Brad Gerstner
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Totally, totally.
So it was really good.
And then, since, um,
That went so well, the JETRO, which is the Enterprise Trade Organization of Japan, called me and said, we want to do it in Japan.
So I'm leaving here to go to Japan and announce the launch of it.
Oh, wow.
And then we'll have it in three cities, the United States, or three countries, United States, Saudi, and Japan, which will officially start in January.
I'm just going there to do like a press tour about it.
So, you know, we get a fee to run the program, but it's not going to, you know, match venture investing, obviously.
It just kind of underwrites the cost of it.
And then that creates the funnel.
About 5% of the companies that come to, 5 to 10% of the companies that come to Foundry University wind up going to the accelerator or we make a direct investment.
So it's a pre-accelerator, but it lets us get to the companies before Techstars or Y Combinator or other folks even know they exist because half of them aren't incorporated yet, right?
So that's kind of the exciting part about it is we meet them when they're just two or three people working on a prototype.
But their valuations of those three companies, one is Cognition, now at $15 billion.
One is Decagon, now at $4 billion.
And the other one is Distilled that just raised at $2 billion.
I mean, the rate at which these companies are scaling for the best companies, really.
I mean, Angel Money is now real money.
It's going to be interesting to see how...