Rocketable

At some point this afternoon, a founder will step on stage at YC Demo day an propose a fairly outrageous idea- a one person, billion dollar AI maximalist software holding company. @alanwells hit our radar after seeing his tweet about building @RocketableInc that made the same outrageous claim as above. We decided to shoot him a DM and share something from the Facts section of the @indievc website: We’re obsessed with the idea that someone is going to build a business doing $100M in revenue with less than 10 employees and see it as this generation of founders’ 4 min mile. Once someone shows it can be done, many more will follow. We want to partner with the one that does to help define a repeatable playbook for those that follow. We decided to schedule a time to talk, originally as a video call. As timing would have it, we ended up in San Francisco on the day of our call and proposed to meet in-person instead. As timing would also have it, we happened to have all our cameras in tow and proposed we film the pitch meeting as he’s working in an opportunity space and in a way that resonates deeply with how we think about things with indie. He agreed and we ‘re publishing that conversation today. Alan, as an archetype, is something we’ve been flagging for a while now. In our Indie Era of Startups presentation, we talked at length about a growing wave of repeat founders and early employees of venture backed startups that will be building this next wave of breakout companies differently. Alan is an alum of Uber and Cruise, and he’s taking lessons learned from those experiences to build the leanest and most scalable team possible, going all in on the modern tooling available for him to to so. As you’ll see in the video, the conversation flowed freely and he did a fantastic job articulating his world view and plans for Rocketable, making it an easy yes by the end of the meeting. We’ve never recorded a pitch live like this and had no idea how it might turn out. Now that we have, it’s kind of cool to have this artifact of a first meeting and our commitment to invest to mark the beginning of a long and profitable relationship. To Alan- best of luck with demo day today and can’t wait to get to work on partnering with you on Rocketable. And to those who see themselves in Alan’s journey or share a similar worldview, we’d love to talk.