Announcer:
Please help me welcome our host, Kate Kozac.

Kate Kozak:
I know your excited for the show this evening. So are we. We have a show in store for you guys. First and foremost, I wanted to thank everybody for coming out tonight and supporting the amazing innovation and entrepreneurship happening in this amazing city. So thank you guys for showing up tonight. Second, we are so thrilled to announce the launch of a very… the launch of Michael Mendenhall's new book, “From Hire to Retire: An Employee Lifecycle Guide.” So I’d love for all of you guys to pick up your free copy in the back. Whether you are new to HR, or you've been in industry for some time, or you're an entrepreneur yourself, I think you guys will find a lot of insightful value in this book.

All right, so to kick things off, I'm excited to bring on stage one of our amazing partners, G-P, along with my director, David Haraburda, for a quick fireside chat on the importance of a remote and hybrid environment. We've been looking into packing the best talent go over some top compliance and challenges as it pertains to [audio gap] national. So please join me in welcoming Jerry Kelly and David Haraburda to a stage.

Jerry Kelly:
Good to see you. Welcome, everybody.

David Haraburda:
Yeah. As we kick this off, understand that at TriNet, we hire in the United States. We hire in all 50 states around the country. And as you think about building out your business, right, I'd like to take a quick poll and get an understanding, like how many first-time founders, second-time founders do we have in the room?

Right. How many hired in the United States? Who's hired internationally? Right. So there's a good understanding of what's going on in the international market. But there's also an opportunity to educate. So, Jerry, as we think about it, as we talk about EOR and G-P or employee of record, if you're having a strategy and thinking about developing a plan for an international hiring strategy, or how should we think about it, going about it to set up that strategy and then implement?

Jerry:
Yeah. So great question. I do want to thank David for having us. TriNet’s been a long-term partner of G-P's for a good reason. I think if I explain a little bit about… how many of you are familiar with EORs, employer of record that David said. So essentially what TriNet does really well for clients here in the U.S. is be their HR partner for PEO, payroll, all the things you need to employ, you know, employees properly, we do for those same clients on an international basis.

So what we've done in the past 12 years is gone around and established entities, boots on the ground in over 180 countries to make hiring for local SMBs, U.S. SMBs hiring internationally make it possible. You all know hiring in different states is its own challenge. Imagine hiring in other countries where they all have their own regulatory laws. All have their own fiduciary responsibilities. We've done all that work. So now it's an avenue, an avenue to talent for SMBs to grow their business and get access to the to the global talent, not just local.

David:
Yeah. So when you think about SMBs, right, you know, I mean, when should someone start thinking about it, right? I mean, how large is my organization and the strategies around it? Because there's talent pools that are now, have moved, have been sourced internationally, but now they're moving around. So how should I think about a strategy? As for, you know, a good pool of engineers or a near-shore solution for the United States?

Jerry: 
Yeah. So I don't think size matters at all. We have clients on our platform who are three, four employees total. And then we have clients who are in the billions of dollars in revenue. So I think it's a matter of where you are in your business and what talent needs that you're maybe bumping into here, that maybe the globe could provide for you. So I don't think there's a, you know, a size of company, that really matters. It's what's right for your business. As the employer of record, what we have found is over 12 years, we've accumulated all these professionals, we call them. They work for clients here in the U.S., but we call them our professionals.

What we've been able to identify are some talent hubs that have emerged over 12 years. Now, if you start thinking about internationally, where are you going to hire? Everybody thinks, “Oh, I'll go to Hong Kong, London, you know, Tokyo, everybody else is going to go there.” And those are your more expensive places to go compete for that talent.

What we've seen and David mentioned nearshore and the like, Toronto, Canada has been just a great hub for tech and financial talent. We've seen the same in Mexico. And those time zones aligned pretty well for U.S. companies. Sao Paulo, Brazil has become a big tech hub as well. So a lot of opportunities don't overlook the secondary markets. And G-P has some of that data that to kind of help you make those decisions.

David:
Can you give me some examples of poorly executed situations where you had somebody who had already gone out to the international market and then come and found G-P, right? And kind of, you know what, what are some of the pitfalls that sit out in the marketplace that, you know, everyone here should be familiar with or at least familiarize themselves with so they can if you don't have a strategy in place, right? What are the first three good steps of understanding you should have?

Jerry:
So we've kind of gone at it from compliance. First is our is our founder’s model and remote work, while it was a thing before 2020 and the Covid days, it really took off after that. I'll give you one example. We had a client come in from, they had an employee who decided he was a programmer, decided he wanted to go home after the pandemic and moved himself to India without telling anybody. And all of a sudden, he, his Covid coworkers found out he did it. They all did it before you knew it. And in eight months, this company had 20 employees living in India with the HQ not knowing about it. I can tell you the fines and the penalties and the risks associated with that are, you know, are huge.

They go back now they bill you for all the time they were there, there's all kinds of regulatory issues with that. So the company put out a mandate. We stepped in, employed them right away and also took the risk out of the situation. But obviously the company had to make some changes in terms of when you do move, not just states, you have to tell us, but if you're going to leave the country and go live somewhere else, you need to get that authorized with the organization.

David:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Talk to me a little about the service model. Right? So what does the employees experience look like on the G-P platform? So you brought up India, right? So if I'm going to hire, you know, the 20 folks in India, what is the what is the level of service? What is the level of understanding? What is the level of outreach they're going to receive from the employee side into G-P?

Jerry:
Yeah. So, you know, from the employee standpoint, you know, they're basically the U.S. or whoever's hiring them and doing their work. They work for that. That's the name on their business card. Their manager is here. Everything is done here from a day-to-day standpoint, from the employees, from the HR, the payroll, when they need help with what their benefits are or time off, or they have a maternity and paternity leave.

That's where G-P comes in and that's where our boots on the ground step in to work in tandem with the client, the client being the U.S.-based company, to give that employee the full experience. So we just had a client referred to us by TriNet, thank you very much, back in September, who decided the remote device company, billions of dollars, $1 billion in revenue, so pretty not small business, but decided they wanted to take their product, they did some market research, it was ready to go to Europe. They could go to some countries. It is a AFib device that, helps prevent strokes with AFib patients who are more susceptible to them.

So they did their homework to do market studies. There's five countries they want to go to. The CFO really wanted to have his brand on the ground in Europe. And their options were to take a team of U.S. people and deploy them there for 12 to 24 months to get the product up and going. To do that legally and to stay in compliance, they would have had to open an entity in all those countries to legally employ those folks, even though they were already employed here in the U.S.

They came to us. We involved the recruiter in all those countries to help them fill those roles. In 60 days, they're able to be up and running. Now with three sales reps, I think in three countries in about 60 days in an effort or they were going to take, you know, three months to 18 months, depending on the country, to establish an ability. So speed to market, you know, this is an avenue to access talent and to expand your business internationally.

David:
You've mentioned compliance several times in that iteration. Let's talk about, you know, anything compliant-wise in specific countries, like the nuances like where, you know, what are we going to run into? What is the level of understanding and what risks does G-P help you avoid?

Jerry:
Is anybody hiring anybody in France? Okay. It's very easy to hire somebody in France. It's very difficult to terminate somebody in France. So we have, we have a network. We actually have our own in-house attorneys globally who help guide the client on those country nuances. France is one of the more difficult ones to terminate an employee for any reason.

We have 50 global attorneys that specialize in labor law for these countries that can guide the client on, “Hey, here's your risks when hiring in those countries.” So France is one, the Netherlands is another one. From a termination standpoint, the sovereignties are long. There's several countries. Day one, you get five weeks vacation, not ten days.

And many countries in the UK, in the Europe region, they get a 13-month bonus whether you want it or not. That's pretty much regulatory that that 13-month pay comes in that.

David:
Yeah. Good to know, good to know. I know we're trying to cover that a lot in this fireside chat. And I want to be respectful of Kate's time and the presenters this evening. So as you kind of think about your international strategy, if you haven't thought about it before, how should we go ahead and formulate it? G-P's been a fantastic partner for TriNet, getting an understanding of really how to navigate those waters. Right? We're similar platform as what TriNet delivers in the United States. If you want to think internationally, how should I go about it?

You know, G-P’s is a great partner for us to kind of execute on that. So I hope this was helpful for everyone. Right? As you begin to think about, if you haven't thought about it and put something into place. But again, the landscape is changing for us in the United States. The landscape is changing around the world. And we're glad to have a partner in G-P.

Jerry:
Yeah, we're thrilled to be here. Good luck to all the presenters tonight and good luck to all the judges. I'm sure it's going to be a tough competition. But I'll be here to answer any questions as well and pick up some socks in the back. I probably should have stopped myself and got some myself.  Have a great night.

Kate:
All right. Jerry, Dave, thank you so much for all of that information. And with that, we are ready to get this evening's event started. So first I would like to call up to the stage our amazing VC partners. So James with Prime Time Venture Partners, Andrew with Alpaca VC, Maurice with Lerer Hippeau and Marc Silberman with Comcast Ventures. Please take the stage.

All right. Thank you, gentlemen. So before they're going to do their introductions, I'd like to give everybody just a quick lay of the land. So we have four amazing pitch contestants that we've selected out of dozens of applicants. So as they come on stage, each one of our pitchers is going to have seven minutes to present their companies to this amazing panel. From there, our VCs will have three minutes to ask any types of questions, get some additional clarity and then we're going to cut them off. So 10 minutes tops. We're going to go through all four of our pitchers this evening. And then we're going to take our judges aside for some deliberation. So are you guys ready for a fun evening.

All right. Let's get started. All right, gentlemen. James, I'll start with you. Can you share a little bit about your company, your thesis and what has you excited for? Innovation in New York?

James Hueston:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm James, I'm a senior associate at Prime Time Partners. We're, early-stage seed Series A fund focused exclusively on technology companies that help older adults and their caregivers. So think of a lot of health care, financial services, insurance, we'll even do some consumer as well. I have been there for about two years. Fund's been around for about four and I'm really excited about the New York Tech ecosystem because I think it brings together a lot of multidisciplinary people and talent and ideas across a lot of different sectors. And I think that combination leads to some pretty exciting outcomes.

Kate:
Perfect. Maurice.

Maurice Russo:
Hey, everyone. It's hard to follow James Hueston because he's the smartest guy I know. But, I'm an investor at Hippeau. As a firm, we're a generalist seed firm. Been around in the New York ecosystem for a while. If we have an investment thesis, it's really just the belief that we think great companies can be built with similar formulas, regardless of what industry or vertical they're in. And we just try to back the right founding teams at the right time, building the right thing. And, yeah, really excited to be here. So thanks for thanks for having me.

Kate:
Absolutely. We're happy to have you. Andrew.

Andrew Peng:
Hey, everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Andrew Peng. I'm an investor at Alpaca VC. We're a New York-based venture firm, been around for a little over 10 years now. We like to lead or co-lead at the pre-seed and seed stage. And then we also have a vehicle that lets us invest from series B onwards, where we typically follow. And I write checks out of both. From a thesis perspective, you know, we're technically generalist, but I would say there's a couple sectors we really focus in on commerce and proptech are two of those. We also, like to look at marketplaces, B2B to see sort of anything that helps businesses reach their customers in a new way.

And in terms of what's going on in New York and what has me excited, you know, I feel like SF has really been talked about as like the pinnacle and like the epicenter for AI, but I actually think that New York, with its finance and banking background, has a way to take that in a really interesting way and use AI from like a sort of tech-enabled lens to rip out the cost structures of traditional businesses. And I think these are very well-positioned to capitalize on that.

Kate:
Amazing. Thank you. Marc.

Marc Silberman:
Hey, everyone. Marc Silberman, I'm a partner at Comcast Ventures. So relatively self-explanatory, but we're the corporate venture arm of jumbo, Comcast Corp, internet provider or media company, all the things. But we exist to invest in kind of categories that Comcast isn't in today but may want to kind of explore in the future.

So, a lot of… I do most of our enterprise software, so AI and cybersecurity. My colleagues spend time in health care and climate and energy. So we're pretty broad in scope, mostly doing kind of Series A and B rounds. Before this, I was at a fund called FirstMark in New York and then spent time at two startups in New York that went from kind of their humble origins here to the public markets. So it's been really fun to kind of see the growth of the ecosystem here. And excited for that to kind of keep skyrocketing upwards.

Kate:
Amazing. All right, gentlemen, are you ready? It's not going to be an easy night tonight. All right. Well, with that, I would love to bring up our first pitcher for this evening, Jie Feng, CEO of Kells. Jie. Please come to the stage. Thank you.

Jie Feng:
Hello? Okay. Yeah. Thank you. All right. How's everyone doing so far? Good. Drink a lot of water. Let me try this out. Perfect. So, really great to be here. My name is Jie, the co-founder and CEO of Kells. Before diving in, I just want to do a quick survey by show of hands. Who here think your teeth and oral health are important? Almost everybody. Now. Oh, there's supposed to be images for some reason. Didn't show up. But the second question. Listen carefully. Who here loves going to the dentist and have routinely visited the dental office every six months, as recommended? Okay, so a lot less hands showed up. So you know, you're not alone. For a lot of people, the answer is no.

So the dental care experience often is inconvenient and expensive and is done in a reactive way. So this leaves over 100 million Americans skipping their annual checkup in the dental office and it leaves businesses paying $45 billion a year for the lost productivity. And on top of that, we are all collectively paying about $140 billion a year to cover these dental costs, which, by the way, most of the dental disease can be fully prevented.

So this is a big problem. But there's also a bigger opportunity. So in the past few years we have seen the success of digital health model, delivering convenient, cheaper and more prevention focused care. When it comes to dental, it has been adopted in the mainstream. Most of the teledental companies today offer a network of dentists you can talk to online, but that's about it. It's very limited and it doesn't really drive high utilization.

So we believe with the advancement of AI and combined with the successful model of digital health, we can actually unlock unprecedented capabilities and experiences for consumers to engage and to manage their oral health like never before. And this is exactly what we're doing at Kells. So Kells is building the first AI-powered dental benefits platform, which act as your personal dental companion.

Kells is designed to help you detect issues early. Get personalized care recommendation. Tell you how much your cost in the dental office. Answer your dental questions and help you navigate insurance all at your fingertips. We work with businesses to help boost employees’ engagement and accelerate their preventative care journey through improved access, accessibility and most importantly, to empower them to make the best decisions.

There's also something missing here, but, this is what the platform looks like on the desktop. And the mobile is all in one place for all your dental needs. You can activate the same day, become a member and also it can be integrated into other distribution channels like website or apps. Unfortunately, yeah, there's a bit of quite of things missing, but through Kells, we're bringing a series of AI-powered digital experiences for dental to you directly on your phone. So the first one, Dental Advisor, is our real time chat bot powered by large language model that can answer highly personalized, that can give you highly personalized answers and relevant to your questions. And also, you can get instant answer to your questions like the coverage of insurance for certain procedures without calling anybody.

The second product we have is a virtual checkup application called AI Dental Scan. It allows you to be at home in the comfort and to take a couple of pictures of our mouth and tell you what risk you have and what kind of needs you may need to go see a dentist. And that's our proprietary killer oral health report that people love to give you all the information you need to know to prepare your visit.

And last but not least, we all know the surprises and struggles when you are told you have a $2,000 dental procedure to come and you're not sure about, so we provide a virtual second opinion that can analyze your X-rays and give you most information to decide what procedures you need to do in the necessary way.

Now what if you need dental procedures? We do not stop on the digital level. If you have insurance, you can take your insurance and use that coverage. But we also can connect you to a national network of dentists and specialists that can give you up to 60% discount on all major dental procedures. No claim, no way. It's that simple.

So by doing all these, by bringing all these unique benefits under the same roof, we're creating a holistic platform to support your entire patient journey towards a better oral health. Think of it as a platform of AI agents work with dental experts seamlessly to drive better convenience, higher engagement and a lower cost. So we think Kells brings unique values to our customers, which are employers and insurance to help them provide truly differentiated benefits when it comes to dental. And they can help employees and members improve engagement, improve preventative care, utilizations, and most importantly, drive down the cost both in short-term and long-term.

And we operate Kells as a membership model. If you remember, you can access unlimited way unlimited, all the features on our platform. But also we can act as enhancement or an alternative to existing or traditional dental insurance. We think this is a huge and untapped market. If you look at how much money employers are paying every year for dental benefits that’s $62 billion, and up to 50% of these employees are not even using it.

So this is a great opportunity for us to introduce something brand new in the modern age. And our go-to market strategy involves certain distribution channels we think is strategic by working with health plans, dental plans, PEOs, broker and consultants. And we have we have had success by doing partnership with synergetic companies, by creating a sales team with benefits specialists, creating referrals and also going to the conferences to introduce this to our new clients.

So you might be surprised we only launched this platform six months ago, but now we're live with one of the largest insurance company in the country who is covering 12 million members. And also, we just signed a contract as this as the only oral health provider for a rising employee benefit platform. And we have a very strong pipeline to lead us to 2025. We're highly excited. But more importantly, we have firsthand data showing the solution is working. 98% of the members are highly satisfied with the service and 60% of the people have identified undiagnosed issues and activated them into a dental office to get treatments. And potentially, we can save about $1,600 per year for using early detection and avoid overtreatment.

By the way, I was told I have 10 minutes, so I'm trying to catch up on that. Hopefully I will skip something. So we're highly differentiated. We're the only platform on the market that has this depth and width of offering. And also it's driven by proprietary AI technology we have built in the past two years. So my background is coming from tech. I did a PhD in Columbia in AI. I worked at Amazon, Google for their consumer health tech products. My partner is a former COO of the largest DSO in this area, and he has built the company to a hundreds of millions of dollars exit. And the clinical lead is my favorite dentist so far in my life. So I have to bring her in to help us.

On top of that, we have really a kick ass advisory board with leaders from Google and also, a leading health care AI company. Lastly, I want to say, at Kells we believe, everyone deserves a healthy smile and we're making this happen with AI to make dental care or oral care more accessible, more transparent and more affordable. So thank you very much for listening to this. And I'd like to invite you to get a free dental scan using Kells on our website, forever in here, and I think you will love it. Thank you.

Kate:
Yeah. Congratulations, Jie. I mean, who can make dental care exciting, right? This guy can. So let's hand it over to our judges. Judges, what questions do you have today?

James:
Happy to kick it off. Jie, great presentation. First off, as someone who hates going to the dentist, I can definitely see myself wanting to use something like this. One of the things that you had mentioned is that first movers in the space have really struggled because they haven't been able to activate employees once they make that employer-led sale. So I'm curious, how do you think about making that activation and ensuring that it's much higher success rate and getting that uptake?

Jie:
Yeah, this a great question. So we started with actually insurance companies. We look at their vulnerable populations and which cohorts are driving the most cost and not engaging with dental care. As you all know, dental, medical are integrated, it's a whole-body health. But the reality is disconnected. So with this solution, we actually can provide very convenient, accessible solutions, which draws attention from these insurance company.

Now we're driving more traction from the employer side mostly initially through differentiating. Right? We can help brokers and help employers to provide things that doesn't existed before, but consumers can really benefit from. So I think by creating this awareness and obviously driving our thesis about cost savings and engagement, I think we can create something new in that space which traditionally are seen very legacy and then not changing over the years.

Andrew:
I'm happy to go for the next question. Jie, thanks for presenting to us. That was a great presentation. Great to learn more about what you're building. My question is, you know, the thing about dentistry that's interesting to me is unlike other areas of telehealth, like sexual health or mental health, for example, there's always going to be a component of dentistry that exists in person, whether that's an affordable model or some kind of like a provider in the field kind of model. And so I'm curious about your geographic expansion and what it looks like for you and going to market in terms of partnering with service providers, making sure that they're high quality, because I feel like a lot of the really, you know, exceptional top tier service providers, they don't take new patients. Right? And so as we go into like new areas, making sure that you can sort of maintain this level of service, through third party providers, especially if you're branding ourselves as kind of like a new AI-powered, you know, not everything under one roof kind of kind of provider.

Jie:
Yeah. No, it's a great question. I think, you know, digital health is always in that area that it provides like an extension of the physical touches. So there's a misconception that people think, are you taking the job of a dentist, which is not because we're helping them to activate patients who needs treatment but not engaging. Right? So by doing this digital experience, we're providing a lot of information, personal information to prepare them for the visit. Now back to the question. The digital platform, digital service are universally available, right? Globally. Everything when it comes to in-person, we're starting with the U.S., obviously, because for the reason you mentioned, James, we want the providers to synchronize with us. So something we're doing is that we can help the patient coordinate care to the dental office near them. So we'll help them find a dentist if you don't have one. Or we'll share the reports and all the data we collected to the dental office. So when they come in, the providers kind of know what to expect and how to better serve this patient. But obviously there's opportunity to do more integrative way, and I think that's where it's getting exciting in the future. And we'll have to figure out how to do that.

Kate:
All right. Thank you so much. Hey. Amazing job. It's not easy going first. All right, guys, are you feeling warmed up? Are you ready for the next one? All right. Well, next up is Colin Horsford, CEO and founder of Muse. Colin, please take the stage.

Colin Horsford:
Hi, everyone. My name is Colin Horsford. I'm here to talk about everyone's favorite topic, taxes. So if you hate going to the dentist, I'm sure you also hate paying your taxes. So my company's Muse. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Muse. And what we're doing is we're boosting checks, hiring and financial well-being.

So let's get right to the point. Every day, employees are struggling. Many of them are struggling to make ends meet and just do simple things like put food on their table. If you have ever heard of the, hierarchy of financial needs, you'll see that most employees actually say that, yes, they want to accumulate wealth. Yes, they want to have financial safety. But their major concern right now is just our basic cash flow needs.

Now, many people may not think that's a big issue, but I’ll back it up with some numbers. 78% of the individuals in this country actually live paycheck to paycheck. You may be thinking, “Oh, well, that means they may not make a lot of money.” Well, close to 52% of the individuals making over $140,000 also live paycheck to paycheck. Well, how does that look? Well, you may have a spouse, you may have two children, a car and oh, by the way, you live in New York City, right? So chances are you probably know someone who is living paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, their employees are losing out over $250 billion annually because of lack of employee activity. Let's just be honest, unhappy employees don't work as hard.

So that's why we created a platform that provides financial wellness to HCM and platforms that can boost deposits. We can lower stress and we can also decrease turnover and improve hiring for some of these companies. Sorry, but I'm sure many of you know, right now, financial wellness is all the rage when it comes to this space. A lot of companies, including Paychex, ADP, Gusto, many of them are looking to improve their platforms for the SMBs on their network. And they're taking and everyone's taking notice right now. And that's why we created two products to meet employees’ needs. The first is Muse Check Boost. And then next is our Muse Canvas.

So let me just give you a little background about myself. I know I made the tax joke in the beginning, so I actually used to work in tax for a while. I start off at Ernst & Young, met my co-founder 17 years ago at Ernst & Young. From there I went to Goldman Sachs. I was in, so I'm on a trading desk and that I actually worked with into it, not far into it, but I was working on their tax counsel, helping them improve TurboTax and also Pro Connect.

My co-founder Basile has his Master's in taxation. I also have my Master's in statistics and quantitative finance. We both ran our own CPA practices for a while before starting Muse and that's how we actually came about with this product. Basile created an AI tax chatbot eight years ago, long before the advent of GPT-2, any of those things became popular. He used plain old NLP and machine learning to bring it out. It doesn't seem that exciting today when you really think about it, but eight years ago, I was very appreciative of mine. And our senior advisor is Andrew Jenkins, who, created Credit Karma Tax Practice, which was sold, to CashApp recently. So this has to be clear.

We do not prepare or filing tax returns. I know that's a big problem for some people that don't want to actually do tax returns with their employer. So we don't do any of that stuff. So let me just get to the sum of the products now. So with Check, what we do is we actually go in and we give people what we call early refund access. That's a term we have coined and also trademark. Many of you have heard of earned wage access, where you can work for days, and you can get paid for two right away. The reason people want that, and the reason why that product has taken off, is because people want access to the money as quickly as possible.

Now, when you really think about it, people are actually getting large refunds and not getting access to their money right away, which is why we give them early refund access. What we do is we go in and we optimize their payroll tax deductions, and they can boost their next paycheck by up to $200, which is massive for someone who's living paycheck to paycheck. It's all we're really doing is helping them boost of deposits, lower their stress and increase their financial wealth.

You don't think that's a big problem? Well, with $366 billion was overpaid to the IRS last year. Now, if you think back to what I said earlier, 70% of the individuals in this country live paycheck to paycheck. So they’re overpaying their taxes, over withholding and then getting the money back at the end of the year, when they do get their money, they're saying, “Oh, well, I'll go buy a bike, I'll go on vacation, I'll pay down debt.”

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article saying that a lot of people are waiting for their tax refunds to pay it on their debt. Well, we know that's not a great, financially efficient decision, because if you incur debt in October and you wait till April to pay it off, you're incurring additional, interest. So that's why we're giving people at just over $200 early by taking it from their tax refunds and allowing them to do things like pay down debt, invest or save.

So, as you can see here with, Checkbooks, once you connect your PTO or you can enter your data manually, we actually estimate your tax refund, so show you what you're expected to make in April. And then using a slider, you can actually tell us how much you want to boost your next paycheck by up to $200.

Now, many people may say, “Oh, well, I don't want to get rid of my tax return.” But you can see here we actually show you what your new tax refund estimate will be and also show you that you can boost your paycheck by up to $100. Then we also collect great information not only for the platform, but also for some financial institutions which we partner with.

Individuals can say, I'm looking to save for a large expense, pay down debt, invest in many other different things that can set up goals. And then we do have the ability for us to track these goals so we can tell individuals, “Hey, you're coming up on your goals,” or we've all done that delicate balance of trying to optimize our 401K by not paying too much and missing out on matching.

We can do all that for them. All right. So now we have gotten them their money. Now what. Well that's why we created Compass. Compas as the name will suggest, advises you the way you should be putting your money. So once an individual actually gets access to that money, we can say, “Okay, well, you're having a large expense coming up or you're having a major financial event, having a child, moving or whatever,” we can actually show them all the right financial products that they need.

And that's exactly why we partnered with some of these financial institutions. We also work with small businesses because we can actually get access to all their transactions, preempt any cash shortfalls and work with this. Credit card companies are also some of these loan facilities that provide loans for them. I don't know why it looks like that, but we can embed quickly into different platforms on or off court.

And we also partnered with one of the largest banks in the world. And, two of the three largest payroll platforms in the country, and also Liberty Tax. And lastly, we have we're backed by a strong team, including Techstars, one of Barclay's first investments, and also a Lytical Ventures. So ultimately, what we’re going to do is boost paychecks, increase employee retention and attract great talent for these platforms and put more money in people's pockets.

And lastly, Muse has been in the news. So, the good work caught on and the Wall Street Journal actually did an article about us recently about our ability to use AI to boost people's paychecks and improve their tax refunds. Thank you.

Kate:
Right on time, Colin. Amazing job. Judges, it's your turn. What questions do you have for Colin?

Marc:
Thanks, Colin. I guess my question is just around kind of the, I guess a high level around the economics of... So obviously if someone's getting a big refund, it means they're paying too much throughout the year. So one way to do that is to just withhold less, so you don't have as much of a refund. Like, is that what are you doing that behind the scenes for them or are you keeping things the same? And, I guess I'm a little bit confused by kind of how that kind of cash inflows and outflows work.

Colin:
So a large element of that is adjusting how they're overpaying their taxes. Just to be clear, we're not a loan facility. We're not giving them or fronting them any money. What we're doing is we're going and pulling all their transactions if we can. They can even do things like upload the tax returns. We get access to how much they're getting paid, what they've paid in taxes so far, and that we use that to estimate the tax refund. Many people may remember, like back in the days, you can put like a one or two whenever you're doing your W-4. The IRS got rid of that in 2020.

So now they're telling you you have to tell them the exact amount to withhold. If you don't tell them the exact amount, they're just going to over withhold for you. How do you calculate that number? I'm a CPA. It's tough for me to do it. And that's exactly why we built this platform to tell you how much you're overpaying so you can adjust it based off of how much you want. We don't get rid of the tax refund because some people are conditioned to get that large influx of money towards the end of the year. So we show them what their new refund estimate will be.

Marc:
So are you making, like, is there just like a fintech component of just making a margin on the kind of upfront payments, say like, and then obviously you're charging the HCM platform as well?

Colin:
So we don't charge the customer. The customer never sees a bill. We do pepm, per employee per month. And we work with directly these IPO platforms. We also integrate with large financial institutions because you're saying we want those deposits. So I can say, well, I just saved the couple that say, well, I got a company who seven people convert and they're all saving $200 more or bringing in $200 more per paycheck. That's $1,400. Twice a month, I can bring you roughly $3,000 in extra deposits every month. The customer never actually sees the bill and the employee never sees it. I'm a CPA. We're not supposed to say contingent fees, so I cannot take a fee on how much I save you or how much I bring it.

Maurice:
Colin, great pitch, by the way. Really enjoyed it. So my question is, there are obviously some, like, larger legacy players in the space. There's one called TriNet that we've heard of, like, curious how you stay ahead of the competitive landscape. Like, you know, they don't seem to be doing exactly... I mean, I use TriNet obviously and I don't think they have like, you know, some of the like tax refund features for example. But like, let's just say they do. Right? And they, they hire a team. They use their resources. They launch something along those lines or frankly, like anybody in the competitive landscape launches some of that, like, you know, how do you maintain a moat, like how do you stay ahead of it? You know, what gives you the right to win on like a scalability perspective later on?

Colin:
Yeah. Great question. So what do we think about it? I mean, of course competitors if you do anything that competitors will come. Right? We already work with two of the three largest payroll providers. They thought, you know, they did the bill versus buy it and figure it’s better to buy it or at least partner with us. The way we look at it is we have some great partnerships and we also have a lot of data.

When we first started the company, we were actually pulling in tax returns. But tax returns is the most comprehensive financial document out there. So we actually, we can actually bring a lot of information to these platforms. The reason they started working with us as opposed to building it themselves, they were saying, “Well, you can help us help our, SMBs on our platform do things like lower, attrition, you know, increase hiring and all those sort of things because we're bringing a treasure trove of data.

They can partner with someone like, into it, like TurboTax, but they're not looking at payroll, right? They're just looking at straight numbers and retrospective. We're looking at retrospective and prospective because we can see what you've been paid. We can also tell what you're going to be paid and project out in the future. So a rich set of data that way, and also our partnerships with the large financial institutions.

Kate:
All right. And time for Colin. Fantastic job. You guys. Didn't realize what an exciting evening you had in store dental care, taxes. I bet you'll like what's next. But we have an amazing entrepreneur. Laura Wells is up next from Awake Teams and I can't wait to see her presentation as well. Everybody's done an amazing job thus far. Laura, welcome.

Laura Wells:
Thank you so much.

Kate:
You're welcome.

Laura:
Thank you, thank you. Hello everybody. It's great to be here. Thanks, everyone, for coming out and for having us, giving us this opportunity to come and talk about our companies. It’s fantastic. So I need the clicker. Is this the clicker? This is the clicker. All right. Let me just orient here for a second.

Okay. Other I'm going forwards I think. Okay. There we go. So hello everybody. Laura Wells, founder and CEO of Awake Teams. I started my career in Fortune 100 companies. I know the change I want to see in corporate culture. I experienced what it's like not to connect authentically with colleagues, not to offer clear and honest feedback, not to navigate effectively through conflict, and then to get a 360 process moment and be really surprised at the feedback.

I personally left corporate to join the leadership team at the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. I learned about neuroplasticity and human behavior change, brought that back to the corporate realm as a certified emotional intelligence trainer. Now Awake Teams delivers an interpersonal skills development tool that changes behavior sustainably in workplace teams. It works as a culture change tool by scaling human behavior change at work.

Companies lose $450 billion a year in lost productivity from disengaged employees. And the bad news? More than 50% of employees are disengaged. On top of this, companies are spending $26 billion a year in soft skills training programs to improve productivity. But current programs don't measure progress and impact. And actually, only 15%, less than 15% of employees actually complete the programs. So how could they work?

Our customers, including the president's management agenda team at the White House and Northwestern Mutual, tell us that awake teams is unlike any other soft skills program they've invested in because of the impact on team performance that they tell us. So here are a couple of testimonial quotes. Our secret sauce: social learning and accountability, peer assessment and asynchronous learning, and proprietary monthly progress reports.

There's data and our data demonstrates that it works. After just one four-month module, teams see up to 30% improvement in productivity. And the thing I am personally the most proud of is that a team at the White House improved 40% in constructive conflict. It's like how to be good humans. Again, teams access content together in an ongoing series of four-month modules synchronous and interactive team sessions, peer assessment, asynchronous and personalized learning, and proprietary monthly progress reports.

We are working with global customers and design partners including Genentech, Roche and Siemens. When they scale, we have a multimillion-dollar business. Companies purchase Awake Teams either in these four-month modules or as an annual subscription. And in the annual plan, companies pay $1,500 per employee, grouped into teams of four to 10 and three four-month modules make up the annual plan. So it's ongoing learning and in a very what they call sticky learning model. We will scale by adding on companies and by scaling across teams in an organization. Our team brings expertise and leadership development, behavioral and data science, and HR to the table. We are all passionate about transforming corporate culture by developing human interpersonal skills that stick and letting AI enable us to be better humans.

We have $25,000 of a $500,000 round in the bank and we are looking for strategic angel investors to join us in our journey to transform corporate culture. The money will enable us to acquire, retain and begin to scale with six new customers in 2025. If you'd like to join us, would like to learn more, please scan the code. Reach out to me directly. We'd love to connect and tell you more. Thank you.

Kate:
Laura. Wonderful job judges. I'll turn it over to you for some questions.

Andrew:
I can go first. Hey, Laura. Great presentation, by the way. I think of a very elegant founder market fit story. And I think the area in which you're building interpersonal communication and conflict is not talked about enough and very important. My question is a little bit one on one. This is not a space that I've spent a lot of time in. So I'd love for you to just kind of educate me here. I feel like when I hear the headlines about how big companies are thinking about their human capital and their labor forces, you hear things about like stripping out labor costs. You know, maybe sort of the specter of AI looms large in terms of, you know, supplanting what the current labor structure kind of looks like for these companies post-Covid. You hear a lot about, like, tech companies using return to work as a way to essentially call down their labor force for people who aren't willing to work remote. I am curious if you could just hit me with the like, why this, why now piece of how this fits into sort of the future of human capital considerations, and specifically attune that to like how your customers think about value and ROI.

Laura:
Yeah. Great question. Thank you. So we know that employee disengagement has lost productivity. Cost has a been static present for a long time in the market. And we also know that post-Covid, it's particularly serious. And Gen Z is called the generation. They have a serious social and emotional deficit. So there are some statistics that say that Gen Z employees are only remaining in their jobs for four months, because of the lack of interpersonal skills development.

So Covid, Covid and our attachment to our digital devices have decreased our natural ability to connect, to collaborate, to argue constructively so that we innovate better, to grapple, to make ideas stronger. And so the companies that I'm speaking with are looking through that lens and that lens that we know we have a social emotional deficit in the workplace.

It's extremely expensive. We don't have an effective tool that we invest in that that addresses that and that we get data to prove that something happened and to prove that something happens consistently across the organization. So as an individual, I might not sign myself up for the interpersonal skills training. I may think I've got it. In fact, when we look at the self and peer assessment data, most people rate themselves better than they actually are in interpersonal skills.

And that's what makes part of this so effective is seeing the blind spots. So the value is in increasing the individual employee engagement by improving their performance and then being able to scale this behavior change across the organization to really hit that staggering $450 billion lost productivity cost, human lost productivity.

James:
Laura, awesome presentation. As someone who has clicked through these trainings in the past, I'm curious, two-part question: what makes your product and platform different? That it's so much more engaging, the 90% plus completion rates and then more importantly, I think, is how do you use measuring and quantifying productivity and team cohesion, and how do you measure that over time?

Laura:
Yeah. Great question. So that 90% completion rate is it's greater than 90%. Is because of the team. So teams trained together. You can't do it as an individual. It's sold. Companies pay by for the individual. But it's grouped into teams of 4 to 10. And so, within those four-month modules you have these synchronous team sessions. So the team is live whether you're remote or hybrid or in person. The team is live together, have research-backed content, have interactive practice immediately applying learning. And then there's this self-imposed peer assessment every month. And then from the data, automatically progress reports are generated and a personalized learning sequence is assigned to each team member based on the data, not based on what you think you need, but based on the data.

And so what incentivizes the people showing up and completing the program is for their team members. It's transparent if they're the one that doesn't show up and they also want their scores to go up. They want the data to be better from month to month. So that's the completion rate. And then your second question was…

James:
How are you measuring productivity and improvement in team cohesion?

Laura:
Yeah. So self and peer assessment. And so, each four-month module tackles five specific skills. And so those are measured by I get to say how much how well do I think I'm doing in those skills. And they're observable behaviors. It's not like in trust building. It's not do I trust you more this month than I did last month? It's do I see you seeking to understand different perspectives? Do I see you sharing your strengths and your challenges? That kind of thing. So I rate myself and then I if you were my team, then I would rate each of you. And then I also answer some engagement questions, some team cohesion metrics. Actually, our behavioral scientist is here in the crowd.

You are he's a NYU, professor at NYU. And, he's actually a perfect fit. So his PhD is on interpersonal trust in teams and its impact on well-being and performance. And so self-assess team cohesion, team performance, and also answer some engagement questions. So that's where we are today. That's how we do it. Thank you.

Kate:
Super job. Thank you so much. All right guys it's that time we have come to our final pitcher of the evening. Please welcome to the stage Ashley Yesayan.

Ashley Yesayan:
I am founder and CEO of One Village Ashley. Okay. All right. For probably can, Well. Hi, everybody. I am the only thing standing between you guys and drinks, so I'm going to try and be quick.

Well. Hi, everybody. My name is Ashley Yesayan. I'm the founder and CEO of One Village. We're a B2B health tech company that helps people to navigate complex life conditions like cancer, mental health or substance use, along with everyday issues like losing weight or eating healthier.

I'm excited to be with you guys today. Thank you, TriNet. Thank you everyone, all of our hosts, for allowing me to shine a light on a problem that we have in the United States. Changing workforce demographics as well as changing insurance dynamics are creating an entire class of functionally uninsured people in our country, which I know about, myself.

So excited to shine a light on that and share how One Village is the solution for this. My story starts back in 2017. I actually spent most of my career as a VC investor, sitting up on stage like you guys. I was at Revolution back in Washington, DC, founded by Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, who had founded AOL America Online. AOL Consumer is the internet and took a boring, prompt-based platform and made it a place where you could find resources and network and community.

We realized there, they realized that people were spending five and six hours a day on the AOL platform, and they realized, why wouldn't people want a better consumer experience in the rest of their life? We invested about $2.5 billion in things like DraftKings to bet on sports and Clear to get through the airport and CustomInk to get your t-shirts made online.

Then in 2017, I got diagnosed with cancer and I found myself an educated, proactive person, completely crippled by the health system. I was getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills and I wasn't sure if I could afford my treatment as a VC. I was wondering how I would show up to work the next day amid crippling depression, much less how I would find the root cause of my illness and how I could actually proactively make it better.

I couldn't find these solutions in my health system from my employer, for my career, and with my VC hat on, I started trying to understand why that was. As it turns out, there is a complex series of financial disincentives that prevent supportive care. What we offer from being offered in the U.S. health system because it's simply too expensive to do brick and mortar.

Employers to date have been using good enough solutions called EAP, employee assistance plans, which aren't incentivized on outcomes and ultimately aren't there to make your experience pleasant. I recognize that this solution had to be developed. And I found that my best ally for a go to market was employers, because 65% of them are self-employed and are truly aligned with us when it comes to improving outcomes and reducing costs.

So I realized that I couldn't do this alone. And unlike other companies which have tried to pave over solutions that have already existed in the medical field, I actually went out and I put together the most impressive, best body of collaborating experts that we could from across a range of leading research institutions like Cedars-Sinai and Johns Hopkins and others.

And so, with this team of individuals, we created a three pillared approach to care. We offer medical navigation, insurance navigation. And unlike anything you'll find in the health care system or employee benefits, 35 different experts, ranging from maternal health to nutrition, to sports medicine that are all integral to whole person wellness.

Your medical concierge is there to help you find and network providers, establish a care team and, transfer your records, removing the administrative need for care. Insurance navigators offer a white glove solution for getting claims approved, understanding your benefits or understanding how much something will cost out of pocket. And of course, one-on-one and group coaching across a range of fields that are recommended by our medical review board as critical to well-being.

What you can't see there is that we do actually offer a 50% reduction in attrition for members who use one village versus those who don't. And we offer employers a 4.2 times on average ROI.

So here is a, picture of the site. As you can see, we do it on one easy to use platform, where you can unlike employee assistance plans, you can click in to watch videos of your providers, read about their background and understand who would fit your solution best. That infrastructure allows us to solve a range of employee problems from simple to complex.

Simple meaning, employees trying to find out what benefits may work for them in a particular situation to navigating a critical illness. As you can see here, our navigation team is there to help you find the right benefit at the right time. At the time we onboard a client, we ingest all of their information, summary plan, benefits, ancillary benefits, and benefits from their carrier so that we can offer employees access to exactly the benefits they need at exactly the right time.

Over the last 18 months, we've started about 10,000 members. We reached these members through channel partnerships with groups like One Digital and Marsh McLennan. We work with companies ranging from a couple hundred to a couple thousand employees. And the benefits pitch is pretty clear. We say, listen, HR, we're going to save you a ton of time, as well as your broker consultant.

And we're going to give you a benefit that people love with an NPS of 92 and save you, on average, about four times your spend in the first year, driven by claim-free virtual savings and finding the root cause of illnesses is withheld, which helps keep people out of the rest of the health system. As you can see, different than solutions that are currently available in the market, we have the most comprehensive platform that you're not going to find again in healthcare systems or within employee benefits.

That is why employees love us. But as broad as we are, we're able to get very precise through the use of human-guided AI, which helps us develop personalized, tailored plans for the whole person. Wellness of every person who comes through the door. As you can see, here we are. We offer both individual coaching recommendations as well as entire pathways which offer comprehensive cross-disciplinary coaching.

This is supposed to be one for our pregnancy and postpartum, platform. As you can see, a range of interactive coaches, ranging from pre-delivery education all the way through maternal mental health, return to work. We're $3 pepm and thank you very much.

Kate:
Ashley great job.

Ashley:
Struggled through it together.

Kate:
You powered through it. Gentlemen, what questions do you have for Ashley?

Marc:
So pretty similar to one of the first questions that was asked, during the first presentation around engaging employees. So Comcast is a massive company, lots of employees, lots of tools that are really amazing. But they have a hard time actually getting to the end user and kind of cutting through noise. And it's a marketing challenge. It's lots of different challenges. What do you think works for you to kind of, breakthrough. Right?

Ashley:
Yeah. Great question. A typical employee assistance plan will have about 5% utilization per year on a good year. We see about 30% after a month or two and upwards of 70 to 80% by the end of the year. The reason for that is, as I can attest, these solutions are not available in our health system or through APIs, and people are desperate for them.

James:
So, Ashley, great presentation. I think we can all agree that it's a struggle to navigate all of this, even as people in the ecosystem, so my big question is, the sheer breadth of your platform is really impressive, right? Being able to help with navigation across all the adult caregiving, child caregiving, childbirth, you name it. We've seen point solutions in the market for every one of these. I also heard you mentioned white glove service, which to me implies a high cost. How are you able to have such a broad platform with that level of service and still come in at $3, which is drastically cheaper than everyone else?

Ashley:
Absolutely. $3 today gives me about a 50% margin, which is fine for 18 months into things. We're working on insurance reimbursement now, which completely changes the game and actually makes us very, very profitable. But the way that we're able to offer such a diverse range of care is because, we have 35 different experts who, in combination, can solve almost any problem. So it's really about the infrastructure that we put in place that allows us to be so broad-reaching.

James:
And how many employees do you think those 35 individuals can serve before having to keep staffing up? More experts?

Ashley:
Yeah, we can, probably at least triple the amount that we're serving now. Everybody's about a third utilized at this point. And quite frankly, hiring is the easiest thing for us because people are so disgruntled by the health system and thrilled to be able to find a more proactive solution. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Kate:
And, all right, guys. Well, now it's time for the decision making. So our judges have a tough choice. I'm going to pull them aside for a couple of minutes. And while I step away, I ask that you guys please remain seated. I'm going to bring Dave back on stage here. And he's going to introduce just a couple of our sponsors on hand.

Candidates, thanks. All right, gentlemen. Thanks, everybody.

Dave:
A couple questions. Everybody learned something tonight, right? I thought these were great. And then two things that stood out to me the most. Just working for TriNet and understanding that servicing the employer. But servicing the employee. Right. So as you kind of think about your businesses and how you want to go about it, right. And if this was your pitch, how would it look right and how would it be delivered? And what message do you want to hear? Those two things centered around either servicing the employer, the employee. And the employee is exactly what we do at TriNet. Right?

So tonight, everybody's efforts to put this all together, we're supremely grateful for. Right? But we couldn't do it without our partners obviously. You heard earlier this evening I'd like to bring up WeWork as well as Vistra. We've had a relationship with WeWork and Vistra for years. Right? This space is inside of a WeWork.

So when you think about building your business, how should it look? We've all heard kind of the turn that's starting to come to the U.S. as it relates to you know, working in office. Right? And things to think about. I'd like to hear it.

[WeWork Rep]:
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you everybody, for coming here. I also want to give a big shout out to TriNet for hosting this event and being a great partner to WeWork. We've done a bunch of events like this with them. And they're also a are a big part of WeWork’s program for small and medium businesses. They help fill the void that small companies that just starting up don't have a HR platform, and they help fill that void, providing expert needs for companies that are growing.

And in terms of WeWork, you're at one of our flagship buildings in the heart of Times Square. If you walk outside into their patio, you could see the New York Times ball drop right over there. And we have locations like this all over the country and all over the world. We help companies of small sizes to medium sizes to even Fortune 500 companies.

So if you're a small mom and pop shop to a Fortune 500 companies, we help fill a void in terms of office space needs. If you're just starting up or you're looking to grow, or if you just need a space to plan your future workplace environment, WeWork is a great solution for that. I also want to introduce my partner, LeeTal, who helps with All Access and workplace enterprises.

LeeTal Shefet:
Hi everybody. Thank you so much for being here. We want to thank TriNet as well. I've been with WeWork for about two years now, and I started working on our community team, which is the bread and butter that sits in these locations. They're a huge resource to our members and we've worked very closely with TriNet through that time. It's so warm and inviting when they are with us. So they add a certain element to the community that is made up of all of the people much like you. So if you have any interest and you'd like to come talk to us. We're going to be here. Happy to answer any questions that you have. And thank you guys so much for coming.

Dave:
Thank you. Awesome, awesome. Do we have our representative from Vistra? Yes. No. Maybe so. I have a we work All Access pass. It's awesome. If you guys travel around and you have a dispersed team you can log in to the app, a couple of credits, you can get an office, you can get a conference room. All the ABs in there. So, you know, I get to I get to travel quite a bit in this role, but getting that understanding and just having that flexibility in that All Access pass, place to sit, recharge, get reset. You know, it works well for me. I urge you to take a look. So lastly, lastly, our partner in Vistra.

Michael Fisher:
So I didn't know I was getting up to speak tonight. But thank you for that. But yeah. Fisher. So we are an international accounting, tax compliance and payroll firm. So if any of you have any international operations, if you're going to new markets and you need to set up an entity or you have tax compliance issues, that's where we come in. We can help with the full suite of back office. We're about 9,500 people in 70 countries now. So yeah. So thank you.

Dave:
Kate Kozak, we ready? Judges?

Kate:
The decision has been made.

Dave:
Awesome. Awesome. Again, thank you to our sponsors. Thank you for taking the time to come out tonight. Can't do it without you. And let's hear from our judges and our winner.

Kate:
All right, guys, we can't have a winner without an award. So after careful deliberation, it wasn't easy. But our judges have come to the unanimous decision that Ashley from One Village is this evening's winner. Ashley.

Ashley:
Thank you.

Kate:
You're so welcome. Ashley not only takes home this amazing award, but she will also be the recipient of $5,000 in TriNet credits. Judges, please share your feedback with Ashley.

Andrew:
Yeah. Congrats, Ashley. First of all, I just wanted to say all of the pitches were very good, so we had a tough decision ahead of us.

I think one of the things you did well, just from a pitch perspective, I know you had some technical issues throughout. I think you did a really good job making up for that in the questions and sort of getting two pieces of the pitch that you weren't able to get to otherwise. And one thing that you've clearly thought through very well is, you know, you have a really complex ecosystem of people in this network that you have to get a line, get buy-in from.

And it's very clear that you've not only spent time in this as someone who's been on the recipient side of this as well, but also figured out how to wrangle them through your business model and sort of align, you know, your business model to each piece of the value chain. And so I thought that was very sophisticated.

Ashley:
Thank you for that. And I believe that without public private partnerships, we can't solve complex problems like health care. So thank you for recognizing that. And thank you all for this.

Kate:
I think the other ones had some commentary for you too, but that's okay.

James:
I mean, if you don't want the compliments we don't care.

Marc:
Well, I just want to echo, great presentations for everyone. I thought the utilization kind of point was very impressive, because I do know that low single digit, low single digits is the norm. So, I thought that was pretty impressive.

Ashley:
Thank you.

Maurice:
All right, first of all, thank you for sharing your personal story behind the. You know, I think that's most important here. And it's not easy to as somebody who's been through all sessions myself, it's not easy to share that, especially in front of everybody. So, there was that. But also I think, from a concept perspective, I think the problem and the why now is extremely real, because there are just so many people still struggling with this issue. And, you know, it's not just the fact that you were a VC looking to potentially invest in the problem and maybe you couldn't find it, but also just the fact that, I think you really illustrated well, like nobody, no matter who you are, could figure out an answer to this problem. And like, you know, I think some of the best founding stories are the ones that that, you know, where you need to go solve the problem yourself because no one else is doing it. And ironically, I know another VC who just left their job specifically, also in the healthcare space, doing something similar to you. So, so anyway, it's really, really awesome to see that.

Ashley:
Yes. And, you know, I mean, the average age of the employee has been 46 for almost forever. It's 42 now. And did you know that people have a 20% more likely to get a chronic illness who are millennials than any other generation in the past? So people expect these technology forward solutions. So thank you.

Maurice:
One more compliment.

Ashley:
Please bring us home.

James:
I'll try my best to bring us home. No promises. First, I did want to give a shout out to the other three startups that pitched. All of you are solving incredibly important problems in the world that are largely underserved today. So keep up the great work.

At the end of the day, what I think it came down to was one of the things we've been seeing and hearing from a lot of the corporate customers we work with is this whole idea of point solution fatigue. So I've looked at probably five to 10 companies in every single category that you listed, and it is too complex for any employee to navigate. But it's also too complex for any employer to navigate. And so, the fact that you're bringing together everything and a one-stop shop that is cheaper and easier to access, I think that that's a very winning formula.

Ashley:
Thank you so much. I appreciate all that you said.

Kate:
Congratulations to everybody that presented their companies today, James, Maurice, Andrew, Marc, thank you so much for your partnership and your participation. Everybody who joined, we appreciate you being here. Please help yourself to drinks and appetizers in the back. And don't forget your free book. Enjoy your evening.