Stakeholder Meeting with Simon Zhou

Stakeholder Meeting with Simon Zhou

Date: 2/1

Preparation

For our preparation for the meeting, we've prepared the "Interviewing Stakeholders" document.

Meeting Notes

The raw meeting notes are linked here for reference.

• Simon – focusing on enterprise software
  • Looking at infrastructure
  • Selling to developers, AI engineers, ML engineers
  • Thought about migrating workloads to the cloud
  • Thinking about simultaneously adopting some tools
• John Vrionis – was big at Lightspeed
  • App Dynamics, Cisco
• Unusual – a new type of fund to give more tailor and hands-on support

Meeting Notes

• Ideas
  • Aligning with the curriculum itself – much is focused on enterprise B2B SaaS
  • Not to exclude other GTM motions
  • Can pick an idea that isn’t B2B and try to work that into the program
• Wine marketplace
  • We are thoughtful about the particular type of restaurants and suppliers on both sides of this marketplace
  • Curious to have conversations – what are the right types of personas to start on both sides of this marketplace
  • Works on smaller side of both vendor and supplier side
  • Larger barrier to entry and getting buy-in from smaller types of vendors and suppliers in order to ultimately expand
  • Try to create some lighthouse advocates before we go to some of these larger players
  • Understanding what that value chain looks like – what does the process look like today? What could it look like in a couple of years after we build what we build?
  • Having more clarity to what the ultimate secret sauce to what we’re selling to different sides of thisn marketplace – defensibility, what is the moat?
  • If the moat is a matchmaking algorithm – a bit clarity into what that is?
• Patent Search Platform
  • More questions: GTM about what types of law firms have a more pressing point? Patsnap and existing incumbents?
  • Tool that you’re introducing – is a wedge replacement. Is it a 2x a 3x improvement? And of what part of the workflow? Is it able to search for the right patents? Enrich patents with other information? Can have some clarity for what multipleof improvement for PX
  • If the experience is 10x or more – more compelling to law firms
  • Super relevant – we see a lot of new AI tools for law firms (Harvey, Casetext) – think about more vertical plays.
  • How can we provide to specific parts of the workflows? How much are they ultimately willing to pay?
  • Some law firms are starting to soften up ideas from third party vendors
• API/Middleware vs. Platform
  • Dependent going on in the market?
  • Whether to consume something via an API endpoint, whether to use a user interface on top?
  • Who is the end customer? Within the end customer, who is ultimately the end user, and who is the buyer?
  • AI-native world – so much is API first
    • Most people think that API is the new layer of abstraction for a lot of things in the foundational model ecosystem as a result of OpenAI
    • Who is the end user?
• How to understand?
  • .edu emails – we’re pretty fortunate to have conversations with other companies in this space
  • Folks at Patsnap that we could hear more about, doesn’t hurt to do more cold outbound
  • Competitive intelligence
  • Unusual does their own homework when thinking about what to invest in in a particular space
  • Implementation details to enable some user experience – if we’re doing any type of retrieval pattern, it is ultimately a proof of ROI

Post Meeting Takeaways

• For wine: think about customer persona on both sides of the marketplace, getting initial advocates, and understanding the entire process to see where value accrues
• For patents: adoption is evident, but where are the pinpoints? What issues exist, and how much better is our solution than Patsnap’s?
  • Pre-product-market fit stage
• Next week should just be dedicated to interviewing stakeholders. We can continue with needfinding other ideas, but we do have to present to VCs next week, so I feel like it’s probably best to have an idea we can at least pitch and present.
  • I think we should go with wine at this point? We can mention that there are other ideas, but since we’re still need finding, that’s probably the one product we’ve talked the most to people about
• My thought is that Guman and O'Brien can focus on finding people to reach out to for wine. We also need people on the other side — if there are restaurant owners and stuff that we know
• Travis and Chris can work on patent stuff. Want to find any patent attorneys/people who work on IP and R&D stuff (I think some folks you talked to might have some experience in that department)