After a career at DARPA, defending America from cyber threats, Jason Syversen founded Siege Technologies which had a great exit. He now focuses on angel investing and philanthropy. Inspiring chat.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Jason Syversen
What Problem Siege Technologies is Solving
"... How do you measure and predict probability of success and collateral damage for a cyberattack? That is actually the technology we end up being acquired for when we sold..."
"... I took over 10X Venture Partners, which is an angel group..."
SportsVisio and What it is Solving
"... That was a really interesting example of you think that this is all figured out even in pro leagues, and yet it really isn't..."
Jason's Background
"... if you had a choice between being born in a family with trust funds where your parents really don't care about you or being born in a hardscrabble family where the parents do care about you, choose the latter..."
"... Human infants need nurturing and then beyond that, and when we're grown, we need a society around us that supports us ... This lack of connection is the biggest problem in America today..."
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Cyberwarrior”
Guest: Jason Syversen
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that The Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups, which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
[music]
Sal Daher Introduces Jason Syversen
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today we are privileged to have with us Jason Syversen, who is founder and now a venture capitalist. Say hi to our audience, Jason.
Jason Syversen: Thanks for having me on, Sal.
Sal Daher: Great, Jason. Jason founded Siege Technologies LLC in the cybersecurity space. I'll let Jason tell the story, what problem that was addressing, and how they did it.
What Problem Siege Technologies is Solving
Jason Syversen: Yes, great. I was a program manager at the time and left in 2009 and had seen, while I was working in industry before DARPA and at DARPA, you'd see these super innovative, disruptive companies coming along, building offensive, defensive, cool technology that they would sell to the defense department and commercial companies and very quickly they would end up getting snapped up by all these big companies.
They'd stick around for their golden handcuffs for a couple of years, and then the big companies would be miserable to work for and drive those companies usually into the ground. Then all those people would leave and then go off and start another company. I learned that was the industry norm. It's like a tree falling in the forest and the saplings grow up and then create these great trees and they fall over, and then they rot, and they start to fertilize the soil, and repeats all over again. I got to know some of these founders and I was like, there's not anything magic to doing that, that can't be recreated.
You have to have six, seven, eight core ingredients. You have to have a vision for what you're trying to build, a personality and motivation to attract people, a willingness to take on risk, a clear expertise, and a problem that you're trying to solve or a specialty you're trying to develop, a network where you can find customers and attract a team, enough capital to get started. It'd be tackling the right problem in a market where there's need that you're trying to address. I looked at that field and I said, "I think I have all that stuff."
I had always wanted to start a company since my college days. I thought coming out of DARPA was probably the best time to do so, so I jumped out, got a couple of early contracts with Northrop Grumman and Lincoln Laboratories, and another commercial company, and started hiring some people. By 2010, we did a million in revenue and we just kept growing from there.
Sal Daher: Wow, that's pretty fast.
"... How do you measure and predict probability of success and collateral damage for a cyber attack? That is actually the technology we end up being acquired for when we sold..."
Jason Syversen: Our specialty was offensive and defensive low-level technology R&D. We built our own Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor, which a lot of people don't know what that is. A hypervisor, if you've ever heard of VMware, VMware is a hypervisor. Basically, it's a monolithic hypervisor. Hypervisor's Intel has these VT-x and VT-d instructions that allow it in hardware to create a virtualization layer so you can run multiple operating systems on top. To do that, if you want to run Windows and Linux, you have a shim that sits underneath that can swap between them.
What we did, was built our own hypervisor for security so because you're sitting there, you're now below the operating system. For defense, even if your operating system gets compromised by an attacker, you can run your code in the hypervisor, you can then be protected from even an advanced rootkit that takes over the operating system. Of course, your offensive applications, it's super nice because they could have the best scanner in the world, but you're sitting below the operating system so they can't see the hypervisor memory or operations because you're running underneath. It was a really powerful tool that we were able to use for a bunch of applications.
We also did a lot of work in quantification of cyber. How do you measure and predict probability of success and collateral damage for a cyber attack? That is actually the technology we end up being acquired for when we sold.
Sal Daher: Who was the acquiring entity?
Jason Syversen: The company was called Nehemiah Security. They were backed by a private equity large office and had bought a couple of other companies and acquired us to take that quantification technology to market. We had spun some tech to a venture-backed firm in Boston that raised 18 million in venture capital before failing, eventually, going after the endpoint market. I had a couple more technologies I wanted to bring to market and ended up, instead of starting new companies, ended up selling, which was a great transaction for us.
Sal Daher: Outstanding. Would you state again what was the competitive edge that you had in the market, which quick adoption because growing to a million dollars in revenue in a highly competitive space within a year? What is it that you were doing right that your competition wasn't quite getting?
Jason Syversen: That's a good question. We were like an R&D company, so for us, it was not a single disruptive technology product that we had, but it was really, I guess, my ability to convince some really smart people to join the company--
Sal Daher: Okay, so it was a talent play.
Jason Syversen: Yes, exactly. We had some incredibly smart, talented people. I had a good reputation coming out of DARPA. I had memorandums of agreement that I'd signed with the Air Force, Army, Navy, CIA, NSA, and another DOD element. I was known in those communities as a smart guy who cared about the mission and had a good network. When I left, I was able to attract a pretty high-end team of hacker types and research folks that were many times much deeper than me in different areas. That reputation and that team is what got people excited because there was just such a dearth of talent. When you concentrate a small team of super high-end folks, people--
There's work to be done. There's more work than there were good people, so it wasn't that hard once I got out there and started talking to folks to get onto different teams and to start getting a reputation. For the first five years it was mostly us going after projects, but where it got really fun is we could then start to sit at home and people were just calling us and coming to us and saying, "Oh, we've heard about you guys. Can you come and help us on this?"
Sal Daher: You built a reputation and then the world beats a path to your door, the old adage
Jason Syversen: That's right.
Sal Daher: This reminds me of my old boss. My boss, when I was working at Bank of Boston decades ago, was a woman named Wendy Abt, and her husband is Clark Abt who's the founder of Abt Associates. They do a lot of government consulting and so forth. I've spoken to Clark maybe two or three times in my whole life, but every single time that I spoke with Clark Abt, he was asking me, "Do you know anybody who knows something about X," or, "Do you know something--" [laughs] because always going on in his head, "How do I find a person to address this problem that I'm working on right now?" His thing was always, "Do you know somebody who knows something about this," or about that, and so forth. When you mentioned that, it reminded me of Clark Abt. It's very interesting.
Let's talk about the startup that you're involved with now. Is there something in between that you want to mention?
Jason Syversen: Sure. There was a period in between where I did a few things. I sold in 2016. My wife and I had an eight-digit exit. Through that transaction, we took enough to live on. We're both Christians really felt strongly about using that money to try to make a difference. We took enough to live on at our current salary basically and donated the rest to a charitable foundation. Then we used the assets of that charity. We give away a percent per year, and then at the same time, I'm investing the money in the charity into different tech startups, and my hope is that we can grow the money faster than we give it away, so we can continue to increase what we're giving over time.
Sal Daher: The statutory minimum of 5% that a foundation has to give away.
Jason Syversen: Yes, exactly.
Sal Daher: If you can beat that--
"... I took over 10X Venture Partners, which is an angel group..."
Jason Syversen: Exactly. If we can make 10% and inflation's 3% or 4%, then you can actually grow how much you can give over time. I took over 10X Venture Partners, which is an angel group. We started a small venture fund, that I'm the GP for and then the charity is an LP and the fund among with other high net worth folks. I started doing the full-time investing thing. I did a quick detour running for Senate actually in 2020 here in Hampshire.
Sal Daher: Oh, my goodness.
Jason Syversen: A crazy side path. I lost, which I was very content with. As a hacker engineer type, politics was not my first, second, or third choice but it just dawned on me. Some people were asking me to run, and I realized, or most people understand, the principle that if you don't vote, you can't really complain about who we get in office. That logic extends to running, right?
Sal Daher: That's true. If you don't run, that's right.
Jason Syversen: If the people don't run, then why do we complain that we have crappy candidates? In my district, there was no one running against the incumbent, who at the same time, he was serving in office, had a job working for a special interest group that was paying him $140,000 a year salary and then sending employees to go campaign for him, and he was putting out press releases bragging about the benefits he was accruing to the special interest.
Sal Daher: It's just pitiful.
Jason Syversen: It was crazy. It made me feel like we're a third-world country. It's like, "How is this happening in America?" To his credit, he does disclose it on his conflict of interest forms that he files with the state, but no one knows about it. Every single person I talked to on the campaign trail had no idea what I was talking about because nobody reads those files.
Sal Daher: A secret in plain sight.
Jason Syversen: Exactly.
Sal Daher: A hidden plain sight. It reminds me of the idea, most people don't understand when people say this is a tribal society. I did a lot of work in Nigeria when I was in emerging markets. Nigeria is a phenomenal-- Let me tell you, Nigeria is one of the great countries in the future, but one of the problems Nigeria has is very much like the problems that Romans had. That is how do you create a polity that exceeds the obligations that people have to their tribes? The tribalism means that if someone who's a relative of yours comes up before you in a court, you have to treat that person differently from someone who's not of your tribe because otherwise, you're not a good member of your tribe. It's not corruption. It's just like you are denying your identity.
People in the West think, "Oh, well, corrupt." There is a lot of corruption in Nigeria, but a lot of what passes in Nigeria for corruption is just tribalism. It's a different conception of society, the Romans, before they could become a republic. The term itself, tribe, comes from tribus. The three groups that existed in Rome, the three tribes of Rome, that came together and said, "No, we're going to set aside our tribal affiliations and create a polity, a system of government, where everybody's equal before the law. We all agree to live under the same law so that we can become stronger and not be swallowed up of the other tribes around us."
I come from Brazil. It's a wonderful country, a lot of talented people, but the institutions do not work, as well as they should. This is why Brazilians come here in droves. They're people with tremendous energy. Brazil loses a lot of really capable people because it's a place-- Mexico and lots of other places in the world, everybody wants to come to America because America is a place where the institutions work. They function correctly. If we start getting these things crumbling around the edges, the place in the world where things work will cease to work. There are places where things work in a small scale. I've lived in Singapore. Things do work there. It's a very peculiar place. It's very tiny.
Sorry to get off on this tangent about institutions, but it really is important. As an immigrant, it's one of the things that I most appreciate, is this ideal of having institutions being impartial, and you get an even break. If you go to the police or if you go to court, you're going to be treated just like everybody else.
Anyway, Jason, you're ahead of this career, mini-political career, which, thankfully-- Was it William F. Buckley who said they're trying to promote him for some, I don't know, mayor of New York, I think it was, "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve"? It wasn't quite that but you were relieved.
Jason Syversen: Yes, I was relieved. I didn't win, and then I'd gotten the point where 10% of my personal and charity portfolio were in early stage investments. I think I've done at this stage, 35 tech investments now. I'd gotten in a point where my friend, who was a finance guy, was like, "From a portfolio theory perspective, you should probably slow down investing."
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Jason Syversen: Well, I love investing. I have great idea flow. I have these companies coming in. I was like, "Well, I don't know what to do with that." I'm in my mid-40s, what am I doing the rest of my life? Am I sitting on a couch all day, am I just playing with my kids, am I volunteering all day, am I getting a job and donating my salary? I looked at raising a venture fund but having bootstrapped one company and grown up in poverty, I don't exactly have a huge Rolodex of rich people I can call Uncle Ralph who's going to drop me a million dollars and things like that to raise a fund, so what am I doing?
Around that time I had an idea for a new tech company, and decided to do that and do that in a second vertical, not in cybersecurity, via a SaaS traditional software company. Build that up, raise venture capital, and God willing if that does well, we can take the resources from whatever I make there, put that back in the foundation, and then either do a larger family office and keep investing in perpetuity and/or possibly raise a fund at that point after having another exit, and hopefully, making a bunch of money for investors.
Sal Daher: Which company is that?
Jason Syversen: A new company, it's called SportsVisio.
SportsVisio and What it is Solving
Sal Daher: Oh, okay. What's the problem that SportsVisio is solving?
Jason Syversen: The problem is the difficulty of getting stats and video highlights for sports. Currently, the way that's done today is you pay someone or a company anywhere from $25 to $80 a game to manually create stats and video highlights, in addition to, maybe, end-of-the-year highlight clips that you might pay someone to pull together or you can spend many, many hours doing it yourself or trying to recruit volunteers do a poor job.
I had the insight that I-- I have a Tesla, so I have a self-driving car, and I saw an ad on Instagram for a person tracking camera that would pan and follow an individual. I was like, "What if we took that technology, expanded that, and actually added in robust AI to track all the players and identify numbers of jerseys and create stats?" It's not that hard. We have surveillance systems that the military has developed that I saw at DARPA. We're doing things from satellites where we can identify people and use gait detection, see how they're walking. Here we are--
Sal Daher: Scary. Very scary.
Jason Syversen: White-colored jerseys with numbers on them throwing a big orange ball through a big hoop. This isn't rocket science, right? It's not trivial. It's been very challenging, technically, but it's still not trying to put someone on the moon. This is something that's doable, and there's a real opportunity. People are paying for this. One of the companies that we're taking on, it's called Hudl. They have 2,500 employees, are backed by Bain Capital or Vista Equity Partners. I always forget. They have thousands of employees in Nepal, and places like that, that are manually typing into an app and sending it back to them the next day.
Synergy Sports got bought by Genius Sports, they do the same thing. They charge $80 a game to colleges. Hudl is about $50 a game for high schools. You have people on the sideline with an app and they just do what they can and have a high error rate and don't do video highlights for analytics, and they might get $25 a game. We're coming in and doing it for about $20 to $25 a game using AI and computer vision, and I've gotten a ton of traction.
Sal Daher: This is interesting. These are professional sports teams?
Jason Syversen: No. Actually, the pros, NBA uses a company called Second Spectrum. They've got like 20 to 25-person AI team. They also have six fixed-mounted cameras in known locations in NBA arenas. A company called Sportsview builds these cameras. They have broadcast feeds of cameras everywhere high-def, gorgeous feeds. They also can throw humans at it because these are multi-hundred thousand, multimillion-dollar deals.
Sal Daher: Oh, yes.
"... That was a really interesting example of you think that this is all figured out even in pro leagues, and yet it really isn't..."
Jason Syversen: They're really targeting everybody else outside of NBA, maybe the top 50 D1 programs, but the smaller D1 programs, D2 programs, or D3 programs, high schools, men's leagues, AAU travel teams, semi-pro teams, clubs overseas, people that want access to the technology, but aren't satisfied with their current solution because of quality and price and things like that.
I actually had a cool story of a pro player overseas, who was saying that he would pay $500 personally out of pocket just for the technology because when he was coming out of Egypt, he was trying to get a job playing in the pro league in Greece, and he said, half his games in Egypt weren't even on the internet. He's like, "That's my resume and half my resume is missing." He's like, "And then I'm talking to guys in Greece, and they're like, 'Well, how do we know you didn't slip a $20 bill to the scoring table and tell the guy you drop 40 points.'" He's like, "I would pay for this, have my wife set it up."
Having a US technology company that independently shows and having video evidence of all those plays that I could then show our perspective league is incredibly valuable to him. That was a really interesting example of you think that this is all figured out even in pro leagues, and yet it really isn't.
Sal Daher: This is interesting. Have you run across a company called Realplay?
Jason Syversen: I have, yes. Justin Real is a great guy.
Sal Daher: Yes, yes. I'm an investor in Realplay.
Jason Syversen: Oh, cool. I didn't know that.
Sal Daher: This is from when I was still investing outside of biotech. I'm just curious if you've connected with him.
Jason Syversen: I have, yes. I would say we're friends. I really like Justin a ton. He's a great guy.
Sal Daher: Oh, he's a great guy, yes, a lot of energy.
Jason Syversen: He tried to get me to do baseball as our next sport.
Sal Daher: [laughs] As your next vertical or your next -
Jason Syversen: Exactly. We're trying to nail basketball before we expand, but baseball is definitely of interest. I would love to work with him and his team. I think they've got a great product in the niche they're focusing on.
Sal Daher: He has a lot of energy. He's done tons and tons with just bootstrapping it and surviving COVID. Oh, my gosh. Being in the business of these baseball camps, and all that stuff, that we're closing down and figuring out states where they're still open, what an adventure. Great. Basically, what you're focusing on is creating software that can provide images from games, and also score, presumably from the-- Where are you getting your feed for the scores? Are you using machine vision to score games or --?
Jason Syversen: We have a couple of apps. We have an app on Android and iPhone to record the game and then stream that to the cloud. We can also take, if they have a third-party camera system or someone recording the game, we can take that feed, ingest that in our cloud system on AWS, our AI runs, and then we put that data in a database and you get a different app on your phone, again, Android and iPhone, so you can see all the stats in your hand. Yes, we've got about a 25-person team. We were in beta testing in November. We launched the paid product last month and we're taking off. We're doing thousands of games now and continue to grow. That's been super exciting to get the early positive feedback.
Sal Daher: Very interesting. The company is called SportsVisio and you've been working on that since February of '21. Jason, I thought that perhaps given that you have to be somewhere pretty soon, that we would just do a very brief -- unless you have anything else that you want to say about the companies that you started and your fund, I thought it would be-- I'll do a quick promo for the program, for the podcast and then we go back, the second part of the podcast, and we get into your life story. Is there anything else that you want to say at this point about the companies you started and your fund?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, not really. I think just that we're, I mentioned, the companies my charitable goals. We have a couple of folks on the founding team. We have four other senior folks that co-founded it. Another DARPA guy is our CTO and co-founder of my last company is our COO. Both of them are pledging to give to charity above and beyond what they need to retire on. The company's also donating 1% of profits to charity. Yes, we're super excited about this idea of using a company for more than just making money and building a nice product, but also using the resources that come in to try to help make a difference. Love to talk to folks that are interested in basketball or just that technology journey in New England.
Sal Daher: I think what you're doing is really tremendous because you are doing that as an owner. As an owner you are taking your ownership stake and turning that, because you have the right to do that, into some kind of a charitable thing that you watch and it's extremely laudable. I'm very leery of corporations using investor capital to engage in their own conception of doing social good because there's too much of an agency problem there.
As a shareholder, I'm interested in that company making money. Let me decide personally where I want to put, what charities I want to support. I don't want a corporate board making decisions about the charities that I put money into. I very much like your approach which is just choose your own charitable activity. I recommend this technology. [laughs] It's a little quieter unless you use a pencil that you can pencil scratch you can hear. Okay, let's just do a brief promo.
Anyone who is enjoying this conversation, that's really inspiring interesting conversation with Jason Syversen, should, if you're not already following us on the app that you listened to, somehow you found us on the internet, click on the app and follow us. It's free. It means that really interesting conversations like this will show up every week on your feed because we launch every week. Another thing you can do to promote this type of conversation and this type of discovery about startups is you can leave a rating in the app that you use for listening, and you can also do a written review.
Funny thing Jason is in the software business. Algorithms control our lives. These apps have algorithms that look and say, "Oh, somebody took the trouble to write a review," and that has a lot more value than just the rating. If you can leave a brief review, a few sentences is just enough. Thank you very much for doing that.
Jason, let's turn to your life story. I understand that you inherited a very significant fortune from your uncle and that you tended secret societies at-- Oh, sorry. [laughs]
Jason Syversen: Different life story.
Jason's Background
Sal Daher: Different life story. [laughs] Where'd you grow up?
Jason Syversen: I was born in New Jersey. My parent, my dad worked for some of the pharmaceutical companies as an engineer. In a nice neighborhood, some guy in a pickup truck was circling our neighborhood which was a dead-end area, and as a kid I wanted to be detective, so I thought it was very strange. The third time I saw him go by, I tried to memorize the license plate. When I came home my mom told me that one of the girls a couple of houses up from us, some guys in a pickup truck had tried to abduct her and were looking for her. As a child, I thought it was very exciting because I got to go to the police station and meet all the detectives and tell them what I'd learned. My parents were not as enthusiastic over the experience and caused some consternation for them.
Then later that year, they rolled out a program to voluntarily fingerprint children so they could identify bodies and missing kids. My parents were like, "You know what? This is not where we want to raise our family." They had both vacationed in rural Maine when they were younger so they decided to pack us up, move up to Maine. My dad started working for the paper mills. Then when the paper mills shut down when, I think, I was 10, we went from middle class. We bought a house up in the middle of nowhere near the ocean, lost that to the bank. Then we had a period of homelessness, we were on food stamps, and the Qantas Club bringing us used Tonka trucks in a Ziploc bag.
I remember cutting frozen blocks of wood in the middle of winter so we would've heat. Might be out there with my brother trying to hold it all. My dad's splitting it or laying in the ground of our gravel driveway trying to fix our 1967 Chevelle so we could go somewhere. We lived in a house that had barn animals and all kinds of crazy stuff and it was condemned after we moved out. It was very challenging, but as a kid, you don't realize how poor you are. That part of Maine was very poor in general. Everybody drives a rusted-out truck and people live in trailer homes. When I got married, I remember my wife yelling at me, she's like, "Why do your socks have holes in them?"I'm like, "Because I wear them."
Sal Daher: [laughs]
"... if you had a choice between being born in a family with trust funds where your parents really don't care about you or being born in a hardscrabble family where the parents do care about you, choose the latter..."
Jason Syversen: Sometimes they have multiple holes in them and she shows me. I'm like, "Yes, well, they're tube socks. You just keep rotating them. That's what you do with socks." It didn't occur to me that that was not standard procedure with socks. She softened and she takes them out of my hands. She's like, "We're going to throw those away and buy you new socks. You're an engineer now."
I got a free ride for computer engineering at University of Maine. I was an Eagle Scout, did well in my SATs, had loving parents. Even if we were very close, well, below the poverty line, I'm very grateful for that opportunity to have a stable home and have academic opportunity that then got me into college for free because I wouldn't have been able to afford to go otherwise.
Sal Daher: Well, actually there is real data to show that if you had a choice between being born in a family with trust funds where your parents really don't care about you or being born in a hardscrabble family where the parents do care about you, choose the latter.
Jason Syversen: For sure.
Sal Daher: Call me stupid and go for the trust fund because that is empty. You will be miserable. You'll really be miserable. This is based on the, originally called, the Harvard men's study, where they've been keeping track of Harvard grads since the 1930s.
Jason Syversen: I believe it.
Sal Daher: There's very strong data that shows this alcoholism, all these things having connection with not having a loving home as you're growing up. I was listening to the discussion the other day. One of the reasons that the population is declining in developed countries is not that it's expensive to have children. It's that people's expectations what children need have gotten way ahead of their income because people are earning more than ever. I remember when I came to America in '66, people were really poor, and yet they managed to have a lot of kids. The point is not things. It's your attention, your time, your affection, your dedication, example. That's what's really valuable.
You can do really well in the world with socks that have more than one hole in them if your parents have your back. That is a wonderful story. I have seen that in action, in the life of both my parents. They both grew up in very difficult circumstances, but they overcame that and gave me a tremendously privileged childhood because of their heroism.
Jason Syversen: I think the only challenge, I've heard stories about people in the Great Depression who were saving bottle caps because maybe you'll melt it down for metal and-
Sal Daher: Who knows?
Jason Syversen: -that sort of thing. Definitely, it took me many years to not save everything I have. I'm always like, "Well, maybe we're going to need this someday." My wife wanted to throw out and I'm trying to store and hoard because "Well, maybe that's going to be important someday," and spending five hours to research some $50 thing I'm buying online. I'm like, "Well, maybe I saved $2," but was it really worth three hours of my time surfing the internet for that? At some point, you have to think about time value of money, and be more judicious with your time, but when you're poor, time is like an infinite object. What matters is the absolute cost of what you're paying for things.
Sal Daher: Well, you think it is. You think it is-
Jason Syversen: You think it is. That's right.
"... Human infants need nurturing and then beyond that, and when we're grown, we need a society around us that supports us ... This lack of connection is the biggest problem in America today..."
Sal Daher: -but the reality is even the poor their time is worth something particularly given that in a country like the United States where there's so many opportunities. Their time might be applied to doing something that can really change the circumstance if properly applied. The reality is that human beings cannot stand on their own. We're not, what is it like, a horse after birth we just stand up and walk within minutes.
Human infants need nurturing and then beyond that, and when we're grown, we need a society around us that supports us. If we don't have interaction with other humans, we lose the power of speech. This lack of connection is the biggest problem in America today. It's not anything else. It's just a lack of connection. All the other problems, I think, are tied to this microscopic problem of people not having enough strong connections in their lives because if they have that, they will figure out the problems.
Jason Syversen: That actually drove two of my portfolio companies. One is a company called Nearpeer, and it's a platform for incoming college students whether they're freshmen or transfers to connect to other students to make friends basically. It's almost like a dating platform that you list things you like to do. You like board games, you like ultimate Frisbee, you like hiking, and then other people post that, and you can connect to each other and meet up and join groups and become friends.
The way their business model works is the university pays them for their software because data shows that if people have friends that are connected to other students, they're far more likely to actually follow through with attending the university and stick around because they actually feel connected and they're not so lonely. It's a good business. They get paid to build this great technology, the students are happier, university improves retention.
Another company's called Cobu and he builds a networking platform for apartment buildings. You can find a babysitter or you can organize a poker game, you can figure out-- It's more than just like a chat board, but also more of this like social platform to help connect to people in your community because, again, data shows if you have friends in the building and you actually feel a sense of social connectivity with the people around you, you're far less likely to transfer. You're far more likely to give good reviews to the apartment building because you have that sense of connectedness.
Sal Daher: Lowers turnover. I'm a landlord, and as a landlord, you don't have tenants coming in and out because it costs money and then the risk of getting bad tenants, and all this stuff. I'm an investor in Cobu. This is from when I still invested outside of life sciences. How did you connect with Ben?
Jason Syversen: I was advising, talking to a bunch of the companies in the Techstars Boston cohort. His class was one that I really enjoyed. I think I invested in three companies out of that cohort. Metrobi, which builds last mile of service delivery platform. I didn't do it at the time, but a year later I also did Piction Health, which was used to be LuminDx. They're awesome and I love what they're building. Yes, been really good. All three companies are doing well.
Sal Daher: Ben, he's been on the podcast and he's told the story of how he came up with the idea of starting Cobu. His mother is a super social-- To be a real estate broker in suburban New York, a successful real estate broker, you got to be a tremendously social person, right?
Jason Syversen: Right.
Sal Daher: She became isolated living in her magnificent co-op apartment in New York City because it's just a bad design of the building and mismatch of the type of population that they had there, people working all day and she was retired and she was becoming isolated. He said, "Geez, something's got to be done about this." It's just a great story. I think that the work of helping human beings find connection, we're just beginning to scratch the surface on that. That is tremendous.
Jason, we've touched on your really compelling story, touched on some really interesting startups that are consonant with the themes that you've seen, as we think about wrapping up this podcast so that you can carry on your schedule, is there anything that you want to share with our audience of founders, of angel investors, and of people who are thinking of starting companies?
Advice to the Audience
Jason Syversen: In general, I would say if you're interested in the entrepreneurship journey, you should definitely think heavily about the plunge. I think it's a great opportunity. It's not a great fit for everyone, but it is a great opportunity for most, even if you don't become an entrepreneur, that entrepreneurial mindset of owning your career trajectory and not assuming that your boss or your boss's boss is going to take care of you in a big company. I worked for Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems and these Fortune 500 big companies, and they're good people who work there, but they do not spend tons of time and energy caring about the individual at the bottom of the ladder, right?
Sal Daher: That's right.
Jason Syversen: You're a number. I remember when I was at BAE, I was N31531.
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Jason Syversen: Not a super warming personal thing, well, that's your identity.
Sal Daher: The system is not designed for building human connection. It happens by accident or despite the system, it's designed for other reasons. If you can create your own environment, your own culture, the chances are that you will learn something, and then even if you go back to the corporate world you might deal with the corporate world on your own terms.
Jason Syversen: Yes. Having a great boss, there are good people in those systems who will try to help you but-- When I was there, I was a literal and figurative hacker of the system, and I was hacking the company network and reporting it to the IT guys and telling them things I was finding and they're like, "No, no, you can't take over the network. I'm like, "Yes, no, I definitely can. Here's how I would do it" and they're like, "Prove it." I was like, "Great. I was hoping you'd give me that in writing from your boss, and I'll do that."
I took over a 4,000 or 5,000-person network, but at the same time, that mentality of fighting against the system, thinking outside the box, being creative, building something of value, and building a group inside of that, you can take that same mentality inside a company and owning your own career and your own goals and your own objectives, what you're trying to do, and assembling a team of people you want to work with. You can do that inside a company. It's very hard. It's much easier to do outside, but either way, you need to own your own career journey.
As you think about taking a plunge, there are a lot of resources out there from the SBDC. In New Hampshire, we have the New Hampshire Tech Alliance and there's some great people there who can connect you to others. It's a mentor program that I'm part of, to try to help mentor small businesses.
There's groups like 10X Venture Partners and York IE, and eCoast Angels that are angel groups and VC groups in New Hampshire, but also, the greater Boston area, there's tons of groups that will fund great ideas and teams. I think it's important for people to just take that ownership and not be afraid. Make good decisions. If you don't have the risk tolerance, you shouldn't do things that are cause you undue stress.
Sal Daher: Yes, that's right.
Jason Syversen: Also, be confident, particularly to some of the women potential founders. I talked to so many amazing women who are so talented and they just lack confidence. Like, "Oh, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I'm the right--" Usually, I don't want people to be foolish and do things they can't do, but in general, many of the women I meet are so overqualified. I'm like, "You do this."
Sal Daher: [laughs] Usually, the person who's saying, "I don't know if I'm--" They're probably very high in conscientiousness and they don't want to do anything less than a perfect job.
Jason Syversen: Yes, exactly.
Sal Daher: Highly competent, but they're just underestimating their potential.
Jason Syversen: Yes, I see it at coaching basketball. It's the biggest thing I see between, as a difference. Again, every individual's unique. It's not all men or all women but coaching a boys' team I have to tell the kids to stop shooting. They're jacking the ball from half-court. Tossing threes and air ball, they're like, "Give me the ball, Coach, I got it." Then on the girls' teams, they're all passing someone else because they're so worried about making a mistake and they don't want to fail. I'm telling them like, "Shoot it. Be confident. Believe in yourself. You can do this." The boys' team. I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, Tiger. Slow down. Pass it to your teammate. A little less confidence, a little more caution might be a good idea."
Sal Daher: Think of it, probably, adolescent boys full of testosterone.
Jason Syversen: That's right.
Sal Daher: They do an absurd thing. What is it? Steven Pinker called unreasonable risks for dubious rewards, something like that. That's the phrase that he used in his book.
Jason, that's a really excellent way to wrap things up. I don't want to take any more of your time because you have a very busy day here. I thank you for making time to be on The Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Jason Syversen: Yes, thanks for having me, Sal. I really enjoyed it. I look forward to talking again sometime soon.
Sal Daher: This has been a tremendous conversation with Jason Syversen, founder and venture capital and philanthropist and a person with a really compelling life story that I think everyone should find out about. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.