high pressure, Marissa Meyer's on stage. It's just really scary. She was one of the judges for you guys. Yes. Well, she was one of the final judges. But still, she's a person that I've always just admired and I've heard stories about. So I was just like, oh my God, that's so scary. But I have a little, I don't want to say ritual, but sort of thing I do to bring down the nerves before I go on stage. And actually as a team, we said a prayer. Everyone was just like, this is going to be okay. We're going to do this. We're going to kill it. And I think we did it pretty well. So it kind of worked out. So sitting in the audience, I was watching these guys and they came out and you did a presentation and then you actually get the demo part of it, right? So you had your technical team come out and they had a little overhead projector kind of thing that was showing what you could do with the app. And I just remember the whole time I was like, wow, this is like, it's a really different industry that you guys are attacking. You obviously have an incredible team and you're based in Atlanta. And at that point we knew we were going to be going to outside the Silicon Valley. And so when I heard Atlanta, I was like, okay, done. Let's talk, guys. Yeah, that's, I mean, I think probably we're the most different you could be. I mean, we're outside Silicon Valley. We're working on a very unsexy industry. We're doing a high, we basically have a very high tech solution. I mean, there's a lot of high tech companies at TechCrunch, but we're solving the problem using really, really difficult technology. So yeah, I'm glad that those things stood out to you. And so like what else happened after an event like that? Like what does it mean for a young company like you guys to be able to get on stage somewhere like that and to be able to show off? Jason, you want to take that? Yeah, sure. As Jules said, the energy at TechCrunch is phenomenal. And for us, it was our introduction to Silicon Valley. We had never really spoken to any investors in Silicon Valley. This was a super large stage for us. And so it was so busy, but for us it was like, okay, we're here and now all we have to do is do our part. The platform is there. And so as far as like what happened afterwards, it was just pretty much figuring out a way to address all of the interests from investors, just techies in general, people that are just interested about the technology, people that seen us doing Startup Alley and just wanted to ask more questions. So we spent a lot of time just dividing and conquering and making sure that we could talk to as many people as possible. Awesome. And so what's response been like, I mean, after all this, after the episode went up today, but has anything changed drastically since you guys were on stage there and now that we're talking here? Yeah, so I'll say I think we had certain expectations about what would happen after TechCrunch. And honestly, it hasn't been, okay, so let me take a step back. It's only been like a little bit over a month since TechCrunch. So things are happening, but in my mind, I always want things to happen faster. So we haven't necessarily closed any investors since TechCrunch. We've had a lot of really great meetings, but we're still kind of, I don't know, we're still kind of waiting for something to drop. So that's one thing where I was just like, oh, we get on stage at TechCrunch and we do really well, then all of our problems are going to be solved. And that's really not how it's been. But it has been pretty cool on the customer side. I mean, we've had a really steady flow of requests on our website or outreach from companies. So that's been cool. But we never really had a problem with customer interest. So it still leaves us in the same sort of predicament where we have all these potential customers and now even more. And we don't really have the resources to support them. And people are like, well, why don't you just get them to pay you? And the answer to that is, well, yeah, we will get them to pay us eventually, but if they're a large corporation, they're not going to pay us to build our team. They're not going to pay us to get the pieces in place to support them. That's called Kickstarter. We're not going to kickstart this. Right, exactly. So that's where we kind of still need seed funding to be able to get all the pieces in place so that we can actually go and launch with these big corporations. I will add to that that it was really inspiring to see how many people reached out to us afterwards because we didn't go and headhunt them. We didn't cold call or anything like that. We sort of waited. And day by day, more and more people reached out and called us, and it really speaks to how well we can serve the industry because people are eager for it. Oh, look, a wild Alexis has appeared. Hey, guys. Sorry for the delay. I was not asleep. I was just caught up in a board meeting. Oh, so I can draw on your face with this? Yeah, too much sake. We get it. Thank you. Keep it professional. For everyone watching, this is Alexis Ohanye. He is co-creative of Reddit and a bunch of other cool things and the show's host. So Alexis, how are things? How is Japan? It's going really well. Yeah, having a wonderful time here. Ohio, good morning to all of you. Actually no, we're having 420 here, but I guess it's Konichiwa. So we were just discussing, I was going to say, early stages of fundraising kind of stuff. And I think I want to take this time with the live chats to get into a little bit more technical stuff that we don't get to get into into the episode. So what advice do you guys have for people that are watching this episode and they're like, all right, this is what I needed to finally get everything together and start working all nights to put together my company. And they're just going to start approaching that seed ground. What are the things to be careful of with term sheets? Maybe what is a term sheet? And how do you know what to look out for? Wow, so a term sheet is basically a document that sets out the terms of the deal. So if you're going to be giving a piece of your company away to an investor or if you're going to do a convertible note, which are just two different ways to structure your financing round, the sheet basically just details all the legalities of it. So what's owed to who, at what point, and those types of things. So at this point, we are still really in the thick of term sheets. So we've gotten a few. We haven't liked a few. We've had people not be able to fulfill things that were put into term sheets. So we've kind of seen the ins and outs in our case so far. It hasn't been the greatest things that we've experienced as regards to term sheets, but that's part of it. And the great thing is that we've had a really amazing legal team that's helped us from the time that we were in an accelerator up until now. And we sent everything to them. So the one thing I would say as a piece of advice is don't sign things that you don't know what they mean. Definitely, yeah. I know a lot of people just are like, oh yeah, term sheet, done. Did you guys follow through that contract that you guys signed when you came on the show? Yeah, yeah, that wasn't a talent release. That was a term sheet. Yeah, Vox Media now owns PartPick. They were on our team. They've fully already reviewed it. We're good. Don't try to trick me. Yeah, so anyway, I was just saying that I think people should make sure that they're reading what they're getting and then also having some ideas. What are you not going to say yes to? I mean, like I said, we got some term sheets early and it's just like, no, we're not going to give you 5% of our company for no money or for your guidance, no thanks. So those are some things to look out for. People will ask for a lot of stuff. If you're not confident and you don't know what your company is worth or what you're willing to put on the table, they'll push the limits. So as you'll say, it's really important to have that foundation and know what you're willing to negotiate on when you sit down at the table. And the last thing I'll say on that is just knowing what you don't know. So I mean, in my case, I have a business background but I never negotiated a term sheet before. So it's really taken like reaching out to people, getting advice and seeing, okay, what do you think about this? Is this industry standard or no? Or at all? So that's kind of how we worked it so far. One of the things – is that a flower? I think it makes you look nice. One of the things that we've done at Y Combinator is we've open sourced some safe documents which it's kind of a remix of the convertible note which was a clever hack to make it as easy as possible to fundraise and safes are a slightly more elegant solution for this. But it's tricky, Greg, because early stage companies don't – it is really hard to value them and the advantage of using things like convertible debt or a safe is that you get to basically put off valuing them until later around when people can have a sort of better sense of what they're all worth. But even with this added simplicity, these things didn't even exist nine years ago when Steve and I were starting Reddit. Or I mean they existed, they just weren't common practice. What this world is moving towards now is one with I think more transparency and more founder friendliness although there are still ways to go. One of the things I'd love to see is for – if anyone wants to go out there and do this, an anonymized place to upload term sheets where you have to obviously be pretty confident they're going to stay that way. I guess you could do a little bit to self-censor but basically see what is market, right? Because right now as founders, we kind of have to go around and we have inefficient knowledge to know what's market here, what's market there, what's market – it's the advantage of networks that allow you to realize, okay, no, these terms are ridiculous or having that lawyer to talk to who says that's ridiculous. But if we actually knew in aggregate what really is market, you could then go to an investor and be like, please, I actually know this is not standard because here's a thousand deals just got done last year that don't have this. So some enterprising founder can work on this now. Yeah, I really actually – that's a great idea because even for us in Atlanta – or do it. Slide share just for the record, is that – Slide share? Yeah, or like – Powerpoint sharing? Nah, nah, man, you need – you basically need to be able to extract the very specific deal terms across the board just to know like what is a normal – what is normal right now for a typical kind of company. Sorry, I was just going to shout out to – I don't know if you guys saw what Buffer put out. I think it was like yesterday or the day before. But basically they're raising – I think they're raising like $3.5 million and they literally wrote out every single reason why and the term sheet and they put it on their website. Oh, yeah. And I thought it would be interesting just to see first of all that they're being so transparent. I don't know what – I don't necessarily know like the motives or everything but they put – they did this whole big write up about it. So maybe that will be a thing to kind of shift the chasm if you will around transparency and fundraising but I thought it was just a really interesting little tip. Yeah, they're also raising at 60. Huh, wow. And they share everyone's costs and all the revenue. This is really interesting. Yeah, yeah, and then you can become an investor as well. Hey, Sam, can we put a link to that? I think it's an interesting article to read. I mean I guess part of the – well, we'll figure that out. There's a chat window, right? Yes. All right, so big question of the episode, funding. How do you get it? Where do you get it from? And we kind of answered this in the episode but I think it would be fun to hear where you're at now. What happens if you guys got some big funder and you guys were like super set and on the right track? What would you guys do tomorrow? We would launch. Well, actually what we would do is we would put our team in place. So right now, full transparency, we have a really great team of folks who have gotten us to this point but because we haven't been able to compete with $100,000 plus offers that engineers have gotten or things of that nature, we really have to just borrow people when we can. But there are so many people that actually want to work for us full time. It's just the fact that they have families to feed or loans to pay off and so they really haven't been able to commit 100% of their time to Partfick. So the first thing is just getting everyone who has worked with us to this point and a few other people we've identified to be full time on Partfick. And then honestly, because we've done so much work to this point, everything else we really have the plans for is just a matter of executing and we really have the people on board to execute with is just a matter of having the team in place to do so. So those are, really it's around building out the team and launching. Submitted the pilot proposals, got initial approvals on those pilots and so everything pretty much is in place on the customer side. It's just a matter of having everyone in place to launch. It's just can you support it when that happens? Yes, exactly. And when we do launch and we're able to start to collect that data and really analyze the results of being in the market, that will go a long way with our funding conversations. That seems to be one of the pieces that unfortunately we're missing in our fundraising conversations. While we have the pipeline, we have the interest from both investors and clients because of our small team and inability to support a large corporation on just a few part-time employees. That will really help us in closing that gap in the fundraising. I got a question for you guys and I know it was sort of addressed in the episode. For those who haven't seen the episode yet, do you think it would help to be in Silicon Valley if you sort of just picked up and moved there at this point? The exposure is kind of snowballing in a sense now and maybe being there, being at a coffee shop with someone who knows someone who knows an investor. But you guys said you're loyal to your hometown. And then this also ties into, I got this question from someone on Twitter. Their question was why do you think other founders don't see the potential of where you guys live? So there's obviously value. You guys are in love with your own home, which makes sense. So the answer on the Silicon Valley question is, I've been kind of like, oh, maybe we could do it. But honestly I really don't think Silicon Valley is the place for part pick. The reason is because I don't know very many of any major manufacturers that are based there. So in terms of our customer base, it's really just not, it's really not in Silicon Valley, period. As far as investors though, yes, it probably would be easier, maybe. Honestly, it's hard to say if location is the thing, that hasn't been the number one thing that people have given to me as an objection. It may be easier just because I'm kind of, would be able to be more in people's faces. And I think maybe for a set period of time would be great to be out there. But I just think for where we are, the most important thing is for us to be close to our customers and close to the talent. So one thing we talked about in the episode is like, Georgia Tech has a really great, there's a really great pipeline coming out of Georgia Tech. And then other schools on the East Coast. So we're seeing people coming from Carnegie Mellon that have really great skills in this area, NYU. So the schools that are gonna be the feeders for the technology that we're working on are really not, I mean obviously Sanford has a great program too. But I just don't think Silicon Valley is the place for part pick. Temporarily, maybe. But in terms of long term and being close to our customers, definitely think that Atlanta, New York is getting more looks just because there's more going on in the investment area there. And then we are still relatively close to a good customer base. But I'd say East Coast for sure. And then my family. And I really just want to be close to my family. So yeah. Go Atlanta. And then you asked another question, sorry, about... Why do you think other founders don't see the potential of where you live? Maybe they just don't know your sort of industry. Because you said like your business is not like many other Silicon Valley businesses and the industry is very much focused around Atlanta too. Honestly I think that has to do with the culture of tech right now. And honestly really the spirit of where people are starting businesses from. What is it that is within them that makes them want to start a business? And not to say that people aren't starting from genuine places, but it was really my experience in this industry that made me feel like okay, this is literally not going to work for me. I'm not going to be able to work in this company because I think this is so horrible that I really just... I have to come up with something because I can't deal and my team, they are seeing them every day and they're just miserable. They're crying to me about how much they hate their jobs. And so I'm not knocking any of the other companies that are in Silicon Valley, but I think a lot of the companies are founded maybe not from the most genuine place. They're not from actually pain. It's more like this is a nice to have thing or this would be really fun or cool, but not like no, you don't understand, I'm depressed. I can't do my job because it sucks. It's just different and I think that there are a lot of people are coming from genuine areas of pain that are outside of Silicon Valley. And so I don't know why people... So anyway, I think maybe the culture is just the thing that's a little bit different that you'll find in different areas that you won't necessarily find in the Valley. You know, Joel, it's actually funny. We were at a factory shooting. Well, it wasn't a factory, but I don't want to give away what's going to happen. We were at this place shooting and they were on the McMaster Car website and this guy was just scrolling through a page looking for something and he couldn't find it. I just said to him, I was like, hey, we just did this piece on this company where you can take a picture of the part that you need and they'll just look it up for you. He looked at me and he was just like, are you serious? Really? I was like, yeah. He's like, how do I get it? I was like, you can't. He just got really mad and I had to walk away. People want to do this. People would be psyched for this. Yeah, it's really cool. I think starting with PartPick, obviously there's a lot of frustrating days and things where I'm just like, I want to give up. The most energizing thing is that every time I pitch it or every time I tell someone this is what I'm working on, they always answer me with a story. They always say, oh, that would be so helpful for this one time and I was trying to fix this thing and I couldn't figure out what it was. I wish I had PartPick. That's always the response. It never fails. That makes me feel like, okay, well at least this is something that people will find valuable. I know that for a fact because literally the thousands of times I've been talking to people, they always give me a story. I'm going to segue with that. There's another Twitter question here. What other industries does PartPick see itself aiming at? Go ahead, Jason. As far as industries, parts are parts. You can look around the room and everything you see is made up of a ton of different parts. We really designed the technology to be able to adapt and be flexible around all different types of parts. We still have some research and some things to do in our roadmap to address those other industries. We are confident that our methodologies will work across other industries. We started with fasteners and plumbing. Some of the low hanging fruit is automotive, which is a huge industry, not just in the US but globally. Electrical supplies. Imagine doing more around home repair. Imagine having all of IKEA's parts in the palm of your hand and accessible just by taking a picture. There are a ton of different industries as far as the types of parts that we are catering to. We also have to recognize that we are trying to be progressive with visual recognition. Our methodology and the way that we approach visual recognition is very different than a lot of the visual recognition companies that exist. That attention to detail, we are hoping that it will continue to evolve and push the recognition space forward. Especially since TechCrunch, we've had so much interest not just from potential clients but from other partners who are like, we could use that for something that our public hasn't even thought of yet. But it's still using the visual recognition technology, the artificial intelligence if you will, of computer simulated vision to be able to solve problems. I think that's one of the great flexible points of that public- So we didn't actually get to show this in the episode, but I want you guys to talk about the thing that you kind of dreamed up, the scanner belt. Can you explain that? I don't know if you have a link that you can share. Yes. I'll tell you about that. That was really an answer to an objection. The objection was, hard pick sounds great, but how are you going to scale? In my mind, I always thought, okay, there are tons and tons of websites that have images of tons and tons of things. I never thought that someone could say with a straight face, hard pick isn't going to work because you're not going to be able to get all the images. But that has been one of the objections. As a response to that, I said, okay, well, if we needed to actually image all of the parts, what would be the quickest way for us to do that? It's obviously not very quick for me to take all the pictures of the parts, so what if we could just automate that process? We got with some mechanical engineers to spec out this machine where basically it's just a conveyor belt and you just send parts down the line and we have cameras on all angles capturing images and putting them automatically into our database. Basically it just automates that process. It's a pretty simple idea, but that's an answer to the objection of, oh, how are you going to scale? Well, now we have this idea really specced out around getting a thousand parts into the database per day, so that's kind of the thing there and that's another thing that we're fundraising to actually be able to build it out and launch that as well. Jason? Because the database doesn't exist at all, right? You guys are doing this from scratch. So to a certain extent, the database for the clients, the customers, the national dealers have probably talked a little bit about this, but they do have components of it. So for the parts that they sent us to put into the database, they already had the specs associated with each part, but they just didn't have good images associated with those specs. So we don't have to do the databasing from start to finish. We just have to plug in to the existing databases that they have and then associate each of the specs for a given part with an image. So some customers that we've talked to, they do have pretty good images that we can use. Most of them really don't have good images, so that's the reason that we need to come up with this machine. But the great thing is that we don't have to have images for all the parts. So this is another question that I got at TechCrunch was that we're actually not, we don't have any goal to take pictures of all the parts. That's crazy talk. We really just need basically a base part for every category and then we use computer vision to tie to the metadata associated with, this is getting a little bit. No, it's good. The meta is good. Sam, can you bring up the video that we're talking about? It's in that chat window on the side. I don't know if you have control. Me? Sorry, no, Sam. Okay. Let me see. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Joel, you were saying, you said this when we were talking to you, that if you have a screw that's half an inch, then you can apply that, whatever technology you have to screw, period, any screw of any kind, right? Is that the simplest way to say it? Yeah, so the thing about it, the easiest way to think about it is like a fingerprint. And so we're basically fingerprinting all the parts. And the things that go into the fingerprint are both the visual information that we get and the metadata that's associated with that. And then the other way to look at it is that we're creating hierarchies. So for screws, we have a hierarchy that is screws. And then from there, we break that into the types of heads that are on each screw. And then from there, we will get the thread count on each of those headed screws. It's complicated. But that's the way that we do the search. So in that sense of a hierarchy, we really just need one part that represents each of the, say, level three, which is the type of head that's on this screw. And that's how we do the search. Yeah, I actually have a question for you. When you're talking to software people and investors, do they get weirded out when you start talking about the real world? When you say the real world? Like when you're talking about a physical object, are people like, what are you talking about? That's not code. Like, is that ever a reaction? Huh, that's interesting. I mean, honestly, I feel like mostly we don't talk to people who really understand what we're talking about. I mean, in terms of investors, obviously there's tons of brilliant investors. But a lot of times, they are not in the position to like deep dive about what's really going on. Right. So as long as we can show them, which the nice thing is that the demo part is really simple. But the back end of it is just, there's a lot going on. So typically, we could just say, OK, look, this is how it works. We might pull up our back end to show them this is what's happening, or this is how we train, or these are the different algorithms that we have running. But typically, we don't go there. And maybe that just means we haven't gone far enough with some of the investors that we've been talking to. But yeah, usually they're like, OK, I get it. I understand generally what's going on here. Yeah, makes sense. Cool. I was just curious. There is another question that came across Twitter. And Alexis, I think you should take a stab at this one first. Somebody asked, they're writing from Austria. And they said how they're on Twitter. What's their Twitter handle? What is their Twitter handle? Hold on one second. All right. In the meantime, guten tag, Österreich. Yeah, finally. OK, this is, I'm going to butcher this. OK. SEDE1998. OK. SEDE1998. All right. And they say, I live in Austria, Innsbruck. It is pretty hard to find a co-founder that is great. How did you find yours? Ah, OK. Well, I... You have people that are looking for co-founders. Unfortunately, my story is not very helpful because I met them freshman year of college on move-in day. So go to college. This is a common issue. I'm sure there are some great founders in Innsbruck. Maybe Veeam might be a little better. But universities are really the best hub, right? What makes so many startup communities great is usually a great school there or schools because it's a bunch of young people who usually don't have anything holding them back from starting a company. Hopefully, they don't have anything sort of dependent on them. And they're thinking and they're doing and they're at this great time in their lives. So you can do that traditional stuff whether, I don't know, if you're of the age to be going to school. If you're not, I don't know, judging from your username, you're probably right about that point. There are actually more and more meetups than ever. Like seriously, meetup.org, Hacker News has a bunch of international meetups. Most of the major cities across the world now have some form of startup weekend that shows up there. Do a startup weekend. Do a hackathon. Google is your friend. But there are plenty of chances to meet up in meet space with other people interested in startups. So take advantage of that. And then there's actually a website. Oh, there's an app for that. Founder dating. Oh, is it like Tinder for… Oh yeah. Not Tinder for… Okay, the one I'm thinking of is… No, but it's like speed dating for founders, right? It's like… Yeah, I've started to see more and more founders introduce themselves that way as having met on itinerary. I mean, he's 16. I don't know if he's ready for that. Oh wow. Okay. If it's 1998, I'm guessing that he's 16, right? Yeah. Oh wow. Dude, you just… Or you, whoever you are, male or female. It's so early to be thinking of starting a startup, but good for you. Great. I have a childhood first too. I'm looking at his website. I think he has a startup. It's called Log You In. It seems pretty… I don't know what it is, what it does. I thought it'd be really cool. Great. All right, tweet at me and I'll try to help. The thing is, I mean, actually you all at PartPick have a great version of this story because this is the other common way a founder meetup happens. Yeah. So Jason and I worked together. Basically it's funny because we actually weren't in the same office, but we were really passionate about the same thing. So Jason recruited… This is a funny story. So Jason recruited me to join his team, which was our kind of 20% projects around diversity and basically getting more minority owned businesses using Google products. So this is when we were both at Google. And he heard about me because I got Howard, which I went to Howard, go Bison. I got Howard using Google Apps when I was still a student after my internship at Google. And so I think I had created a little buzz for myself. And Jason was like, hey, I'm the popular dude around here. Who's this girl? So… What's the problem with that? So he kind of… he had called me up even before I got… like even before my first day starting full time at Google, he recruited me to join the effort around getting more minority owned businesses using Google tools. So we started working together basically when I first got to Google. And we made it our mission to take what I had done at Howard and do that at all historically black colleges and universities. And we had a lot of success. We got like around 25, 30 HBCUs transitioned to Google Apps. Not just like considering it, but actually moved over. So… Within a year. Yeah, within a year. So… Like as an aside to our day jobs. Right. This was neither one of our day jobs. So we discovered, okay, we work really well together. And actually in this case, we're still not in the same place every day. So that was kind of a good, I guess, practice for part pick because in a sense, we're still doing the same thing because Jason's based in New York and I'm in Atlanta. So yeah, that's how we met and got started and we became really great friends. And he's one of the first people I called when I had the idea. Actually I'll say this. I say that a lot, but the real story is I was frustrated at McMaster and I was talking to Jason and telling him about it. And he was like, why don't you try to think of something that will make your time go by, really? And I was like, that's a good point. And so that's kind of how things really got started. And when I was like, ah, this is what I need to do, I called Jason and he was working at Shazam. And he was like, you guys know about recognition stuff. What are you doing? Give me the algorithms. Yeah, give me the stuff. Those geniuses come up with ways to recognize music. Let's do it for parts. So yeah, that's kind of how we got started. And then we found our technical team. I just started being really creepy and hanging out at Georgia Tech and meeting people like, what's up? But that kind of parlayed into us building relationships and bringing people on board. So that's our story. So there you go. Go to college, get a job, or just hang out at a college or a meetup. Just be aggressively cool and have people come to you. Is that what you do? And then find the people that are cool and go to them. And then once you go to them, they come back to you later. You close your laptop, you go outside, and you experience the world. Meet people, talk to people. You put on your Oculus Rift. And your robe and wizard hat. Wow. That's how Steven finds his co-founders. That is how you found me. Yeah, precisely. Cool. I think we're coming up on an hour. We're coming up on an hour, which is great. I think this was a great discussion. Cool. Does anyone have any final thoughts or anything to say before I stop this broadcast? Well I'm going to say something a little bit unrelated to Parfait. But I'm from Kansas City, so go Royals. Nice plug. Had to. I do that every year. Just for parity. Go other teams. Yeah. I still, the very doubt is out for me about whether or not baseball is really a sport. Probably because if one of your, look I'm going to get a lot of flack on Twitter for this. You can't do it in Japan. Watch out. No, sorry. Baseball is the one where all the fat guys stand on the dirt. Exactly. If one of the greatest baseball players ever in America was an overweight alcoholic, is that really a sport? Fat guys need a chance too. No, I know. But there are plenty of great roles to play in football for instance. And again, Jewel, I'm sorry about last Sunday. Oh no. That's a no there. But yesterday, that was pretty legit. I was really surprised. Yeah, that was a great game. That Redskins game was great. Good boy. Hold 45. Yeah, that's good. The Titans are continuing to disappoint me every single week. And the Falcons are no better. So yeah. Sorry, there's room on this bandwagon. We're just getting started. No, I will never join. You went to school in DC. Anyway. I did, but just now. For anybody else out there watching that hasn't seen the episode yet, do you guys want to give them a favorite moment to look out for or a preface to it? I just think it is so, not just because I'm in it, but I'm just really impressed by the production and it's just really well done. I was just like, man, I can't believe I'm just a part of this great stuff. This is good stuff. Also, I wasn't really sure the direction it was going to go, but I think you guys did a really great job of covering really the story, how it is for us right now, which I think a lot of people don't really get to see this segment of the journey. As much as for me it feels like, oh, this is so hard. I just want to get over this part of it. It is nice even just to see, okay, this is part of the journey. At least now people know we're still pressing, we're still going, and we're going to make it. Bye, Kelly. Thank you for letting us capture that part, too. It's not a lot of people get to see that. I think it's really helpful for a lot of people, too. Thank you. I thought it was really brave and really cool. Great. Awesome. Wait, we have one question from Twitter that I think we should answer. Alexis, Kunit Thakkar is asking, what is on your head, a crown, a VHS player? No because I didn't draw it, Kunit. I'm sorry. I think that was Kirk, a terrible artist. I think it's a crown and a VHS player. It's whatever you want it to be. Cool. All right, guys. All right, cool. Well, to everyone watching, assuming you haven't seen the episode, you can go to YouTube.com slash The Verge or you can just Google search Small Empires. It's up on TheVerge.com. It's up on YouTube. Also season one is available on the internet to watch. There's a bunch of great episodes there. And we'll be back next week. We're doing another Hangout and another episode of Small Empires will be out next week, too. Thanks to Alexis and Jason and Kirk and everyone else for joining us. And yeah, cool. We'll see you guys soon. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Nice to see you. Get some rest. I'm certainly hungry.
 And we're live.
 Hello and everyone, welcome to the first Small Empires Google Hangout live for season two.
 I'm Sam Sheffer, the Verge's social media manager, here with a bunch of fine folks.
 If you guys want to introduce yourselves, Stephen, go first and we'll go that way.
 This way, that way.
 I'm Stephen Green.
 I am the executive producer of Small Empires.
 This is my second year doing the show.
 Very excited to be here.
 Hey.
 That's all you get from me for right now.
 Hey, I'm Kirk Larson.
 I am the director of the second season of Small Empires.
 I am more excited than Stephen to be here.
 Yeah, take it away, part pick folks.
 Jewel, you go.
 Okay.
 I was like, I don't know which direction.
 Okay, I'm Jewel.
 I am the co-founder and CEO of Part Pick.
 And I think I'll probably be most excited to be here.
 Be back.
 Jason, where does that leave you, man?
 An interesting predicament.
 My name is Jason Crane, co-founder and CEO of Part Pick.
 And I'm probably the second most excited.
 I give that to Jewel.
 I give it to Jewel.
 Cool.
 Yeah, so for everybody tuning in, hopefully you caught the episode this morning.
 And we wanted to take some time just to kind of chat about Part Pick and field some questions.
 So if anybody has questions out there, use the hashtag Small Empires on Twitter and we'll
 try to get to them a bit later.
 Oh, and we are supposed to have Alexis Ohanian here today.
 I just want to point that out.
 But he is in Japan and it's four in the morning.
 It's the middle of the morning.
 Maybe the last Saki train is running a little late.
 Exactly.
 All right, so first order of business.
 How do we find Part Pick?
 Stephen, you found Part Pick.
 How did this happen?
 How do we locate these fine folks?
 Okay, I wanted to tell this story just because it was kind of important to me as we were
 trying to put the season together and starting to look at what kind of companies we were
 going to be featuring.
 I got to go out to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this past September.
 And the lovely Part Pick team was presenting on the first day.
 You guys were on the first day, right?
 Yes, we were.
 We were.
 Because we had to wait, I remember.
 So walk us through what that's like, the whole presentation at TechCrunch.
 I've seen the Silicon Valley HBO TV show and I see how nervous all those guys got before.
 Is it like that at all?
 Yes.
 Well, okay, so I watched the show too and there's no one fighting on stage.
 I remember that part of the episode where there was a fight.
 So none of that happened, which is great.
 But it was very nerve-wracking.
 I was very, very nervous.
 Like I'm sweaty.
 And I've done a lot of presentations before, but I just feel like the energy was really
 different there.
 It's like high pressure, Marissa Meyer's on stage.
 It's just really scary.
 She was one of the judges for you guys.
 Yes.
 Well, she was one of the final judges.
 But still, she's a person that I've always just admired and I've heard stories about.
 So I was just like, oh my God, that's so scary.
 But I have a little, I don't want to say ritual, but sort of thing I do to bring down the nerves
 before I go on stage.
 And actually as a team, we said a prayer.
 Everyone was just like, this is going to be okay.
 We're going to do this.
 We're going to kill it.
 And I think we did it pretty well.
 So it kind of worked out.
 So sitting in the audience, I was watching these guys and they came out and you did a
 presentation and then you actually get the demo part of it, right?
 So you had your technical team come out and they had a little overhead projector kind
 of thing that was showing what you could do with the app.
 And I just remember the whole time I was like, wow, this is like, it's a really different
 industry that you guys are attacking.
 You obviously have an incredible team and you're based in Atlanta.
 And at that point we knew we were going to be going to outside the Silicon Valley.
 And so when I heard Atlanta, I was like, okay, done.
 Let's talk, guys.
 Yeah, that's, I mean, I think probably we're the most different you could be.
 I mean, we're outside Silicon Valley.
 We're working on a very unsexy industry.
 We're doing a high, we basically have a very high tech solution.
 I mean, there's a lot of high tech companies at TechCrunch, but we're solving the problem
 using really, really difficult technology.
 So yeah, I'm glad that those things stood out to you.
 And so like what else happened after an event like that?
 Like what does it mean for a young company like you guys to be able to get on stage somewhere
 like that and to be able to show off?
 Jason, you want to take that?
 Yeah, sure.
 As Jules said, the energy at TechCrunch is phenomenal.
 And for us, it was our introduction to Silicon Valley.
 We had never really spoken to any investors in Silicon Valley.
 This was a super large stage for us.
 And so it was so busy, but for us it was like, okay, we're here and now all we have to
 do is do our part.
 The platform is there.
 And so as far as like what happened afterwards, it was just pretty much figuring out a way
 to address all of the interests from investors, just techies in general, people that are just
 interested about the technology, people that seen us doing Startup Alley and just wanted
 to ask more questions.
 So we spent a lot of time just dividing and conquering and making sure that we could talk
 to as many people as possible.
 Awesome.
 And so what's response been like, I mean, after all this, after the episode went up
 today, but has anything changed drastically since you guys were on stage there and now
 that we're talking here?
 Yeah, so I'll say I think we had certain expectations about what would happen after
 TechCrunch.
 And honestly, it hasn't been, okay, so let me take a step back.
 It's only been like a little bit over a month since TechCrunch.
 So things are happening, but in my mind, I always want things to happen faster.
 So we haven't necessarily closed any investors since TechCrunch.
 We've had a lot of really great meetings, but we're still kind of, I don't know, we're
 still kind of waiting for something to drop.
 So that's one thing where I was just like, oh, we get on stage at TechCrunch and we do
 really well, then all of our problems are going to be solved.
 And that's really not how it's been.
 But it has been pretty cool on the customer side.
 I mean, we've had a really steady flow of requests on our website or outreach from companies.
 So that's been cool.
 But we never really had a problem with customer interest.
 So it still leaves us in the same sort of predicament where we have all these potential
 customers and now even more.
 And we don't really have the resources to support them.
 And people are like, well, why don't you just get them to pay you?
 And the answer to that is, well, yeah, we will get them to pay us eventually, but if
 they're a large corporation, they're not going to pay us to build our team.
 They're not going to pay us to get the pieces in place to support them.
 That's called Kickstarter.
 We're not going to kickstart this.
 Right, exactly.
 So that's where we kind of still need seed funding to be able to get all the pieces in
 place so that we can actually go and launch with these big corporations.
 I will add to that that it was really inspiring to see how many people reached out to us afterwards
 because we didn't go and headhunt them.
 We didn't cold call or anything like that.
 We sort of waited.
 And day by day, more and more people reached out and called us, and it really speaks to
 how well we can serve the industry because people are eager for it.
 Oh, look, a wild Alexis has appeared.
 Hey, guys.
 Sorry for the delay.
 I was not asleep.
 I was just caught up in a board meeting.
 Oh, so I can draw on your face with this?
 Yeah, too much sake.
 We get it.
 Thank you.
 Keep it professional.
 For everyone watching, this is Alexis Ohanye.
 He is co-creative of Reddit and a bunch of other cool things and the show's host.
 So Alexis, how are things?
 How is Japan?
 It's going really well.
 Yeah, having a wonderful time here.
 Ohio, good morning to all of you.
 Actually no, we're having 420 here, but I guess it's Konichiwa.
 So we were just discussing, I was going to say, early stages of fundraising kind of stuff.
 And I think I want to take this time with the live chats to get into a little bit more
 technical stuff that we don't get to get into into the episode.
 So what advice do you guys have for people that are watching this episode and they're
 like, all right, this is what I needed to finally get everything together and start
 working all nights to put together my company.
 And they're just going to start approaching that seed ground.
 What are the things to be careful of with term sheets?
 Maybe what is a term sheet?
 And how do you know what to look out for?
 Wow, so a term sheet is basically a document that sets out the terms of the deal.
 So if you're going to be giving a piece of your company away to an investor or if you're
 going to do a convertible note, which are just two different ways to structure your
 financing round, the sheet basically just details all the legalities of it.
 So what's owed to who, at what point, and those types of things.
 So at this point, we are still really in the thick of term sheets.
 So we've gotten a few.
 We haven't liked a few.
 We've had people not be able to fulfill things that were put into term sheets.
 So we've kind of seen the ins and outs in our case so far.
 It hasn't been the greatest things that we've experienced as regards to term sheets, but
 that's part of it.
 And the great thing is that we've had a really amazing legal team that's helped us from the
 time that we were in an accelerator up until now.
 And we sent everything to them.
 So the one thing I would say as a piece of advice is don't sign things that you don't
 know what they mean.
 Definitely, yeah.
 I know a lot of people just are like, oh yeah, term sheet, done.
 Did you guys follow through that contract that you guys signed when you came on the
 show?
 Yeah, yeah, that wasn't a talent release.
 That was a term sheet.
 Yeah, Vox Media now owns PartPick.
 They were on our team.
 They've fully already reviewed it.
 We're good.
 Don't try to trick me.
 Yeah, so anyway, I was just saying that I think people should make sure that they're
 reading what they're getting and then also having some ideas.
 What are you not going to say yes to?
 I mean, like I said, we got some term sheets early and it's just like, no, we're not going
 to give you 5% of our company for no money or for your guidance, no thanks.
 So those are some things to look out for.
 People will ask for a lot of stuff.
 If you're not confident and you don't know what your company is worth or what you're
 willing to put on the table, they'll push the limits.
 So as you'll say, it's really important to have that foundation and know what you're
 willing to negotiate on when you sit down at the table.
 And the last thing I'll say on that is just knowing what you don't know.
 So I mean, in my case, I have a business background but I never negotiated a term sheet before.
 So it's really taken like reaching out to people, getting advice and seeing, okay, what
 do you think about this?
 Is this industry standard or no?
 Or at all?
 So that's kind of how we worked it so far.
 One of the things – is that a flower?
 I think it makes you look nice.
 One of the things that we've done at Y Combinator is we've open sourced some safe documents
 which it's kind of a remix of the convertible note which was a clever hack to make it as
 easy as possible to fundraise and safes are a slightly more elegant solution for this.
 But it's tricky, Greg, because early stage companies don't – it is really hard to
 value them and the advantage of using things like convertible debt or a safe is that you
 get to basically put off valuing them until later around when people can have a sort of
 better sense of what they're all worth.
 But even with this added simplicity, these things didn't even exist nine years ago
 when Steve and I were starting Reddit.
 Or I mean they existed, they just weren't common practice.
 What this world is moving towards now is one with I think more transparency and more founder
 friendliness although there are still ways to go.
 One of the things I'd love to see is for – if anyone wants to go out there and do
 this, an anonymized place to upload term sheets where you have to obviously be pretty confident
 they're going to stay that way.
 I guess you could do a little bit to self-censor but basically see what is market, right?
 Because right now as founders, we kind of have to go around and we have inefficient
 knowledge to know what's market here, what's market there, what's market – it's the
 advantage of networks that allow you to realize, okay, no, these terms are ridiculous or having
 that lawyer to talk to who says that's ridiculous.
 But if we actually knew in aggregate what really is market, you could then go to an
 investor and be like, please, I actually know this is not standard because here's a thousand
 deals just got done last year that don't have this.
 So some enterprising founder can work on this now.
 Yeah, I really actually – that's a great idea because even for us in Atlanta – or
 do it.
 Slide share just for the record, is that –
 Slide share?
 Yeah, or like –
 Powerpoint sharing?
 Nah, nah, man, you need – you basically need to be able to extract the very specific
 deal terms across the board just to know like what is a normal – what is normal right
 now for a typical kind of company.
 Sorry, I was just going to shout out to – I don't know if you guys saw what Buffer put
 out.
 I think it was like yesterday or the day before.
 But basically they're raising – I think they're raising like $3.5 million and they
 literally wrote out every single reason why and the term sheet and they put it on their
 website.
 Oh, yeah.
 And I thought it would be interesting just to see first of all that they're being so
 transparent.
 I don't know what – I don't necessarily know like the motives or everything but they
 put – they did this whole big write up about it.
 So maybe that will be a thing to kind of shift the chasm if you will around transparency
 and fundraising but I thought it was just a really interesting little tip.
 Yeah, they're also raising at 60.
 Huh, wow.
 And they share everyone's costs and all the revenue.
 This is really interesting.
 Yeah, yeah, and then you can become an investor as well.
 Hey, Sam, can we put a link to that?
 I think it's an interesting article to read.
 I mean I guess part of the – well, we'll figure that out.
 There's a chat window, right?
 Yes.
 All right, so big question of the episode, funding.
 How do you get it?
 Where do you get it from?
 And we kind of answered this in the episode but I think it would be fun to hear where
 you're at now.
 What happens if you guys got some big funder and you guys were like super set and on the
 right track?
 What would you guys do tomorrow?
 We would launch.
 Well, actually what we would do is we would put our team in place.
 So right now, full transparency, we have a really great team of folks who have gotten
 us to this point but because we haven't been able to compete with $100,000 plus offers
 that engineers have gotten or things of that nature, we really have to just borrow people
 when we can.
 But there are so many people that actually want to work for us full time.
 It's just the fact that they have families to feed or loans to pay off and so they really
 haven't been able to commit 100% of their time to Partfick.
 So the first thing is just getting everyone who has worked with us to this point and a
 few other people we've identified to be full time on Partfick.
 And then honestly, because we've done so much work to this point, everything else we really
 have the plans for is just a matter of executing and we really have the people on board to
 execute with is just a matter of having the team in place to do so.
 So those are, really it's around building out the team and launching.
 Submitted the pilot proposals, got initial approvals on those pilots and so everything
 pretty much is in place on the customer side.
 It's just a matter of having everyone in place to launch.
 It's just can you support it when that happens?
 Yes, exactly.
 And when we do launch and we're able to start to collect that data and really analyze the
 results of being in the market, that will go a long way with our funding conversations.
 That seems to be one of the pieces that unfortunately we're missing in our fundraising conversations.
 While we have the pipeline, we have the interest from both investors and clients because of
 our small team and inability to support a large corporation on just a few part-time
 employees.
 That will really help us in closing that gap in the fundraising.
 I got a question for you guys and I know it was sort of addressed in the episode.
 For those who haven't seen the episode yet, do you think it would help to be in Silicon
 Valley if you sort of just picked up and moved there at this point?
 The exposure is kind of snowballing in a sense now and maybe being there, being at a coffee
 shop with someone who knows someone who knows an investor.
 But you guys said you're loyal to your hometown.
 And then this also ties into, I got this question from someone on Twitter.
 Their question was why do you think other founders don't see the potential of where
 you guys live?
 So there's obviously value.
 You guys are in love with your own home, which makes sense.
 So the answer on the Silicon Valley question is, I've been kind of like, oh, maybe we could
 do it.
 But honestly I really don't think Silicon Valley is the place for part pick.
 The reason is because I don't know very many of any major manufacturers that are based
 there.
 So in terms of our customer base, it's really just not, it's really not in Silicon Valley,
 period.
 As far as investors though, yes, it probably would be easier, maybe.
 Honestly, it's hard to say if location is the thing, that hasn't been the number one
 thing that people have given to me as an objection.
 It may be easier just because I'm kind of, would be able to be more in people's faces.
 And I think maybe for a set period of time would be great to be out there.
 But I just think for where we are, the most important thing is for us to be close to our
 customers and close to the talent.
 So one thing we talked about in the episode is like, Georgia Tech has a really great,
 there's a really great pipeline coming out of Georgia Tech.
 And then other schools on the East Coast.
 So we're seeing people coming from Carnegie Mellon that have really great skills in this
 area, NYU.
 So the schools that are gonna be the feeders for the technology that we're working on are
 really not, I mean obviously Sanford has a great program too.
 But I just don't think Silicon Valley is the place for part pick.
 Temporarily, maybe.
 But in terms of long term and being close to our customers, definitely think that Atlanta,
 New York is getting more looks just because there's more going on in the investment area
 there.
 And then we are still relatively close to a good customer base.
 But I'd say East Coast for sure.
 And then my family.
 And I really just want to be close to my family.
 So yeah.
 Go Atlanta.
 And then you asked another question, sorry, about...
 Why do you think other founders don't see the potential of where you live?
 Maybe they just don't know your sort of industry.
 Because you said like your business is not like many other Silicon Valley businesses
 and the industry is very much focused around Atlanta too.
 Honestly I think that has to do with the culture of tech right now.
 And honestly really the spirit of where people are starting businesses from.
 What is it that is within them that makes them want to start a business?
 And not to say that people aren't starting from genuine places, but it was really my
 experience in this industry that made me feel like okay, this is literally not going to
 work for me.
 I'm not going to be able to work in this company because I think this is so horrible that I
 really just...
 I have to come up with something because I can't deal and my team, they are seeing them
 every day and they're just miserable.
 They're crying to me about how much they hate their jobs.
 And so I'm not knocking any of the other companies that are in Silicon Valley, but I think a
 lot of the companies are founded maybe not from the most genuine place.
 They're not from actually pain.
 It's more like this is a nice to have thing or this would be really fun or cool, but not
 like no, you don't understand, I'm depressed.
 I can't do my job because it sucks.
 It's just different and I think that there are a lot of people are coming from genuine
 areas of pain that are outside of Silicon Valley.
 And so I don't know why people...
 So anyway, I think maybe the culture is just the thing that's a little bit different that
 you'll find in different areas that you won't necessarily find in the Valley.
 You know, Joel, it's actually funny.
 We were at a factory shooting.
 Well, it wasn't a factory, but I don't want to give away what's going to happen.
 We were at this place shooting and they were on the McMaster Car website and this guy was
 just scrolling through a page looking for something and he couldn't find it.
 I just said to him, I was like, hey, we just did this piece on this company where you can
 take a picture of the part that you need and they'll just look it up for you.
 He looked at me and he was just like, are you serious?
 Really?
 I was like, yeah.
 He's like, how do I get it?
 I was like, you can't.
 He just got really mad and I had to walk away.
 People want to do this.
 People would be psyched for this.
 Yeah, it's really cool.
 I think starting with PartPick, obviously there's a lot of frustrating days and things
 where I'm just like, I want to give up.
 The most energizing thing is that every time I pitch it or every time I tell someone this
 is what I'm working on, they always answer me with a story.
 They always say, oh, that would be so helpful for this one time and I was trying to fix
 this thing and I couldn't figure out what it was.
 I wish I had PartPick.
 That's always the response.
 It never fails.
 That makes me feel like, okay, well at least this is something that people will find valuable.
 I know that for a fact because literally the thousands of times I've been talking to people,
 they always give me a story.
 I'm going to segue with that.
 There's another Twitter question here.
 What other industries does PartPick see itself aiming at?
 Go ahead, Jason.
 As far as industries, parts are parts.
 You can look around the room and everything you see is made up of a ton of different parts.
 We really designed the technology to be able to adapt and be flexible around all different
 types of parts.
 We still have some research and some things to do in our roadmap to address those other
 industries.
 We are confident that our methodologies will work across other industries.
 We started with fasteners and plumbing.
 Some of the low hanging fruit is automotive, which is a huge industry, not just in the
 US but globally.
 Electrical supplies.
 Imagine doing more around home repair.
 Imagine having all of IKEA's parts in the palm of your hand and accessible just by taking
 a picture.
 There are a ton of different industries as far as the types of parts that we are catering
 to.
 We also have to recognize that we are trying to be progressive with visual recognition.
 Our methodology and the way that we approach visual recognition is very different than
 a lot of the visual recognition companies that exist.
 That attention to detail, we are hoping that it will continue to evolve and push the recognition
 space forward.
 Especially since TechCrunch, we've had so much interest not just from potential clients
 but from other partners who are like, we could use that for something that our public hasn't
 even thought of yet.
 But it's still using the visual recognition technology, the artificial intelligence if
 you will, of computer simulated vision to be able to solve problems.
 I think that's one of the great flexible points of that public-
 So we didn't actually get to show this in the episode, but I want you guys to talk about
 the thing that you kind of dreamed up, the scanner belt.
 Can you explain that?
 I don't know if you have a link that you can share.
 Yes.
 I'll tell you about that.
 That was really an answer to an objection.
 The objection was, hard pick sounds great, but how are you going to scale?
 In my mind, I always thought, okay, there are tons and tons of websites that have images
 of tons and tons of things.
 I never thought that someone could say with a straight face, hard pick isn't going to
 work because you're not going to be able to get all the images.
 But that has been one of the objections.
 As a response to that, I said, okay, well, if we needed to actually image all of the
 parts, what would be the quickest way for us to do that?
 It's obviously not very quick for me to take all the pictures of the parts, so what if
 we could just automate that process?
 We got with some mechanical engineers to spec out this machine where basically it's just
 a conveyor belt and you just send parts down the line and we have cameras on all angles
 capturing images and putting them automatically into our database.
 Basically it just automates that process.
 It's a pretty simple idea, but that's an answer to the objection of, oh, how are you going
 to scale?
 Well, now we have this idea really specced out around getting a thousand parts into the
 database per day, so that's kind of the thing there and that's another thing that we're
 fundraising to actually be able to build it out and launch that as well.
 Jason?
 Because the database doesn't exist at all, right?
 You guys are doing this from scratch.
 So to a certain extent, the database for the clients, the customers, the national dealers
 have probably talked a little bit about this, but they do have components of it.
 So for the parts that they sent us to put into the database, they already had the specs
 associated with each part, but they just didn't have good images associated with those specs.
 So we don't have to do the databasing from start to finish.
 We just have to plug in to the existing databases that they have and then associate each of
 the specs for a given part with an image.
 So some customers that we've talked to, they do have pretty good images that we can use.
 Most of them really don't have good images, so that's the reason that we need to come
 up with this machine.
 But the great thing is that we don't have to have images for all the parts.
 So this is another question that I got at TechCrunch was that we're actually not, we
 don't have any goal to take pictures of all the parts.
 That's crazy talk.
 We really just need basically a base part for every category and then we use computer
 vision to tie to the metadata associated with, this is getting a little bit.
 No, it's good.
 The meta is good.
 Sam, can you bring up the video that we're talking about?
 It's in that chat window on the side.
 I don't know if you have control.
 Me?
 Sorry, no, Sam.
 Okay.
 Let me see.
 Yeah, I mean, yeah, Joel, you were saying, you said this when we were talking to you,
 that if you have a screw that's half an inch, then you can apply that, whatever technology
 you have to screw, period, any screw of any kind, right?
 Is that the simplest way to say it?
 Yeah, so the thing about it, the easiest way to think about it is like a fingerprint.
 And so we're basically fingerprinting all the parts.
 And the things that go into the fingerprint are both the visual information that we get
 and the metadata that's associated with that.
 And then the other way to look at it is that we're creating hierarchies.
 So for screws, we have a hierarchy that is screws.
 And then from there, we break that into the types of heads that are on each screw.
 And then from there, we will get the thread count on each of those headed screws.
 It's complicated.
 But that's the way that we do the search.
 So in that sense of a hierarchy, we really just need one part that represents each of
 the, say, level three, which is the type of head that's on this screw.
 And that's how we do the search.
 Yeah, I actually have a question for you.
 When you're talking to software people and investors, do they get weirded out when you
 start talking about the real world?
 When you say the real world?
 Like when you're talking about a physical object, are people like, what are you talking
 about?
 That's not code.
 Like, is that ever a reaction?
 Huh, that's interesting.
 I mean, honestly, I feel like mostly we don't talk to people who really understand what
 we're talking about.
 I mean, in terms of investors, obviously there's tons of brilliant investors.
 But a lot of times, they are not in the position to like deep dive about what's really going
 on.
 Right.
 So as long as we can show them, which the nice thing is that the demo part is really
 simple.
 But the back end of it is just, there's a lot going on.
 So typically, we could just say, OK, look, this is how it works.
 We might pull up our back end to show them this is what's happening, or this is how we
 train, or these are the different algorithms that we have running.
 But typically, we don't go there.
 And maybe that just means we haven't gone far enough with some of the investors that
 we've been talking to.
 But yeah, usually they're like, OK, I get it.
 I understand generally what's going on here.
 Yeah, makes sense.
 Cool.
 I was just curious.
 There is another question that came across Twitter.
 And Alexis, I think you should take a stab at this one first.
 Somebody asked, they're writing from Austria.
 And they said how they're on Twitter.
 What's their Twitter handle?
 What is their Twitter handle?
 Hold on one second.
 All right.
 In the meantime, guten tag, Österreich.
 Yeah, finally.
 OK, this is, I'm going to butcher this.
 OK.
 SEDE1998.
 OK.
 SEDE1998.
 All right.
 And they say, I live in Austria, Innsbruck.
 It is pretty hard to find a co-founder that is great.
 How did you find yours?
 Ah, OK.
 Well, I...
 You have people that are looking for co-founders.
 Unfortunately, my story is not very helpful because I met them freshman year of college
 on move-in day.
 So go to college.
 This is a common issue.
 I'm sure there are some great founders in Innsbruck.
 Maybe Veeam might be a little better.
 But universities are really the best hub, right?
 What makes so many startup communities great is usually a great school there or schools
 because it's a bunch of young people who usually don't have anything holding them back from
 starting a company.
 Hopefully, they don't have anything sort of dependent on them.
 And they're thinking and they're doing and they're at this great time in their lives.
 So you can do that traditional stuff whether, I don't know, if you're of the age to be
 going to school.
 If you're not, I don't know, judging from your username, you're probably right about
 that point.
 There are actually more and more meetups than ever.
 Like seriously, meetup.org, Hacker News has a bunch of international meetups.
 Most of the major cities across the world now have some form of startup weekend that
 shows up there.
 Do a startup weekend.
 Do a hackathon.
 Google is your friend.
 But there are plenty of chances to meet up in meet space with other people interested
 in startups.
 So take advantage of that.
 And then there's actually a website.
 Oh, there's an app for that.
 Founder dating.
 Oh, is it like Tinder for…
 Oh yeah.
 Not Tinder for…
 Okay, the one I'm thinking of is…
 No, but it's like speed dating for founders, right?
 It's like…
 Yeah, I've started to see more and more founders introduce themselves that way as having met
 on itinerary.
 I mean, he's 16.
 I don't know if he's ready for that.
 Oh wow.
 Okay.
 If it's 1998, I'm guessing that he's 16, right?
 Yeah.
 Oh wow.
 Dude, you just…
 Or you, whoever you are, male or female.
 It's so early to be thinking of starting a startup, but good for you.
 Great.
 I have a childhood first too.
 I'm looking at his website.
 I think he has a startup.
 It's called Log You In.
 It seems pretty…
 I don't know what it is, what it does.
 I thought it'd be really cool.
 Great.
 All right, tweet at me and I'll try to help.
 The thing is, I mean, actually you all at PartPick have a great version of this story
 because this is the other common way a founder meetup happens.
 Yeah.
 So Jason and I worked together.
 Basically it's funny because we actually weren't in the same office, but we were really
 passionate about the same thing.
 So Jason recruited…
 This is a funny story.
 So Jason recruited me to join his team, which was our kind of 20% projects around diversity
 and basically getting more minority owned businesses using Google products.
 So this is when we were both at Google.
 And he heard about me because I got Howard, which I went to Howard, go Bison.
 I got Howard using Google Apps when I was still a student after my internship at Google.
 And so I think I had created a little buzz for myself.
 And Jason was like, hey, I'm the popular dude around here.
 Who's this girl?
 So…
 What's the problem with that?
 So he kind of… he had called me up even before I got… like even before my first
 day starting full time at Google, he recruited me to join the effort around getting more
 minority owned businesses using Google tools.
 So we started working together basically when I first got to Google.
 And we made it our mission to take what I had done at Howard and do that at all historically
 black colleges and universities.
 And we had a lot of success.
 We got like around 25, 30 HBCUs transitioned to Google Apps.
 Not just like considering it, but actually moved over.
 So…
 Within a year.
 Yeah, within a year.
 So…
 Like as an aside to our day jobs.
 Right.
 This was neither one of our day jobs.
 So we discovered, okay, we work really well together.
 And actually in this case, we're still not in the same place every day.
 So that was kind of a good, I guess, practice for part pick because in a sense, we're
 still doing the same thing because Jason's based in New York and I'm in Atlanta.
 So yeah, that's how we met and got started and we became really great friends.
 And he's one of the first people I called when I had the idea.
 Actually I'll say this.
 I say that a lot, but the real story is I was frustrated at McMaster and I was talking
 to Jason and telling him about it.
 And he was like, why don't you try to think of something that will make your time go by,
 really?
 And I was like, that's a good point.
 And so that's kind of how things really got started.
 And when I was like, ah, this is what I need to do, I called Jason and he was working at
 Shazam.
 And he was like, you guys know about recognition stuff.
 What are you doing?
 Give me the algorithms.
 Yeah, give me the stuff.
 Those geniuses come up with ways to recognize music.
 Let's do it for parts.
 So yeah, that's kind of how we got started.
 And then we found our technical team.
 I just started being really creepy and hanging out at Georgia Tech and meeting people like,
 what's up?
 But that kind of parlayed into us building relationships and bringing people on board.
 So that's our story.
 So there you go.
 Go to college, get a job, or just hang out at a college or a meetup.
 Just be aggressively cool and have people come to you.
 Is that what you do?
 And then find the people that are cool and go to them.
 And then once you go to them, they come back to you later.
 You close your laptop, you go outside, and you experience the world.
 Meet people, talk to people.
 You put on your Oculus Rift.
 And your robe and wizard hat.
 Wow.
 That's how Steven finds his co-founders.
 That is how you found me.
 Yeah, precisely.
 Cool.
 I think we're coming up on an hour.
 We're coming up on an hour, which is great.
 I think this was a great discussion.
 Cool.
 Does anyone have any final thoughts or anything to say before I stop this broadcast?
 Well I'm going to say something a little bit unrelated to Parfait.
 But I'm from Kansas City, so go Royals.
 Nice plug.
 Had to.
 I do that every year.
 Just for parity.
 Go other teams.
 Yeah.
 I still, the very doubt is out for me about whether or not baseball is really a sport.
 Probably because if one of your, look I'm going to get a lot of flack on Twitter for
 this.
 You can't do it in Japan.
 Watch out.
 No, sorry.
 Baseball is the one where all the fat guys stand on the dirt.
 Exactly.
 If one of the greatest baseball players ever in America was an overweight alcoholic, is
 that really a sport?
 Fat guys need a chance too.
 No, I know.
 But there are plenty of great roles to play in football for instance.
 And again, Jewel, I'm sorry about last Sunday.
 Oh no.
 That's a no there.
 But yesterday, that was pretty legit.
 I was really surprised.
 Yeah, that was a great game.
 That Redskins game was great.
 Good boy.
 Hold 45.
 Yeah, that's good.
 The Titans are continuing to disappoint me every single week.
 And the Falcons are no better.
 So yeah.
 Sorry, there's room on this bandwagon.
 We're just getting started.
 No, I will never join.
 You went to school in DC.
 Anyway.
 I did, but just now.
 For anybody else out there watching that hasn't seen the episode yet, do you guys want to
 give them a favorite moment to look out for or a preface to it?
 I just think it is so, not just because I'm in it, but I'm just really impressed by the
 production and it's just really well done.
 I was just like, man, I can't believe I'm just a part of this great stuff.
 This is good stuff.
 Also, I wasn't really sure the direction it was going to go, but I think you guys did
 a really great job of covering really the story, how it is for us right now, which I
 think a lot of people don't really get to see this segment of the journey.
 As much as for me it feels like, oh, this is so hard.
 I just want to get over this part of it.
 It is nice even just to see, okay, this is part of the journey.
 At least now people know we're still pressing, we're still going, and we're going to make
 it.
 Bye, Kelly.
 Thank you for letting us capture that part, too.
 It's not a lot of people get to see that.
 I think it's really helpful for a lot of people, too.
 Thank you.
 I thought it was really brave and really cool.
 Great.
 Awesome.
 Wait, we have one question from Twitter that I think we should answer.
 Alexis, Kunit Thakkar is asking, what is on your head, a crown, a VHS player?
 No because I didn't draw it, Kunit.
 I'm sorry.
 I think that was Kirk, a terrible artist.
 I think it's a crown and a VHS player.
 It's whatever you want it to be.
 Cool.
 All right, guys.
 All right, cool.
 Well, to everyone watching, assuming you haven't seen the episode, you can go to YouTube.com
 slash The Verge or you can just Google search Small Empires.
 It's up on TheVerge.com.
 It's up on YouTube.
 Also season one is available on the internet to watch.
 There's a bunch of great episodes there.
 And we'll be back next week.
 We're doing another Hangout and another episode of Small Empires will be out next week, too.
 Thanks to Alexis and Jason and Kirk and everyone else for joining us.
 And yeah, cool.
 We'll see you guys soon.
 Thanks.
 Bye.
 Thank you.
 Nice to see you.
 Get some rest.
 I'm certainly hungry.