Tzakhi (00:01.186)
Hi, Robbie.
Robbie Crabtree (00:02.529)
Hey, Saki, how are you?
Tzakhi (00:04.77)
Very good and very happy to be with you because we're on the Meet.Capitol startup pod and you're Robbie Crabtree and I'm very happy to have you. I've heard a lot about you from a lot of good people and I've been following you on LinkedIn and seeing your stuff about storytelling. I should say you're a co-founder of Potential AI, which is a very interesting startup where you're taking your story-stelling.
telling skills and experience and turning it into technology with AI, which maybe you'll say a couple of words about because it's really intriguing. And you've helped a lot of startups raise money or you've helped a lot of startups hone their storytelling so that they raise money. 670 million, is that the number?
Robbie Crabtree (00:56.177)
That is the number. It's gonna change here very shortly, but for now that is the number.
Tzakhi (01:02.982)
Okay, cool. Did I leave anything out? You want to say a little bit more about yourself, your background?
Robbie Crabtree (01:10.721)
The only other thing I would add is before I got into this world, right, I was a trial lawyer. So I tried 102 jury trials, everything from murder cases to the last 16 months of my career, I was all child abuse. So physical abuse of children, sexual abuse of children, and then child death cases as well. And so I tried a lot of really, really serious, awful things in my time and also was teaching at SMU Law School.
for three of those years where I was teaching students their trial advocacy. So really just got super comfortable in this world of storytelling and how to present and how to convince people, right? Build winning arguments. And then before competitive storytelling and potential AI, there was like a brief kind of jumping off point where I actually built an ed tech company and that ed tech company was acquired at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. So.
That was actually my first jump into the startup world and now, you know, been doing it for a little while, but that's, that's kind of the short version of, of my background.
Tzakhi (02:13.662)
Okay, cool. I think maybe on another conversation, we would talk about how you built and sold the ad tech company and we have a lot of very relevant experience. But since your main business now is all around storytelling, I thought that we should focus on that. And, you know, there's a lot to say about how startups should build their story towards investors.
and I'm sure you have a lot to say. Maybe the best is if you can just give us some basic framework, and then if we can take it another step and kind of think about how to use this framework in different stages in a startup's journey, and maybe with different personas that a startup founder meets and has to tell their story to along the way. But maybe first a basic framework would help us.
Robbie Crabtree (03:09.849)
The most basic framework that I use with founders is just an origin story. So the founder origin story, and then the future vision story, the startup vision story. And so it's FOS and SVS for short is what I call them. Now, when it comes to what is that basic framework, right? It's always starting with that. Who is that founder slash founding team? Why are they built to solve this problem?
And then demonstrating the unique special characteristics and qualities that they have. And like that's the first piece of the story. That has to be the foundation piece of everything. And we see this with great founders, right? Like Steve Jobs and Brian Chesky and Sarah Blakely and, you know, pick whoever you want and you're going to see that. And the second piece of that framework is the vision story, right? The startup vision story. And that really is setting where you're going and saying, here is this world.
Tzakhi (03:52.75)
Okay.
Robbie Crabtree (04:08.897)
that I'm telling you could exist. And if we find a way to work together, you back me, give me the capital, and we work really hard for five, seven, 10 years, we can build that world, we can make it real. So that is at the core how I think about the framework. And then there's lots of obviously different nuances, depending on stage and sector and all those sorts of things, which we'll talk about today. But that's like the fundamental basic.
framework that I use over and over and over again.
Tzakhi (04:44.871)
So, okay, when the founders just getting started, then I guess a lot of the focus is really around the vision. How do you incorporate into the vision story the traction part, which I think is what a lot of investors want to hear about right at the get go.
Robbie Crabtree (05:09.721)
There's two things to remember when storytelling at the earliest stages, right? Of course, it'd be great if you had, you know, tons of traction, you have millions of dollars in revenue. But the reality is that normally is not an early stage company, like a very early stage, right? That's normally not a pre-seed company. That's normally, it used to be a series A these days, you know, it's between a seed and a series A when you're looking at some of those numbers, but in order to, to think about traction, right?
We want to one, identify the right investors that we're telling the story to. If I tell the story to the wrong audience, the story isn't gonna land. And the same is true for founders. You have to make sure you're talking to investors who get that you probably don't have a ton of traction in terms of revenue at the earliest stages. But this is the, takes us to the second piece. The story, when we think about traction, founders mistake traction for thinking that it's only revenue. Traction can be...
that you have built the first version of the product. Traction could be that you hired your lead engineer. Traction could be that you have a thousand people on your wait list. There's lots of ways to put traction into it. And really all you're trying to do at the early stages is saying, there's a glimmer of this thing is working. And that's really it. Cause you're saying, here's the big vision. And all you're trying to say is, we're not delusional. There is like a small glimmer of hope here that tells us we're on the right path.
Tzakhi (06:37.571)
So you incorporate validation into the story, but the focus is mainly on the vision.
Robbie Crabtree (06:48.377)
It's mainly on the vision. It's about being creative, right? I tell this to a lot of founders who complain. And the reality is a lot of them do complain and say, well, how am I supposed to do anything? I can't get traction because I don't have money. I'm like, well, lots of founders have figured this out themselves and been able to find a way to do a lot of things with very little resources. And some of this is like you have to create traction yourself. Like you can get on a call. You can reach out.
to a thousand people who are the decision maker inside of the space that you want to go and sell into, and you can talk to them and get all their feedback about the exact problem that they're looking to solve and the type of solution that they would have. Well, now when you go in, your traction is, I've talked to a thousand of the leaders inside of this space. I know the decision makers. Like this is exactly what they're saying and I already have the relationship with them. So now I can go and sell to them when we have the product live. You've now created traction.
inside of the story because like you did some hard things and it goes back to that idea of Ben Horowitz book, right? The hard thing about hard things. And like you have to be able to do things that don't scale and work really hard. And that can become a part of your story as well, because it also shows a level of relentlessness and grit and persistence in you, the founder. So like there's all these different interesting ways that we can check the psychological boxes that we need at the earliest stages if a founder is willing to do that work.
Tzakhi (08:12.966)
Okay, so now let's get to how do we kind of evolve story as the startup evolves and how do we adjust it when talking to different people. So, okay, I get it. If we're talking about someone that's really just started and they don't have a lot of traction, then you're saying build traction. And even if it's not related to revenue, it's just related to initial.
business success or research even, then that's what you have to tell and build a story around that and make it and tie it to the vision that you have. So I think we got that. How does the story evolve as you go along and how do you adjust it as you go along?
Robbie Crabtree (09:00.345)
There are multiple inflection points inside of the story. So you're gonna have an inflection point when you're at the, really the series A level, the precedence seed storytelling is gonna be pretty similar oftentimes. It really hits an inflection point at series A. Because typically series A, we're saying like, we found some level of product market fit already, and now it's time to accelerate, and we have the ability to get to...
Tzakhi (09:14.862)
Okay.
Robbie Crabtree (09:27.037)
a hundred million plus in annualized revenue to reach those venture kind of scale expectations. And so in that, you now have to identify inside of the storytelling of we figured some things out. Now here's the story of how we grow and scale this very quickly, which is a different story than believe us we're onto something, right? The early stage is like, believe us. We have a good idea. Series A is now like, we validate this thing is here now believe that we can go and we can really grow it quickly.
And that is a more metric driven story. It's also more of a differentiation in terms of like the competitors out there and like how you've built differently to set yourself up for success. It's understanding trends and converging kind of ideas that are coming together that are your unique strengths. And you have to be able to put that into the vision in order to make a series A investor say, this company has the ability to grow into
that venture scale type company. So that would be the biggest shift that I see there. And then there's another inflection point. Sometimes it's at the B, sometimes at the C, but there's normally an inflection point right there where the A is really that point where they've validated that they can grow this thing. And now it's, okay, can you take it from growing it to building a company around this idea, which is much bigger, right? Like it's normally not a single channel that you're selling anymore. It's normally not a single product line you're selling anymore, which means
you have to paint a more comprehensive picture, especially as the founder of how you're moving into a CEO role, playing more of that conductor role and saying, these are all the areas that we can expand and grow and conquer and do all these different things where it looks like a more corporate side outcome in the long run, because you have a lot more data. And this is very data-driven when you get to that.
Tzakhi (11:22.722)
Does that mean that you kind of step away from the origin story?
Robbie Crabtree (11:28.777)
Interestingly enough, never. The origin story will always be there. The origin story is again, what is going to help someone orient why you're doing the thing you're doing and all the progress that you've made. The reason I say the origin story is so important, we can use another example here. When someone is trying to lose weight, right?
Tzakhi (11:31.502)
Okay.
Robbie Crabtree (11:53.921)
the best thing that they can do is take a picture of themselves on day one. And we see this in weight loss challenges, right? They like hold up a newspaper showing the date when they start it. And then they'll, you know, get to day 90 or day, you know, six months in or a year and whatever that, that number is that they're going after. And they'll take a picture of themselves then, and they'll put the pictures up where one was day one and one was at the end of the weight loss journey. And they look like an entirely different person. The thing is, if you don't have that before picture,
Tzakhi (12:00.376)
Okay.
Robbie Crabtree (12:23.221)
you forget because it's like these little changes over time. So you're actually not aware of how much progress that you've made. The same is true when telling a story to investors to show them that if we made all this progress in three years, well, we're going to make more progress in the next three years because look at all the lessons that we've learned in that period of time. So our growth is going to compound, which allows that exponential growth to happen. And they can see
why you've been able to navigate whatever's coming your way, right? If you're a founder now, you have had to navigate one of the toughest funding markets in history. If you can show that in 2022 and 2023, you've found a way to survive through it and actually put your company in a stronger position, that story is going to make it so much easier in 2027 and 2028 to continue to back you and believe you in terms of what you're capable of doing. So this is why I say the origin story continues to be so important.
Tzakhi (13:20.294)
So what changes is less of the focus on the vision, or does, I guess, the vision piece also stays, but that piece also has to evolve.
Robbie Crabtree (13:31.897)
The vision piece has to evolve because the reality is as you get later down the line, your vision probably is what you said on day one when you started your company, the vision, it probably is not exactly what you're now doing in, you know, year four, year five, when you're at a series B, series C level. You've probably made some changes. You had some lessons that you learned. You realized the thing that you thought you were gonna do really was better suited for something else. You've had to pivot. And so,
in that sense, you have to change the vision story because now all of a sudden it might have gone from, you know, we're going to disrupt the taxi industry to we're going to disrupt the transportation industry. Right. And that would, you know, that's an Uber example. Right. And that's, that's a very different vision from where they started to where they were later on in their journey. But that was the reality of the company that they had built at that point. So what we do is inside of that story, we say, look, here's where we started. Here's all the lessons we learned. We weren't wrong.
We just also weren't right in terms of where we were going to ultimately land out. We had a good idea that guided us to this point, but now we need to do this thing, which is much bigger. And that's really what you're trying to get to is something that is much bigger than what was that in that initial kind of vision that you had.
Tzakhi (14:46.178)
So in the story at say a startup that's at the A round stage, and they should also talk about their past vision and how it evolved.
Robbie Crabtree (14:58.657)
potentially if it has shifted. A lot of times the A story is still gonna be very similar in vision to what they started with. You typically, right, oftentimes have stayed pretty true to what you're doing. It's a lot of times at the A where you start to, and this happens, I am talking from personal experience, a lot of the companies that I work with, it is in their A that they're doing really well. But then they have these insights that come from the metrics,
from insights, from talking to customers, and they realize that while they were doing well, they could do much better if they did something a little bit different. And so what they do then is they use that period during the A to continue to show growth, figure out how they're going to go back to this idea that I said earlier, grow a company instead of just growing like a product line or technology. And when they do that, they oftentimes need to shift it going into their B. This happens so often where the B vision story is much bigger.
than was the A vision story because they figure they have so much more insight, so many more years in the trenches where they've been able to talk to customers, talk to their team, figure these things out. And that's where things really start to change the aid, not so much, but really at the beach.
Tzakhi (16:14.434)
Okay. What is the, can you talk a little bit about the different, the ways that the storytelling changes when addressing different.
personas or different audiences. So one thing is talking to investors and, you know, we're at Meet That Capital, so maybe that's the main thing that people are thinking about, but telling your story is not just for investors, it's for finding partners, it's for business partners, and of course for hiring. So how does the story have to shift when talking to those people?
Robbie Crabtree (16:53.405)
It's always one of the most fun parts about working on storytelling inside of the capital raising world because founders will use that and they'll raise capital and they'll be very happy and then all of a sudden they'll go into recruiting conversations and they're trying to bring on their next C-suite position. They're trying to bring on a chief revenue officer. In order to do that, they're trying to figure out how to go about this and all of a sudden they just kind of revert back into, well, I'm going to sell them like I sold my investors and they start telling the story.
And then the story works on the, you know, this candidate and they join as a CRO. And it happens over and over and over again. I can't tell you how many times founders will reach out and say, Hey, I use the same story that we use for investors, but like it landed me like this incredible person on my team. I go, I know it's, it's all related. Storytelling is a leadership tool, right? And it applies in these different vertical instances, like funding and marketing and recruiting and leading your team.
talking to customers, sales, all this sort of stuff, right? And so the biggest thing to remember when you're making these shifts between audiences is they have different motivations, right? So an investor is much more geared on what is like the highest potential outcome that I can get. Because at the end of the day, they're kind of gamblers, right? They're gambling that I'm gonna put money in and it's gonna come back at a much higher multiple in some number of years. But a...
Tzakhi (18:17.386)
Right.
Robbie Crabtree (18:20.897)
person joining your team, totally different. Their motivations are like, I want a paycheck, one. So they wanna make sure that you have enough security to do that. And then it depends on who that role is, right? So someone who's an engineer is likely more interested in the complexity of solving the technology problem of what is that challenge gonna be just from an intellectual level? Whereas someone who is in sales is likely gonna be more focused on how big can my commission be?
and what kind of outcome can I drive there? If you're a marketer, you might think, well, is this something that's going to really be a huge kind of brand builder for my portfolio that long-term is gonna set me up for success no matter where I wanna go? So they all have different motivations, so you have to think about why does somebody care enough to talk to you and what is gonna make them feel the way that you need them to feel to take the action you want them to take? And...
Investor is different than a recruit, which is different than a customer. Customer wants to know what's in it for me. Why is my life gonna be better if I use your product? Your team wants to know why they should work so hard. When you're asking them to work 80 hours, even though they're only getting paid for 50, why? Like why should they be willing to do that? And the motivations is what you're trying to figure out.
Tzakhi (19:40.702)
OK, but the basic framework is the same. So you're still telling your personal origin story. You're still focusing on the vision of the company. And again, trying to prove your traction and give validation by showing what you've done so far. Those three basic components are the same.
Robbie Crabtree (20:02.777)
there will be pieces of it. It depends on who you're talking to, right? So sometimes it will change and sometimes you'll add in customer stories, right? To validate that this is something worth working on, right? If I'm talking to a candidate, I'm not just gonna talk about me and the vision, I'm also gonna say like, here's the people we work with. Here's the like really cool stuff that we get feedback from and like why we do what we do. Because I worked with so and so and they were a small business and they were about to go out of business and they reached out to us in a hail Mary.
And we said, we can help you. We can provide this marketing automation tool that's gonna allow you to stay in business. And you know what? Six months later, they reached out to us and said, they just had their best quarter that they've ever had in the history of their business. That's why we do what we do. Now that person, the person you're talking to, the candidate all of a sudden gets to feel the human side of the work that you're doing. So you're gonna add in some different stories as well. You might add in stories about your team, right? And some of the work that they've done. If you're trying to hire someone,
and you're trying to get them to join the engineering team, you might talk about your CTO and their story about what they did. So now you're using storytelling across the board to again, lead. And that's why the fundraising environment is so valuable because it's a pressure test and a microcosm of what you need to be able to do as a founder and CEO across the board, which is storytelling to get people to get in alignment with what you want them to see.
Tzakhi (21:31.15)
Okay. Now, another thing I was wondering about, so the origin story. Well, there's a lot to talk about. But the first thing that I wanna know is, does the origin story also change as the startup goes along? Or do you like really stick to a certain origin story? Because the vision changes, it makes sense, right? But...
I'm sure the origin story naturally also gets adjusted as it goes along, but do you guide people to adjust it?
Robbie Crabtree (22:07.157)
It's funny I laugh because an origin story should be the same, right? You would think it's always the same. It doesn't change. It's the origin story. It's like a, it's already happened in the past. So why would it change? I'm thinking to myself.
Tzakhi (22:18.39)
Well, every story has different parts, and you might emphasize something else in it in a different time, right?
Robbie Crabtree (22:26.029)
No, you're totally right. I'm laughing because I know instances of very famous tech founders who have sanitized and polished their origin stories to a point that they're very different than what was the reality. And so sadly you do see this where people will fictionalize their origin story. And I think that that's also a
the nature of we've seen some of the TV shows and movies made about some of these tech companies and founders. And so there's this kind of natural pull to do that. So you look better than maybe what happened. I think everyone forgets that most of the origin stories are super messy. Right? It's not smooth. It's not easy. You didn't get it a hundred percent right. You probably made lots of mistakes. You probably did a lot of things you wish you wouldn't have done. And I think that's where you
have to figure out what kind of storyteller and leader do you wanna be? Do you wanna be the one who is like the polished perfection that you get to feel, you know, everyone thinks that you're this icon inside of the tech world, and maybe that feels better to you, but it's a very, it's not real, right? It's very surface level and it's a facade. And you can decide to do that. And there's plenty of people out there who tell their story that way, and it's effective and you're able to make a lot of money.
I tend to lean more towards, I'd rather the person be raw and real and messy and do all of the crazy stuff there and let your story be more of a filter and a magnet, right? It's gonna filter out the people who don't get along with you and pull the people in who do. And so along those lines, to your point, you will get better at telling the origin story and it will change because you might leave things out that over time you realize were much more important to you or much more important to the founding of the company. There's that classic.
Steve Jobs quote, you can only connect the dots when you look backwards. And oftentimes that's what happens. As you go further along, you realize why you actually were doing the thing that you were doing in the first place. So in the early days, your origin story might be very tight and short, and you just say, hey, I saw this problem, I wanted to work on it, it spoke to me, I went after it. And over time, you might realize that it was actually three levels deeper than that. And now those three levels deeper start coming out as a bigger part of the origin story. And you get more leeway.
Robbie Crabtree (24:46.817)
to do that, the more successful you are because people wanna hear you more. So like early on, your origin story can be two minutes, three minutes long. Then you see people like Brian Chesky, whose origin story is like 15 minutes long now. And the reason it's 15 minutes long is because he's the founder and CEO of Airbnb and people will listen to him because he's been very successful. And so that's where it gets nice because you can kind of expand it out.
Tzakhi (25:11.79)
But OK, I think a lot of founders don't have a very, like you say, clean and smooth origin story. Or in a way, they don't really have a story. I was trying, I was looking for ideas. I was trying different things out. This failed, this sort of work. But then we had to change course. And we came to this idea, which is what we're trying to push forward now. So it's not, there isn't, you know,
like a very deep story. I was working in the, I don't know, in the fintech world for this long, and I saw this problem again and again, and finally I decided to go after it and build it. You know, that's a very nice story, but lots of founders don't have a story like that. So you're saying they just focus on the problem and detach everything else that came before?
Robbie Crabtree (26:04.021)
I push back on this. I think that almost everyone who is.
really trying to be a founder and building something, it's much deeper than just, I saw a problem, I wanted to fix it. This is actually why I say, anytime I'm working with anyone or even if I'm just telling people like at a talk or something like this, and they wanna know how do you build your origin story? I say, start when you were 10. And 10 is just a placeholder for when you were young, but you'd be amazed how many people.
It's like 90, 95% of every founder that I've ever worked with, come across, talk to, seen in potential AI, like they all are doing what they're doing because something as a part of their life led them to this moment. You just have to be willing to go deep and do the self deep dive discovery to figure out why you're doing what you're doing. I say like,
If someone were to ask me about my origin story, I could talk for three hours about my origin story and all the pieces, but I can also tie it back to a project that I did in sixth grade when I did a project on propaganda in the media. And it was the first time that I did this project and just fell in love with the idea of how words can move markets, can move people, can influence elections. And from there, I was super deep into storytelling. My favorite book were the Red Wall series by Brian Jock.
It was an incredible kind of fantasy series, which led me down the rabbit hole of a bunch of other stuff. And so like, I can tell you my entire life has, I didn't realize it at the time. Like I didn't realize when I was in sixth grade that I was gonna end up becoming a professional, you know, storytelling kind of person who's looking at this and building AI around it and working with founders in this and being a trial lawyer. But I can tell you every piece of my life when I look backwards has been gearing up to this moment. And the thing is, I'm not alone.
Robbie Crabtree (28:03.549)
Every founder who cares deeply about what they're doing has that inside of them. It may not be that everything was storytelling, but it might be something that they experienced in their childhood that led them down this route. So again, there's so many different examples of this and that's why I'd push back on that idea. Almost every founder has a great origin story. They just haven't found it.
Tzakhi (28:24.591)
So I guess a lot of your work is helping founders find their origin story.
Robbie Crabtree (28:32.821)
In many ways, part of my job is what I used to do as a trial lawyer, right? Which is just to ask questions and really listen and guide founders down these routes. Because it's just like, you know, witness prep for me, where I'm just trying to pull piece of information out and let them see why they're doing what they're doing. Because it's not about me telling them this. It's about them realizing it themselves. And so then it kind of becomes like part therapist, you know, part coach, part writer. I mean, it's...
It just becomes wild and they realize, this is not one of the craziest examples of this I can give. I was doing this work with someone and towards the end of the work, he turned to me, he goes, I finally understand why I named my company what I named it. And that, like it was in his own founder story. It was in that why he cared about this stuff as he got deeper into it.
Tzakhi (29:18.955)
Okay.
Robbie Crabtree (29:28.233)
he was able to piece together, that's how he had come up with the name of the company. And it had never dawned on him before as to why he was calling the company the name that he did. And it's like, that sort of stuff is there, you just kind of be willing to do the work.
Tzakhi (29:41.354)
Yeah, I have to tell you that in my mind, I'm thinking, how did I name Meet Capital? I was browsing for like a day through different domains till I found an available domain and I liked it and I thought this could work and then I just kept it and I didn't do anything with it for like a year and then I just, like if I come across a very good domain, I'll just keep it just like for. So
you know, like a, like a $20 domain. So I'll buy it. Why not? Maybe I'll do something with it one day. So, um, I don't have a great story about why I named meet that capital besides that it's, you know, about meeting capital, I mean, helping founders raise capital, um, but yeah, maybe, uh, I need to do some uh, deeper work with you and figure out, um, some more about my own origin story.
because I'm not clear about it, the way you describe the founders that you work with, having clarity about it.
Robbie Crabtree (30:45.465)
Well, like I said, start when you're 10. And then the three questions I always tell people you gotta work through are, how did you get here? Why do you care? What makes you special? And it's oftentimes that third one that really trips people up, especially, I think Americans are a little bit, we're a little better at bragging about ourselves and doing that. I find when it's outside of the US, it's a little bit harder to get them comfortable with that. But even inside the US, there's lots of people who really struggle with that idea. But...
That one, what makes you special is a huge piece of it. But when you do that work, starting when you're 10, you'll start to connect dots and you'll see the ways that you got to where you are today. And it will make sense in that light, when you're able to zoom out and really look down as though you're almost like, you know, above your own story so you can figure it out.
Tzakhi (31:41.054)
Yeah, I am thinking maybe I need to do some inner work here. This is a very, because just speaking directly, very honestly, I can't think of any direct connection between a lot of stuff that I went through around age 10 and my current company. It just doesn't. So it's either it's completely blocked
or it's not there, or I need to do a few sessions with Robbie.
Robbie Crabtree (32:16.625)
I mean, I know a little bit about your story already and I could put pieces together that tell me why you're doing what you're doing. And now this is also part of the challenge is oftentimes it is a blocker, right? Because I always say part of the challenges for a founder is you are a piece on the chess board and you're playing chess. It's really hard when you are on the board to see everything around you. Whereas...
Tzakhi (32:45.191)
That's the basic thing of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, is you can see someone else's unconscious, but you're unconscious to your own unconscious.
Robbie Crabtree (32:57.469)
Exactly. And so my job is to basically come up and be like, no, I can see the entire board and what's going on and put all those pieces together. Um, and that's, that's why it's beneficial sometimes to do that work, but it's, it's still an exercise that many founders can do on their own and work through. And, and, you know, that's why I tell them, this is what I would, these are the questions, this is what you go through to figure it out. And many of them do, and they go on to raise and use it. And like, I love getting LinkedIn DMS from people who tell me I raised my round. I used what you said. And, uh, now I get to build my company like that.
That to me is great. Like I love seeing people go out and implement the stuff that we're talking about because it, I promise you I'm not putting these things out. I don't do this conversation with you to just blow hot air. Like I could read, I could be writing, I could be doing other things. Like I want people to use this stuff to build the future. Like that's the whole idea of why I do what I do.
Right? Being a child abuse prosecutor, I saw the worst of humanity. And my whole vision is to change that dynamic by working with the best of humanity to build that better future. And if we do that right, it makes everything so much better for everybody. So that's why I say that I love when people use it. And again, that's why I give it. And even you can take those questions and do some deep work and you'll start to put pieces together that you didn't even realize until you actually were intentional with that process.
Tzakhi (34:23.838)
Yeah, I think the main thing to take here is deep work, meaning that a convincing origin story is one that you yourself are really connected to. And for that, I guess, for a lot of people, that means doing some inner work and finding something that's really real for them, because I can tell you a shitty origin story, which is inauthentic, I think does the opposite. I mean, I've heard a few of these.
people that clearly are just making up something and it just sounds terrible. And it's better off not to have an origin story if you can't tell something that's real and yours. Robbie, this has been really, really insightful and useful and thanks so much. Who should reach out to you and how?
Robbie Crabtree (35:13.485)
So, I mean, anyone who is founder, CEO, mostly like Series A and later companies who are looking to get help on their storytelling, whether that's for raising capital or the other use cases as that kind of leadership side, so recruiting, talking to their team, all that sort of stuff, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's an easy way to find me. And then for anyone who's early stage, right, who wants to figure out how to put together their story to raise capital.
That's what potential AI is for. And so, you know, pre-seed seed, like I know that budgets are tight. I know that it's hard to spend much money because you're trying to raise the money. So you have it. And that's the place to go there is potential.ai so that you can kind of get into that world and get the help so that you can go out and ultimately raise funding. And that's kind of what we want.
Tzakhi (36:06.126)
Okay, cool, done. We'll have both links in the description. And Rabi, thanks so much. This was very useful and very good. Thanks so much. Bye for now.
Robbie Crabtree (36:17.076)
Awesome. Appreciate it.
