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Bold Innovations and Gritty Growth: Key Insights from SXSW's Startup Showcase

In DealMaker's Startup Showcase panel at SXSW, three ambitious founders shared their experiences building disruptive businesses, scaling growth, and overcoming challenges. The conversation highlighted the role of bold vision, resilience, and creative fundraising in driving entrepreneurial success.

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Key Themes and Insights

• Turning Insight into Action: Each founder’s story revealed how identifying a market gap and acting decisively can unlock major opportunities. Whether it was uncovering inefficiencies in lithium production, developing sustainable materials, or enhancing VR experiences, seizing the right moment was crucial.
• Resilience in the Face of Roadblocks: From supply chain disruptions to legal battles and unexpected financial hurdles, the founders emphasized the importance of persistence, adaptability, and decisive leadership during challenging times.
• Leveraging Alternative Funding Models: All three founders tapped into alternative capital-raising methods, such as equity crowdfunding, to maintain control, connect with supporters, and supplement traditional funding sources.

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Overcoming Challenges with Determination

The founders’ growth stories were defined by resilience. Jan Goetgeluk of Virtuix faced ongoing fundraising challenges as a hardware company, ultimately turning to equity crowdfunding to connect with retail investors who became loyal supporters. "VCs run the other way when they hear ‘hardware,’" he said. "Our customer base became our best investors."

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Manuel Rendon of TimePlast experienced setbacks when Nestlé invested in his technology but later divested from its PET business. Despite this, Rendon refused to compromise his vision: "I turned down a $50 million offer when I realized the investor's vision would dilute our mission."

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Teague Egan of EnergyX described major roadblocks, including losing a critical bid in Bolivia and nearly running out of cash before securing funding from General Motors. "I had to sell my house to keep the company afloat," Egan revealed. "It was tough, but persistence kept us moving forward."

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Unlocking Growth with Alternative Funding Models

Equity crowdfunding emerged as a critical tool for all three founders. Goetgeluk credited his success to leveraging Virtuix's passionate community, who invested in the company alongside purchasing its products. "Equity crowdfunding wasn’t just a funding solution—it brought us passionate investors who believe in our vision."

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Egan combined retail investment through DealMaker with strategic partnerships, attracting major investors like General Motors and Posco to support his company’s growth. "Both sides have strengthened our growth," he explained.

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Key Takeaways for Founders

• Identify gaps in the market and move decisively when opportunities arise.
• Develop resilience—challenges are inevitable, but adaptability and persistence are key to overcoming them.
• Explore alternative funding models like equity crowdfunding to connect with engaged supporters and supplement traditional funding sources.

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By embracing innovation, staying persistent, and leveraging creative funding strategies, founders can successfully navigate the challenges of building and scaling disruptive businesses.

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Transcript

Jon Stidd: Alright, everybody. We're gonna get started with panel number two. Thanks for joining us. So this panel is the Startup Showcase. We're lucky to have three amazing founders here with us now.

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These are top founders. They're gonna share insights to growth, their bold ventures, and the disruptive technologies that brought their journeys here today. So we're gonna do more of, like, a fireside style chat with them and get some of those insights. Alright. Starting off we’re gonna do a quick round robin.

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We'll hand it off to you, Manuel. Why don't you, give us an intro and, share, you know, the quick elevator pitch.

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Manuel Rendon: Right. Thank you for having me. I am Manuel Rendon, founder of TimePlast, a chemical technology company.

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And we are set to change the human interface. Essentially, everything you touch, we wanna be part of that. And there's been, in our opinion, an overall allocation of talents to the software sector. But what about the hardware sector? So we're working on that right now down to a molecular level.

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Jan Goetgeluk: My name is Jan Goetgeluk. I'm the founder and CEO of Virtuix, and we make Omni. The Omni is an omnidirectional treadmill that lets you walk and run around inside virtual reality games and other applications. And we brought free products to market to date, did about $20,000,000 in sales to date, and just launched our first Omni treadmill for the home, OmniOne.

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Teague Egan: I'm Teague Egan. I just spoke on the last panel, but for those that are new here, I run a company called EnergyX, and we are a lithium extraction technology and production company. So we're building two lithium projects that will produce, hopefully, enough lithium for about a million electric vehicles per year.

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Jon Stidd: Amazing. Well, thank you guys for joining us. Part of what we wanna talk about is that founder journey.

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Right? So all of you, I'm sure there were, you know, two really important moments. You know, one kind of that initial insight and then the moment you decided to go all in. Maybe for some of you that, that moment was one in the same time, but Manuel, for you, you know, what was that initial insight? How did you come about that? And then what was the moment where you're like, oh, you know, I'm going all in on this?

Manuel Rendon: Well, I am a passionate environmentalist. It's actually my background. I'm an environmental engineer with a major in chemistry. And, I was blown away by the Kardashev scale when I was 17 years old.

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You know, the fact that scientists, when they look into space, they don't look for the tiny green man alien life. They look for type one, type two, or type three civilization. And, essentially, we're type zero, and we're trying to become a type one civilization. So anything and, that would be an existential threat for us to become a type one is of my interest. And I think that the microplasticification of all living beings is the biggest problem to solve in terms of, existential threat, even though it's looking like no no big deal for now, studies are, you know, coming out that are very, I mean, ridiculous.

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And so when I, you know, noticed that the fact that our planet Earth looks blue from outer space, because nature intended for water to be the universal solvent, yet the most used and consumed material by humans repels water down to a molecular level. So there's gonna be something, you know, very wrong happening in the future. It wouldn't change the, you know, the grand chemistry of the materials that we use every single day.

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Jon Stidd: Incredible. Can you share just quickly with the audience about time last and and and what it does to do that?

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Manuel Rendon: So you should look for that. Any material that you can think of can be divided into two groups, polar and nonpolar. For whatever reason, scientists believe back in the thirties that the nonpolar materials were, you know, the most amazing thing ever after sliced bread, I guess. So everything you touch, essentially, that's a non natural material, it's nonpolar. So it repels water.

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Tantalus came into the picture to create materials that are 100% polar so that they adapt to, you know, the, the grand chemistry that I talked about before. And we're aiming not only to substitute plastics, but also, metal, glass, paper. And, and and so essentially, that's what TimePlast does. Typlast creates polar materials. Incredible.

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Jon Stidd: Thank you. Jan, for you, you know, talk to us. What was the initial insight? Where were you in investment banking before? Were you actually in a similar space to Jan?

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Were you working in, was it oil? And was it the oil space?

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah. I was an investment banker with, JPMorgan, natural resources. But I thought, I thought that virtual reality was gonna be the next big thing.

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This was thirteen years ago, so it was a bit early before VR was cool again. And I thought the biggest problem that hadn't been solved yet was how to walk around inside the virtual world. So I thought you need something like a treadmill, but in 360 degrees, an omnidirectional treadmill. And I started working on that. And it took quite a while to figure out the right approach, first prototype.

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The first prototype didn't work at all. I kept working on it. I was still at JP Morgan, so I did this, after hours, which is in the middle of the night. Yeah. Few and far between.

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Yeah. Exactly. But then the breakthrough was I had the first prototype that was working, and I put this video online of me playing Skyrim, a big video game, with VR glasses on this big first treadmill I made. And that video blew up online. Hundreds of thousands of views, big press cycle.

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And that's when I decided, you know what? I think I'm gonna pursue this, bring this to market. And that's when I quit my day job, which at that time, I was probably gonna make 405 hundred thousand dollars that year. And I just said I'm I'm I'm I'm leaving. I'm gonna do this crazy thing.

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Jon Stidd: So yeah. Yeah. You went on to pick the hard thing. And, so was that you had built the prototype and then, you know, you're like, alright, you know, got it working well enough, go all in, Quit work. Go dive in.

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Jan Goetgeluk: Pretty much. Yeah.

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Jon Stidd: Amazing. Teague, for you, you had told us earlier, part of your start, you were down in Bolivia seeing, you know, untapped lithium. Right?

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Did you, you know, on the flight home, you know, start the business plan? Like, how soon after that initial insight did you just decide to go all in or, you know, was it upon that trip you're like, oh, this has to be solved?

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Teague Egan: Yeah. I'll tell that story, but I have a quick question for Manuel. I might not be the only one wondering this, but if we're a type zero civilization, what are type one, two, and three civilizations?

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Manuel Rendon: So type one civilization is planetary civilization. They have cities in the oceans. They control the weather. All of the technologies are clean technologies and sustainable technologies. Essentially, they can sustain life on a planet for perpetuity.

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That's a type one civilization. Essentially, they outrun their energy sources on the planet and they become type two when they take the energy directly from their mother's sun. So they have, like, the Dyson sphere, you know, essentially solar panels, right, you know, orbiting the sun. And then when that star becomes too dim because of the many solar panels, which is actually a significant portion of what Webb telescope is looking for, it is for this megastructure called Dyson spheres because they present a shift in the light that we get from the sun. Anyway, so when they exhaust their mother sun energy, they become type three civilization or stellar civilization.

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They just go star after star. So we're, like, point nine, but there's a big filter hypothesis, which may be why we haven't seen any type one, two, or three civilizations in this space. There may be a great filter that we cannot surpass or, you know, we may become extinct. It's a big concern for many scientists that look far ahead into the future.

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Teague Egan: Very interesting.

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So I told my story a little bit earlier, but there's obviously a lot more to that story. Right? You know, I have been driving a Tesla since 2013. So actually, the same Tesla that I've had for about twelve years now. And basically, early believers in electric vehicles saw or at least believed in the adoption and that kind of hockey stick curve of EV adoptability.

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But fast forward five years in 2018, that's when I found myself in Bolivia. And I was on the tour of this salt flat, just as a tourist. And the tour guide is the one who started telling me about this is the largest, you know, lithium reserve in the world, blah blah blah. It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's a town with only a few thousand people.

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They have a little airport. The terminal is probably the size of this room. And, that's both the arrivals and the departures. And when I was leaving, the place was called Uyuni. The next day, a private plane lands. I think it was probably a g four or something like that.

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And I was like, there cannot be too many private planes in Bolivia. This has to be somebody important. My guess is that it's the president of the country or something. So I Google the president of Bolivia and sure enough, it's him. Hold that up?

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And I was like, he's obviously coming to check out, you know, this lithium project. And, you know, as soon as I got back to my hotel, I started googling lithium in Bolivia, like, what they're doing, why are they not producing any lithium from the world's largest deposit. And kind of all those things made me realize, like, how big of an opportunity this was. And, you know, that from that moment on, I was all in.

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Jon Stidd: Wow. Incredible insights from the tour guide to a quick Google search.

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Teague Egan: He was the first person, like, you know, I'm here in Bolivia. I'm like, who the fuck do I talk to about, like, this? I literally found my tour guide on LinkedIn asking him if he had any connections to the government of Bolivia. Unfortunately, he didn't and I had to find other means.

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But, you know, as an entrepreneur and as a founder, you're you know, the early days are lonesome and you're just trying to follow any loose end. You know, I was literally hitting up my tour guide, to try to find connections into Bolivia, to try to talk to anybody that would talk to me about this idea. But, you know, that's, you know, you have to be relentless and determined and, you know, I'm sure these guys can attest to that too. Well, thank you for teeing that up. I wanna talk about that.

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Jon Stidd: I'd, yeah. Not a lot of tour guys getting, you know, slides into their DMs. So incredible work. That relentless attitude. Right?

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So you guys are all doing disruptive things in your own rights. And by nature, you know, disruptive is new. You're gonna face a lot of friction in trying to get that across. You know, Jan, let's, you know, talk about some of those moments of friction for you guys, whether it was, investors or, you know, manufacturers, right, or just friends and family being like, you guys are crazy. So, Jan, for you, like, you made the initial prototype yourself.

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Jan Goetgeluk: Were people, you know, asking you, what are you doing? And did you get any notes? Like, tell us about some of those moments of how you, you know, push through being a disruptive technology and people telling you no. Yeah. The biggest challenge for us has always been fundraising.

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Our products have always been well received. People love it. We have a big community, big fans, that love what we do. And every time I go to traditional VC investors, as a hardware company, a big piece of hardware, I mean, VCs run the other way. And so hardware is one industry that needs a lot of capital, sort of Teagan's industry and then business as well.

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But we need a lot of capital, and then hardware is probably one of the hardest industries to get traditional capital for. So that has always been our main challenge. Now luckily, equity crowdfunding came about right around the same time that we started, and that has always been a great fit for us because we have, again, a great community, lots of fans who are not just customers but also want to be investors. And that that's been our, our saving grace, if you will. This method of fundraising.

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Jon Stidd: Wonderful. Well, you know, at DealMaker, personally, glad to hear that. We help companies raise capital online. Because yeah. When you're talking about the VCs not getting it, my first thought was, you know, some of the ads that we made for you about this, you know, you watch somebody in the Omni and this, like, excitement that they have.

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You create these viral moments. It's like, well, you know, can't you just show that to the VC? But, you know, you showed that to the community who has then, you know, backed you all for millions of dollars now and helped with the growth. Yeah. That's a great way to push through that.

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Yeah. Manuel, for you, you know, polar, non polar, were people looking at you, like you were off in another polar? I don't know how to string that together. What did people say to you when you went off on your endeavor? Did you face any, any friction?

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Manuel Rendon: So I was fortunate enough to work for PepsiCo, one of the largest food companies in the world, and I was at the right place. I was working under, the global director of packaging, for PepsiCo in Plano, Texas in the research and development line when I kinda had the opportunity to learn how the industry is thinking about plastics technology and how to move forward. So I could understand how to position myself. When I left PepsiCo to find time passed, I convinced my initial partners that I had the technology to convince Nestle, the largest, to invest or acquire our technology. And so with friends and family funds, we endeavor to convince Nestle, the largest company in the food packaging space.

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And they did, bought our technology for chemical depolymerization of PET. Again, if you tap into essentially like a simulation theory, how is it so popular? I think it's because if you look at nature and how nature does it, it's so advanced. So we take notes constantly of how nature deals with, you know, chemical pathways. And so one of our, the technology that Nestle acquired, it's, you know, one of a kind better than anything else.

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They did, you know, 19 press releases. All of our bottles are gonna be depolymerized with time plus technology. But then Nestle Global, I think you were mentioning something like this, in your case. Nestle Global decided to get rid of all of the PET businesses, all of the, you know, Nestle Waters because they were having a significant issue with, I guess, the public image of, you know, pollution and whatnot. They were taking too much water out of a well, I guess, in some cities.

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Anyway, so 100% of all of the executives that we're working with were fired, and then Blue Triton acquired that technology. And they put us on the back burner. We were supposed to launch in 2020, but then, that didn't happen. And so, the former chief sustainability officer that I was working with at Nestle went on to lead a venture capital firm up in Canada, and he offered me, you know, a $50,000,000 check. But I noticed that the vision of the company was going to be diluted along with the governance and whatnot.

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So, I said no and, you know, started raising funds, and equity crowdfunding. Incredible.

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Jon Stidd: Well, not everybody can say that their MVP, their minimal viable product, was supported by Nestle. So, you know, pretty incredible there. So, you know, transitioning that over to Teague.

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Right? You know, we're talking about, you know, people trying to steer and change your vision. You know, Teague, when you're out raising capital, was it were you able to, you know, show them the supply demand imbalance? Or, you know, were they saying, you know, do it this way, don't do it that way? How did you maintain that vision that you had on your romantic tour guide journey?

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How did you keep strong in that? Sorry. I characterized it as romantic.

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Teague Egan: Yeah. I mean, we've, we've had a very fortunate fundraising journey.

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I think that in the early days when you just have a start up and you have no track record of successful exits and things like that. It's always harder for first time entrepreneurs. You know, I'm not a first time entrepreneur. I had other businesses, but never a big successful exit. And this business is dramatically different from anything I had done in the past.

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You know, I was living in California. I was in the center. I had an entertainment business, and then I was looking at, you know, c-scale seed stage investments, as a business. And then getting into the lithium industry with this founding story is a bit of an outlier. And I think that while venture capitalists, tip you know, highly value a founder, and really look at the team, they underestimated my determination. And determination and optimism are two of the most under the two of the most important characteristics, but they're two of the most unrecognized.

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It's hard, it's hard to really gauge that at least in a few conversations. As we started to pick up momentum in the company, we attracted a lot of institutional investors. And our journey in fundraising has been a hybrid approach where we've been really successful at bringing in the retail markets through crowdfunding, but we've supplemented that. Or you could say that we've supplemented our institutional fundraising with crowdfunding. But we've been fortunate enough to bring in, you know, big corporate investors, like grade a credit investors such as General Motors.

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That's probably the most notable name. But then, Posco, which is a huge steel and battery conglomerate out of Korea. A lot of people get that confused. They say Costco is an investor? No.

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No. No. No.

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Jon Stidd: They'll buy in bulk. Yeah.

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Teague Egan: They'll buy in bulk. They'll buy in bulk. But, you know, we were talking about steel in the last panel. This company, Posco, makes, about, I wanna say, 40,000,000 tons of steel a year. That's about, call it, $50,000,000,000 in revenue.

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And then they have a big battery business, battery materials, where they make cathodes, lithium, etcetera. So a really, really important strategic investor, that has an unlimited balance sheet, essentially. I think they have, like, 13,000,000,000 in cash right now, a huge balance sheet. And then the third investor is a global oil and gas major, called ENY out of Italy. Basically, the equivalent of, like, a Chevron or Shell out of, you know or or Total.

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But having big, credible strategic investors has helped with the crowd funding, and our crowd funding has helped attract more strategic institutional investors. So we've used that to leverage each other and we found that that, you know, it's worked for us. I think that that would work for anybody. But we've been fortunate enough to have that fundraising journey where both sides are interested in investing into something that is really into the it's, you know, supply chain for the future. Yeah.

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Jon Stidd: Certainly. Teauge, you made me think about it, the sort of those unrelenting characteristics. I think it's Paul Graham from YC who talks about you just gotta be a cockroach. Right? You gotta stick around long enough and you can win.

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Right? Or, you know, just don't die. You know, so default alive, I think is how he refers to it. Right? So talking about that grip, one of the things that I wanted to ask you guys, some of those low moments, like, you know, a moment of, you know, where you really had to to pull yourself up and and and find that, you know, unrelenting attitude, in the face of all that.

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Jan, you know, for you, how about you? Was, you know, supply related? Was it market related? Was it capital related? Tell us more about that.

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah. It's %. I mean, determination, you said it right, Jake. I mean, determination and optimism, I mean, you have to be not just determined. You have to be obsessive about what you do and and and determined beyond imagination.

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You know? It gets really hard sometimes. And, yeah, our one low moment for us was COVID, and we were right in the business of selling Omni Arena, based on our technology, a big attraction for entertainment venues. And Dave and Buster's was about to roll it out, and we are still at Dave and Buster's and a lot of entertainment venues nationwide. But that was our bread and butter, going into the pandemic.

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So in a matter of days, I remember it was I was at a trade show in New Orleans, and we were still selling. And COVID was just starting to unravel in The US, and and and we were still selling attractions on the show floor. And then just days later, everything was shut down, the economy shut down, and our revenues went from a million dollars a month to zero. So that was a tough moment. You know, we had to lay off people, furlough, salary cuts, pull all the stops to survive, which we did, which we did.

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Jon Stidd: But, yeah, that was a tough one. Jesus. Incredible. Manuel was the lowest moment. Nestle, you all are doing some when they backed out, you all are doing incredible things in material science.

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I'd be hard pressed to imagine that was the lowest moment. What about you? Anything you can share with the audience?

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Manuel Rendon: No. No.

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Not at all. I hope and I wish. But now, actually, I had an internal fight with some of the original partners. Because of equity crowdfunding, we were new to the space, so we didn't understand how the voting through proxy of the investors is that situation. And we've all got in not knowing what we're getting into.

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Right? So essentially one of my partners, which is an attorney, checked all of the documents. Long story short, they got together with a billionaire investor. I think he is, not to say his name, but he has links to the petrochemical industry. And, anyway, so I was they challenged the proxy, so they sued TimePlast, at a free revenue stage.

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And we essentially, you know, put hundreds of thousands of dollars of our very delicate, crap funded, budget to fight this lawsuit, which was ridiculous, then this billionaire offered a loan. No. No. He wanted to get the loan that he had. At the same time, it was like a coordinated attack to acquire the company, I believe.

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And, and so that was kind of the worst moment. But, thankfully, the rest of the partners saw through this situation and, and helped me out to get out of that situation. But that was tough. I almost lost my company.

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Jon Stidd: Jeez.

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Wow. I wasn't familiar with that story. That's crazy. Yeah. Lawfare, you know, to the start up trying to do the thing.

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I'd imagine that billionaire investor's name rhymed with schmooch smoke. But, anyways, so, Teague, for you, I remember, being at your facility. I was in one of the shipping containers where some of these, like, sieves and processing worked and I could not believe myself. I was like, how is this possible? You know, so you all have created something incredibly innovative.

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Right? What have been some of those moments of, you know, hiccups or or, friction like that for you? Was there a moment where you're like, you know, we might not make it?

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Teague Egan: Many. Many.

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So I will talk about three low moments. Only three. Okay. Three. Two of them are kind of one in the same, but the first one was it it wasn't a make or break moment, but we spent probably, a year putting together our DOE application for one of these big DOE grants, that the last administration was giving out, and that would have been all the money we needed to build our Texas project.

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I think it was because we were asking for about $200,000,000, and I don't know exactly how many hours we put into this, but it was several hundred page applications. It must have been at least a thousand to a few thousand hours of, like you know, it's expensive to pay people and and, you know, that's a lot of time and money going into that, and we felt really confident in our percentage chance to win this. They ultimately gave, about $3,000,000,000 away, to approximately 20 companies, and two companies right in the area that we so we are developing a project that will produce about 30,000 tons of lithium in the Smackover Formation, which is a geologic formation, that goes from Texas into Arkansas that has proven to be one of, if not the best lithium deposits in The United States. And we're building a demonstration plant there. We'd already won a little DOE grant, but we've invested tens of millions of dollars into this project.

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And, there are other lithium companies that are up there, like Exxon just bought about a hundred thousand acres there. There's standard lithium, and the DOE awarded two companies right next to us big grants. And I felt it was just heartbreaking to see the announcement and not be listed and have two of our main competitors win that. That was certainly a low moment. But, you know, I cried for a night and then the next day, I got up early and went back to work and kept grinding.

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That was one. The first two are kind of related. We raised our series A funding, about $10,000,000 in April of twenty twenty one. And that gave us the money to relocate here to Austin. We moved here in June of 2021.

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And before that, we were kind of a remote company. We probably had 12 people that were all spread out. I was living in Puerto Rico before this. We moved to Austin and we got right to work and we won this pilot bid in Bolivia. So from, I guess, January of twenty eighteen when I first set foot in the Bolivia Salt Flat to, August of 2021 is when we won the pilot bid.

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They did a global tender for lithium extraction technology companies to pilot, to extract lithium from their resource. And we won one of eight slots, and we deployed our first pilot to Bolivia in January of 2022. So four years from my first seeing the salt flat to putting a pilot there. Yeah. There's, you know, sticking with it is another big, big attribute, required of a founder.

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But we spent a lot of money doing that and getting this pilot set up and deploying it to the field. And we ran this pilot twenty four seven for about almost half a year. It ended in May. And, you know, that was expensive. And I was ten minutes late in turning in our final submission of the report to Bolivia.

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They said the deadline was, like, midnight on some day, and Bolivia is a few hours ahead. I, you know, I was translating this whole hundred page report from English into Spanish, and I sent it to the wrong email. And there's no excuses. It was ten minutes late, and we ended up getting disqualified from the bid. And of course, they could have accepted us, and ignored, you know, being late.

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I also like to think that there's some geopolitical issues going on. They ended up awarding the commercial contracts to a Chinese company and a Russian company. You know, people in The United States may say, oh, Russia. Like, they're friends with Russia. So, but that was a super low moment losing that.

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And we had signed a term sheet for our series B, at the end of twenty twenty one, and this company, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in Argentina, was leading our series B. But they basically were optioning us to see if we won this contract. And when we lost it, they pulled the term sheet. And General Motors was following on to their lead. And, I'll never forget, I was in Sweden at this conference called, Brilliant Minds.

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And as soon as I found out, you know, my dad always taught me you have to get out as soon as you find out something bad, you have to get up and address the crowd or whatever it is. Like, get out in front of you can't you can't hide when bad things happen. So the first thing I did was call the partner from General Motors who was leading their investment, and told him what happened, was completely honest about it, and asked if they would lead the round. And it was I think it was 2AM in the morning, my time, in Sweden, and it was, like, I don't know, 8PM in Detroit. And he agreed, and boy, did I party that night?

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But it was still, like, it was a super low moment. And so that was the second one. The third one was that it was May 2022, and we were running out of money quickly. And we had started a Reg A+ backup plan with DealMaker

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Jon Stidd: Thank you.

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Teague Egan: In July of 2022, but we are quickly running out of money.

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And because of that situation with losing the commercial contract and our main investor pulling out, it took GM a lot more time to write us their own term sheet, lead the round, and we would have run out of money. And I ended up having to sell my house to bridge the company, to last until GM funded us. And man, when you're two weeks away from running out of payroll and the company ending, that is a low, low point. Like, we're looking at all scenarios, firing half the company. And I ultimately made that decision to sell the house and bridge the company.

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And, you know, we were able to pull the money that we were raising in DealMaker at that time, which was also a huge, huge help because GM ended up not funding until December of 2022, and this was happening in September. And it was just a few months, and, you know, that can make all the difference. I wouldn't be sitting up here today if that were the case. So, you know, there are always highs and lows, and you just have to have a steady temperament. You can't get too excited from the highs.

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You can't get too depressed from the lows. Just gotta keep going.

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Jon Stidd: Well, I really appreciate all three of you sharing those gritty moments. Right? You guys are innovative.

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You know, any startup is hard, and the spaces that you guys are doing it in have their own unique challenges. And, I really appreciate that. After this panel, we're gonna move on to something, potentially more optimistic, future looking, future of investing, exciting. Before we wrap though, you know, I had some conversations with founders in the crowd. Any questions before we wrap?

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Couple in the back.

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Attendee: Great panel. I've got a question for Omni. I know you mentioned you're rolling out the OmniOne for home consumers. What's been the biggest, I guess, you could say unexpected adoption hurdle you've seen with home consumers compared to the enterprise customers?

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And then what are you guys doing to tackle that?

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah. I mean, the biggest challenge we had was getting the product to market. Hardware always takes longer than you think, costs more money than you think. As we launched it officially late last year, still working through our order backlog.

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So even over the holidays, if you bought one online, the wait time, the lead time was about four months. And so that's, of course, a big hurdle to adoption. And people wanna buy something for Christmas and get it by Christmas, not in April. So but we're almost past that. And that that's gonna be a big big exciting moment for us is to clear that backlog and then really be able to scale our sales and scale our marketing.

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Attendee: Other questions? So, Jan, I remember seeing something very similar to your product at, Renaissance Hotel in Dallas at, QuakeCon ten years ago. Just wondering if that was you. Yes.

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Jan Goetgeluk: That was us.

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QuakeCon two thousand thirteen wooden prototypes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I obviously, I don't know what you guys word prototype?

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Jon Stidd: Wooden prototype.

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah. We had a wooden prototype for several years. Because to take a, you know, to take a prototype from a garage to a product, that can take years. And then to take a product from an actual product of which you can make one or two or 10 to one that you can make thousands off, that takes another two years.

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It's a big difference. It's a long process to bring a big piece of hardware to market.

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Attendee: Great. Just have one more question for Teague. Well, thanks for sharing the lows.

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That was, you know, very relevant to us. Believe me. Right? So institutional investors, do you have any tips on how to pursue them? E and I, for instance, are very relevant to us as a start up as well.

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Teague Egan: Yeah. I mean, going through institutional due diligence is a nightmare, which is one of the reasons I like using DealMaker. But you need to have all your i's dotted, all your t's crossed. You have to be relentless. Like, we have three great institutional strategic partners, but I probably contacted I have 250 on my list, so way more no's than yes's.

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And, I would credit a lot to building relationships over time. So allowing investors to follow your story is really important, keeping them updated with your progress. At some point, you might be too early for them. But if you are able to follow through with what you say you're going to do, if you tell them, this is my road map. In six months, I'm gonna be here.

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In a year, I'm gonna be here. In two years, I'm gonna be here. And you actually do that and show them, that creates a lot of confidence and conviction, in their ability to invest in you. And I would say that that's probably the single biggest thing or piece of advice that I could give is get in touch with them a lot, but then allow them to come with you on the journey before they invest.

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Jan Goetgeluk: Except for due diligence, if you're an AI company, you don't have to do it.

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So that helps.

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Attendee: Another question. I think we have one more. Oh, you have a question. You have a question.

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Yes. Hey. Hey. So I actually do have a question. This first follow-up is, have you read the book slash and watched Ready Player One?

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yes. We were in the movie. Warner Bros. Contact us and ask for two omnis that we shipped to them, and we're part of the movie. Yeah.

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Attendee: Wow. And then for that reason too as well, did you see a shift in trend slash higher, like, demand for you guys' products after that for other companies, but also for lithium as well, any other company? Like, when you see that trend happen, there's obviously a high, and then it goes to a steady state and maybe to a low, or it still continues up. How do you manage or predict that type of trend when you're on the rise of, let's say, ready player one, you're in demand, and then all of a sudden, oh, the trend's over, or it's just steady?

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah.

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There's this thing called the, the Gartner hype cycle, which you may have seen. And and and VR and probably other technologies as well has really followed that hype cycle to a tee, where you have the quick rise to the peak of the hype, and then invariably, you go down to, they call it a trough of disillusionment. And then slowly but steadily, you have the slope of enlightenment. So we all went through that, and we went through that as well. When Ready Player One came out, it was around the peak or even probably a little bit behind the peak.

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But certainly it creates a lot of interest and VR going mainstream. But VR is a type of technology where you know, everybody predicted or not everybody predicted, but a lot of people predicted that, man, VR is gonna be everywhere. And by 2016, there's going to be a hundred million headsets in the market. And it just really didn't happen. It's a type of technology that has taken a lot more time to take off to get mainstream adoption, and it's getting there slowly but steadily.

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It's now on that slope of enlightenment where, you know, more and more people do use it. Various industries use it. But it hasn't been the type of technology that's taken, this type of upward curve, which is not unusual. You know, people would be used to thinking that because of mobile and other technologies that take off like that. But a lot of technologies don't take off like that.

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The TV, for example, this is an old example, but notoriously took, you know, twenty, thirty years to get mainstream adoption. And so VR, I think, is more in that category. There's quite a bit of user friction, and and and so it's not it's not the type of technology that gets easily adopted. But it is getting more and more used. So, yeah.

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Attendee: Teague, do you wanna answer that for lithium and the rise in demand? Maybe the volatility of the pricing?

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Teague Egan: Yeah. Lithium had a hockey stick moment back in 2022 where it went from 15,000 a ton up to 80,000 a ton. But this was actually bad because those costs were being passed through to the end user, the EV purchaser, and it made electric vehicles unaffordable.

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Maybe even that one material in the battery made electric vehicles unaffordable. And there's always a long tail on these types of things. You know, I'm not gonna sit here and say that the lull in EV adoption was based on the 2022 price of lithium, but you can certainly draw conclusions from that, or at least parallels. And now lithium, the price of lithium has come down a lot, and I think that we're starting to see a lot more affordable EVs, while there could be this valley in EV purchasing today. Companies like BYD, Tesla, even General Motors sold 400,000 electric vehicles last year.

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Not many people know that. Tesla's well over a million, I think in the 1.2 to 1.5. And then, man, China is just rolling these EVs off the assembly line. Like, America doesn't even know. I think that BYD is up to almost 4,000,000 electric vehicles a year, and that's just one company.

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Obviously, America buys a lot of American cars, but China is really becoming I mean, China is already the factory of the world, but China is really becoming the auto manufacturer of the world. If you go over to Europe, you will see so many Chinese vehicles and electric vehicles. So, there's definitely a tail in terms of demand. When demand is high, everybody tries to pile in, and then, you know, it'll drop, and you'll start to see lower investment. But, yeah, lithium is further up the supply chain, so that's why you see that lag as opposed to maybe something that's consumer facing, like Omni.

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But it's certainly there as well.

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Attendee: Okay. We have time for one more question. Curtis. This is actually a question for you, Teague.

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So unlike sorry. What was your name again? Jan.

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Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah.

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Attendee: Yeah. You obviously have a consumer product that's easy to get retail investors excited about. I mean, it's tangible. They can see it. It's exciting, fun.

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Whereas, like, for you, you have thousands of retail investors. How do you educate and get retail investors excited about lithium extraction? And then the second question on that is, what level of transparency do you give to these potential investors? And that might even be a question for the CMO over here as well. Maybe.

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Oh, no. No. You’re the CMO. I'll let Teague answer, and I bet you have an answer too because yours sounds very complicated. But go ahead, Teague.

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Teague Egan: I wanna hear Manuel's as well. I think that for us, it's a little bit easier because lithium has become headlines in, you know, media and publications everywhere. But you actually almost answered the question yourself. Education and transparency is the key. We are a non consumer facing product.

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Like, lithium is actually a white powder. It looks like, you know, other types of battery materials that you might not know of. And other than people with bipolar disorder, they're not buying lithium. So there's a lot of education involved, but, you know, we were extremely fortunate with the tailwinds and the momentum behind the electric vehicle revolution and lithium ion batteries. They're called lithium ion batteries.

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That was one of the first things I thought about. There are other elements that go into batteries, and depending on what type of chemistry is in your battery. There's nickel, there's iron, there's phosphate, there's manganese, there's cobalt, but they're called lithium ion batteries. So we got really lucky in terms of education. And then, yeah, like, transparency around the importance of it in terms of where we are as a business, in terms of our milestones that we're trying to achieve, our road map.

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Those are all things that we want to share with potential investors. And then, ultimately, it's up to investors to make their decisions. But I am very interested, Manuel, in how you sell your product and educate your investor base on TimePlast.

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Manuel Rendon: I think it's the second most complex thing we've ever done at TimePlast, you know, because chemistry is one thing, but after you have an incredible new technology, how do you sell it? Right?

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So you hit it in the nail when you said that in order for you to continually attract investment, you need to meet your milestones, you know. And, that hit me hard back in the day when I was thinking about how Apple grew to the level that it is right now and how because we're very high, in the industrial chain, we manufacture the actual polymer itself from, alcohol that is sold from organic waste. Now, 10 plus is 70% water, which is our main competitive advantage against conventional plastic. We can be significantly cheaper than plastic, and it presents an opportunity for the future. But by the same token, how do you sell a product if you're a chemical technology manufacturer of raw material?

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Nobody buys raw pellets or plastics. Right? But if you really think about it, the absolute best tool for companies to increase their revenue is the combination of AI and social media. Essentially, you have all of the eyeballs in the world that you can select. You can ask the, you know, the algorithm, what is the person that would buy my product and then just present it to that person.

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Now raw plastic is such an abstract material that nobody buys, so we had to go and create an application for that. As you can imagine, we can make 50,000 applications, but we have started from four dimensional three d printing filaments. Yes. If you guys are in the three d printing hobby, it's one of the most complex niches, you know, to enter it. But, we are selling the only portfolio of three different filaments in the world that are burnable.

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You can make a soap out of one of our filaments. You can time program it so you can create four dimensional objects. Imagine a seed pod that is able to grow a tree to fruition in the Sahara Desert without any human intervention. Essentially, it's an analog computer in which water is the battery. Because, you know, you 3D printed an object with different time plus filaments that had to it.

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So one of the channels that connect the water to the seed will dissolve in one week, the other one in two weeks, two months, three months, six months, one year, three years, so that this seed can continue to grow into a tree without any human intervention. This is one of the many applications that we can tap onto. Now we're building a manufacturing facility to make a straw, again, a big icon for the plastic pollution. But we're going after the bottle of water too. And imagine a bottle that self-destructs since you can put water in between.

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Time plus is all about water soluble materials. Right? Time programmable water soluble materials is in the name. So, if you make a wall that has water in between, then you can program the time it takes for that bottle of water to dissolve by itself. So, it will turn red before it dissolves, so it doesn't make a mess out of the shells.

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But imagine, you know, a bottle of water even after it's being thrown into the I don't know. In a landfill or on a beach, you can see that bottle dissolving in front of your eyes. Now we're using the sun and the grand chemistry of our planet to molecularly disintegrate down to the cover of carbon level materials, which is the only way to go if you think about it. Conventional plastic nowadays takes a significant amount of energy, resources, and, like, you know, crazy chemistry for it to disappear. Now time plus only requires sun and water.

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And since 70% of the surface of our planet, even our own bodies, are, you know, composed of water, then it only makes sense that we follow that, you know, nature guidance. So we're simulating all these into our products, which is why we believe we can scale up production, but niche by niche. It's a new type of business model, but we'll see what happens.

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Jon Stidd: That's incredible. Thank you.

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Alright. I think that was the last question. So the next panel will start in fifteen minutes. So if you guys wanna grab a drink, we'll meet you back here.

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