Boardy CEO Andrew D'Souza on connecting 5,000 founders raising $16B with 600 investors managing $1T

Speaker 12: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm the founder founder, CEO, creator of Bordy, the AI super connector. Bordy is helping, you know, helping founders meet investors primarily, but connecting people for, you know, business and economic reasons. We've had we launched a program about two weeks ago to try and get a 100 founders to help close the round. We have 5,000 founders raising $16,000,000,000 sign up and 600 investors, I think, about a trillion dollars of capital who

Speaker 2: Some size.

Speaker 12: Get act so, yeah, we've got I think we probably got about 10% of the active fundraising happening right now among founders that are that is are working through Boardy, which is pretty exciting.

Speaker 2: Awesome. So, yeah, I guess I guess yeah. I guess I guess immediate thought is with products like this, like, one of the one of the challenges is just like balancing the network, basically. And with InVenture, it's oftentimes the the companies that have the most demand for their equity or or the companies that are that are, you know, maybe performing the best oftentimes don't need intros. You know, they're in the position of, like, saying no. How are you thinking about kind of, like, maintaining quality on the platform when you're a business and you wanna be as as big as you can possibly be? And I imagine you you have a strategy there.

Speaker 12: Yeah. I think it's it's that was something that I was worried about. This is the reason why we didn't start with the idea of connecting founders and investors. It just sort of happened organically, that this was this was the activity that was taking place. I've been shocked at the caliber of founders that have come in looking for help. And I think as a CEO, as a founder, like, your job is to create demand for your shares. It doesn't matter whether you're Elon or, you know, Roy Lee or, you know, a YC founder.

Speaker 2: Like Yeah.

Speaker 12: That's your job, and you'll take all the help you can get. Most founders only raise capital, you know, two or three times in their life and and help having someone that can help you navigate that, get the right introductions. I think there are probably 50 or 100 founders in the world. I think this is the reason why we talk about the sort of AI bubble right now. So 50 or a 100 founders in the world that every investor is chasing. Right? Because that's, you know, that's the hype cycle. There's probably thousands of founders who have incredible business. We're we're talking to them. They have incredible businesses, incredible metrics, and they're just you know, they just haven't they're not based in Silicon Valley or they're not, you know, straight down the middle pattern recognition.

Speaker 1: They're not based at all. I'm back.

Speaker 6: They may not be based at all.

Speaker 1: Stupid joke.

Speaker 2: Good luck good luck raising if you're not based these days.

Speaker 1: That's a good you're

Speaker 2: not based. No. Yeah. That that makes total sense. What like, where where does this go from here? This feels like a good early wedge, but, you know, hard hard to build a bit a billion dollar business yourself just within just within venture. So I imagine you have a number of other kind of pathways or or use cases for the for the kind of introduction engine or or I don't know how you

Speaker 12: Yeah. Yeah. We've built Boardia as like an AI board member. So what is the most important meeting for the CEO to take at any time? Right? Is it a customer meeting? Are they hiring an executive? Are they trying to get on, you know, a podcast? Mhmm. Are they you know, like, is it a is it a big partnership? Is it corp dev? It happens to be that fundraising ends up being a a high urgency place where you can build a great relationship, But I think of Bordea as an economy. Mhmm. You know, Bordea every time you connect two people, there's some economic opportunity that that is unlocked. There's some latent economic potential. And

Speaker 1: We can financialize it. Yeah. I love it. It's actually it's actually what you're doing. It's true. It's it's actually good.

Speaker 2: Okay. Can I give can I give feedback to board if I get an intro and I and I and I take the call and I'm like, can I be like, yo, Bordy, that never again? Never again. Because we I mean, everyone's gotten an intro from somebody and and you're like, wait. Why'd you make that intro? Like, I jumped on. They didn't know who I was.

Speaker 1: Am I on with the venture fund that loves firing CEOs? Don't introduce me to them. Introduce me to the friendly ones.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So how do you how do you because because I can imagine that's, like, one way that you you wanna make sure you wanna get to the point where the entire industry is is onboarding. Like, every single founder, every single investor. But as an investor, for an investor to, like, not churn, they need to be able to, give feedback and say, like, hey. Like, this didn't meet this didn't meet my bar for a meeting. I don't you know, if you you know, and if you keep sending people meetings or intros that don't meet their bar, eventually, they'll just say, like, I'm I'm gonna, you know, log off.

Speaker 12: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So so this is, this is one of the things we take a lot of we we take feedback. Boardy has goodwill with people. Right? So his idea the same way that if anytime I make an introduction, I'm gambling goodwill. Mhmm. I mean, I make a bad introduction, burn some goodwill. If I make a great introduction, maybe I've gained some goodwill. And you're sort of doing that calculation at any given time. The version of if you just sign up, you you're talking to a low latency, relatively low cost on on the phone, on WhatsApp. You're just talking to, you know, the the standard version of Boardy. What we tried to do we had this experiment. We were running this fundraising thing. We said, what if you could remove the constraints of latency and cost? What if I could spend a 100 times of tokens?

Speaker 1: What if

Speaker 12: we could let Bordie run for thirty minutes trying to find the per perfect introduction and position you in the perfect way? Can I get better results? And that's kinda what we're seeing. So now we've had five and Bordie's talked to 5,000 founders that are raising in 600 investors in the last two weeks. He has now picked the top 100 that he knows he can help that are gonna be in demand from the investors in his network, and we put them into a shared Slack channel with us and Bordie and the founder, And and we've we've now got those shared Slack channels with with people who are like, hey. Here's some investors. What do you think? Get feedback from the founders. We're doing the same thing with investors. So then the investors are sort of signing up and saying, here's a few founders that are raising. We think they'd fit your thesis, and Boardy's just learning. So you're like, actually, that's not a good fit. Or I've talked to this founder more like this, less like this. And over the course of a couple weeks, we really dial it in on both sides, and we just make sure that you're spending time. And it's less about capital allocations. It's more about, like, how are you allocating your time and attention onto the deals that are actually likely to materialize? As an investor, the deals are gonna win. As founder, the found the the investors are actually gonna give you a term sheet

Speaker 7: and fund.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: That makes sense. What what are some other kind of, like like, types of work that you expect Boardy to do in the future?

Speaker 12: Yeah. We're already starting to see a lot in sort of corporate, you know, enterprise sales and biz dev and partnerships. There are there's it starts with the corporate venture capital arms. So we're getting a ton of corporate venture capital funds coming in, and now we're talking to their innovation teams. It's the same thing. It's like, hey. Look. I gotta I gotta stay abreast of what's happening in my industry. Mhmm. And it's almost impossible. Right? Maybe I'll watch TPPN and see who comes on there, but, like, that's almost too late. Right? It's actually, like, I've gotta I've gotta see who's starting a company, you know, who's just being funded, who who is going who do I want to be who who do I wanna be tracking? And so Bordi is starting to help with that and making those introductions. Hiring is another one that I think is interesting, you know, especially when people are passive. They're not actively looking. They don't wanna take a bunch of recruiter calls, but they'll talk to board. Like, I might start a company, but if there's a really great startup out there, I might join the team. And so those kind of conversations are are are quite interesting as well. But it's like, whatever you call your board member, whatever whatever introduction is gonna move the needle for you that is worth the time of the CEO, that's what we wanna work on.

Speaker 2: That makes a lot of sense. I'm

Speaker 1: looking for a board member who can take me on a track day. That's that's my only thing I wanna get out of them. Take me to the track. Put me in a race car. It better not have a passenger seat, and then get out of the way because I'm building on my own. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, that that's

Speaker 1: a good challenge. Development. Maybe once you get into the really high tier of boardy spend, you do a track day.

Speaker 12: Well, you know, so Nico Rosberg is a big boardy user.

Speaker 1: No way.

Speaker 2: There we go.

Speaker 1: Oh, he's been on the show. A big

Speaker 12: big time boardy user. That's awesome. And, and so he he could probably make it happen

Speaker 1: for you. Very cool. I love it.

Speaker 2: I like it. I like it. It's one of those things that in in kind of working on when when you when you describe it of just like a place that a founder can go to just get help with their business. It's not it's surprisingly not something that not some nobody's, you know, made that pitch on on the show to date, which is surprising because that's pretty much, you know, feels like very valuable to a lot of the companies that are are coming on.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Great. Great for you. We'll we'll try out the product and Yeah. Yeah. Need to find, like, a guest.

Speaker 1: We're raising. Yeah. That'd great.

Speaker 2: There you go. Love to

Speaker 12: give give it a shot.

Speaker 1: Awesome. A good one. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Andrew. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. I'm also gonna tell you about AdQuick, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Parag Agarwal from parallel.ai. Welcome to the show, Parag. How you doing? Hey. Hey.

Speaker 4: Hey. Hey. Good to see you next.

Speaker 2: What's so much fanfare in Are you, are you at a newcomer event right now?