I think one fun heristic for a demo is current trend has been like go have some hyper hyper optimized video and talk about things that like your customers do not give a uh give a about, right?

For example, we've raised $50 million from XYZ fund and we work with this person and this investor is on our table, right?

Like no customer that's using their product cares at all about them. So who are they talking to? It's performative. It's theater for Twitter.

Your entire demo should be a demo is even a stupid word. Like your introduction to your customers should be talking to your customers.

It should be, hey, here's this product that you've always wanted. Here's exactly how it works and I'll walk you through it.

So our launches are always 2 minutes exactly and they spend the majority of them just walking through the use cases and showing the value to people in a way that is crystal clear.

And it got I think 4 million views on just LinkedIn. It got like 4 million views on Twitter as well.

Uh and then on Reddit, I think we probably hit like 10 million views in like 10,000 plus comments or or more than that even asking for access.

The right response to your demo should be, "Holy crap, these people are going to make so much money."

Hey, I'm Nico. I'm the co-founder of Fundamental. I'm also the creator and CEO of Shortcut.

Fundamentals is a research lab. We spun out of MIT about 18 months ago, where my co-founder was a professor.

And since then, we've been on the pursuit of building digital humans.

And Shortcut's our first winning product, uh, which is the first superhuman Excel spreadsheet agent that can automate most of your work on Excel.

On the surface, it's really, you wouldn't picture like a Miami pro street ball dunker and a MIT professor starting a business together.

I was arguably not just Miami's best dunker. I was arguably one of the very, very best dunkers in the world.

In most ways, it's completely uncorrelated and unrelated to what I'm doing now, except for I know what it looks like and what it's required to be the best in the world at something.

Doing the thing is the best way to get good at the thing. I hit a 47in vertical, but to get from 46 to 47 took like 3 years of dedicating my life.

and you dunk on it a thousand times and then the next day you raise it by one inch and you do it again and again.

You can just get good at things by putting in many many hours and you have no business breaking into some other technology or some other field or whatever until you've put in your hours and gotten good at it.

and thankfully there's unlimited resources the internet and AI for you to get good.

You get exactly what you deserve that if you're not suffering you're not doing things enough.

I believe you need to suffer in order to really do anything significant.

I knew at a young age that I was extremely gifted as in I was always the local best in my city.

And what that caused was a sort a sense of confidence that like I can start to work more and more on this.

And then what that built was a really positive feedback loop that I would get better and better at it because I loved it and then I would love it more.

And then I would start to meet people who were just like me and I would travel.

I ended up writing a book called How I Learned to Jump Higher than LeBron James. Sold like tens of thousands of copies.

I was providing for myself, but I knew that this wouldn't scale and it wouldn't last.

And and frankly, I actually had accomplished all of what I had ever dreamed for in dunking.

And that went till I was about 25. And even at about 22, I knew that I would need a traditional career to support myself in addition to that.

So, when I moved out of dunking, bizarrely, autistically decided I'm going to get good at programming.

I had done a masters in data science. I had used Python and R a bunch.

Um, and I thought, you know what? I'm just going to grind uh le code every single day.

And I did that for hours a day.

Uh when I wanted to get into MIT, it was the first time I had ever taken academic seriously.

And I had realized that getting a perfect score was totally doable. Um it was just a game of gamified system.

Uh and what you should do is take as many tests as possible and iterate.

So I got every practice test that's ever happened and I did one a day. Uh which takes two to three hours.

And then I got the feedback from every single score and I would do it again. And like you can imagine the scores would climb.

The other one that I did which is very bizarre is I accounted for every word that has ever shown up in the vocabulary for the verbal section and I learned every vocab word.

There wasn't one word that I would didn't know.

And this is just like I I think it's a very silly anecdote but of course I got a perfect score on the verbal and I got into MIT with a full ride.

But it was because I just decided that like you could get good at these things.

So we talk about like end to end iteration as a key philosophy of this company but also it's always been one in my life.

So end to end iteration is like you want to score by Friday and you want to hit 80%.

You better have a score by Monday morning of doesn't matter could be 1%.

But from there every time you have an iteration cycle you can improve.

What you don't do is set up the things in you know in the periphery that don't help you get there fastest.

Learning and getting world class at anything is actually a relatively similar thing regardless of the field and it requires quick iteration specificity uh and the belief that like your ceiling is actually higher than other people probably think it is.

So I actually took the first job I can find which was as a finance consultant but I had zero passion or fundamental interest for consulting or finance.

It took until a real authentic interest in technology that I actually bridged that I jumped out of finance consulting.

You know as the first hire I joined and started a a sports tech business that brought those two interests together and it was my doorway into coding entrepreneurship and starting companies.

And what I offered to do was do free work.

So I worked for free from December to August.

I provided instrumental value to the company to the extent where when it was time and we had closed our first fundraising round, it was obvious that I should be joining as a part of the founding team and the first hire.

And um I learned what it meant to build like a product people love and a business and to hire and to scale.

And I knew that I wanted to do it as a co-founder with people who were the best in the biggest and baddest pool which is AI.

So I was actually at MIT. I was working out of Robert's lab.

Uh Robert is one of the premier scientists in the world.

Robert has a paper onactor smelling like can can AI or machines smell? Can they have long-term autonomy? Can they collaborate? Can they have a sense of time?

Like all of these things in neuroscience are not nearly as dirty of words.

Uh and in fact they have been attempted to be modeled for for for very many decades.

So when we talk about building digital humans, we mean going far beyond intelligence. uh as just a key component of who we are, but not not not not really what it means to be a human.

So, we're very very intentional about how we organize our company.

This is like a three-headed beast.

We have research uh which definitionally will have like a bunch of things happening in parallel. Some of which will be fruitful in the short term, long term, some of it might not ever be.

Um and then you have a core product or or core platform.

And this platform is is like the basis for how we do research and for how we build products.

But for us, our core thesis, our core tech platform is building strong agents, specifically multi-agent frameworks.

So you have the research lane, you have this core engineering platform and then from there you also have products and products can be built off of this core platform to give us advantage.

and one of these products is shortcut and when a product succeeds it has to be massively unconstrained in relation to its potential opportunity.

So shortcut is going to automate all spreadsheet labor.

So because we are so intentional with how we orchestrated this company, a breakout success or even a failure don't change anything about our roadmap.

especially because we were always very clear about we were going to start um our research and start our company in games.

We were very very honest about like none of us had games experience.

Um but we knew it was such a great playground for rapid iteration like I talk about like you can fill in low stakes right.

but we didn't know the first thing about building a product that people like or monetizing or working with people and hiring in in games spec specifically.

So working with speedrun was a massive game changer for us.

It also taught us the value of storytelling in in some different ways.

We're used to it in terms of you know the science and accomplish mission but not in terms of like how we build things.

Um and that was that was huge for us.

And then we even created an internal deadline we didn't have to do in which we would present our progress every Tuesday I think it was to the partners at speedrun.

and they were like you don't have to do this. We're like no this is like the right iteration cycle speed for us.

and that was massively beneficial.

I think it's instilled in our culture like a very maniacal sense of speed where we ship every day.

I'm very good at like executing in sprints.

Um, Robert is a very very big picture thinker.

Uh, in fact decided that he was going to build his company more or less when he was 17, 18 years ago.

Like he's okay with being wrong for a long time if he knows he's right.

Uh, and I vowed to find people who felt that way about their work and their mission.

And that's what we have here.

And we always painted the same picture.

You should see the picture on our first like pitch deck when we when we were shutting down the lab.

It was from games to multi- aent to productivity to embodiment being the final stage.

And now with Shortcut, we're at the productivity stage, but we even have, you know, the top rated AI game in Roblox. Um, and a few other experiments over there.

You know, I think this is one of my weaknesses as a person is that I am a man of like a passion and passions.

I love music. I love I love so many things.

So for me, I can't imagine not knowing what you want to do.

Um I maybe at the shallow level I can say getting good at things is a good way to start to love them.

So put in enough time to give yourself a chance to love something is probably the best chance you have.

I I remember learning guitar and thinking this really hurt my fingers and I wasn't sure I liked it.

Um but I remember about a week in I started really loving it.

So yeah, 14 hours a day is like the minimum. It's tablesticks.

I get in every day around like 6:00. I leave at like 7:00.

I want to see my kid before she goes to sleep.

Um, and then I work at night.

It's probably log scale.

Uh, as in, you know, there's a very powerful relationship between the initial time you put into something and there's, you know, a some sort of ceiling in which like the returns diminish.

The thing is is that like as the ceiling happens and as the long tail flattens, that's actually where the majority of the value occurs.

So that like getting from the 95th to 98th percentile in anything is harder than getting from 1% to 95.

Um, but the difference between the 95 and 98 is like it's it's everything.

It's it's how you distinguish yourself amongst others and how you really create value.

So if if as long as you have that framework for that, it actually becomes very tolerable to understand that you might see very menial improvements.

The things you love, you end up getting really good at.

And if you get really good at things, you're able to provide and capture a lot of value on those things.

Um, I know a lot of people who make a lot of money in professional dunking, for example, and they it hasn't poisoned their passion.

I think if you really love it enough, it's not a concern.

But you should find the parts that that tank the well and abstract those away from you as much as possible, even if it hurts your business. I think