YouSaid · the spoken record

Francisco Cornejo

lines on the record: 38
first: 2025-11-24
most recent: 2025-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It will happen at some point. You'll have some bad actor fake that they're using it for insurance and then they'll do something gnarly or whatever. So you just got to be vigilant. All platforms get abused. It's really just. The percentage of abuse in a system is and how you react to it. So awesome. Well done. Continued success, Jade and I will see you on December 5th in the Bay Area. We'll get some dip”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting, Alex. Like you hear founders now talking about building software. And it's like, yeah, we'll just add a CRM to it. It's like CRM used to be like, okay, that's like a two or three year project to build a CRM company. Now it's like, yeah, we could just build a CRM. It'll take us like two months to just add it. The pace Jake of development has”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“VAs being virtual assistants like Athena. They use virtual assistants to do their scheduling, to get people on the phone, et cetera. So you're saying, hey, we might be able to do that a gentle as well.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. Really, your pitch is amazing. You know, the feedback you'll get from some venture capitalists is, oh, it's a small, you know, vertical idea. It's never going to get to a billion in revenue. You know, when we look at that, we always look at founders and they kind of start putting the wedge in, things crack open, and they find more opportunities. What do you think if you nail this use case and you get to tens of millions in revenue, which seems completely probable given your progress that you could get to 10 million in revenue. If you get there, what do you think the sort of next markets, feature sets, where does this all wind up? What can we see happening if you get to 100 million, 200 million in revenue? What would cause that to happen?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask them what their needs are step two, book an appointment or step three, send them pricing, whatever it is, the person on the other side doing solar needs to know is this a single family home? Do you own the home? You know, have you Gotten a quote for solar before do you have batteries, whatever it is, who's your energy provider? There's a bunch of steps that go into this. And then a key piece of this is you have an AI builder that helps people build those scripts. Yeah.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your screen and we'll have you pitch, and then I'll give you a little feedback here on your gamma. Three. Pitch Salespeople SMEs That deals deals faster. More Dealing with texting rules and selling. Current SMS platform is stuck in compliance review. Stalling his out Isn't just Mike's problem Make businesses register something called A Sending texts. Approvals can take weeks, so Mike loses momentum.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“C Nice to see you. How's everything going in the accelerator? You were in the Current class or the last class? You're in the current.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well done, very excited about what you're building. It's one of these things. We all need help with. And if we can build a standard here and you can help the industry build a standard and just make it super easy for all of us to just pay for it, I think it's going to be really interesting. So I'm very excited to use the platform.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is like, oh, it costs nothing. And then for the VC side, you know, yeah, you probably should just do firm-based pricing. If you have whatever your last fund is, if your fund is 10 million to 50 million, it's a thousand a year. If it's 50 to 250, it's $5,000 a year. And if you have over a billion in management, it's $50,000 a year. And boom, you're just done. So anyway, lots of interesting things you can do with pricing, Colin. Appreciate you coming on the show. Continued success. And how can people learn more if they're a startup or an investor and they want to meet with you or hear more about the product? Yeah.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was an investor in your company, I would tell you to double it. For series A or below 500 a year. I would just say it's 500 a year. You can have two or three members of your team on it. Just make it easy people. Squeezy for them. I think Carda and Cake and a bunch of the cap tables, they just say, hey, if your company's under 10. Million raised under, I think that's actually a way to do it. Like if you have a startup program, if you just have a startup program and you say, if you're under 10 million raised, under 100 employees, under 10 million. Revenue, any of those 500 bucks a year.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if people don't use a platform like this, that would be a bit of a tell, right? So, what does it cost? Just brass tax if I'm a founder and I want to use it, I'm a seed stage founder, I haven't done my series A, I'm coming out of Y Combin it or launch accelerate how much you charge of me, how do you charge me?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, really? That's a fascinating place to come from. They've had some very, yeah, robust, vibrant investments at robust valuations.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make an informed decision. And depending on the stage, this stuff becomes more important. Yeah. So which stage are you targeting for your ideal customer profile for your initial market as a startup?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that saves you from this potential screenshot editing that people have done in the past where they put a different number in the bank account. And it might also protect the founder from having to give complete access to their bank account. What we did when we started doing this is we do diligence training with founders in our accelerator. We'll just have them pull up on the Zoom and say, okay, yeah, go to your bank, log in, and we watch them on Zoom, log in. And we see the URL. So for them to fake that would take, you know, a lot of the atrix. Is it possible? Of course, they could make a movie that played exactly what we asked them to do and opening up their bank account, but that would be pretty far out there. And again, you know, when you're doing diligence, you're just trying to do the best you can to reduce the chance of outright fraud and the best you can, I think, to understand as much as possible.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Am I correct that the platform will authenticate with the bank? And so when the bank statements are in there, you've had them authenticate or if they had using fresh books or whatever QuickBooks, you're authenticating in your due diligence platform with the founder. So if I look at it as an investor, you've said, hey, this came from QuickBooks. This came from the bank statement. Yeah.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a presentation deck or in a statement or a sales report, it might show that that money is coming in or it might give the appearance that that money has already arrived. And in my book, Angel, I literally gave an example of somebody told me that they had Google and Facebook as a customer. We were made a commitment. We went into diligence. We asked to see the contracts. He said it was a verbal. And I said, okay, well, who did you make the verbal with? And he said, well, I don't remember the guy's name. It was actually at your conference. He verbally committed. And I said, you don't understand what the term securities fraud is? You told me you had these two people as customers. That's like a really perfect term for they pay you for a service and you don't even know the name of somebody who was a sales lead.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Examples of this, in my experience, might be somebody literally makes a fake bank statement. That has happened in our industry. Another one is they say they have a contract and they have a customer and the customer is spending this amount of money and there is no contract. It was a verbal and the money's never come in.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those cases, they didn't actually check that the numbers were correct. It is possible for a founder to commit fraud. It is possible for a founder to spin and weave a story that uses some correct information, but maybe is not as honest or might omit things. So if you're not listening to your customers and iterating based on their feedback, your startup will fail. So if you're drowning in feedback from support, reviews, calls, it's time for an interpret. Interpret is the customer intelligence platform that helps you turn random comments and feedback into actionable insights that help grow your company. Their AI system is already trained on your business and your product. It then reads all your support tickets. It reads all your reviews, call transcripts.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explain that word confirmatory due diligence as opposed to regular due diligence for people who don't know due diligence is basically confirming what the founders told you. So when you put this word confirmatory in, I've never heard that before. Did you come up with that term?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're well. My team sore your product. I think you applied for funding or somebody introduced you to us. And my team, I always tell them, if you see something really interesting or weird, either of those two things or traction, I have like a small set of things that we want to know about. Just text me. Text me in the transcript. Text me whatever you got people when they saw Inverite were like, this is incredible. Explain to the audience what you've built and why it's important.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black Friday, Cyber Monday. People don't realize that people do a lot of gifting and gifting, the VO app. Hey, that's a beautiful thing you could do for somebody in your family. So go gift the app and look up Theo and go subscribe to the app. Get a little more Jesus in your life. If you need more Jesus, Theo is waiting for you. If you got enough Jesus, you don't need it. But maybe you want a little more Jesus in your life. All right. It's The Theo Prayer app. You can search for it on all your different social media and Theo Pray.com T-H-E-O-P-R-A-Y.com.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But almost none of them were born there. Shocker. Like literally 5% of the top 100 top founders in Silicon Valley were born in the Bay Area. The other 95 came to the Bay Area at some point. And a lot of them then relocated. Elon's living near Joe, Lonsdale is living here in Texas. You know, people can come from anywhere. Canva worth $40 billion is in Australia, Spotify is in Sweden. Great founders can come from anywhere. Francisco, good luck. It's a pleasure to be on the cap table. You have my phone number. If you ever need anything or you're ever panicked, remember, there is the bat signal. You can text me at any time. I'm a night owl. If you're scared, if something's terrifying or inspiring, just text me. Say, JK, how are you up? And if I am, I'll call you back. Great job, Francisco.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that you learn as an investor is you're going to take chances, you're going to take risks, and talent can come from anywhere. One of the things I learned so early on was the talented people were in Los Angeles, New York. And the talented people I knew in San Francisco were not from San Francisco. So there's this bias in the world. Oh, all the great founders are in San Francisco. They may wind up there at some point in their career, for sure.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should understand almost everything. And then you could always go deep into metrics, et cetera. But what a great job you've done, Francisco. Don't you remember how?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunch of sides on the bunch of bullet points on the right, a bunch of bullet points on the left, and then three notes on the bottom, and you're like, oh my God, this is a book, not a slide. One slide, one message, always a good idea. Get to the product in the first 15 seconds when you're pitching to investors, always a good idea. So those are the things that are top of mind for me. teaching people how to present. And I learned that from doing like the launch festival, TechCrunch 50, which became TechCrunch disrupt before that. I just looked at the great pitches and I wrote down what I liked about them and eventually came up with that short list of five rules. And you just know those inherently. What doesn't work? Rambling. Oh, man. When you're just rambling and the slide's not moving and you're telling your life story, like people are busy. Get to the point. Less is more. You should be able to present your company in two minutes, maximum three minutes, and then start a discussion with investors.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 times better than the last person who came into a VC's office, right? We want you to be more efficient than them. So even in your two-minute pitch today, gosh, so efficient. So much to take from that. Number one, show don't tell, right? Just a very simple guiding principle. Show what you're trying to explain to the viewer as opposed to telling them. Well, you show the chart where you show the product, they're going to understand a lot better. Examples matter. Give examples that are illustrative of the product. Now here you aren't doing a product pitch exactly. You're doing a performance pitch and the results, but you did show the product over and over and over again and you gave examples of it working synchronicity. What you're saying matches what's on the screen. It's a simple one, but it's an important one. Sometimes people will go off on tangents. One slide, one message. So don't try to explain to them.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A loyal twist listener that covers 150,000 errors. Just go to century.io and use the code twist. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io. And make sure you use that code twist so they know we sent you. Amazing. And so for people who are on my team and wondering, is it necessary to torture founders by making them present week after week after week? Ask yourself, is it necessary to make Steph Curry when he's in high school shoot three pointers over and over and free throws over and over again and videotape them and then tell them, hey, here's where your elbow was out, here's where your fingers weren't on the seams. And then here's your percentage when your fingers were on the seams of the basketball I'm referring to here. Yeah. And when you, when pitching becomes second nature and you are so good at it, you took all of the pointers we have to heart. I'll just tell you what those are because we believe in systems, not goals. We want you to be the best at presenting your startup.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been working with and investing in founders for so long, I've got supernatural startup powers. For example, I know your team is spending too much time on debugging. Your engineers are chasing down bugs at 1 a.m., 8 a.m. and every time in between instead of building amazing new features or pushing fresh code, just admit it. You'll feel better. The reality is, from time to time, your code is going to break. We all know that, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world. Now they're a century. They're the one-stop application monitoring platform that's not just going to tell you, hey, something's broke, but what specifically happened where and most importantly why? Plus they've added sentry logs. So now when something goes wrong, you get a complete report. No more random jobs that just don't run. No more tab hopping, just actionable information with tons of context. And that means faster fixes. And we want to give you three months free of Century's team plan. That's right. F-R-E.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my team who's listening can get a little Ataboy, Attabir, or maybe knowledge of what to lean into as we invest in another hundred companies this year in 2025 and next year will probably hit 150.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then adds what we look for in startups to invest in, which is product velocity. And when we saw you initially, Francisco, one of the things we tagged about your startup was you had great design and you had product velocity and you were builder founders. So for my investment team that's listening, you're the perfect example of a founder with product velocity, world-class design, and you're builders. So you put those three things together, Alex. What you have is a founder who could find the diamond mine. And I really congratulate you on finding the diamond mind. Great things. I'm sure to come for you. Anything we can do to be helpful as investors in your company. And then I guess the converse, which is looking back, is there anything that we did particularly well in helping you get this company off the ground? And if so, let me know.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the bottom of the coal mine, if you make a right turn and you keep going right, you find the diamond mine. That opportunity is always there. I use the analogy with founders. Sometimes you're in like a dark room and you start feeling around for product market fit. You're trying to find something. And then all of a sudden you feel a light switch and you flick it. And then the entire room becomes illuminated. In a way, that's what happened to you. You were looking through the data. You're kind of flying blind through this soup of clouds and turbulence that is running a startup. And you find a pocket of clean air. You find a beautiful path to growth and profitability. So I'm super excited for you. And I guess you take this forward and you start thinking, hey, I wonder if there's another app that we could add to this. And obviously there are other apps in this zone that you could keep adding to. And you also are pretty efficient. You were able to launch this in three weeks, which.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gains compound so regularly doing it you then regularly lower your heart rate you get more sleep and if you look at the obsession right now in the world we talk to any of these people who are biohackers from Tim Ferris to Peter Atia Andrew Huberman all of them are focused on sleep and relaxation and centering and meditation all in the same zone. What I really like about what you did here Francisco is the intellectual curiosity. Hey, what's going on in our metrics? Let's take a look at them. There are many startups listening to the show today who probably haven't done that. So here's a reason to look at your numbers. There might be something in your numbers that leads you to a diamond mine. You could have been chipping away, just taking coal out of the mind, getting dirty every day, pulling out 10% growth rate every quarter over quarter. And then all of a sudden.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great irony or paradox here is meditation where you started and prayer both have or similar origin stories of where they came from and they both activate my friend Sam Harris has done a ton of research neurological like brain scan research on prayer and meditation It turns out they both do the same thing, which is they turn off that active mind, your wandering mind that goes around and ruminates and makes you wonder about the world and flutter around and it gets you centered.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your wife saw in the data the trend. And it was not just the launching of it. It was that you took the time to research the data and then you found something in the data, yeah?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Domain purchase that's squarespace.com twist. How did it come up? Like, I get it, you guys are Christians, but somebody must have, there must have been a moment where somebody said, maybe we should include some prayer in here. Do you remember that moment? Do you remember that Slack message? Do you remember that phone call? Or was it over dinner? When did that spark happen as prayer?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you know Squarespace is our longest running sponsor in the history of this weekend startups? You can find episodes from more than a decade ago with me singing the praises of this wonderful platform Squarespace and how they're going to help you build an incredible website for your new business. That kind of longevity is no accident and folks Squarespace has been in the game for some time because there's no better, easier way or faster way to make your first website. And they're constantly upgrading and making their product better. They now have an AI-powered blueprint feature which works right alongside you helping you upgrade your design game. And it was just named One of Time magazine's best innovations of 2025. And it doesn't matter what kind of business you're in. This could be your personal branding. You could be an author. You want to have a beautiful, highly functioning website and Squarespace can help you with that. So check out Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first website.”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would order like four of them, and then they kept calling back How can you get how quickly can you get me these milkshakes machines? And they brought the milkshake makers and he saw McDonald's and then he wound up licensing it. And at the age of 55 or something, he had a career pivot, which was to license McDonald's. This is Ray Crockett. 55 years old as a traveling salesman. I tell that story because it's never too late. And so with your data, you had a bunch of investors, Francisco, I guess, wondering, is this startup going to ever return money? Is it ever going to grow again? Because you were growing modestly. Where did the idea to run this experiment come from? Can you remember the moment in time? Was it somebody on the team? Was it you? Who had this idea to include prayer? And how does that inform how you run the business going forward?”
2025-11-24 · This Week in Startups · Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson here is fairly obvious running experiments consistently can lead to a founder learning about a new opportunity. And this is a tried and true method of entrepreneurship. This great film called The Founder and in it a guy named Ray Croc is selling milkshakes. And then a certain store, he was having a hard time selling them because people are like, why don't I need one with four different blenders in it? I can make one at a time, right? I don't need to have four. And then all of a sudden this one burger stand. Decided”
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