Investor Update #4 - July 2023

• 🔐 Please keep this update “within the family”. Don’t share with others.
• 🤝  We use Cabal for managing investor/advisor intros. If you haven’t shared your LinkedIn connections, I’m going hunt you down and make you do it next week. 🪤

📈 Key Metrics

• ARR = $0 (no change)
• Runway = 22 months (-4 since last month)
• Team size = 5 FTEs (+2 FTEs since last month)
• 🆕 Design partners = 1 signed; 4 verbal commits; 5 total (+5 from last month)

👍 Highlights

• Hiring has been great. We added 2 engineers and 1 part-time designer to do brand and UI/UX. Everyone is onboarded and we are shipping code 3x faster.
• We’ve started signing design partners. The first signed this week and 4 others are in contracting. We hope to have 5 fully-signed in the next 7 days.
• NOTE: These are businesses that are agreeing to test (and hopefully adopt) an early version of our product.
• We released internal v1 of the product. Kai and the team showed us the full end-to-end SDK workflow in a demo this week, which looked great.

👎 Lowlights

• Brand redesign has been slow, as our original freelance designer took a full-time job and we had to fire another. This slowed us down on launching a new website.
• Design partners want to integrate fast. In reality, this is a positive, but it means we are under-the-gun to ship the first external version of our product (targeting ~2 weeks).

🎯 Asks

• Beta partner introductions. We are “over capacity” and can’t support more v0.1 design partners but looking for v0.2 beta partners (targeting Oct/Nov go-live). Specifically:
• Intro us to 🤖 AI agent companies building agents that “take actions” as users and interact with other services (e.g. booking travel, sourcing leads, sending messages, etc.).
• Cabal intro link here.
• Intro us to 👤 personalized AI companies that are trained on external data to act like a specific person (could be “you”, creators/influencers, experts, celebrities, etc.).
• Cabal intro link here.
• Intro us to 🧑‍💻 virtual or executive assistant providers or really any service where a human (usually offshore/remote) needs your account credentials to do things as you.
• Cabal intro link here.
• No immediate hiring needs, but always open to backend/full-stack engineers or product designers as opportunistic hires (or even freelance).

⭐ Shoutouts

• Shoutout to Raullen Chai and to the Winnie at BTVC for the (simultaneous) introduction to one of our first AI design partners.
• Shoutout to Zoe at Ex/Ante for the introductions to two great potential partners.
• Shoutout to Josh at Picks and Shovels VC for continuing to be an introduction machine, and connecting us to a few design partners, or people who one-off introduced us to partners.
• Shoutout to Jordi Hays for extensive help on our re-brand, and for some key partnership introductions, as well.

⚒️ Product

• We are building the “Developer Toolkit for Multiplayer Identity”.
• It’s a simple concept really. You have identities across hundreds of sites on the internet. For the most part, it’s you that uses your identity.
• But sometimes it isn’t. You might share your Netflix password with your friend. You might have a virtual assistant to book a flight. You might ask your IT team to log in and fix Outlook.
• Today, identity on the internet is “single player”, manual, and clunky. If every site had OAuth or public APIs, this wouldn’t be an issue, but unfortunately the vast majority of sites do not.
• Instead, identity sharing largely means sharing your explicit password, texting 2FA codes back-and-forth, and blindly trusting the counter-party.
• For friends and family, this is fine. But delegation is big business. There are 30mm virtual freelancers, BPO is a $150B+ industry, and AI is on the precipice of changing the world.
• We believe delegation will define the next decade of technology. AI, outsourcing, remote work — technology has a way of turning people into platforms, freelancers into apps.
• You can text a freelancer your password, but you can’t text an app, or an AI agent. Software needs a trustless, secure API to “share”, or delegate access to user’s identity.
• That’s what we’re building at Anon. A Developer Toolkit (or SDK) that lets developers build authentication and access management into the next generation of the internet.
• The world needs “multiplayer identity” to complete this transformation. Our partners need it to build products. We’ll share a live demo soon, but hopefully, this was helpful for now. 🙂

👨‍👨‍👧 Team

• The full-time team is now 5 — Daniel, Peter, Kai, Ben, and Julian.
• Ben (Founding Software Engineer) joined from Stability AI (and Amazon and Meta before that) and Julian (Software Engineer) has worked with Kai 3x now (Alaffia, Qume, and Anon!).
• We also have a part-time designer and part-time product consultant on the team.

🎨 Brand / Marketing

• The redesigned brand should be finished by early next week.
• The first landing page with real information about the business should be completed in the next 7 days and be live by 8/4. We will send an update once it’s live!