March 26, 2024 • 50 mins
At just 12 years old, Sam Obletz decided to put his studies on the back burner and start a computer integration company with his friend. Today, he has come a long way from building computers and is now on a mission to change advertising forever. This is his multi-billion dollar plan.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
The current system is broken.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
These are our legacy tools.
I think it's important to remember Facebook,Instagram, these things have been around for
over a decade, if not longer.
And so it's an aging suite of tools coupledwith a really difficult macro picture for
marketer.
Sam, thanks for taking the time to join theepisode.
(00:21):
I'm excited for this one.
To understand how your startup claim is gonnachange advertising forever.
Wanna start with your personal story.
What would be the earliest piece of contextthat I would have to know about you to
understand the person sitting in front of metoday?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, Seamus, thanks for havingme.
I'm really excited about this opportunity tospend some time with you and talk a little bit
(00:43):
about the Shamus story.
So I grew up, in a family of, my parents and myyounger brother who's 3 years younger than I
am.
And what's important to know is I had thetremendous opportunity to explore and create
during my childhood, but also see 2particularly strong role models in my parents.
(01:03):
And to me, they embodied tenacity, grit, andteamwork, and they really espouse that through
athletics.
And so we grew up on the road a lot.
And by that, I mean, we would travel the worldand my parents would race.
And my mom was a college swimmer at Stanfordturned national champion and then competed
doing Ironman triathlons around the world.
(01:26):
My dad marathoner competed at the world leveland do Athhelons, which is running and biking.
My younger brother ended up going to Stanford.
He walked on to first the crew team, or, excuseme, the cross country team, and then the crew
team, and then became a naval officerafterwards.
And as kind of the athletic runt of the family.
(01:47):
I did have the opportunity to see what, effortlooked like, what passion looked like, and to
see that on full display through the hard timesof kind of seeing the pain on my parents' faces
as they were going through these gruelingphysical activities.
And that definitely shaped what I think hardwork looks like.
So I would say that that kind of from theearliest, I would say precognition or
(02:11):
preconsciousness level that has pervaded kindof who I am as a person from the earliest
stage.
And do you learn a lot about hard work when youwere younger what are some of the ways that at
that younger age, you decided to work hard andand and was a hard worker?
Yeah.
So I I would say the entrepreneurial bug waskind of placed within me at that young age, and
(02:36):
I'll give you a couple examples.
I was probably 11 or 12, just entering middleschool, 6th, 7th grade.
And my friend and I decided we wanted to youknow, kind of put our studies, quote, unquote,
on the back burner, and instead try to build acompany.
So we researched what we could.
Again, this is probably 2005 ish, 2004, maybe.
(03:02):
And we built a computer integration company.
So We called it hailstorm PC inspired by thefamous Pacific Northwest weather.
We went out and bought a number of parts offthings like Newegg.
We assembled those computers, and then wemarketed them publicly, mostly on Craigslist.
And the price point for us at the time, wethought it was high end.
(03:26):
We, we would sell computers for 800 to $1600.
They'd be Zeon based, you know, workstations orgaming rigs, and we poured our heart and soul
into that effort for what came to be verylittle financial return.
But certainly it was it was the first time Irealized, wow, it is incredible to try to build
(03:46):
something from 0, build something from scratch.
And, boy, does it require a lot of hard work?
The funny part is we'd show up to deliver thesecomputers.
And, you know, to be completely honest, thereweren't more than a dozen or so that we ended
up selling.
But we'd show up to deliver them.
And I'm not sure exactly what the customersthought at the time about these 2 middle
(04:06):
schoolers delivering their $1000 PC.
But I'm hoping that they thought that, youknow, this company was scrappy and hired cheap
delivery, for what was assembled byprofessionals.
So that was kind of one.
The other example I'd offer from kind of at theentrepreneurship intersection with hard work is
(04:27):
late middle school, early high school, Istarted building a, freelance web design
company.
And, again, I think this is a good example ofhiding behind a keyboard with the internet in
the early to late, 2000, but people didn't knowI was fourteen teen years old.
And I fell in love with Illustrator.
I fell in love with Photoshop, fell in lovewith HTML.
(04:49):
And I would build these sites and deliver themto customers and It's amazing how much cash
flow you can generate as somebody in latemiddle school, early high school when you're
fortunate not to have to pay rent.
And so I would pour so much time into these 2endeavors.
And, again, it kinda reinforced this cycle tome, this virtuous cycle that with enough kind
(05:12):
of tenacity, you can find your way withinuncertain times.
Now web design, building computers, far lesscertain, far clearer road map than what we're
doing with claim now, you know, some decadeslater, but definitely the first kind of
twinkles that I experienced at that time.
Yeah.
Your journey with web development and buildingcomputers kinda reminds me of when I was in 9th
(05:35):
grade when I started a a phone repair business.
When I started to learn about how to repairphones and computers, I just went on YouTube
and watched this guy named Hugh Jeffries, whowho does a lot of phone repairs.
And that's how I learned.
But, I mean, back then, YouTube wasn't even athing, really.
At least they weren't, doing tutorials.
So How did you learn how to work computers andrepair them?
(05:58):
I had a a partner in crime.
We launched that hailstorm PC company Imentioned.
We both were Geeks.
You know, from a hardware perspective, we tryto figure out what worked, you know, nicely in
the sandbox together.
From a software perspective, we were hackingaround bios the registry editor in Windows, you
know, we were just learning as we went, and itwas very much a trial and error process.
(06:20):
I'm so thankful for YouTube now, by the way, Ilove spending my time when I'm not looking at a
screen, you know, working on things like snowmachines, snowmobiles, dirt bike engines,
aircraft.
And, boy, it would be a lot harder to learn nowwithout YouTube.
Before we get into the backstory of claim andwhat you're doing today, I wanna delve into the
(06:41):
problem first.
What's wrong with advertising today?
Oh, boy.
Here we go.
So so let's let's attack this both from kind ofa consumer lens, as well as the merchant or
kind of advertiser lens.
Let's start with the the merchant lens first.
I actually think that most people don't realizehow difficult it is to be a marketer today.
(07:05):
There are a few reasons for that, and then I'llkind of aggregate those up to the picture of of
how we see the world.
The first is that the cost to acquire a rightnow is more expensive than ever, and we see
this in the data.
The cost per acquisition CPA and kind ofmarketing parlance has overall tripled over the
past 8 years.
So that's number 1 is it is very difficult tomake your P and L really pencil right now,
(07:31):
given the cost that it takes to go reach andget that customer in the door for the first
time.
So that's one.
The second aspect is actually figuring out howto attribute where that customer came from is
more complex than ever, and we see entireindustries, $1,000,000,000 industries developed
around multi touch attribution and assigningvalue to where that customer came in the door.
(07:53):
And unfortunately, It's becoming more and moreopaque, especially for the end user here who is
the marketer.
It's kind of a fool's errand in a way, and sothat's complicating the picture.
And then lastly, these kind of industry widedevelopments with good intent, by the way, the
phasing out of cookies from a Googleperspective.
Apples do not track or, anti trackingtechnology in the iOS system.
(08:16):
These further complicate the ability of themarketer to say, How do I find the right
customers?
How do I reach those customers?
How do I bring them in the door?
And how do I know how I brought them in thedoor?
And so marketers being put in this impossibleposition.
Again, this is kind of the sum total of thatdifficulty right now where they're being asked
to grow top line by their leadership teams, bytheir investors, by their shareholders.
(08:39):
They're being asked to cut marketing spend,being asked to grow gross margins and operating
margins.
And they're given kind of a legacy set of toolsto to do so.
Things like Google AdWords, which reinventedwere rather invented early advertising on the
internet, things like Facebook, instagram,TikTok.
These are our legacy tools.
(09:00):
I think it's important to remember FacebookInstagram, these things have been around for
over a decade, if not longer.
And so it's an aging suite of tools coupledwith a really difficult macro picture for
marketer.
Why is this so difficult to figure out whereconsumers are coming from on that merchant
lens?
Yeah.
So we'll talk kind of attribution 101 here.
(09:22):
The earliest version of this probably goes backto, like, the Madan men days, if not sooner,
right, where you're seeing a a billboard or atelevision ad, and that's what we kind of call
today awareness marketing.
And so can you really tick and tie somebody whowatches the Temu Super Bowl ad to somebody who
makes the purchase?
You you really can't at the end of the day.
And so this whole industry of performancemarketing that's worth tens and tens, if not
(09:45):
100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars per quarter,really arose to answer that question.
So If I click a link on Instagram, can I trackthrough from seeing that with my eyeballs
through making a purchase on the website?
And the answer is Kind of.
Provided that you make a lot of assumptionsaround where do ascribe trust and authenticity
(10:07):
within that system.
And so performance marketing to me isinadequate in its current state, for brands
because It is nearly impossible to know.
Is it because you saw this one ad?
And that ad drove you to make this purchase?
And that's going to only get harder and harder,as I mentioned, because of tracking being
(10:28):
pulled out of the system by sort of thematicregulatory constraints.
Yeah.
I think it's also extremely difficult to gainattention now because of how much, content is
already out there.
And for Bryce,
I think that traditional advertising marketslike this are gonna break in the next few
years.
If we continue down the trend of chat, GPT,LOMs, sat over saturating the market.
(10:53):
I mean, if if a if an LOM right now is able tooperate at some nontrivial percentile of of
human cognition, then it's going to be harderthan ever to know whether the eyeballs air
quotes that Saan had were truly human than not.
And that's gonna throw a wrench, in terms ofthe generative capability of of advertising for
(11:16):
attribution in the next few weeks.
It's interesting because I never thought of itlike that.
I always thought about, you know, chatty PT andAI being used to create content.
I think for the most part, that ends upcreating lower quality content depending on
what it is.
If I didn't think about it, on the other sideis if if they're actually viewing it and to
actually know if somebody who's viewing it as aperson or not, it's an interesting,
(11:40):
perspective.
And I think that's a perfect segue, Shamus,into the consumer side because what we're
talking about now is that consumer attention isat an all time low, which is, again, feeding
into kind of the vicious cycle of CPAs or costof acquisitions being at an all time high
because we are absolutely inundated withadvertising all day on our screens in real
(12:03):
life.
And the net total of that is Personally, andthis is part of the inspiration for claim,
disillusionment.
But if anything, it's desensitization, to thesebrands that are trying to grab our attention
when we're not, you know, we're not onInstagram to be sold things.
We're not walking down the street to be soldthings.
(12:25):
So it's a root interruption, in our day, whichI would argue as an economic drain on our
society as well.
So how are you guys solving this problemthrough claim?
We've mentioned your new business a couple oftimes, but let's dig deep into what you guys
are doing to actually fix this issue.
Yeah.
So so maybe helpful to kind of fill in a littlebit of the picture here on on what inspired us
(12:47):
to to start claim.
We'll start with kind of the disillusionmentaspect that that I mentioned.
I grew up with Facebook, at the end of college,I wanna say 2013 ish, I deleted my Facebook
entirely, not deactivated, but deleted, becauseI felt 2 things.
1, the sort of dopamine loop is real, and Ifelt myself getting dragged more and more into
(13:15):
checking Facebook often at the expense of realworld relationships and time better spent
elsewhere.
But 2, I got tired of the 4th or 5th direct toconsumer company trying to reach me on
Facebook.
When again, I was not there to be sold to.
So I deleted Facebook, and I never got anInstagram.
I think it's kind of a funny, Paradox in a waythat we have a consumer internet advertising
(13:38):
founder who never had an Instagram.
And so it's a known blind spot.
And I'm able to fill that in with reallytalented folks on our team, but it speaks to my
belief that the current system is broken.
And going forward, we've built claim almost tobe the anti Instagram and the anti direction
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that A lot of these platforms are going, whichstarted as true connections.
They started as, what are my friends doingtoday?
Much like B Real still is.
And they've expanded in scope to not what aremy friends up to, but who is this influencer
who's trying to market to me?
What is this celebrity doing?
And the density of those networks has becomemore diffuse.
(14:20):
And so I'm glad that I'm I'm not on Instagram,frankly.
So that's one.
The second aspect of starting claim came fromthis feeling that a lot of our digital
interactions are more transactional than everright now.
There's a story that that I tell with my mycofounder where He did something really great
for the company.
He shipped a feature way ahead of schedule forus, and it was a step change for the company.
(14:43):
I thought about what I could do to thank him,for doing that.
And I kinda considered 3 options.
I could go downstairs.
I could, you know, recite his favorite coffeeorder by heart, get him that coffee, at the
coffee shop, bring it back up and give it tohim.
That's one.
I could, you know, hand him a $5 gift card tothat coffee shop.
As a second way of thinking him, or I couldjust slap $5 down on the table in front of him,
(15:07):
and all of those would have the same monetaryvalue, but, like, we all realize that there's
one right answer in that sort of decisionmatrix, and it's get him the thing that he
loves because I know him.
And I feel like so much of our digitalinteractions in the past decades have been
reduced to bits to ones and zeros totransactions on things like Venmo, Cash App
(15:29):
PayPal and the like.
And we've lost some of that emotionalconnection, and there's something about that
that is deeply human that were missing.
And so we wanted to bring back that sort ofemotional connection through interaction,
through authenticity with claim.
And then the last aspect of this and why Ithink claim will become kind of a generational
(15:49):
company, on the consumer side is we werelooking around at the world, a few years ago
when we were saying, wow, there are some reallyinteresting things going on here that we're
seeing in places like web 3 in gaming,etcetera, around digital ownership of private
property.
If you think about the way that our societyfunctions in the United States, it is very much
(16:11):
dictated by private property ownership.
And so I don't think it takes a massive leap tobelieve that in the future, if private property
ownership were you know, essentially sacrosancton the internet, that would transform how our
society functions, perhaps by multiples becauseof the distribution of the internet.
And so Part of the inspiration from claim isearly tests around what could private property
(16:33):
ownership on the internet look like.
And, of course, claim is definitely you know,course corrected and made adjustments over over
time, but that sort of ethos still underpins alot of our work as a company.
Those were kind of the 3 epiphanies or ormoments, when we started clean.
And how did you and your co founder How did youand your cofounder meet and why did you decide
(16:55):
to go into business together?
Yeah.
I love this.
It's so central to our story.
There was an admissions officer in theundergraduate admissions department at Yale,
who decided for whatever reason to put mycofounder and I together as roommates.
And it was a stroke of luck because we reallyclicked, and we ended up living together all 4
years in undergrad.
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We kind of set our goodbyes.
He went off to go work in the Bay Area, afterschool, I went to go work in New York.
But we always had this thought that one day wewanted to start something together.
And I think part of me in my mind always heldthis place of admiration for my dad because he
started a company with his best friend back inthe 1980.
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And when he did, he did something that Ithought was really powerful.
He said, I'm gonna write a letter to you beinghis best friend, and here are here's what I
value about you as a person.
Here here are all the things that I admire inyou and why I'm so excited to, intertwine our
lives even further in an uncertain venture, buthere are the things that are non negotiables
(17:57):
for us.
And and here are the reasons that we need tomaintain our friendship in the face of know,
adversity as a business.
And so I knew that I wanted to go start acompany, and I wanted to do so with my
cofounder.
TAP.
And so that ended up changing my life for thebetter.
I I wanted to go find TAP.
I knew I needed to poach him for whatever hewas up to at the time.
(18:20):
He was in business school at Harvard doing a ajoint degree between the engineering school and
and HBS.
And so I I applied there.
I was really fortunate to to get in.
And then we did the whiteboard thing in ourdorm room.
We lived together again.
And before we took the leap of faith, I wrotehim a letter.
And You know, my dad actually brought out theletter that he wrote not too long ago, and it
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was kind of amazing.
It makes you think about nature nurture a lot,but the same themes were present there.
In the letter that I wrote tap saying, here'swhat I admire about you.
Here's why I'm so excited in the letter thatwas dated in 1982, from my dev.
And at Harvard Business School, what are someof the startup ideation ideas that you were
brainstorming at that time?
(19:02):
Oh, man.
Okay.
Tripped down memory lane.
We had a whiteboard in our room.
We overbuilt this matrix to evaluate differentideas, which was silly.
It's kind of a saying in in in business schoolthat there are 4, horsemen of the NBA
apocalypse.
Meaning, what are the ideas that rear theirugly heads every single MBA class?
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And yet, every single MBA thinks that they areworld changing ideas in no particular order
It's an alcohol delivery app.
It's a dating app.
It's an English tutoring app.
It's a meetup or or networking app.
And, I will lie.
We evaluated some of some things in those, 4.
The 2 that we ended up exploring more, one wasa take on streamlining the immigration system,
(19:50):
the skilled immigration system in the US, it'sappalling to me that we have a country that
doesn't support bringing great people here,highly skilled laborers, the H1B system, going
through it now for one of our teammates.
It's it's broken.
Whereas you look at our neighbor to the NorthCanada, and they are welcoming, skilled
(20:13):
immigrants to Canada.
And and in fact, I I think it's kind of aglobal competition issue for the United States,
but without going too deep down that, becausethat's a certainly rabbit hole.
We didn't feel like we had a good foundermarket fit there.
And so we moved on to a second idea that wespent more time on, in the computer vision
space.
And that one, we felt was really missiondriven.
The idea was how can we equip, lower skilledtechnicians, meaning nurse practitioners
(20:40):
physician's assistance at the highest level orphysicians in rural areas with better
capabilities to identify, disease, things likelung cancer, things like breast cancer,
etcetera.
Again, the reason that we ended up letting thatidea go aside from business model
considerations was founder market fit.
(21:01):
My cofounder had great expertise in computervision, but We certainly didn't have medical
expertise, and it wasn't something that we feltthat we could personally speak to.
Interesting.
I liked the personal backstory behind that.
And how that led to claim.
I think to understand how you guys are solvingthe issue, I wanna bring back or or touch on
something you previously said How do you bringback that emotional connection, through claim?
(21:27):
Yeah.
Awesome question.
I think part of it starts with, a consistencyand design that feels opinionated and
consistent.
So what do I mean by that?
If you play with claim, it should give younostalgic vibes.
The logo is inspired by Nintendo, but it is avery clear and consistent departure from what I
(21:50):
call the 2010s fintech UI stack.
So it feels like you're you're kind of havingthis different experience as 1.
Secondly, your friends are already on theplatform, and we'll talk about growth in a
minute of its of interest, but we've launchedin really dense social networks.
On purpose.
And so with authenticity being kind of the keyword here, when you use claim, you're seeing
(22:14):
what your friends are up to actively, wherethey are shopping, where where they are
discovering new things.
And it's done in a non transactional way.
And I think that is kind of the the beauty atthe heart of claim is, you know, we, if we're
talking about shopping and customer acquisitionand brand discovery, the heart the beating
heart of that is transactions.
It's the ones and zeros and the dollar signsthat I mentioned.
(22:38):
But we've managed to rip out the feeling oftransactions from the platform.
And one of the ways we do that is by pushingnumbers under the hood as much as we can.
And we ran a number of AB tests and and kind ofinterviews around this, And there is a very
different reaction to if I put a brand in frontof you and the opportunity to try that brand
(22:59):
and we say iced coffee, then if I say 20% off,a $5 off.
In a way, it gets you to react more emotionallyto something.
You can picture it in your mind.
It feels like it's yours.
More so than it feels like, oh, here we goagain.
I'm operating the left brain.
So the combination of a dense social networkplus treating objects or brands as discrete
(23:22):
things, not numbers as part of the secret saucewith claim.
That's really interesting.
It's something that I actually wanna breakdown.
So For example, let's say I'm at a student at 1of the universities that you currently support.
I download the app.
Sign up.
One of the first things that I'm seeing and I'minteracting with on the platform.
Yeah.
So we'll drop you on to the activity feed,which, you know, talking to the early folks at
(23:44):
at Venmo A lot of people ask, why Venmo had anactivity feed?
Like, why do I need to see my friends payingeach other rent or or paying each other back
for pizza?
And at the beginning and and still today,that's to really drive home the point that
there is activity happening here.
This thing is real.
It is credible.
It's trustworthy.
And so in the same way, we drop you on theactivity feed on claim, and you can see the
(24:07):
pace of interaction that's occurring on theplatform.
Today's Thursday, which is claim drop day.
We can talk about the mechanics later, but ifyou open up the app right now, you're seeing
hundreds of activities happening on theplatform per minute.
And what's cool about that is you're kind ofimmersed in this world if this is there's
(24:27):
there's some moving and shaking going on here,and among my friends, which is the the key
point.
So that's one.
The second kind of aspect of what we do isfocus on these moments.
I just mentioned drop day.
That was partly inspired by be real saying it'stime to be real.
By HQ trivia, there's really something specialabout timed internet functions and kind of
(24:51):
conditioning people to expect timed internet tooccur.
So what do I mean by that?
We send a text to everyone at 11 AM Eastern onThursdays, and we say the drops here.
Come grab your claim.
And people look forward to that.
I mean, I've I've had, you know, students tell,tell me that claim is a bright spot in in their
week.
They look forward to this.
(25:12):
It's Not only an excuse to to try a new brand,but go with a friend.
And I think that experience bringing back thatsocial experience of trying something new
together is really powerful.
Whether it's online and you're you're you'rebuying a a new tea together on a, you know, a
website or if it's your you know, going andtrying a a new restaurant for the first time,
(25:33):
when you associate that with a socialexperience, you tend to value it higher Not to
mention if you do work, you're going to valuethat experience higher.
It's kind of the classic IKEA effect in inconsumer psychology.
And given that it's harder than ever to reachconsumers nowadays, especially college
students, how did you get your first 100 usersin each of these campuses?
(25:54):
Yeah.
So huge, kudos to Caroline who who runs growthfor us.
And what we've done is borrowed a lot from ourpredecessors, companies like Be real, gas app,
Tinder, what are the growth marketing or fieldmarketing strategies that were used there, but
also Venmo.
And so what we do on a new college campus isfirst, we identify the right college campus we
(26:15):
wanna launch at.
We look at student population.
We look at the dynamics of that Shamus?
How dense is it?
Where do students live?
What's the quality of food on that campus?
What brand partners are proximate to thatShamus, what e commerce companies want to
market to that campus.
And once we've identified the campus, we usekind of a 3 pronged strategy We hire college
(26:35):
ambassadors.
Nothing, you know, particularly new there, butwe use them to gather on the ground
intelligence.
And we give them 5 to 6 discrete tasks to helpus with.
Hey.
Introduce us to, you know, 10 sororityfraternity or student group leaders on campus.
Tell us about the places that people love tomeet up tell us about the restaurants that
(26:55):
people love to go, try with their friends.
And so we have that kind of on the groundknowledge We then launched partnerships with
key organizations on Shamus.
At Harvard, it was, the undergraduate women andbusiness organization in the automotive society
became kind of our key partners.
We may or may not financially incentivize thatgroup, depending on the organization.
(27:17):
But what they end up doing is the student groupleaders will say, hey.
You know, to our members try claim and and ourinvitation will get dropped into group chats,
and that helps us spread one to many veryquickly.
We also work with either paid influencers ormicro influencers on campus, or we get a lot of
organic content on Instagram and TikTok aboutthe sort of delightful experience that claim
(27:41):
brings.
And so those are kind of 3 strategies we use wealso have a wait list, again, looking at what
companies like gas app have done in the past.
We've had several students try so hard to geton to claim.
I know 1, you know, University of Nevada, LasVegas student, for example, in the last week
has tried 62 times to sign up with her emailaddress.
(28:02):
And UNLV is in the school we currently support,but the wait list shows us essentially where
there is student appetite to go next.
And so we can reach out to those users.
Hey.
Wanna become an ambassador?
Do you wanna become one of our launch partnersand launch with kind of, a friendly welcoming
party on these campuses?
But to be honest, Seamus, It's scrappy.
It's feet on the street.
(28:22):
It's boots on the ground.
If there were a a silver bullet to capturingThe majority of a college Shamus, I think we'd
see a lot more companies do it.
We've just started to build our own replicableplaybook over time.
We spoke a little bit earlier before this call.
And you told me that you only need, like, lessthan 10% of students at a university, or
(28:43):
college to sign up for the platform before itstarts going viral.
Why is the number so low that you need it andhow you're able to go viral after just having a
small students up front.
So this is, this obviously varies.
The 5 to 10% number, though, at a largeuniversity is still a a fair number of
students.
If we're at a 50,000 person university, that's25100 to 5000 students on the platform.
(29:08):
So it's not a non zero number of folks on theplatform before things start to rip.
I think the reflection for us is 2 things.
1, We see this all the time in consumer, and weprobably experience it ourselves.
It takes multiple impressions, or exposures toa new app or a new opportunity before you get
(29:28):
over the fence and you try it.
You know, in kind of business school parlance,this would almost be like crossing the chasm in
where you have some early adopters who arewilling to try anything, but how can you
actually get kind of the early majority ontothe platform?
And to us, the 5 to 10% is the early adopters.
The early majority is the next 20 plus percent.
So it takes your friend trying this thing,having that magical experience of unwrapping a
(29:51):
brand for the first time going and trying thatbrand often with a friend based on the games
that we build on the platform and then gettinga Venmo back for that sort of loop to want to
download it yourself.
So it's multiple exposure, and then it's trustand brand recognition.
And we borrowed a lot from be real on this aswell in their playbook for launching on college
(30:13):
campuses.
But it it takes enough of your friends having apositive experience and seeing claim, fulfill
its obligations to reward you for branddiscovery.
To be able to download the app.
And part of that is, around the data privacywork that we do.
The reason that we can be so powerful both forour consumers and brands is because we're able
(30:36):
to on a transaction level identify places youhaven't been before.
And a lot of our consumers think, oh, is claimgoing to sell our data?
And and the answer emphatically absolutely not.
We are not selling consumer data at all.
Full stop.
We only use that to find places that youhaven't been before to see that you've actually
shopped at that place and to find new placesthat you're gonna like going forward.
(30:59):
And so that trust aspect, which is so core toattacking some of the problems from the
marketing perspective around attribution, issomething that we look to build on these
campuses.
If we see that tipping point around 5 to 10%?
You mentioned games.
What are some of those games that are helpingwith engagement on the platform?
Yeah.
Let me offer 2.
So, for Valentine's Day, we launched what wecall half heart.
(31:22):
And, basically, we gave everyone on theplatform either a left half of a heart to go
get a coffee with somebody else.
It was worth about 5 to $6, I wanna say, or aleft half or a right half of art.
Excuse me.
And so it created this virtual game wherewhether or not you wanted to go with a friend
or or maybe a crush, which is kind of our idealyou had to trade around to make sure that you
(31:44):
had the complimentary heart.
And so I didn't mention this earlier, but whenyou get these sort of Claims we call them these
cards to go try a brand for the first timebased on your past spend, you can trade them on
the platform.
And that creates a lot of interesting consumerbehaviors.
It's a killer feature for us, but we wanted touse trading to create a world in which people
(32:05):
were actively talking about and finagling forthese hearts so they could go together with
somebody.
So that's one.
What we did on Tuesday, actually, isessentially launch Pokemon Go for brands, for
brand discovery.
And so what that looked like is we'd sendeveryone a text.
The drops here go to this point on campus andunwrap your reward with other people that are
(32:28):
there.
We did this in Boston.
Our team was on the ground there.
And we saw these groups of students looking attheir phones.
It's how we could identify them.
We see them tracking towards the radius.
And then there'd be these audible momentsdelight where they'd be yelling at each other
what they got.
Hey, did you get this?
Did you get this?
You wanna go?
Let's go.
We had one student clear an entire flight ofstairs.
(32:49):
To make it into the radius to kind of check-inand unwrap, his claim at that time.
And so these are some of the The games weretesting in terms of blending single player with
multiplayer in terms of blending digital with,you know, IRL or physical world, that all come
back to kind of the key theme of branddiscovery and brand discovery is best done
(33:11):
through your friends?
I wanna touch on the actual the other side ofthe marketplace, which is the branch really
quickly.
I've noticed over time that changing behavior,changing consumer behavior, basically any type
of change of behavior is pretty to do.
How do you convince brands to go from thoselegacy platforms like Google ads, Facebook ads,
(33:33):
to then your platform claim?
Yeah.
I would say an indirect conversation that wehave is around friction.
Friction to getting a consumer to try a newthing is really high.
We can actually price it in a way because, weknow that it's going to be a higher value
required to get you out of bed in the morningto go walk across town and try a new place.
(33:57):
So it's friction for the consumer, which Ithink a lot of marketers understand.
And then for us, It's a question of how can wereduce friction to a brand partner trying claim
for the first time.
And let me kind of describe that.
What we do for our brand partners is we say,Hey.
What are you willing to pay for a new customer?
Let's get some benchmarking done on your statusquo.
And a lot of our partners will tell us Hey.
(34:18):
Look.
We are beholden to Facebook.
We are beholden to Instagram.
The algorithm is Capricious.
We are looking to diversify a way these are ourcurrent cost per acquisition numbers.
We say, great.
We're not gonna charge you anything up front.
We're gonna go out you know, with your blessingand bring a lot of great new customers through
your doors or through your checkout flow forthe first time.
(34:41):
And then afterwards, we'll report back on thecustomers that we brought in, the number of
customers, the value kind of delivered to Thebrand, again, I'll I'll note here from a
consumer perspective, no personal information'sever shared with the brand, but we're able to
on a very data driven level provide that sortof proof to brands that they lack because we
have the credit card transactions to prove it.
(35:04):
They can't get that on any other platform withthat level of sophistication.
And so there's really no downside to brandsworking with claim.
There are no integrations.
We don't require any technical lift, no staffretraining.
We're not touching checkout flows.
We're not touching physical lines and processesin person.
(35:26):
We've just been really excited by Marker'swillingness to try a new thing, see the
results, and then refer their peers in theindustry to claim.
And today, how many users are you signing up,on the platform on, like, every week or every
day?
What what's what are those numbers breakingdown to be
Yeah.
Every day, we're in the thousands at thispoint.
(35:48):
High hundreds, low thousands is kind of our ourrun rate.
For us, it's not a growth at all costsquestion.
We have an invite channel in Slack, which isactually fun because I know Shamus, when I go
back to this after the episode, it'll be kindof gratifying to see the the register come in.
But if we were trying to make this as large aspossible, we would do probably 2 things.
(36:12):
1, we would expand to more campuses.
We would allow list more.edu addresses.
We also probably would consider moving off ofcollege campuses if we wanted to really get as
big as possible.
And, again, I think that separates us fromplatforms of late, be real laps, most recently.
Obviously, the the big legacy incumbents Butour goal is not to get as fast as possible on
(36:35):
the consumer side.
Our goal is to reach critical mass on thesedifferent campuses.
Be able to take that captive audience of ofgreat Gen Z consumers, allow brands to access
those Gen Z consumers, and start to let thismarketplace balance over time.
And so I I do imagine the next few months,we're gonna take the guardrails off more and
(36:55):
more.
But for now, we're pretty excited about the thepace of growth.
Why is your goal not to grow super large atfirst instead do it in stages.
Why is that?
Yeah.
This is the the blessing in the curse of being,something in between a consumer social company
at a in a fintech, right, is consumer socialcompany, the the road map is get big quickly,
(37:17):
figure out monetization down the road.
For us, we have the benefit of of monetizationearlier on.
But until we figure out essentially the uniteconomics or the company equation and we really
refine that company equation, if we grew to10,000,000, you know, students or users
tomorrow, I'm not confident that we haveperfectly figured out the math there to account
(37:38):
for that as a company.
And I think we will you know, in in the nearfuture.
But until we do that, I think we're betterserved by a velocity of learning in this sort
of constrained environments than we are ofgrowth at all costs.
And I would note that in any marketplace, Youknow, a company needs to prioritize one side or
the other.
We call it the shifting bottleneck.
(37:59):
Is the bottleneck for us on the consumer side,or is it on the merchant side of this platform?
And you can look at great companies like Airbnbwho emphasized one side or the other towards
becoming a stabilized marketplace.
For us, our thesis right now is if we're ableto get to enough consumers and build a consumer
experience to people's love, then we're goingto bring the right brand partners onto the
(38:21):
platform, which will then start create theflywheel of 2 sided network effects that we're
looking for.
And you mentioned monetization there are someapps that have, you know, grown super big like
Clubhouse had millions of users.
And then the they just realized there wasn'tactually a business model there.
How what's your business, Wanna?
How do you guys make money?
(38:42):
Yeah.
I mean, this is where we have a ton of priorart to pull from, and we can play to the the
very Madan reliable and dated business modelsof the giants.
Right?
So we don't monetize consumers.
We want consumers to use this platform we wantconsumers to feel safe and know that we're not
selling their data.
We're trying to build a better advertisingMadan.
(39:04):
And so if I'm a brand, the way I think aboutthis is if I have a dollar, my status quo is I
can buy ads.
Or you can essentially give it straight to newcustomers on claim.
It's taking that ad, you know, a brand wouldhave bought an ad.
They're instead giving that value to acustomer, you can think of it almost as a
virtual free sample in a way.
(39:26):
And when they do that, it gives the customerthe chance to directly experience the brand,
experience the product, and everything thatthat brand manager or that CMO is obsessed
over, which is a better experience for thecustomer.
They've now had that full experience, a betterexperience for the brand because they have
higher attribution and frankly, usually moreefficient.
(39:47):
Outcomes, it's a better experience for claim toreally be that sort of distribution mechanism,
that exists.
And again, I I would just harken back to Thereason claim matters is because advertising is
broken and consumers are more disillusionedthan ever, with advertising, with influencers,
(40:08):
etcetera, they didn't grow up with thesethings, especially our gen z folks.
And so they're looking for a new more authenticway to do things together.
And that's what claim provides as a newer andmore authentic way to do things together.
And so to answer your question, Seamus, onmonetization, we structure our partnerships
such that brands are paying us for newcustomers in the same way that they pay the
(40:32):
incumbents for new customers.
We're just doing it in a more authentic, andreliable way.
Got it.
And this might be going a little off track, butI am curious to do this, you, in the higher top
talent, you obviously need some level ofcapital, which you raised, through venture
venture funding.
So you raised at the peak of the VC market acouple of years ago.
(40:55):
And more recently, when the market was in atrough, you just raised some, a seed round by
Sequoia.
What has been, like, the most important lessonsthat you've learned in that fundraising process
to lay to raise money when capital is flush,but also when capital is more limited.
Yeah.
I would say at the outset, what I what I kindof tell other founders who are are thinking
(41:17):
about raising capital is first understand whatkind of business you want to build and what are
the pros and cons of of various sources ofcapital.
In the venture world, when you do raise the topof the market or or a more frothy, you know,
capital rich environment and you raise it thethe other end of the spectrum, you do learn
some some hard lessons.
(41:37):
And so, to me, I I think it's Finding the rightinvestors who are values aligned and vision
aligned is more important than ever.
A lesson that I learned is It's going to behard, if not near impossible, to convince an
investor who doesn't believe or have overlapwith your view of the world or your thesis.
(41:59):
That your company is best suited to attack thatproblem.
They might not even believe that that problemis worth attacking due to, you know, scar
tissue or skeletons in that closet or their ownlived experience, and that's totally fine.
But what I think you want to be doing or atleast our experience was being hyper targeted
finding investors that have an existing thesisthat have worked with other great companies
(42:22):
adjacent or similar to yours or that haveattack hard problems with a similar level of
uncertainty or new categories, are the bestconversations.
And I could often find during the fundraisingprocess that within the first five minutes, I
knew whether this was going to be a goodconversation or not.
And that's no disrespect to, the person orpeople that I was speaking with, but You can
(42:44):
you can tell if you can you and the investorcan start dreaming together early on.
Hey.
Have you thought about this?
What about this?
You know, have you considered this?
That's very different than, you know, what isyour current down mouth?
You know, tell me about cash burn.
You know, the the typical questions that shouldcome up in any diligence process.
I found to be back weighted in goodconversations.
(43:06):
You've raised your seed round from Sequoia,just recently.
Know Sequoia doesn't really do a lot ofconsumer investments.
How did you get inside the table there?
Yeah.
Certainly, certainly, not recently.
Obviously, Sequoia's incredibly storied, fundwho invested early in Apple, Google, you know,
WhatsApp, Instagram, the list goes on, so veryfortunate to to work with them.
(43:31):
And, you know, candidly, when we walked intotheir office in Menlo Park and you see the big
Sequoia tree and you see all the the termsheets of the first investments they made in
these, you know, iconic companies.
It was a little bit of a imposter syndrome oror pinch yourself moment.
And so I I would say that, you know, going backto the the fundraising tactics that we
(43:52):
mentioned, we found true, true, truly valuesaligned and vision aligned partners in
Josephine Chen and Jesley at Sequoia.
And from the first conversation, it wasdreaming It was understanding what are the
dream scenarios?
What could we build here?
How could we transform?
How consumers interact with one another?
How brands and consumers interact?
(44:13):
Is very much a a generative energy givingdiscussion.
The way that we were introduced to Sequoia, asI mentioned, was we were able to find somebody
who would vouch for us, say, hey, thiscompany's worth your time.
Maybe you should just spend a little bit oftime hearing what they have to say Madan since
then it's been a partnership that's blossomed,but especially in the last year or so, you
know, we truly understand how fortunate we arebecause capital is expensive right now, and and
(44:38):
capital is difficult to come by, and certainlyfrom, top tier venture firm.
And that's why We're working our hardest to togo make the future that we're building together
a reality.
You hyper target, your investors how do you dothat?
What do you do to hyper target investors?
Yeah.
I mean, that there's there's a classic strategywhen you're running a fundraising process where
(44:59):
you want to be targeted because you don't wantthe opportunity to feel like, it's being
shopped around everywhere.
And so there's a sequencing element of it of,hey.
We wanna go for these firms first.
Get their opinions you know, rope them in,hopefully get some traction, hopefully get some
term sheets, and then go to the next to kind ofwave and end up with a hot round or a
competitive environment a hot round in, youknow, 2022, 2023 is a little bit less common
(45:26):
than a hot round in 21.
But the way that I would look at it is Hey.
Who are investors that are writing activelyabout the space?
Even if it's not aligned with our view of thespace or who are investors who have a, enduring
thesis about social commerce, for example, orabout advertising or about consumer social
(45:46):
finding those people and then cruciallyfinding, a warm introduction to those people.
I think most investors will say, hey.
My DMs are open.
You know, on Twitter or or the like.
The reality is that an investor at a tier 1, VCthese days is getting exposed to thousands of
pitches per year is evaluating actively 100 ofcompanies per year and is only making a handful
(46:10):
of investments.
And so The networking aspect of this is real.
You'd be much better served taking the extratime to figure out if you can get just a warm
intro via email or whatever to an investorbecause in their mind, I would bet you that
they would place incrementally more weight onthe conversation that you're going to have.
And therefore, the sort of luck surface areathat you're creating in a way is increasing,
(46:34):
and therefore your probability of getting agood round done is increasing.
I guess to wrap it up, we have a couple of lastquestions, that we like to end with.
One is what's the best piece of advice you'veever received?
Yeah.
Good question.
It's happened a couple times, including onerecently from a friend.
(46:56):
But essentially, the advice is take a step backand and have some perspective.
And what I mean by that is every founder, everyentrepreneur, whether it's a small business or
a venture backed startup, feels the grind,feels the uncertainty, feels the stress.
I certainly have been quite stressed outcandidly.
And that's okay because what these friends helpme do is realize the context for what we're
(47:21):
doing.
It's a tremendous opportunity to wake up, go towork, you know, today with the claim team, you
know, a team of really passionate, curious,vibrant smart people, and get to work with
those people every day.
That's 1st and foremost, to be able to attack,$100,000,000,000 plus opportunity, and create a
(47:42):
generational potentially, you know, worldchanging company.
That's pretty massive, to have really greatinvestors, on our side, like Sequoia, like
Sousa, like box group, is a great honor to havestudents who love our app so much to have
brands that love the platform so much to havethat sort of traction.
(48:04):
And so, essentially, what it helped me do, thisadvice was to pull myself out of, you know, I
wouldn't say a dark place by any stretch, butcertainly a a place of stress and realize What
a great opportunity we have.
And and, you know, maybe zooming out one stepfurther, Shamus.
What a great opportunity we have in the UnitedStates?
As well to have the the liberties, thefreedoms, the potential for economic mobility.
(48:29):
Obviously, there are a ton of horrible thingsgoing on in the world, and there are a ton of
horrible things going on in the United But whata blessing?
What a privilege it is to to be a founder andgo try to make your mark in some small way on
the world.
And and I think that for me was, a sobering andimportant reminder, and it makes me more
thankful every day.
And the one question we like to close it withis if I slid you over a phone and you could
(48:54):
call your eighteen year old self, would youcall And if so, what would you say?
Do a lot of people say they wouldn't call?
Is that a common answer?
About is 5050.
That's fascinating.
I don't know.
As a quick aside here, when I try to makedecisions, what's worked well for me is to
minimize regret regret minimization.
(49:16):
It's how I made decisions about where I went toschool, big life decisions, personally,
etcetera, etcetera, company wide decisions.
I I know it's it's kind of a a fun exercise,but I regret not taking the opportunity to grab
the phone from you and and call my eighteenyear old self.
So therefore, I would do it what I would sayis, this is personal, but I'd say, hey, don't
(49:38):
drink.
And and and let me explain more.
I think the world, you know, whether it'sHuberman or, you know, various other
commentators, scientific literature, I thinkwe're understanding more and more how bad
alcohol is for us physiologically.
It's it reminds me of smoking.
(50:00):
And sure.
I I socialize in college business school,whatever.
I quit drinking a year or so ago entirely forno other reason than than health and and mental
clarity, and I feel the best I have ever feltin my adult life.
And so I would I'd call my eighteen year oldself and say, hey.
Look, you know, try to push the peer pressureoff.
(50:20):
Find another way.
Find another outlet to socialize.
You don't need alcohol.
Because I wonder I wasn't a heavy drinker, butI wonder what it would have been like.
There are so many other ways to stretch yourmind, stretch your creativity.
Why would you poison it?
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thank you very much, Sam, for taking the timeto join the show.
(50:41):
We'll have a link to claim, in the episodedescription.
If you happen to be one of the supportcampuses.
You can download it and check it out.
And thank you very much, Tim.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Seamus.
This is really fun.
The current system is broken.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
These are our legacy tools.
I think it's important to remember Facebook,Instagram, these things have been around for
over a decade, if not longer.
And so it's an aging suite of tools coupledwith a really difficult macro picture for
marketer.
Sam, thanks for taking the time to join theepisode.
(00:21):
I'm excited for this one.
To understand how your startup claim is gonnachange advertising forever.
Wanna start with your personal story.
What would be the earliest piece of contextthat I would have to know about you to
understand the person sitting in front of metoday?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, Seamus, thanks for havingme.
I'm really excited about this opportunity tospend some time with you and talk a little bit
(00:43):
about the Shamus story.
So I grew up, in a family of, my parents and myyounger brother who's 3 years younger than I
am.
And what's important to know is I had thetremendous opportunity to explore and create
during my childhood, but also see 2particularly strong role models in my parents.
(01:03):
And to me, they embodied tenacity, grit, andteamwork, and they really espouse that through
athletics.
And so we grew up on the road a lot.
And by that, I mean, we would travel the worldand my parents would race.
And my mom was a college swimmer at Stanfordturned national champion and then competed
doing Ironman triathlons around the world.
(01:26):
My dad marathoner competed at the world leveland do Athhelons, which is running and biking.
My younger brother ended up going to Stanford.
He walked on to first the crew team, or, excuseme, the cross country team, and then the crew
team, and then became a naval officerafterwards.
And as kind of the athletic runt of the family.
(01:47):
I did have the opportunity to see what, effortlooked like, what passion looked like, and to
see that on full display through the hard timesof kind of seeing the pain on my parents' faces
as they were going through these gruelingphysical activities.
And that definitely shaped what I think hardwork looks like.
So I would say that that kind of from theearliest, I would say precognition or
(02:11):
preconsciousness level that has pervaded kindof who I am as a person from the earliest
stage.
And do you learn a lot about hard work when youwere younger what are some of the ways that at
that younger age, you decided to work hard andand and was a hard worker?
Yeah.
So I I would say the entrepreneurial bug waskind of placed within me at that young age, and
(02:36):
I'll give you a couple examples.
I was probably 11 or 12, just entering middleschool, 6th, 7th grade.
And my friend and I decided we wanted to youknow, kind of put our studies, quote, unquote,
on the back burner, and instead try to build acompany.
So we researched what we could.
Again, this is probably 2005 ish, 2004, maybe.
(03:02):
And we built a computer integration company.
So We called it hailstorm PC inspired by thefamous Pacific Northwest weather.
We went out and bought a number of parts offthings like Newegg.
We assembled those computers, and then wemarketed them publicly, mostly on Craigslist.
And the price point for us at the time, wethought it was high end.
(03:26):
We, we would sell computers for 800 to $1600.
They'd be Zeon based, you know, workstations orgaming rigs, and we poured our heart and soul
into that effort for what came to be verylittle financial return.
But certainly it was it was the first time Irealized, wow, it is incredible to try to build
(03:46):
something from 0, build something from scratch.
And, boy, does it require a lot of hard work?
The funny part is we'd show up to deliver thesecomputers.
And, you know, to be completely honest, thereweren't more than a dozen or so that we ended
up selling.
But we'd show up to deliver them.
And I'm not sure exactly what the customersthought at the time about these 2 middle
(04:06):
schoolers delivering their $1000 PC.
But I'm hoping that they thought that, youknow, this company was scrappy and hired cheap
delivery, for what was assembled byprofessionals.
So that was kind of one.
The other example I'd offer from kind of at theentrepreneurship intersection with hard work is
(04:27):
late middle school, early high school, Istarted building a, freelance web design
company.
And, again, I think this is a good example ofhiding behind a keyboard with the internet in
the early to late, 2000, but people didn't knowI was fourteen teen years old.
And I fell in love with Illustrator.
I fell in love with Photoshop, fell in lovewith HTML.
(04:49):
And I would build these sites and deliver themto customers and It's amazing how much cash
flow you can generate as somebody in latemiddle school, early high school when you're
fortunate not to have to pay rent.
And so I would pour so much time into these 2endeavors.
And, again, it kinda reinforced this cycle tome, this virtuous cycle that with enough kind
(05:12):
of tenacity, you can find your way withinuncertain times.
Now web design, building computers, far lesscertain, far clearer road map than what we're
doing with claim now, you know, some decadeslater, but definitely the first kind of
twinkles that I experienced at that time.
Yeah.
Your journey with web development and buildingcomputers kinda reminds me of when I was in 9th
(05:35):
grade when I started a a phone repair business.
When I started to learn about how to repairphones and computers, I just went on YouTube
and watched this guy named Hugh Jeffries, whowho does a lot of phone repairs.
And that's how I learned.
But, I mean, back then, YouTube wasn't even athing, really.
At least they weren't, doing tutorials.
So How did you learn how to work computers andrepair them?
(05:58):
I had a a partner in crime.
We launched that hailstorm PC company Imentioned.
We both were Geeks.
You know, from a hardware perspective, we tryto figure out what worked, you know, nicely in
the sandbox together.
From a software perspective, we were hackingaround bios the registry editor in Windows, you
know, we were just learning as we went, and itwas very much a trial and error process.
(06:20):
I'm so thankful for YouTube now, by the way, Ilove spending my time when I'm not looking at a
screen, you know, working on things like snowmachines, snowmobiles, dirt bike engines,
aircraft.
And, boy, it would be a lot harder to learn nowwithout YouTube.
Before we get into the backstory of claim andwhat you're doing today, I wanna delve into the
(06:41):
problem first.
What's wrong with advertising today?
Oh, boy.
Here we go.
So so let's let's attack this both from kind ofa consumer lens, as well as the merchant or
kind of advertiser lens.
Let's start with the the merchant lens first.
I actually think that most people don't realizehow difficult it is to be a marketer today.
(07:05):
There are a few reasons for that, and then I'llkind of aggregate those up to the picture of of
how we see the world.
The first is that the cost to acquire a rightnow is more expensive than ever, and we see
this in the data.
The cost per acquisition CPA and kind ofmarketing parlance has overall tripled over the
past 8 years.
So that's number 1 is it is very difficult tomake your P and L really pencil right now,
(07:31):
given the cost that it takes to go reach andget that customer in the door for the first
time.
So that's one.
The second aspect is actually figuring out howto attribute where that customer came from is
more complex than ever, and we see entireindustries, $1,000,000,000 industries developed
around multi touch attribution and assigningvalue to where that customer came in the door.
(07:53):
And unfortunately, It's becoming more and moreopaque, especially for the end user here who is
the marketer.
It's kind of a fool's errand in a way, and sothat's complicating the picture.
And then lastly, these kind of industry widedevelopments with good intent, by the way, the
phasing out of cookies from a Googleperspective.
Apples do not track or, anti trackingtechnology in the iOS system.
(08:16):
These further complicate the ability of themarketer to say, How do I find the right
customers?
How do I reach those customers?
How do I bring them in the door?
And how do I know how I brought them in thedoor?
And so marketers being put in this impossibleposition.
Again, this is kind of the sum total of thatdifficulty right now where they're being asked
to grow top line by their leadership teams, bytheir investors, by their shareholders.
(08:39):
They're being asked to cut marketing spend,being asked to grow gross margins and operating
margins.
And they're given kind of a legacy set of toolsto to do so.
Things like Google AdWords, which reinventedwere rather invented early advertising on the
internet, things like Facebook, instagram,TikTok.
These are our legacy tools.
(09:00):
I think it's important to remember FacebookInstagram, these things have been around for
over a decade, if not longer.
And so it's an aging suite of tools coupledwith a really difficult macro picture for
marketer.
Why is this so difficult to figure out whereconsumers are coming from on that merchant
lens?
Yeah.
So we'll talk kind of attribution 101 here.
(09:22):
The earliest version of this probably goes backto, like, the Madan men days, if not sooner,
right, where you're seeing a a billboard or atelevision ad, and that's what we kind of call
today awareness marketing.
And so can you really tick and tie somebody whowatches the Temu Super Bowl ad to somebody who
makes the purchase?
You you really can't at the end of the day.
And so this whole industry of performancemarketing that's worth tens and tens, if not
(09:45):
100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars per quarter,really arose to answer that question.
So If I click a link on Instagram, can I trackthrough from seeing that with my eyeballs
through making a purchase on the website?
And the answer is Kind of.
Provided that you make a lot of assumptionsaround where do ascribe trust and authenticity
(10:07):
within that system.
And so performance marketing to me isinadequate in its current state, for brands
because It is nearly impossible to know.
Is it because you saw this one ad?
And that ad drove you to make this purchase?
And that's going to only get harder and harder,as I mentioned, because of tracking being
(10:28):
pulled out of the system by sort of thematicregulatory constraints.
Yeah.
I think it's also extremely difficult to gainattention now because of how much, content is
already out there.
And for Bryce,
I think that traditional advertising marketslike this are gonna break in the next few
years.
If we continue down the trend of chat, GPT,LOMs, sat over saturating the market.
(10:53):
I mean, if if a if an LOM right now is able tooperate at some nontrivial percentile of of
human cognition, then it's going to be harderthan ever to know whether the eyeballs air
quotes that Saan had were truly human than not.
And that's gonna throw a wrench, in terms ofthe generative capability of of advertising for
(11:16):
attribution in the next few weeks.
It's interesting because I never thought of itlike that.
I always thought about, you know, chatty PT andAI being used to create content.
I think for the most part, that ends upcreating lower quality content depending on
what it is.
If I didn't think about it, on the other sideis if if they're actually viewing it and to
actually know if somebody who's viewing it as aperson or not, it's an interesting,
(11:40):
perspective.
And I think that's a perfect segue, Shamus,into the consumer side because what we're
talking about now is that consumer attention isat an all time low, which is, again, feeding
into kind of the vicious cycle of CPAs or costof acquisitions being at an all time high
because we are absolutely inundated withadvertising all day on our screens in real
(12:03):
life.
And the net total of that is Personally, andthis is part of the inspiration for claim,
disillusionment.
But if anything, it's desensitization, to thesebrands that are trying to grab our attention
when we're not, you know, we're not onInstagram to be sold things.
We're not walking down the street to be soldthings.
(12:25):
So it's a root interruption, in our day, whichI would argue as an economic drain on our
society as well.
So how are you guys solving this problemthrough claim?
We've mentioned your new business a couple oftimes, but let's dig deep into what you guys
are doing to actually fix this issue.
Yeah.
So so maybe helpful to kind of fill in a littlebit of the picture here on on what inspired us
(12:47):
to to start claim.
We'll start with kind of the disillusionmentaspect that that I mentioned.
I grew up with Facebook, at the end of college,I wanna say 2013 ish, I deleted my Facebook
entirely, not deactivated, but deleted, becauseI felt 2 things.
1, the sort of dopamine loop is real, and Ifelt myself getting dragged more and more into
(13:15):
checking Facebook often at the expense of realworld relationships and time better spent
elsewhere.
But 2, I got tired of the 4th or 5th direct toconsumer company trying to reach me on
Facebook.
When again, I was not there to be sold to.
So I deleted Facebook, and I never got anInstagram.
I think it's kind of a funny, Paradox in a waythat we have a consumer internet advertising
(13:38):
founder who never had an Instagram.
And so it's a known blind spot.
And I'm able to fill that in with reallytalented folks on our team, but it speaks to my
belief that the current system is broken.
And going forward, we've built claim almost tobe the anti Instagram and the anti direction
(13:58):
that A lot of these platforms are going, whichstarted as true connections.
They started as, what are my friends doingtoday?
Much like B Real still is.
And they've expanded in scope to not what aremy friends up to, but who is this influencer
who's trying to market to me?
What is this celebrity doing?
And the density of those networks has becomemore diffuse.
(14:20):
And so I'm glad that I'm I'm not on Instagram,frankly.
So that's one.
The second aspect of starting claim came fromthis feeling that a lot of our digital
interactions are more transactional than everright now.
There's a story that that I tell with my mycofounder where He did something really great
for the company.
He shipped a feature way ahead of schedule forus, and it was a step change for the company.
(14:43):
I thought about what I could do to thank him,for doing that.
And I kinda considered 3 options.
I could go downstairs.
I could, you know, recite his favorite coffeeorder by heart, get him that coffee, at the
coffee shop, bring it back up and give it tohim.
That's one.
I could, you know, hand him a $5 gift card tothat coffee shop.
As a second way of thinking him, or I couldjust slap $5 down on the table in front of him,
(15:07):
and all of those would have the same monetaryvalue, but, like, we all realize that there's
one right answer in that sort of decisionmatrix, and it's get him the thing that he
loves because I know him.
And I feel like so much of our digitalinteractions in the past decades have been
reduced to bits to ones and zeros totransactions on things like Venmo, Cash App
(15:29):
PayPal and the like.
And we've lost some of that emotionalconnection, and there's something about that
that is deeply human that were missing.
And so we wanted to bring back that sort ofemotional connection through interaction,
through authenticity with claim.
And then the last aspect of this and why Ithink claim will become kind of a generational
(15:49):
company, on the consumer side is we werelooking around at the world, a few years ago
when we were saying, wow, there are some reallyinteresting things going on here that we're
seeing in places like web 3 in gaming,etcetera, around digital ownership of private
property.
If you think about the way that our societyfunctions in the United States, it is very much
(16:11):
dictated by private property ownership.
And so I don't think it takes a massive leap tobelieve that in the future, if private property
ownership were you know, essentially sacrosancton the internet, that would transform how our
society functions, perhaps by multiples becauseof the distribution of the internet.
And so Part of the inspiration from claim isearly tests around what could private property
(16:33):
ownership on the internet look like.
And, of course, claim is definitely you know,course corrected and made adjustments over over
time, but that sort of ethos still underpins alot of our work as a company.
Those were kind of the 3 epiphanies or ormoments, when we started clean.
And how did you and your co founder How did youand your cofounder meet and why did you decide
(16:55):
to go into business together?
Yeah.
I love this.
It's so central to our story.
There was an admissions officer in theundergraduate admissions department at Yale,
who decided for whatever reason to put mycofounder and I together as roommates.
And it was a stroke of luck because we reallyclicked, and we ended up living together all 4
years in undergrad.
(17:16):
We kind of set our goodbyes.
He went off to go work in the Bay Area, afterschool, I went to go work in New York.
But we always had this thought that one day wewanted to start something together.
And I think part of me in my mind always heldthis place of admiration for my dad because he
started a company with his best friend back inthe 1980.
(17:37):
And when he did, he did something that Ithought was really powerful.
He said, I'm gonna write a letter to you beinghis best friend, and here are here's what I
value about you as a person.
Here here are all the things that I admire inyou and why I'm so excited to, intertwine our
lives even further in an uncertain venture, buthere are the things that are non negotiables
(17:57):
for us.
And and here are the reasons that we need tomaintain our friendship in the face of know,
adversity as a business.
And so I knew that I wanted to go start acompany, and I wanted to do so with my
cofounder.
TAP.
And so that ended up changing my life for thebetter.
I I wanted to go find TAP.
I knew I needed to poach him for whatever hewas up to at the time.
(18:20):
He was in business school at Harvard doing a ajoint degree between the engineering school and
and HBS.
And so I I applied there.
I was really fortunate to to get in.
And then we did the whiteboard thing in ourdorm room.
We lived together again.
And before we took the leap of faith, I wrotehim a letter.
And You know, my dad actually brought out theletter that he wrote not too long ago, and it
(18:41):
was kind of amazing.
It makes you think about nature nurture a lot,but the same themes were present there.
In the letter that I wrote tap saying, here'swhat I admire about you.
Here's why I'm so excited in the letter thatwas dated in 1982, from my dev.
And at Harvard Business School, what are someof the startup ideation ideas that you were
brainstorming at that time?
(19:02):
Oh, man.
Okay.
Tripped down memory lane.
We had a whiteboard in our room.
We overbuilt this matrix to evaluate differentideas, which was silly.
It's kind of a saying in in in business schoolthat there are 4, horsemen of the NBA
apocalypse.
Meaning, what are the ideas that rear theirugly heads every single MBA class?
(19:25):
And yet, every single MBA thinks that they areworld changing ideas in no particular order
It's an alcohol delivery app.
It's a dating app.
It's an English tutoring app.
It's a meetup or or networking app.
And, I will lie.
We evaluated some of some things in those, 4.
The 2 that we ended up exploring more, one wasa take on streamlining the immigration system,
(19:50):
the skilled immigration system in the US, it'sappalling to me that we have a country that
doesn't support bringing great people here,highly skilled laborers, the H1B system, going
through it now for one of our teammates.
It's it's broken.
Whereas you look at our neighbor to the NorthCanada, and they are welcoming, skilled
(20:13):
immigrants to Canada.
And and in fact, I I think it's kind of aglobal competition issue for the United States,
but without going too deep down that, becausethat's a certainly rabbit hole.
We didn't feel like we had a good foundermarket fit there.
And so we moved on to a second idea that wespent more time on, in the computer vision
space.
And that one, we felt was really missiondriven.
The idea was how can we equip, lower skilledtechnicians, meaning nurse practitioners
(20:40):
physician's assistance at the highest level orphysicians in rural areas with better
capabilities to identify, disease, things likelung cancer, things like breast cancer,
etcetera.
Again, the reason that we ended up letting thatidea go aside from business model
considerations was founder market fit.
(21:01):
My cofounder had great expertise in computervision, but We certainly didn't have medical
expertise, and it wasn't something that we feltthat we could personally speak to.
Interesting.
I liked the personal backstory behind that.
And how that led to claim.
I think to understand how you guys are solvingthe issue, I wanna bring back or or touch on
something you previously said How do you bringback that emotional connection, through claim?
(21:27):
Yeah.
Awesome question.
I think part of it starts with, a consistencyand design that feels opinionated and
consistent.
So what do I mean by that?
If you play with claim, it should give younostalgic vibes.
The logo is inspired by Nintendo, but it is avery clear and consistent departure from what I
(21:50):
call the 2010s fintech UI stack.
So it feels like you're you're kind of havingthis different experience as 1.
Secondly, your friends are already on theplatform, and we'll talk about growth in a
minute of its of interest, but we've launchedin really dense social networks.
On purpose.
And so with authenticity being kind of the keyword here, when you use claim, you're seeing
(22:14):
what your friends are up to actively, wherethey are shopping, where where they are
discovering new things.
And it's done in a non transactional way.
And I think that is kind of the the beauty atthe heart of claim is, you know, we, if we're
talking about shopping and customer acquisitionand brand discovery, the heart the beating
heart of that is transactions.
It's the ones and zeros and the dollar signsthat I mentioned.
(22:38):
But we've managed to rip out the feeling oftransactions from the platform.
And one of the ways we do that is by pushingnumbers under the hood as much as we can.
And we ran a number of AB tests and and kind ofinterviews around this, And there is a very
different reaction to if I put a brand in frontof you and the opportunity to try that brand
(22:59):
and we say iced coffee, then if I say 20% off,a $5 off.
In a way, it gets you to react more emotionallyto something.
You can picture it in your mind.
It feels like it's yours.
More so than it feels like, oh, here we goagain.
I'm operating the left brain.
So the combination of a dense social networkplus treating objects or brands as discrete
(23:22):
things, not numbers as part of the secret saucewith claim.
That's really interesting.
It's something that I actually wanna breakdown.
So For example, let's say I'm at a student at 1of the universities that you currently support.
I download the app.
Sign up.
One of the first things that I'm seeing and I'minteracting with on the platform.
Yeah.
So we'll drop you on to the activity feed,which, you know, talking to the early folks at
(23:44):
at Venmo A lot of people ask, why Venmo had anactivity feed?
Like, why do I need to see my friends payingeach other rent or or paying each other back
for pizza?
And at the beginning and and still today,that's to really drive home the point that
there is activity happening here.
This thing is real.
It is credible.
It's trustworthy.
And so in the same way, we drop you on theactivity feed on claim, and you can see the
(24:07):
pace of interaction that's occurring on theplatform.
Today's Thursday, which is claim drop day.
We can talk about the mechanics later, but ifyou open up the app right now, you're seeing
hundreds of activities happening on theplatform per minute.
And what's cool about that is you're kind ofimmersed in this world if this is there's
(24:27):
there's some moving and shaking going on here,and among my friends, which is the the key
point.
So that's one.
The second kind of aspect of what we do isfocus on these moments.
I just mentioned drop day.
That was partly inspired by be real saying it'stime to be real.
By HQ trivia, there's really something specialabout timed internet functions and kind of
(24:51):
conditioning people to expect timed internet tooccur.
So what do I mean by that?
We send a text to everyone at 11 AM Eastern onThursdays, and we say the drops here.
Come grab your claim.
And people look forward to that.
I mean, I've I've had, you know, students tell,tell me that claim is a bright spot in in their
week.
They look forward to this.
(25:12):
It's Not only an excuse to to try a new brand,but go with a friend.
And I think that experience bringing back thatsocial experience of trying something new
together is really powerful.
Whether it's online and you're you're you'rebuying a a new tea together on a, you know, a
website or if it's your you know, going andtrying a a new restaurant for the first time,
(25:33):
when you associate that with a socialexperience, you tend to value it higher Not to
mention if you do work, you're going to valuethat experience higher.
It's kind of the classic IKEA effect in inconsumer psychology.
And given that it's harder than ever to reachconsumers nowadays, especially college
students, how did you get your first 100 usersin each of these campuses?
(25:54):
Yeah.
So huge, kudos to Caroline who who runs growthfor us.
And what we've done is borrowed a lot from ourpredecessors, companies like Be real, gas app,
Tinder, what are the growth marketing or fieldmarketing strategies that were used there, but
also Venmo.
And so what we do on a new college campus isfirst, we identify the right college campus we
(26:15):
wanna launch at.
We look at student population.
We look at the dynamics of that Shamus?
How dense is it?
Where do students live?
What's the quality of food on that campus?
What brand partners are proximate to thatShamus, what e commerce companies want to
market to that campus.
And once we've identified the campus, we usekind of a 3 pronged strategy We hire college
(26:35):
ambassadors.
Nothing, you know, particularly new there, butwe use them to gather on the ground
intelligence.
And we give them 5 to 6 discrete tasks to helpus with.
Hey.
Introduce us to, you know, 10 sororityfraternity or student group leaders on campus.
Tell us about the places that people love tomeet up tell us about the restaurants that
(26:55):
people love to go, try with their friends.
And so we have that kind of on the groundknowledge We then launched partnerships with
key organizations on Shamus.
At Harvard, it was, the undergraduate women andbusiness organization in the automotive society
became kind of our key partners.
We may or may not financially incentivize thatgroup, depending on the organization.
(27:17):
But what they end up doing is the student groupleaders will say, hey.
You know, to our members try claim and and ourinvitation will get dropped into group chats,
and that helps us spread one to many veryquickly.
We also work with either paid influencers ormicro influencers on campus, or we get a lot of
organic content on Instagram and TikTok aboutthe sort of delightful experience that claim
(27:41):
brings.
And so those are kind of 3 strategies we use wealso have a wait list, again, looking at what
companies like gas app have done in the past.
We've had several students try so hard to geton to claim.
I know 1, you know, University of Nevada, LasVegas student, for example, in the last week
has tried 62 times to sign up with her emailaddress.
(28:02):
And UNLV is in the school we currently support,but the wait list shows us essentially where
there is student appetite to go next.
And so we can reach out to those users.
Hey.
Wanna become an ambassador?
Do you wanna become one of our launch partnersand launch with kind of, a friendly welcoming
party on these campuses?
But to be honest, Seamus, It's scrappy.
It's feet on the street.
(28:22):
It's boots on the ground.
If there were a a silver bullet to capturingThe majority of a college Shamus, I think we'd
see a lot more companies do it.
We've just started to build our own replicableplaybook over time.
We spoke a little bit earlier before this call.
And you told me that you only need, like, lessthan 10% of students at a university, or
(28:43):
college to sign up for the platform before itstarts going viral.
Why is the number so low that you need it andhow you're able to go viral after just having a
small students up front.
So this is, this obviously varies.
The 5 to 10% number, though, at a largeuniversity is still a a fair number of
students.
If we're at a 50,000 person university, that's25100 to 5000 students on the platform.
(29:08):
So it's not a non zero number of folks on theplatform before things start to rip.
I think the reflection for us is 2 things.
1, We see this all the time in consumer, and weprobably experience it ourselves.
It takes multiple impressions, or exposures toa new app or a new opportunity before you get
(29:28):
over the fence and you try it.
You know, in kind of business school parlance,this would almost be like crossing the chasm in
where you have some early adopters who arewilling to try anything, but how can you
actually get kind of the early majority ontothe platform?
And to us, the 5 to 10% is the early adopters.
The early majority is the next 20 plus percent.
So it takes your friend trying this thing,having that magical experience of unwrapping a
(29:51):
brand for the first time going and trying thatbrand often with a friend based on the games
that we build on the platform and then gettinga Venmo back for that sort of loop to want to
download it yourself.
So it's multiple exposure, and then it's trustand brand recognition.
And we borrowed a lot from be real on this aswell in their playbook for launching on college
(30:13):
campuses.
But it it takes enough of your friends having apositive experience and seeing claim, fulfill
its obligations to reward you for branddiscovery.
To be able to download the app.
And part of that is, around the data privacywork that we do.
The reason that we can be so powerful both forour consumers and brands is because we're able
(30:36):
to on a transaction level identify places youhaven't been before.
And a lot of our consumers think, oh, is claimgoing to sell our data?
And and the answer emphatically absolutely not.
We are not selling consumer data at all.
Full stop.
We only use that to find places that youhaven't been before to see that you've actually
shopped at that place and to find new placesthat you're gonna like going forward.
(30:59):
And so that trust aspect, which is so core toattacking some of the problems from the
marketing perspective around attribution, issomething that we look to build on these
campuses.
If we see that tipping point around 5 to 10%?
You mentioned games.
What are some of those games that are helpingwith engagement on the platform?
Yeah.
Let me offer 2.
So, for Valentine's Day, we launched what wecall half heart.
(31:22):
And, basically, we gave everyone on theplatform either a left half of a heart to go
get a coffee with somebody else.
It was worth about 5 to $6, I wanna say, or aleft half or a right half of art.
Excuse me.
And so it created this virtual game wherewhether or not you wanted to go with a friend
or or maybe a crush, which is kind of our idealyou had to trade around to make sure that you
(31:44):
had the complimentary heart.
And so I didn't mention this earlier, but whenyou get these sort of Claims we call them these
cards to go try a brand for the first timebased on your past spend, you can trade them on
the platform.
And that creates a lot of interesting consumerbehaviors.
It's a killer feature for us, but we wanted touse trading to create a world in which people
(32:05):
were actively talking about and finagling forthese hearts so they could go together with
somebody.
So that's one.
What we did on Tuesday, actually, isessentially launch Pokemon Go for brands, for
brand discovery.
And so what that looked like is we'd sendeveryone a text.
The drops here go to this point on campus andunwrap your reward with other people that are
(32:28):
there.
We did this in Boston.
Our team was on the ground there.
And we saw these groups of students looking attheir phones.
It's how we could identify them.
We see them tracking towards the radius.
And then there'd be these audible momentsdelight where they'd be yelling at each other
what they got.
Hey, did you get this?
Did you get this?
You wanna go?
Let's go.
We had one student clear an entire flight ofstairs.
(32:49):
To make it into the radius to kind of check-inand unwrap, his claim at that time.
And so these are some of the The games weretesting in terms of blending single player with
multiplayer in terms of blending digital with,you know, IRL or physical world, that all come
back to kind of the key theme of branddiscovery and brand discovery is best done
(33:11):
through your friends?
I wanna touch on the actual the other side ofthe marketplace, which is the branch really
quickly.
I've noticed over time that changing behavior,changing consumer behavior, basically any type
of change of behavior is pretty to do.
How do you convince brands to go from thoselegacy platforms like Google ads, Facebook ads,
(33:33):
to then your platform claim?
Yeah.
I would say an indirect conversation that wehave is around friction.
Friction to getting a consumer to try a newthing is really high.
We can actually price it in a way because, weknow that it's going to be a higher value
required to get you out of bed in the morningto go walk across town and try a new place.
(33:57):
So it's friction for the consumer, which Ithink a lot of marketers understand.
And then for us, It's a question of how can wereduce friction to a brand partner trying claim
for the first time.
And let me kind of describe that.
What we do for our brand partners is we say,Hey.
What are you willing to pay for a new customer?
Let's get some benchmarking done on your statusquo.
And a lot of our partners will tell us Hey.
(34:18):
Look.
We are beholden to Facebook.
We are beholden to Instagram.
The algorithm is Capricious.
We are looking to diversify a way these are ourcurrent cost per acquisition numbers.
We say, great.
We're not gonna charge you anything up front.
We're gonna go out you know, with your blessingand bring a lot of great new customers through
your doors or through your checkout flow forthe first time.
(34:41):
And then afterwards, we'll report back on thecustomers that we brought in, the number of
customers, the value kind of delivered to Thebrand, again, I'll I'll note here from a
consumer perspective, no personal information'sever shared with the brand, but we're able to
on a very data driven level provide that sortof proof to brands that they lack because we
have the credit card transactions to prove it.
(35:04):
They can't get that on any other platform withthat level of sophistication.
And so there's really no downside to brandsworking with claim.
There are no integrations.
We don't require any technical lift, no staffretraining.
We're not touching checkout flows.
We're not touching physical lines and processesin person.
(35:26):
We've just been really excited by Marker'swillingness to try a new thing, see the
results, and then refer their peers in theindustry to claim.
And today, how many users are you signing up,on the platform on, like, every week or every
day?
What what's what are those numbers breakingdown to be
Yeah.
Every day, we're in the thousands at thispoint.
(35:48):
High hundreds, low thousands is kind of our ourrun rate.
For us, it's not a growth at all costsquestion.
We have an invite channel in Slack, which isactually fun because I know Shamus, when I go
back to this after the episode, it'll be kindof gratifying to see the the register come in.
But if we were trying to make this as large aspossible, we would do probably 2 things.
(36:12):
1, we would expand to more campuses.
We would allow list more.edu addresses.
We also probably would consider moving off ofcollege campuses if we wanted to really get as
big as possible.
And, again, I think that separates us fromplatforms of late, be real laps, most recently.
Obviously, the the big legacy incumbents Butour goal is not to get as fast as possible on
(36:35):
the consumer side.
Our goal is to reach critical mass on thesedifferent campuses.
Be able to take that captive audience of ofgreat Gen Z consumers, allow brands to access
those Gen Z consumers, and start to let thismarketplace balance over time.
And so I I do imagine the next few months,we're gonna take the guardrails off more and
(36:55):
more.
But for now, we're pretty excited about the thepace of growth.
Why is your goal not to grow super large atfirst instead do it in stages.
Why is that?
Yeah.
This is the the blessing in the curse of being,something in between a consumer social company
at a in a fintech, right, is consumer socialcompany, the the road map is get big quickly,
(37:17):
figure out monetization down the road.
For us, we have the benefit of of monetizationearlier on.
But until we figure out essentially the uniteconomics or the company equation and we really
refine that company equation, if we grew to10,000,000, you know, students or users
tomorrow, I'm not confident that we haveperfectly figured out the math there to account
(37:38):
for that as a company.
And I think we will you know, in in the nearfuture.
But until we do that, I think we're betterserved by a velocity of learning in this sort
of constrained environments than we are ofgrowth at all costs.
And I would note that in any marketplace, Youknow, a company needs to prioritize one side or
the other.
We call it the shifting bottleneck.
(37:59):
Is the bottleneck for us on the consumer side,or is it on the merchant side of this platform?
And you can look at great companies like Airbnbwho emphasized one side or the other towards
becoming a stabilized marketplace.
For us, our thesis right now is if we're ableto get to enough consumers and build a consumer
experience to people's love, then we're goingto bring the right brand partners onto the
(38:21):
platform, which will then start create theflywheel of 2 sided network effects that we're
looking for.
And you mentioned monetization there are someapps that have, you know, grown super big like
Clubhouse had millions of users.
And then the they just realized there wasn'tactually a business model there.
How what's your business, Wanna?
How do you guys make money?
(38:42):
Yeah.
I mean, this is where we have a ton of priorart to pull from, and we can play to the the
very Madan reliable and dated business modelsof the giants.
Right?
So we don't monetize consumers.
We want consumers to use this platform we wantconsumers to feel safe and know that we're not
selling their data.
We're trying to build a better advertisingMadan.
(39:04):
And so if I'm a brand, the way I think aboutthis is if I have a dollar, my status quo is I
can buy ads.
Or you can essentially give it straight to newcustomers on claim.
It's taking that ad, you know, a brand wouldhave bought an ad.
They're instead giving that value to acustomer, you can think of it almost as a
virtual free sample in a way.
(39:26):
And when they do that, it gives the customerthe chance to directly experience the brand,
experience the product, and everything thatthat brand manager or that CMO is obsessed
over, which is a better experience for thecustomer.
They've now had that full experience, a betterexperience for the brand because they have
higher attribution and frankly, usually moreefficient.
(39:47):
Outcomes, it's a better experience for claim toreally be that sort of distribution mechanism,
that exists.
And again, I I would just harken back to Thereason claim matters is because advertising is
broken and consumers are more disillusionedthan ever, with advertising, with influencers,
(40:08):
etcetera, they didn't grow up with thesethings, especially our gen z folks.
And so they're looking for a new more authenticway to do things together.
And that's what claim provides as a newer andmore authentic way to do things together.
And so to answer your question, Seamus, onmonetization, we structure our partnerships
such that brands are paying us for newcustomers in the same way that they pay the
(40:32):
incumbents for new customers.
We're just doing it in a more authentic, andreliable way.
Got it.
And this might be going a little off track, butI am curious to do this, you, in the higher top
talent, you obviously need some level ofcapital, which you raised, through venture
venture funding.
So you raised at the peak of the VC market acouple of years ago.
(40:55):
And more recently, when the market was in atrough, you just raised some, a seed round by
Sequoia.
What has been, like, the most important lessonsthat you've learned in that fundraising process
to lay to raise money when capital is flush,but also when capital is more limited.
Yeah.
I would say at the outset, what I what I kindof tell other founders who are are thinking
(41:17):
about raising capital is first understand whatkind of business you want to build and what are
the pros and cons of of various sources ofcapital.
In the venture world, when you do raise the topof the market or or a more frothy, you know,
capital rich environment and you raise it thethe other end of the spectrum, you do learn
some some hard lessons.
(41:37):
And so, to me, I I think it's Finding the rightinvestors who are values aligned and vision
aligned is more important than ever.
A lesson that I learned is It's going to behard, if not near impossible, to convince an
investor who doesn't believe or have overlapwith your view of the world or your thesis.
(41:59):
That your company is best suited to attack thatproblem.
They might not even believe that that problemis worth attacking due to, you know, scar
tissue or skeletons in that closet or their ownlived experience, and that's totally fine.
But what I think you want to be doing or atleast our experience was being hyper targeted
finding investors that have an existing thesisthat have worked with other great companies
(42:22):
adjacent or similar to yours or that haveattack hard problems with a similar level of
uncertainty or new categories, are the bestconversations.
And I could often find during the fundraisingprocess that within the first five minutes, I
knew whether this was going to be a goodconversation or not.
And that's no disrespect to, the person orpeople that I was speaking with, but You can
(42:44):
you can tell if you can you and the investorcan start dreaming together early on.
Hey.
Have you thought about this?
What about this?
You know, have you considered this?
That's very different than, you know, what isyour current down mouth?
You know, tell me about cash burn.
You know, the the typical questions that shouldcome up in any diligence process.
I found to be back weighted in goodconversations.
(43:06):
You've raised your seed round from Sequoia,just recently.
Know Sequoia doesn't really do a lot ofconsumer investments.
How did you get inside the table there?
Yeah.
Certainly, certainly, not recently.
Obviously, Sequoia's incredibly storied, fundwho invested early in Apple, Google, you know,
WhatsApp, Instagram, the list goes on, so veryfortunate to to work with them.
(43:31):
And, you know, candidly, when we walked intotheir office in Menlo Park and you see the big
Sequoia tree and you see all the the termsheets of the first investments they made in
these, you know, iconic companies.
It was a little bit of a imposter syndrome oror pinch yourself moment.
And so I I would say that, you know, going backto the the fundraising tactics that we
(43:52):
mentioned, we found true, true, truly valuesaligned and vision aligned partners in
Josephine Chen and Jesley at Sequoia.
And from the first conversation, it wasdreaming It was understanding what are the
dream scenarios?
What could we build here?
How could we transform?
How consumers interact with one another?
How brands and consumers interact?
(44:13):
Is very much a a generative energy givingdiscussion.
The way that we were introduced to Sequoia, asI mentioned, was we were able to find somebody
who would vouch for us, say, hey, thiscompany's worth your time.
Maybe you should just spend a little bit oftime hearing what they have to say Madan since
then it's been a partnership that's blossomed,but especially in the last year or so, you
know, we truly understand how fortunate we arebecause capital is expensive right now, and and
(44:38):
capital is difficult to come by, and certainlyfrom, top tier venture firm.
And that's why We're working our hardest to togo make the future that we're building together
a reality.
You hyper target, your investors how do you dothat?
What do you do to hyper target investors?
Yeah.
I mean, that there's there's a classic strategywhen you're running a fundraising process where
(44:59):
you want to be targeted because you don't wantthe opportunity to feel like, it's being
shopped around everywhere.
And so there's a sequencing element of it of,hey.
We wanna go for these firms first.
Get their opinions you know, rope them in,hopefully get some traction, hopefully get some
term sheets, and then go to the next to kind ofwave and end up with a hot round or a
competitive environment a hot round in, youknow, 2022, 2023 is a little bit less common
(45:26):
than a hot round in 21.
But the way that I would look at it is Hey.
Who are investors that are writing activelyabout the space?
Even if it's not aligned with our view of thespace or who are investors who have a, enduring
thesis about social commerce, for example, orabout advertising or about consumer social
(45:46):
finding those people and then cruciallyfinding, a warm introduction to those people.
I think most investors will say, hey.
My DMs are open.
You know, on Twitter or or the like.
The reality is that an investor at a tier 1, VCthese days is getting exposed to thousands of
pitches per year is evaluating actively 100 ofcompanies per year and is only making a handful
(46:10):
of investments.
And so The networking aspect of this is real.
You'd be much better served taking the extratime to figure out if you can get just a warm
intro via email or whatever to an investorbecause in their mind, I would bet you that
they would place incrementally more weight onthe conversation that you're going to have.
And therefore, the sort of luck surface areathat you're creating in a way is increasing,
(46:34):
and therefore your probability of getting agood round done is increasing.
I guess to wrap it up, we have a couple of lastquestions, that we like to end with.
One is what's the best piece of advice you'veever received?
Yeah.
Good question.
It's happened a couple times, including onerecently from a friend.
(46:56):
But essentially, the advice is take a step backand and have some perspective.
And what I mean by that is every founder, everyentrepreneur, whether it's a small business or
a venture backed startup, feels the grind,feels the uncertainty, feels the stress.
I certainly have been quite stressed outcandidly.
And that's okay because what these friends helpme do is realize the context for what we're
(47:21):
doing.
It's a tremendous opportunity to wake up, go towork, you know, today with the claim team, you
know, a team of really passionate, curious,vibrant smart people, and get to work with
those people every day.
That's 1st and foremost, to be able to attack,$100,000,000,000 plus opportunity, and create a
(47:42):
generational potentially, you know, worldchanging company.
That's pretty massive, to have really greatinvestors, on our side, like Sequoia, like
Sousa, like box group, is a great honor to havestudents who love our app so much to have
brands that love the platform so much to havethat sort of traction.
(48:04):
And so, essentially, what it helped me do, thisadvice was to pull myself out of, you know, I
wouldn't say a dark place by any stretch, butcertainly a a place of stress and realize What
a great opportunity we have.
And and, you know, maybe zooming out one stepfurther, Shamus.
What a great opportunity we have in the UnitedStates?
As well to have the the liberties, thefreedoms, the potential for economic mobility.
(48:29):
Obviously, there are a ton of horrible thingsgoing on in the world, and there are a ton of
horrible things going on in the United But whata blessing?
What a privilege it is to to be a founder andgo try to make your mark in some small way on
the world.
And and I think that for me was, a sobering andimportant reminder, and it makes me more
thankful every day.
And the one question we like to close it withis if I slid you over a phone and you could
(48:54):
call your eighteen year old self, would youcall And if so, what would you say?
Do a lot of people say they wouldn't call?
Is that a common answer?
About is 5050.
That's fascinating.
I don't know.
As a quick aside here, when I try to makedecisions, what's worked well for me is to
minimize regret regret minimization.
(49:16):
It's how I made decisions about where I went toschool, big life decisions, personally,
etcetera, etcetera, company wide decisions.
I I know it's it's kind of a a fun exercise,but I regret not taking the opportunity to grab
the phone from you and and call my eighteenyear old self.
So therefore, I would do it what I would sayis, this is personal, but I'd say, hey, don't
(49:38):
drink.
And and and let me explain more.
I think the world, you know, whether it'sHuberman or, you know, various other
commentators, scientific literature, I thinkwe're understanding more and more how bad
alcohol is for us physiologically.
It's it reminds me of smoking.
(50:00):
And sure.
I I socialize in college business school,whatever.
I quit drinking a year or so ago entirely forno other reason than than health and and mental
clarity, and I feel the best I have ever feltin my adult life.
And so I would I'd call my eighteen year oldself and say, hey.
Look, you know, try to push the peer pressureoff.
(50:20):
Find another way.
Find another outlet to socialize.
You don't need alcohol.
Because I wonder I wasn't a heavy drinker, butI wonder what it would have been like.
There are so many other ways to stretch yourmind, stretch your creativity.
Why would you poison it?
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thank you very much, Sam, for taking the timeto join the show.
(50:41):
We'll have a link to claim, in the episodedescription.
If you happen to be one of the supportcampuses.
You can download it and check it out.
And thank you very much, Tim.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Seamus.
This is really fun.
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