14-year-old Australian founder pitches Finkle, a Duolingo for life skills, with 7.8M-view YC application video

one place. We have a special guest. special guest today opening the show with us, Albi from the Land Down Under.

Probably saw him go viral recently, but uh why don't you introduce yourself?

Yeah. Um so I just I actually arrived in LA on Saturday.

Welcome.

Um

yeah, I'm from Sydney or Wllingong, so about an hour and a half from Sydney.

Um and yeah, I've been building something called finle which is basically dualingo for life skills. Um, and I just applied to YC as well with that post on X. Um,

how many views did you get on the application video?

I think it got like 7.8 million. So, yeah.

Hit the Let's hit the gong. Pretty viral for Albi.

Well done. Well done.

So, uh, give me an example of a life skill that you can learn with your app. Yeah, I guess like um entrepreneurship especially um startups and stuff cuz like in Australia, I don't know about in the US, but school is very entry level. It's not hands-on. I feel like it's very um

uh just not preparing us for life. Like you do need it for if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or something, but some kids don't want to do that. Um

and like yes, you do have commerce and computer science and stuff which I am doing as electives. um but they're not hands-on and they're very like outdated and like textbook heavy.

Um so I feel like actually learning uh life skills that can that you can apply now especially like with AI and everything like if you don't know how to use AI now you're sort of going to be left behind. So

very exciting. What are you what are you hoping to get out of your trip? You're on summer holiday right now. Um, well, like my exams just finished before I came, so there's still like two weeks left of school. But

how do you think you did?

I think I got I got like a B in science and like

there you go. There you go.

A B in math.

Focus focus on the game. Focus on the game. There's really room to grow. But

um yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get out of it is just to like meet as many people as possible, make as many connections as possible because this trip probably won't a trip like this probably won't happen again for a while.

Um so yeah, that's sort of my goal.

What's the status of the YC application? You've submitted it.

Uh yeah,

have you heard back yet?

No, it hasn't. It's still like

I'll need to recommendation.

We got a Yeah, we can we got we got a long

If you're a YCL watching this, please go leave a recommendation.

Yeah. Um but uh congratulations. Thanks so much uh for coming by. Uh what what is the stage of development of the actual application? The the product itself. Are you live? Can people go download demo right now? We're getting like beta testers. Um but the beta should um should be launching soon, probably by like the end of this year.

Um

do you have a wait list? Are you doing email capture yet?

Yeah, like weight list beta testers. We've got like a couple hundred, but yeah.

Very cool.

Incredible. Well, congratulations on uh all the attention. I'm sure you'll convert it into a lot of opportunity and uh have a great trip.

Yes. Great to have you.

And good luck with the YC application.

Looking sharp in the suit.

Looking sharp in the suit.

Amazing. Have a good

Thank you.

Thanks for stopping by. Uh before we move on to the rest of the show, let me tell you about Reream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multiream, go to reream.com. And uh it's been three years since chat GPT launched. I wanted to reflect a little bit. Everything changed or maybe nothing changed or maybe some amount of change in between everything and nothing. You're more on the nothing changed camp. I sort of agree with you. I was sort of I was sort of reflecting on like, okay, Thanksgiving's happened. It was Thanksgiving over the weekend. You know, how different is my world? Like there's not a humanoid robot that's cooking for me. And also, even if we had a humanoid robot, I think that would I think Thanksgiving would be the day we let the robot sit in the closet cuz we enjoy No, no, let us cook. We enjoy cooking. Cooking is a fun family experience. And so, of all the things,

let us

Thanksgiving is like the track day of cooking. Like even if you have the robot that does it, you still want to do it on Thanksgiving. You don't want to cook on a random Tuesday when you're busy, you got lunch, you know, all this other stuff. Uh Thanksgiving is the is the Nurburg Ring. And I was doing some dishes after Thanksgiving and I felt like it was a good way to kind of like it felt like walking off the pie in a little way. I wasn't walk wasn't walking very far just kind of back and forth.

And so yeah, so that that that hasn't really changed that much for me. Um I was thinking I was reflecting more on the agentic commerce thing. It feels like chatbt and openai they really are pushing to make revenue from agentic commerce like in this holiday season. uh and uh incredible speed of execution like clearly it's a big opportunity if you can figure out how to you know run ads commerce convert take a cut of that that's big um my experience actually demoing it it was kind of interesting like the actual product in ship is pretty good but you can see that the walled gardens are already going up so uh one place that I like to go to for reviews of products specifically around the holidays is the wire cutter now the wire cutter their whole twist was they wouldn't rate each product, what they would do is they would pick a category and then they would just tell you what their best product was in that category. Sort of like a cluster max of of vacuums. So, they would give you the platinum tier uh vacuum and then a budget pick. And so, I've always liked the Wire Cutter. I think they do a very rigorous job. Uh they were acquired by the New York Times. The New York Times is currently in a lawsuit with OpenAI. And so, if you go to Chad GBT and say, "Hey,

and I think they're about to be in a lawsuit with David Sax,

maybe. maybe which we will talk about on the show in a little bit. Um but if but but but if you go so I went to ChachiP and I was like hey okay pull a deep research report just pull everything from the wire cutter and uh and tell me every category and every product that's top ranked because then I can just scan it really quickly and be like oh yeah I didn't even remember that that category existed. That would be a great gift. I'll get it and I'll go through the I'll go through the wire cutter link. I'm fine with that. I'm paying ChachiBT. I'm happy to go and use their affiliate link on the wire cutter. That's how the wire cutter monetizes. Uh, but it couldn't do it. It couldn't do it. It said, "Hey, we don't we can't touch the wire cutter. Like, it's off limits.

You got to head over there yourself. Get uh pop open a Chrome tab, brother, if you want to get over there." Like, that's on you.

Or or maybe an Atlas tab. I don't know. But, uh, so so so that that had not really changed that much for me. Um, but the one thing that did really change on Thanksgiving was the discourse. Like the AI narrative has fully arrived to just family and friends.

You mean in in the in the home?

Yes. Yes. In people that don't work in technology that don't their job is not

their favorite trough.

Not that more talking about is it a bubble? Where do you think all this stuff goes? Um the stuff that you know we've been talking about.

Sure.

You're not living in a bubble. You think the average family in America is talking?

I saw I saw multiple newsletters where the whole conceit of the newsletter