See visible.com for details.

We're valued at 230 million, and we're only [laughs] seven full-time employees, so every employee is worth more than 23 million in valuation.

Silicon Valley is a very interesting place.

It's like sheep: once you get one investor, they all flock.

I think the most successful companies in Silicon Valley tap into people's emotions.

So dating apps tap into lust, m- money-making apps like Robinhood tap into greed, and you have to tap into a core human emotion to succeed.

I see a lot of entrepreneurs, they're building AR glasses for the Apple Vision Pro or crypto projects, but I think they should be more in touch with what ordinary people need, which is just to save time and money in their daily lives.

See visible.com for details.

See visible.com for details.

I was a terrible driver and I got about 30 parking tickets.

Of course, as a college student, I couldn't afford to pay these expensive tickets, so I had to find other ways that tickets get dismissed.

If you know the right thing to say around the signage, you can actually save a lot of money and get out of tickets.

I am the type of person to wait on hold for six hours to save $10, but I realize that not everyone is like that and not everyone has the time to do that.

All my family and friends were asking for my help with their ticket.

Because I was studying computer science, that I should automate it.

I've been a fan of your company, your work from afar, and, um, I would love to hear just a little bit of your backstory, your origin story.

As you can tell from my accent, I'm originally from, uh, England, um, in London, and, um, I moved to the US when I was 18 for school at Stanford.

And, um, between the transition of high school and college, I, um, started a company called DoNotPay, uh, which I still run to this day, uh, almost 10 years later.

Uh, DoNotPay is the software version of, uh, anti-establishment.

Uh, we've helped millions of people appeal parking tickets, save money on bills, fight companies and the government.

Um, and I, I started it because I'm Mr. DoNotPay myself.

I'm the type of person to wait on hold for three hours just to save $20.

Mm-hmm

Can I ask you, when you think about, like, a really challenging time like that, seeing that news, can you take me to a really hard day you had with DoNotPay? And how did you learn about yourself from it?

This is probably the, the hardest point of DoNotPay, which is three years into the company.

So I, I'd raised the pre-seed from Andreessen, from Mark.

It came time to raise the seed two or three years later.

DoNotPay was incredibly popular.

Millions of people were using our free product, and I thought it was a slam dunk pitch.

That was a huge mistake.

What did your parents say?

So when you say AI and talk about what AI can do, You know, is this, you know, dynamic template generation through generative AI? Is it sort of having agents? What's what is it? Is it passive? Is it active? What does this actually look like in practice for some of these situations?

Yeah, so the very first use case, so I'll use the excuse.

I came from the UK to study at Stanford and the Americans drive on the other side of the road.

So I'll use that excuse, but really I was a terrible driver.

And so I was getting all of these expensive parking tickets and I couldn't afford to pay them.

They were like $300 each, very, very expensive.

And so I became an accidental expert at how to get out of tickets.

I guess for me, what's interesting, Josh, is not just the technical challenges, but some of the some of the technology that's out there and the way that you're able to overcome some of these challenges.

So they're not working for you, they're working for the company?

Yeah.

So, um, and everyone has different goals, so- and you have to change your recruiting pit to base the- uh, on the kind of goals.

So if it's a 21-year-old fresh college graduate, it should be all about their personal growth and how the company will help them.

If it's someone who's a bit older, it should be about stability, and all of the kind of- that the company will be around in five years and all of that stuff.

Anyway, going back to the Thiel Fellowship.

So I- I found these, um, amazing 19 other people in my class of Thiel Fellows who could give me advice on these very issues.

Are you looking just for IQ and grit? Are those the two variables? Or what other variables are there?

Uh, but, but, but does the, uh, does, does this idea of like going after bor- boring kind of vertical SaaS, vertical AI, uh, does that fit with a, a worldview that, uh, maybe like we're not just gonna get the, the, the foundation model labs to one-shot every single business opportunity, and in fact, it is a great time to build a, a niche business?

I think that there's opportunities that are b- beneath the foundation models.

You're seeing them now get into like coding and things like that, but those are huge opportunities.

They're not going to go into waste management.

What, what's happening in, uh, in your business that's, that's exciting? Uh, I imagine there's every time the models get better, your product gets better?

Yeah.

Um, I, I think y- you constantly have to be innovating.

We're, like, always worried about what the big companies are doing to detect our AI robots.

Exactly.

... um, because they're order of magnitude bigger.

Um, so I encourage any founder I back to move to the US and also to move to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Um, unfortunately, um, still being in the Bay Area really matters a lot.

The companies don't have to start in the Bay Area, they could start in Arizona or wherever they drop out from, but they should really move here.

Um, Pilgrim is a great example, um, Jake started in Canada and then, uh, moved to the Bay Area.

Um, I also think there's a huge arbitrage on the O-1 visa.

Uh, give us the update there.

What's the strategy here? What kind of size checks will you write? What cadence of deals do you want to do? Because we're talking early stage.

So there's so much noise right now.

People are doing dozens or even hundreds of deals a year.

I want to take the opposite approach.

I take one person every month or every other month and go all in for them.

And that can be a 200K check and it can be as high as a million dollars.

Is it like more akin to an incubator than it

What are the learnings you're taking from the Do Not Pay story and how you want to approach this? I recall a story where you had breakfast with Marc Andreessen in 2016, and at that time, Do Not Pay was going to be a not-for-profit, but you were convinced otherwise by him.