Speaker 1:
In a world captivated by criticism and negative clickbait headlines, it's easy to overlook the scope and power of technologies propelling us forward. At Tech Optimist, we delve into the vibrant intersection of technology and entrepreneurship, shining a light on innovators who are building a better future. As members of the most active venture capital firm in the United States, our unique vantage point offers us insights into the real world impact of technology. Join us as we explore, celebrate, and contribute to the stories of those creating tomorrow.

Mike Collins:
Welcome to episode seven of the Tech Optimist podcast. In the show, we cover topics at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. We have a new segment today called Three Breakthroughs. Drew Wandzilak, and I picked three things that we think are most notable technology breakthroughs the last week or two, and discuss those and try and make them accessible to a broad audience. Enjoy the show. In block one, we have a new segment called Three Breakthroughs. In the segment I talked to Drew Wandzilak. Drew is an associate at Alumni Ventures. We talk about three new breakthroughs in the tech industry that have happened over the last couple of weeks. We try to make those topics accessible and point to how they can impact real people in their lives in the near future.
Then in block two, we have Itamar Benedy. He's the co-founder and CEO of Anzu, a company that's developed an in-game advertising platform. As we all know, eyeballs are where it's at, attention economy, and people game. So advertising will follow. We'll learn a little bit more about Anzu. Finally, in block three, I have a conversation with Steve Chen. He's the founder and CEO of New Retirement. This is a AV portfolio company that utilizes AI to build a comprehensive financial planning model for people. They use a fee-based system, so it's not a function of AUM, which is really a great choice for people. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
As a reminder, the Tech Optimist Podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized financial advice and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities for additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.
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Okay, here's our segment three breakthroughs. This is where we try to identify three things that we think are most likely to change the world. All right, Drew, welcome to the Tech Optimist Podcast. We're going to try a new segment today where we're talking about three breakthroughs that we think basically happened in the last week or so, and hopefully bring those to the attention of people. Talk about it a little bit and have some fun with it. So who's going first today?

Drew Wandzilak:
I think you're going first with some new updates in drug discovery.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. So for mine, I'm picking AlphaFold, the AlphaFold announcement. And just to set some context, at the JP Morgan conference, the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, he really talked about drug discovery moving from scientific discovery to engineering. And I think that was.... And we'll put that clip in there, but I think it was really striking that when you can move things into the engineering realm, you start experiencing geometric improvements. And I think-

Drew Wandzilak:
Can you describe, when we're talking about going from science to the engineering world, what does that mean and why now? Why haven't we done this before?

Mike Collins:
Yeah, I would describe it as, obviously you have scientific frameworks and ideas about systems and processes, but it's a little bit hit-and-miss. It's like, let's try this. Let's design this automobile shape and then we're going to put it in a wind tunnel and see how aerodynamic it is. But it takes a long time in clay to make the model and it's like, this worked, now we got to go back and make a new one. But if you can do that in software and you create a simulated automobile and you can run models and iterate, it's just again, orders of magnitude better. And again, I think for me, that's why for one of the three breakthroughs of the week, I'm picking this AlphaFold announcement.
And again, just to keep it at the strategic level of a discussion, it basically allows people to model proteins, small molecules, and all the things that go into drug discovery. And so you can basically do it in a software simulation and can greatly shorten the time of trial and error hit-and-miss that would take place in a laboratory. I think people have all... I mean family members who have had disease, cancer, and you sit there and it's so frustrating to see, hey, there's promising technologies, but it's in phase one trials and that's five to 10 years from actually at scale helping people... And even before you hit. And that's phase one is the starting gate. Companies spend years and years three to seven just in the wind tunnel if you will. And so bringing more and more of biology into models and software where you can find of side effects, how things work, trial and error in software I just think is huge.
I think if he is right and we are moving into the engineering phase of drug discovery, I think there's something to be very excited about. I mean, we've talked before that I think one of the more underestimated technologies right now are this family of peptides, GLP-1 drugs that I think we're just at the beginning of understanding of how they work on certain important systems of the body. And I think in five years people are going to... The vast majority of the population is going to be able to be at their target weight, which is transformative to a society where half the population is overweight and a quarter is obese. I think this is like that. I think the ability to really get at some nasty diseases, I think that the ability to get at niche diseases with some of these breakthroughs are really exciting. And part of, listen, I am not a biologist, but I can read the room and I can see and read the enthusiasm of people who know what the hell they're talking about in this space. And when they're excited, I'm excited. So, for me, that's number one.

Drew Wandzilak:
Yeah, I think it's a great announcement and it's something that I think we've been hearing for years, right? It's like computers are going to revolutionize pharmaceuticals and drug discovery, AI is going to revolutionize drug discovery. And I've always read that and gone, great, we have artificial-

Mike Collins:
Where is it?

Drew Wandzilak:
Where is it and why is there such a bottleneck? Why is this so hard to do? And when you shared this, I mean that piece on simulation I think is the most important. And that is what has been so incredibly hard to achieve because human bodies are complex, there are billions, trillions of data points, how a drug can interact, how our bodies interact. And so being able to model that is hard to do. And we got to a point where I think we could get the data points, but then the actual simulation, analyzing that and then over a period of time, I mean we're seeing this across other industries as well, is if a study has to take 10 years because you've got to understand the effects 10, 15, 20 years down the line, people can't wait for life-saving drugs or for that long. So if we can review that.

Mike Collins:
And it's also money. Because some of these things because they take 15 to 25 years soup to nuts, and then you find out at later stages in year seven of this process that something didn't work or there was this nasty side effect and you've already spent $500 million to get there. Our business, it's a hit business, it's a power law business. Bringing these drugs to market, if you can do it in software, you're probably reducing the cost by an order of magnitude, which also then feeds into what companies have to charge for drugs. So I just think it's like when you can digitize something, a whole new ball game. We've got a whole new order of magnitude arsenal to do things. So again, talk about an area to go into that is super exciting right now is at the intersection of software, AI. Jensen also talked about even within the physical world of instrumentation and robotic surgery, the combination of AI and robotics, the physical world and the software world, going to the next level is also I think something not to be underestimated. So it's just super exciting.

Drew Wandzilak:
And neither of us are recommending or in favor of reducing clinical trials or safety regulations from the FDA. Can we reduce those bottlenecks where it isn't a regulatory bottleneck? And time is a constraint. And to your point, I mean that's producing costs for the end user, the end patient, and getting these drugs to market faster hopefully.

Mike Collins:
So that's a good one. All right, what's yours?

Drew Wandzilak:
I'm actually staying in the drug discovery realm. So there was an announcement, we've made some progress on what's being called inverse vaccines. So looking at the percent of the population that deals with autoimmune disorders and disease, one in 10 people. And right now, so as a vaccine would work is attacking antigens from a virus or a bacteria. And then in autoimmune disorders, it's your body essentially attacking itself. And so there's current drugs in the market, right? Humira, Stelara, 20 billion and 14 billion respectively in annual sales. So these are big markets. The problem with those drugs is they essentially tell your immune system to relax and to calm down. So there's less of this inflammatory response to-

Mike Collins:
It calms down everything.

Drew Wandzilak:
But it calms down everything. So you're susceptible to more disease. So it's helping the self response, but you're still susceptible to external response. And so they've created these new developments where it's actually sending the self-antigen, so the part of the immune system that's reacting to parts of our own body into the liver. And by doing that, it's helping to train our body, understand that these are not necessarily threats to our body and it calms down those reactions. So really interesting. You get the benefits hopefully of what a typical autoimmune drug would do without the downsides of making you more susceptible to disease.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. So it's this theme of more targeted, right? So it's like because seeing this with, I mean this is obviously that a lot of the historical approaches to cancer let's poison you, but it poisons the cancer more kind of thing and just all the side effects that come along with it. But if we can go into the human system, which is incredibly complicated with a much more targeted response attack, either offense or defense or in this case targeting the body to tone down on one vector, not just broadly. Really interesting, yeah.

Drew Wandzilak:
And maybe not for the doctors or the scientists listening, but to your point on targeting mean, this is when we talk about simulation, when we talk about modeling, that's a big part of, we know how to do a lot of things. We know how to stop a lot of things. The problem that I think a lot of drugs face is can you stop X thing without Y thing happening? And to understand that at a really granular deep level, it requires understanding all the elements of the body, what is going to be impacted when we put this drug or we put this molecule into a body? Can we get the positive benefits without the negative effects? And that's been I think holding it back a lot of these drugs that aren't necessarily safe to go to market because of those negative side effects.

Mike Collins:
And what was it? Was it a scientific paper? Was it a product release? What triggered you to put this on the list for the week?

Drew Wandzilak:
Yeah, it was a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. So it was in a paper, it was just on mice. They've been very clear. They don't know if this will be effective in humans yet. But I think it's promising, especially when you think about just how big this market is and how many people are affected by disease and disorders that are autoimmune.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, no, I mean the size of the market opportunity, I think it's surprising to some people, how many people are on these drugs.

Drew Wandzilak:
All right, Mike, what's your next breakthrough?

Mike Collins:
So my third one was, there was a couple, but I'm going to go with the ChatGPT 4.0 announcement. And I think the reason I picked it was it was an interesting announcement. It was clearly a sexy demo, but I think the reason I picked it is the pace of change here is just something in 30 years that I have not seen. And so I'm really picking it for that, just the Delta we're seeing with the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world in an arms race here. And again, I saw evolutions in the personal computer, I saw evolution in the internet, and mobile computing and just even take the iPhone, which really disrupted computing, putting it in your pocket, amazing user interface innovation there. I mean we talked generations of iPhone that were basically every year, and I think there was a big breakthrough about the iPhone three, four where you were really starting, but you absolutely wanted to buy every iPhone because each generation was way better than the previous generation.
Now it's like, okay, every two or three years... Now, I think Apple's got some stuff off its sleeve that's going to be pretty exciting. I would be shocked if they aren't all in on AI assistance. I think Sam Altman, in this release, is getting some live data for whatever Siri 2.0 is going to be from Apple. But I would be shocked if Apple isn't going to be all in on an AI digital assistant that's safe and on your phone and your data is safe on the special chip. I don't know, don't have any insider information, but would you be shocked if that doesn't play out? But those were year cycles. Now it is like every two months or every month we are seeing, oh shit, jaw dropping improvements in what these tools can do, how they cost, how broadly available they are.
And so I'm picking it just because I just think this is one hype cycle that may be under hyped. Because again, I'm just looking at plot points of improvement and if you extrapolate this ahead three years, five years, it's already, I think far exceeding people's ability to digest that. They're like, oh, I can't handle it. I just, I'm trying to get through the day, but these tools that are now available are going to change our society 100%. The demo on a learning assistant that is looking at you and reading what you're writing and asking you questions, the voice believability is just at a totally different level. The ability for it to see, I think we crossed, we're very close to crossing her threshold. I mean, the demo where you had the person applying for a job and the female assistant saying, hey, you might want to change your shirt and leave the hat at home, is I think way more constructive than a lot of people would find that they're getting from their current life partner.

Drew Wandzilak:
I mean, it's worth watching the announcement. It's pretty incredible stuff. But that was part of the big, maybe breakthrough is too strong of a word, but this multimodal audio, video speech, being able to understand and contextualize and respond to that in real time is you mentioned her, the movie her. That's the breakthrough we've been looking for. It's one thing if you can type a prompt into the chat GPT, and then a couple seconds later it spits back out a response to you. But when you can turn your phone around and say, what am I looking at? And it can describe what you're looking at, and then you can interact with that.

Mike Collins:
And it's fast and it's instantaneous. The latency, the natural language interaction, I've got it up on my phone and it's like I'm talking to instead of Googling stuff. And so that's real world, and these are practical today, the language thing. So the ability to sit down with somebody if you're... This sounds trite, but I think these things are powerful, is like to sit down and speak to someone in real time in my language and they're hearing it in their language and we're having a conversation because it's basically the UN translator in your ear thing going on. And so I think it's like, hey, I need to rethink recommending taking four years of high school Spanish. Maybe that needs to be replaced by four years of cultural immersion or something like that. But the actual practicality of having to sit in language lab for four years, it's like, no, thanks.

Drew Wandzilak:
There is something really interesting brewing here. I think 10 years from now we're going to look back and go, it was all connected. And we look at the last couple big technology trends, buzzwords, whatever you want to call them. You have blockchain technology, you have AR, VR, XR, and then now you have what's going on in AI and they seem disconnected. They seem like there's these separate innovations, but when we're talking about this multimodal live fast reaction to what's happening around you, being able to communicate that to you, does that not fit perfectly into this Apple vision of their Apple vision Pro? Right? What's the unlock there for them on spatial computing? You want to have Siri in your headset, not just something that you can talk to but understands what you're seeing is that the breakthrough there? And then tying in the blockchain pieces, if we're living in this digital world where it's mixed between mixed reality and the real world-

Mike Collins:
It's hard to know what's real and what's not.

Drew Wandzilak:
What's real and what's not, and how can we create essentially these permanent structures of identity of money flows. What is a fake anonymous actor versus who's a real person person. And so, one at a time, they seem like these big buzzy breakthroughs, but I think we're going to look back and see that everything molded together. Maybe not in the nicest or fastest way possible, but there's definitely this thread that's starting to expose itself.

Mike Collins:
No, I think that comment is actually very profound in that I think as a venture capital firm and as venture capitalists, oh, where do you invest? Where do you think what's next? I actually think there's really interesting work at the intersection of these huge technology waves. And as you point out is what is the Venn diagram between blockchain, AR and AI? What is the Venn diagram between telemedicine and robotics and testing technologies? Energy is also in this mix, right? I mean, we're talking about energy requirements. At the end of the day, you're going to build these data centers, you're going to energy storage. So there's all kinds of innovations going on, but I think a lot of people right now are investing in buckets. And I think there has been a lot of venture firms that have been raised around verticals.
And I think where the action really is to take two of these major trends that look, as you mentioned, disparate, and there's great new companies to be built at those intersections. And so I think I've made the point where I think there's somewhere between eight and 15 major trends that are order of magnitude on the equivalent of the innovation of the iPhone. And instead of a couple of things, there's literally 10. And not only are you going to have amazing new businesses being created, I also think that there's going to be huge productivity gains of existing businesses. The incumbents are going to do just fine if you have certain aspects of your business where these technologies are just going to be an accelerant or an efficiency machine. But I think the place that is not being looked at closely enough is actually, as you point out, intersectional, where can I bring AI and robotics together and a market problem or something kind of thing. Okay. I think pretty good ones. Yeah.

Drew Wandzilak:
Yeah, some good ones. I just wanted to say, I think you brought up a good point of you're almost taking it a level deeper. When you look at some of these really effective or notable VCs, it's like understanding that Venn diagram, understanding the intersection, and then what are the side effects of that intersection, good and bad, you and about energy, ChatGPT uses the same amount as 17,000 homes every single day.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, it's like a small country, right?

Drew Wandzilak:
Yeah. It's more than Iceland, right? It's like this is insane. So it's like as these things intersect, it's not only can we find opportunities in that intersection, but what does that mean for all the infrastructure that world that we view would require?

Mike Collins:
And again, that's the whole theme of tech optimist, which is there's a new wave, there's value created, we're moving things forward, but there's always negative unintended consequences. And instead of retreating back, let's go back to some romantic notion of the past. No, what you have to do is now take those problems and go solve those things. So you invent the automobile. We're not going to go back to horse and buggy automobiles, however, have created all these externality problems, including 50,000 car deaths a year. Okay, let's go solve that problem. It's doing bad things at the atmosphere. Okay, let's go solve that problem. Well, in solving that problem, you're creating another problem. Okay, well, again, you can't go backwards. That is life, that's existence, that's darwinism. You just got to keep plowing ahead. Okay, interesting inaugural episode. We'll talk again in a couple of weeks with Drew, and three more big breakthroughs. I'm not going to tell you mine next time. So there we go.

Drew Wandzilak:
Spontaneous.

Mike Collins:
You get two, you have two. Next time I'll have the sandwich episode in between,

Drew Wandzilak:
I will use the element of surprise to my advantage.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, don't take mine though.

Drew Wandzilak:
Awesome. All right, Mike.

Mike Collins:
Have a good one. See you.

Sophia Zhao:
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Mike Collins:
Okay, let's get into block one with Itamar Benedy, and CEO of Anzu. All right, we'll kick off. So I'm pleased to welcome and who's the founder and CEO of an AV portfolio company, Anzu. We're super excited to talk to him today. Anzu is a company that follows something that we really believe in, which is we're in an attention economy and eyeballs and time is being spent in the digital world. And when people are there, brands and advertisers need to reach those people. So welcome to the show.

Itamar Benedy:
Hey Mike, and thank you for having me here, and thank you for the partnership for many years.

Mike Collins:
Great. Let's hear the elevator pitch. Tell us a little bit about what Anzu does and why our investors should be excited to be part of the story.

Itamar Benedy:
Yeah, of course. So first, great to meet you all. I'm the CEO and the founder of Anzu, which are the company six and a half years ago. So an exciting journey and thank you for being part of it. So Anzu is the leader in the world of in-game advertising. Think about a digital out-of-home at format inside the gaming world. So you're playing a racing game, a sport game, a casual game, a simulator game, and there's branded content in the game, like a product placement type of advertisement. It can be a billboard, it can be a poster in a building, it can be a logo of a brand on a shirt and a character and a car on any game objects. And the reason why we're excited about this is there is so much consumer time spent in gaming,
Little advertising dollars going into gaming. So we saw this opportunity of number one, helping this education of how big gaming is. Gaming is not only geeks locked in their basement, a sixty-year-old lady playing Candy Crush will not say, hey, I'm a gamer, but she's playing a game. So figure it out. And second is bringing for the first time the advertising standards into the gaming world, into mobile games, PC games, console games, VR, AR, cloud gaming, all the virtual environments, the 3D types of interactions. And it's the first time ever this is happening because brands love innovation, but brands don't typically change the way they work. So bringing them how you're used to buy media, to measure media, to evaluate media from television, first time into the gaming world.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. And I'll share something too, again, as an old timer that this went on in the early days of the internet where the adoption of brands to move into new vectors tends to be somewhat slow. And it's like, oh, we've worked really successfully on in the olden days, radio and prints and television. And then it's like, oh, there's this new thing called the internet and oh, there's search now and how does that work? And it's like it literally took 10 or 20 years for brands and there's still the ratio of digital advertising has taken a time to catch up, but enormous value has been created here. And this is one of the reasons we were excited to be an investor in the company is we thought we were early, but we'd rather be early as again, people spend more time in their digital worlds.
And I think we're still at the beginning of that. I think there's an immersive world that is yet to even be hinted at. I mean, we've got peaks of it, I think with Apple Vision Pro and with the Meta Oculus product, but I think we're headed toward increasingly high-tech, digital 3D immersive world, and a totally unplugged, superhuman high touch world. And can you speak about the trends and how you've seen them play out over the six years and what's played out as you thought and what's been a little different than you anticipated?

Itamar Benedy:
Yeah. So first maybe an example to emphasize what you said, right? So digital advertising the internet for many years, companies spoke about it and big brands were still putting a lot of dollars in print and offline and radio. And only really when Facebook started to get a lot of attention is where we really saw this change of ad dollars moving more into digital. That's what it took from the advertising community to do something versus speak about it. And this shows the complexity of moving mountains in this regard. So that's maybe number one. Number two, I mean, yes, today we're focused on the gaming world, but I think gaming is the beginning of something bigger. Gaming is where today we see 3D interactions at scale, but it's going to be more than gaming.
I mean, our technology supports every application game, and that's not only gaming. So VR, AR, the Apple glasses that you mentioned, and cloud gaming, Hollywood movies being produced with a game engine. There is more and more of this content and autonomous cars. I believe that once autonomous cars become a big thing now is already available in San Francisco, that in-car entertainment is going to become a big deal And all these screens are game. So there is so many opportunities of how our technology can be relevant. The work we're doing to today with the official advertising bodies, the big brands, the big agencies on laying out the infrastructure for how to do efficient and effective buying in 3D worlds, how do we treat measurement in the 3D world will be relevant to much more than gaming. I believe most of the interactions that consumers will have with the Internet's going to be in a 3D world.
Maybe there's going to be lenses of the device empowering it. So that's number one. That's very exciting. Second, focusing more on gaming and what we're actually doing now, aside from gaming being the first environment that bring the three-D world, but has advertising standards, programmatic advertising and scale, which has a lot of value for brands in the sense of better visibility and viewability of the content. Gaming is also unique because it has a very high attention. So you're playing a game. There is no second screen in comparison when you watch television for example. It's a very brand safe world in comparison to social media. Like most games don't have a user-generated content. There is moderation by the platform, the engine, the developer. If you are in a tennis game exactly as a brand, what you're getting, other platforms and mediums cannot say that. And then the last part about this is this what we call this incremental reach. A lot of brands don't yet have a gaming strategy
Put aside, I believe, and here is like a prediction I'm happy to give. Two years from today, most of the CMOs of the world have a gaming strategy, and gaming is an advertising medium same that television, social media and music are today. Put that aside, a lot of brands without having a gaming strategy are finding value with this incrementality of gaming is the excuse to reach a million Americans that today they cannot reach them in other mediums after some time. You see the value, we need to think bigger about gaming. So that's some of the dynamics we see about the value in gaming as an advertising medium.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, it's a super exciting space you're playing in. Give our audience a little sense of the company and the story and how it got founded and what it was like those first years and where you are in your journey and what's the next big milestone you're trying to hit.

Itamar Benedy:
Yeah. So I'll tell you a secret, I'm not a gamer, right? And my two co-founders who lead tech and product are hardcore gamers. They're very excited to work with the game that they were playing as children. I'm many years in the world of building technology for the advertising world. I get very excited and proud when the biggest brands in the world use technology I led and built to do advertising better. I believe people don't hate ads. They hate bad ads. Most people will not complain of having ads on an Instagram or in the search of Google and will prefer it over having a paid product. People get annoyed when the ads are bad, when you are trying to navigate a website and ads jump on your face and you cannot have just have a good experience. So an example, one of the big publishers has annoying ads in his website.
Put the name aside so people will use ad blockers to block that content. So the publisher will block people with ad blockers from being able to enter his website. So that's a lose-lose of the industry. The publisher creates great content, no one sees it. So this win-win win is really what we want to do. We call it internally, let gamers play ads that make the world the gaming world more realistic. I can give another example. We're based now in New Jersey just out of New York. Before we moved here from Europe, I told my boy that we're moving to the US and he told me, oh, of course I know New York. I'm playing the Spider-Man game and I see Manhattan all the time.
I told him there's one big difference between that Manhattan in the real Manhattan in the real Manhattan, there's a lot of advertisements. Timescore is no Timescore without the ads in there. So our ad formats can even make the game more realistic on top of being a new business model and net new reference to the publishers, this win-win win is really what it's about. So this is where I got excited about this opportunity for an Anzu educating gaming companies, is the biggest gaming companies in the world who never had ads in their game because they didn't like this annoying pop-ups and annoying ads and for the first time are accepting advertisements. That was exciting. Working with the big brands about gaming doesn't advertise in medium. And for us it was always about this triangle because we knew that it's hard to move mountains and change how the big brands are looking into gaming as a new medium.
This triangle was about number one, having unique tech that no one in the world has. Of course, having patents and securing it and bringing new capabilities to the world. Too many advertising companies don't have any unique tech, don't have any added value, and you see in their price talk and valuations that the market is giving them a very low price on that. That's number one. The second thing is strategic partnerships. We know we need the biggest gaming and advertising companies as partners and champions to make this happen, A, faster, B, better, and we're very proud of the partners we partner with alongside the way. WPP, the biggest advertising group in the world's first ever investment in gaming. Sony owner of PlayStation, one of the biggest gaming groups first ever investment in advertising. Samsung, HTC, PayPal, NBCUniversal, Axel Springer, and a lot of other great tech media advertising and gaming partners. That's number two in the pillar. And number three is just having a great team. This is my third company. I was never part of a strong team. I'm proud every day to go into battle with these guys.

Mike Collins:
How did you meet your co-founders?

Itamar Benedy:
So maybe one sentence to complete the last part, five, because it's also related, five people from our management team are with me between 10 to 15 years, two or three different companies. So we have a unified strong team that works a long time together. These are some of the smartest people in the world. They could have a lot of opportunities and they choose to continue and partner with me. So one of our co-founders, Ben, our chief product, were best friends from school. So this is year 15 for us together. Maybe a fun fact about him, he has the same girlfriends from age 13. So his joke was I have the same girlfriend, business partner and father for many years.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, he's a lawyer.

Itamar Benedy:
And then as we started, we understood the tech complexity of Anzu was like real-time image recognition and 3D world engineering. And we met our CTO Mickey who was a deep tech engineer. Ben is more like a gaming product guy. I come more from the advertising side. I was the CEO of Glispa, a $100,000 annual advertising business before Anzu's pretty much complete each other. So that's how we got going. Then I took my gang from the previous companies that we had some success and this is then taking it from there.

Mike Collins:
Excellent. Now we've got a big audience of other entrepreneurs and a huge community of connected people. Just is there any way our community could help you? What's your ask? What's the Anzu ask of the AV community, how can we help?

Itamar Benedy:
Yeah, I mean, first thank you for offering this and we received over the years a lot of great introductions from the network and some of our biggest clients and partners came from these interactions. So this is fantastic. We're always looking A, to meet brands, agencies, and marketers who are willing to consider a new advertising format, a new advertising-

Mike Collins:
Who may need a gaming or non-traditional strategy in these kinds of domains.

Itamar Benedy:
Correct. And gaming is one thing. As I said before, there's incremental reach, new eyeballs, high attention because the advertising world is changing and they will not stay for a very long time. Consumer time spend is changing preferences of native versus annoying types of media is changing, and there's an opportunity of getting it right and adopting your plans faster. And hundreds of the biggest brands in the world already work with us. There are thousands that we don't yet work with. So I guess that's maybe the number one thing.

Mike Collins:
The people out there that control brands or in advertising and one of you where the puck is going versus where it's been and perhaps help their career, help their company by being very forward-looking, this could be a good partnership for you.

Itamar Benedy:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's so much inefficiency and how advertising is being done today. There's too many dollars in cable in your TV. There's too many dollars on the open exchange programmatic ad dollars and websites where people are blind for these ads. And I think there's a massive opportunity there. So that's the number one thing we're focusing on because we're pretty much completely most of building the tech platform. We're working with most of the big gaming companies. And another area that we're really focused on is on the sport leagues. And that's an interesting concept of we work with the sport leagues and with their teams and clubs on expanding sports sponsorships from the stadiums to the official gaming asset.
So if you work with the official game of one of the sport leagues, that can be a great extension of something from the stadium, from the jersey to the game is we see this as an easier way for some brands to get involved in gaming because building a game strategy is a big thing, but if they're putting millions of dollars and sponsoring the Chicago Cubs stadium and giving them the same experience in the game, it can be a great opportunity. We also have a lot of investors in the world, so the owner of the Pacers, the Cubs team, the owners of the Jersey Devils, the Commanders, and the 76ers are all investors and partners as well. So there's also a big push on that front.

Mike Collins:
Any other places our community could help with?

Itamar Benedy:
I mean, we're also looking to partner with more gaming companies, so that maybe can be another opportunity we are hiring. So we also would love to hear from great talent on joining on our journey. And I mean that's really where we're now at in terms of company. We're now a hundred people in the company. So it's an interesting timing of this transition from a startup to a more gross scale company. So that's also,

Mike Collins:
I mean, the nice thing about joining a company where you're at too, which is, it's one thing if you're leaving a very successful safe job where you're leaving to join three people in an Irish setter, just literally rah, rah startup, obviously huge upside, but also huge risk. But you're beyond that very first phase now. And when you join a company that has, what I say is a 100 to 250 employees, you're at the next level of, and that's professionally a pretty good risk reward profile typically of Yeah,

Itamar Benedy:
So on the one side, we raised $65 million, 40 million last year. We have cash in band. It's like a safe, stable place. We have resources to do things right, but it's still pretty early in the sense of joining early and having a big impact on this growing and there's a big opportunity on the stock to significantly grow. So I think it's a good balance between the tech giants and a pre-seed startup.

Mike Collins:
And a pre-seed start your own thing. So, yeah, again, when I talk to young people or people that really are thinking about making a leap into something that has a lot of upside still in front of it, I think again, you're in that sweet spot of really a really nice risk reward. Because again, I too think you're in the second or third inning of your story here with Anzu. And again, we all read about where the amount of time young people and everybody is spending on screens, and it's not just gaming. Some of it's a professional environment too with VR training going on, and our digital lives are just really, really a bigger part of our story. And this is where companies and brands need to be if they're going to be forward-looking. Yeah,

Itamar Benedy:
I mean, I believe our technology is going to empower the next wave of the internet, which is going to be a 3D interaction world. And even just from gaming, the CEO of Netflix said in the past that his biggest competitor was Fortnite. And not the other streaming television platforms. So gaming is for these Gen-Zs, millennials, it's their social media. They don't use WhatsApp, they use the chat of Call of Duty to interact with each other. And so I think it's a fascinating world. Also, people who like gaming, this is a fun place to be at. I'm a bit biased.

Mike Collins:
No. And the social side of gaming is also, not everybody thinks of a lone person in a room playing game. But again, I see it more as a group of friends getting together, watching a sports event, doing a little interactive stuff on the side, or forming a team and playing a game together. And some people love the game, some people don't love the game, but they all like being together for a couple of hours on Friday night. So if that's where people are, that's where brands need to be. So keep up the good work. It was great checking you. Again, I encourage our listeners to follow the company and again, if this is something that you in your life and profession want to reach out, we encourage you to do it. We'll have some contact information in the show notes and again, Itamar, it was nice to meet you, and keep up the good work.

Itamar Benedy:
Thank you for having me here, and we'll speak soon.

Mike Collins:
All right, take care. See you.

Keaton Nankivil:
Hey everyone, taking a quick time out so I can tell you about the Sports Fund from Alumni Ventures. AV is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual investors like you. In fact, AV is one of the most active and highly rated VCs in the US, and we co-invest alongside renowned lead investors. With our sports fund you'll have the opportunity to invest in a portfolio built around tech and business advancements across the sports world, from personal wellness to sports media to team ownership. This fund is focused on companies that have the potential to tap into the massive global sports market that is expected to exceed $250 billion by 2030. To get started visit av.vc/funds/sports. Enjoy the rest of the show.

Mike Collins:
Here's our third segment in my conversation with Steve Chen, founder and CEO of New Retirement, a company using AI to make retirement planning easier. So, Steve, nice to meet you. Welcome to the Tech Optimist Podcast. We're super excited to learn a little bit more about your company, and again, full disclosure, we're an investor, super proud to be involved. And yeah, tell us a little bit about your background and how this came about.

Steve Chen:
Sure, yeah, Mike, no, appreciate the opportunity and super glad that alumni VC and Castor invested and it's awesome. I went to Boston University, so across the river from MIT, but I used to go play volleyball at MIT. And in my first company, the co-founder, CEO was an MIT rocket scientist guy, so pretty familiar with the culture there and a lot of his fraternity brothers, Kappa Sig guys joined the company. And so I get the value of the human capital side. So for us, I mean essentially our core innovation is we've built essentially Turbo Tax for financial planning. So we let anyone create their own financial plans. So we're trying to democratize, democratize access to financial literacy, financial planning, help people get organized, see what's possible, make good decisions across their whole lifecycle.
The analogy is physical wellness. So we believe financial wellness is coming, people realize they need to have some agency, they have to make good decisions across their whole life. Don't take, be thoughtful about how many student loans you take on and how you're going to pay them back. Be thoughtful about credit card debt and other things like that as you get going as a younger person. And then make good decisions as you go through life. If you have kids, have a family go to retirement, be smart and aware of how the system works. So what's different about us is we enable anybody. We're transparent, we work for the end users. The user pays us for our software just like they would pay for TurboTax. Much of financial services is opaque. There's fees on assets or there's transaction fees that you don't see. It's presented as you don't pay for it, so don't worry about it. But the fees are enormous or can be enormous and-

Mike Collins:
Or they're opaque.

Steve Chen:
Yeah. So that's the core thing that we do.

Mike Collins:
You're pretty early stage in your journey too, right? Steve, where are you in your entrepreneurial journey here with-

Steve Chen:
Yeah, we're a series A company. So in the consumer side, we have more data. The platform, we have 25,000 paying customers, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the average user has a couple million bucks, so like $50 billion of their life savings they're managing, and there's another 50,000 active free users that are managing another $50 billion. So people that free users have a little bit less money, but it's still material. And we've helped people build a few hundred thousand plans. So we're working on always lifting the engagement side of this, but I would say we do have product market fit on the consumer side for a certain segment of the population that's like takes planning seriously, might have had their own spreadsheet, very often tech oriented. They're like, I see the value. They're telling their friends, they're signing up, that's all working.
What we're doing is we're taking that funnel, so in the consumer side, 8,000 a month create plans, a couple of thousand people swipe their credit card and start paying us. 2000 people are in classes, over a hundred people are taking one-on-one coaching sessions that they pay incrementally for one time. And then a bunch of people raise their hand. We have an RIA inside of this, but we only do fee for service flat planning starting at 1,500 bucks. But it's really just to show the whole model works. So that whole funnel works. We're taking that to employers. So Rayman's a customer, they gave this model to 230,000 people in the workplace. We're talking to big healthcare systems about it, groups like that.
So there's employers and then there's RIAs when wealth managers are like, oh, I can use this myself, because a lot of them get people coming in the door that their model is, if you have a million or 2 million, they'll service you one-on-one. But they have a lot of people that come in, I want help, but they're not set up to do this. They're not set up for scale, so we can help them do both. Help everybody at the top and then if people need extra help, hey, plug your service engine in and then help them there.

Mike Collins:
Is that really the core of your ask then would be if you're working at a company and you think that this would be a great service or benefit to the employees that work with you, your teammates. Because I got to also believe you're competing mostly with non-consumption here. The number of people in the world that have no plan has got to greatly exceed the numbers that are currently have a plan with somebody. Right. So sorry, compounded question there. I guess question one, what is your ask to our audience, Steve?

Steve Chen:
Yeah. I would say if you're an Alumni VC investor and you think your company would like this as a benefit for sure, we'd love to get an introduction that's happening in our own community. People, I just talked to someone from Pulte Homes, the guy, he's a user on our platform and he works in the tax department. He is like, yeah, I would love this as a benefit. So or if you work in a large financial services organization, you're like, hey, I think we could do more with planning and literacy and get the user more involved. I mean, it is a great education. It's a selling tool. It's also our attention tool. So those are the main ways that we're going to market.

Mike Collins:
Great. And then again, from the thesis I had, which was you're mostly non-consumption, this is just something that is good hygiene that most people just are not doing and they're probably not, especially not doing it at a young enough age, right?

Steve Chen:
Right. Yeah. I would say someone made this comment a while ago and they're like, this is an urgent should versus an urgent need. I would say that it actually transitions from an urgent should to an urgent need as you age. So, for sure, most of our users are 45 plus. It's like, oh, I'm raising my kids, but I see my parents getting older.

Mike Collins:
Know I'm behind. Yeah.

Steve Chen:
Yeah, I know I'm behind and I'm used to making 150,000 a year or whatever it is, but I'm seeing my friends get laid off or AIs coming, and it's like there's always pressure out there and it's getting, our users have much higher confidence because they have much more command of their finances, they understand how it works, how the whole system works. They understand are they taking as much advantage as they can of company benefits 401(k) matching HSAs or whatever it is. They understand how am I going to claim social security? How might I use my house? How's healthcare going to work while I'm working? Once I'm in Medicare, they're thinking about their financial lives, not like this week or this quarter, which is how the financial media, it's like, "All right, we got to buy Nvidia or Bitcoin or whatever."
It's like, yeah, I mean, no, actually, what you should be thinking about is how is the money going to go over the next 10, 20 years If you're out of school, fund your Roth. It's like get the money into index funds. I mean, yeah, take some risk, but just start saving and investing and do it for 15 years If you save and invest 10, 15, 20% of your income, which might feel like a stretch, but if you do that for 15 or 20 years, you'll wake up and have more money than 99% of this country and have way more control. And that unlocks you In your late thirties, early forties to... Well, it unlocks you to make whatever choice you want to make at that point.
But along the way, if you know you're on this journey, the second order effect is that you can make the most of your human capital, which is our non-renewable resource. So our time is what's so scarce, and I think there's this giant dialogue about purpose and what are we doing in our lives. It's like people that have more control. It's like, hey, if you think climate matters, if you think healthcare matters, if you love AI, whatever it is, we are talking about your daughter, very smart, made lots of money. I'm sure she's being very intentional about what she's doing with her time and why, or she's at least taking a moment to think about it.

Mike Collins:
Absolutely. I mean, I think you covered a lot there, and I would say that so much of financial independence is thought of as being a dirty word or something, and it's like it is about the flexibility to have time to make choices. In some respects, there's a few key principles that are just so powerful that spend less than make and invest early and regularly over a long period of time. Just those two simple things. Warren Buffett, I think everybody knows part of his success was just he's lived to be 90 and he started to invest in his teams, and you compound anything over a long period of time, and whether that's investing or getting good at playing the piano, those things compound over time. Steve, how do you think about partners and couples? We mentioned my daughter, again, we'll bring her back into it, but she's now engaged, and these kinds of discussions are also somewhat, you hear about couples that just don't talk about money enough and have a plan. Is this potentially a tool to have conversations between husband and wife or parents and kids and those kinds of things?

Steve Chen:
Great question, Mike. Yeah, for sure. And very often in families, you'll have someone who's like the banker, and that's across generations. They know about the money, they're into it, and definitely in couples, usually one person's way more educated about it and has the keys to the kingdom to some degree. And you have to be really careful about this because if that person predeceases or dies first, it's like you need to make sure that people know how to operate the machine and that it's set up in a way that the right controls are in place. I actually sometimes think about this from a governance perspective. I think as people live longer and there's 50, $60 trillion-

Mike Collins:
Yeah, it's crazy.

Steve Chen:
... That is going to move between generations. This is showing up. I mean, in our town, some people will show up and they're like, hey, there's these 35 year olds rolling in. They're buying houses for cash. Where is it coming from? They're inheriting this money, or they're a tech person that's like cashed up, but it's material. But yeah, it can definitely facilitate those discussions where someone, because families, a lot of the reasons people do this saving and planning, it's for not just themselves, it's for their kids or their parents, and they want to make sure people are taken care of. And so we actually are leaning into this intergenerational thinking, which is I would like people already build plans and share it with their spouses, but it's like I want them to be able to build plans for themselves and then for their parents.
I mean, the reason I started this company is help my mom figure this out, and my brother and I are still involved in our parents' lives, making sure that they're generally on track and we roughly know where the money is. It's definitely imperfect, and there's also a huge risk as people age and you need more caregiving. And I've seen this in my own family too. It's like in other future, my grandparents, they get more care and maybe they were more cash oriented. It's like, where's the money going? It's a giant exposure. And then the other way for your kids, it's like, hey, can you help your kids make good decisions? Or if they're going to inherit money, be intentional about it so that you don't screw up their values and they still understand the value of-

Mike Collins:
I can again, personally relate on both those fronts. When my parents are of that generation where he did the money. And then when he passed away in a time that was really hard for my mom, it's having her having to figure this stuff out because of that. So, again, that's something that I think a lot of us face. Then again, I just think out there, but I don't think people totally get the wealth transfer that is just starting to happen as boomers who have been incredibly successful in generating an enormous amount of wealth for generations. But in a way, they're also going to be a huge piggy bank as that wealth is transferred in tens of trillions of dollars to the next generation. And then I think they equipped to handle it and planning. And I know again, with Alumni Ventures, a lot of our investors use venture investing as actually an educational tool for their kids.

Steve Chen:
Okay.

Mike Collins:
Because it really brings into relief some really important decision-making about how do you look at an investment, how do you evaluate risk reward? It tends to be more fun and interesting than ETFs in a diversified S&P portfolio. So, again, a lot of our investors actually use individual deals and we do share due diligence. Like how do we think about an investment? And then they share that as a family and they vote on whether, hey, should we do this syndication or not? But it's all in that same spirit of wanting to have good plans and good education and something that probably people don't talk enough about. But yeah. I guess my last question, Steve, is again, very successful entrepreneur. What would be one personal productivity hack or piece of content that've consumed that you would just share with somebody is like, check this out.

Steve Chen:
Okay. Yeah, great question. So a couple of things that I've been listening, there's Lenny's podcast, which is, I'm going to mess up his last name, Lenny Rachitsky. He's a product guy. He is interviews all these other product people and it's so many great insights in his podcasts and videos, and that's been super helpful for us as a company.

Mike Collins:
We'll put a link in the graphics here so people can check it out. Yeah.

Steve Chen:
I've also been using Perplexity, which is this AI search engine, and I mean, if I was Google, I'd be paying. They give the answer, right? So you ask a question that gives the answer and footnotes at all. It just saves so much time. I mean, you have to still make sure you're this stuff. But you can see with tools like that how the answers to our questions are going to be in front of everybody all the time. And I use it. I also use voice a lot now with my mobile phone. This is actually, I think Apple has a killer thing, like voice recognition is so good. I can't do it on my, I use a PC. It's like I can't talk to my PC, so I'm talking my phone a lot and getting answers.
But yeah, no, the world is changing. I mean, I've been in technology and seeing the different waves, I would say AI and what's happening with all this convergence. It is astounding. And I feel like we're in this place where I always used to feel like, okay, you can see, can see, hey, if I was a young person, I'd be all in on AI and I'd be all in on software. But it's like I don't feel like I know what the world could look like in five years or even maybe three years. It could be so wildly different.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, I think first of all, I've got Perplexity, I've got a bunch of screens open. Perplexity is constantly open on one right now. And again, we're not investors in Perplexity, full disclosure. But yeah, I mean, it gives you the answer. And listen, I use on a daily basis now ChatGPT, I'm using Google, Bing, Perplexity, Claude. I believe it's just made me 50% more productive right now. So, again, I just think we're at the beginning of that wave and it is, yeah, there's a lot of hype around it, but I think it could still be underestimated in the long-term how profound it could be.

Steve Chen:
Yeah. We're thinking about what the, and you're unlocking something here. So we're thinking a lot about how do we use AI in every businesses in their own thing here. And I think one orientation is, all right, so what we're seeing is these LLMs, they know everything about the world, but they don't know about you. And so what you're seeing with us, we learn a lot about our users because they're creating financial plans. So we learn all about their finances. I think the opportunity is you have that AI interface that also knows you and the world. So it's like, "Oh, hey Steve, should you refinance your mortgage or whatever?"
And based on what's happening with my kid's education, what's happening with interest rates? Should I go to a ten one, whatever? And then make that all easy. You can definitely see a world where what you should do with your money is their basic simple rules are proven. So, the thing is, there's math work and then there's open dreams, which is what you get from a lot of the industry. It's more like, let's lean into the math and then you'll have much better outcomes for broad swaths of sites and just make it accessible. Making bets on making powerful stuff accessible. Lots of people. That's generally wins.

Mike Collins:
That generally wins. And just to build on your point, Steve, because I think all good entrepreneurs and CEOs are thinking about this, which is what is AI going to do better? And then where do we still need people? And in the case of financial planning or medicine, I think there's a lot of the medical profession too that is going to be done just as effectively if not more effectively by AI. But at the end of the day, I think as humans, we still want a relationship with another human being through a difficult time or an important process.
So I could very much see in new retirement, it is, yeah, the machine has developed a plan, but I also just want to talk to somebody and go through it with another human being like you and I are talking right now, just to bring my own specific situation, empathy, relatability, and just, again, we've been wired over hundreds of thousands of years to be with other human beings, and I just think there's this high-tech, high touch barbell that I think we're going to be seeing more and more of over the next, like you said, three years, five years, seven years, it's going to change for sure.

Steve Chen:
I completely agree with you that the human in the loop, but people are not going away. They're just going to be smarter and more productive and more insightful. But yeah, you still, it's like when you have questions, you're not, I mean, we do go to places like Perplexity and ask those questions, but I don't think that it's another tool. You still want human expertise that has seen this pattern with other people, and we're also emotional creatures first, right? We react to emotions first. And reading that is an interpret. Being able to relate to someone on an emotional level is equally important because it's behavior. A big part of this is behavior. This is why people, the one big thing you talked about, the easy steps. It's like, hey, learn to save money, learn to invest.
The third thing is know yourself and your behavior so you don't screw yourself. What people they can make... I'll leave you with one story. There is someone I know in our family, they make good, great choices their whole life, super sophisticated, plenty of money. Then they get a little older and they're like, I'm going to start messing around and start trading stocks. Well, you can blow yourself up. And they almost blew themselves up by starting to take these positions that they didn't even need to do it. So the risk sizing, don't start making bets you don't need to make. And don't make, yeah,

Mike Collins:
The psychology of money and just being self-aware about how you're wired. I think you're right. That is like the third pillar to wealth, financial security. So, Steve, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Congratulations on your progress. Great conversation. And look forward to your B round.

Steve Chen:
Yeah, thanks, Mike. Really appreciate the support and getting to know you and the Alumni VC network and appreciate the support there. And yeah, we're optimistic and let's see how maybe come on our podcast and we'll talk about how AI is coming and for sure we'll have that second part of our conversation about opening up access to different kinds of investment opportunities for people.

Mike Collins:
Excellent. Look forward to it. Thank you, Steve. We'll follow up. Be well.

Steve Chen:
Thanks. Appreciate it.

Mike Collins:
Bye.

Pete Mathias:
Hey everyone, just taking a quick break so we can tell you about the US Strategic Tech Fund from Alumni Ventures. AV is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual investors like you. In fact, AV is one of the most active and best performing VCs in the US. And we co-invest alongside renowned lead investors. With AV's US Strategic Tech Fund, you'd have access to an investment portfolio focused on technologies that are critical to bolstering US national security and economic prosperity. We prioritize three key areas, homeland security, cyber AI, and digital strategy, and space innovation. By investing in companies innovating in these areas, you can support early stage ventures and help encourage sustained growth and technological progress in the United States. If you're interested in learning more, visit av.vc/funds/strategictech.

Mike Collins:
Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you liked it, please subscribe, share it with friends. Have a great week, keep building stuff.

Speaker 1:
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