Becoming a "SPEEDRUNEER"

How we got into a16z Speedrun 2024

Oct 06, 2023

Interview Email

It was Sep.16 2023, when I received this email from a16z. We weren’t expecting ourselves to make it to the interview stage, so we were quite surprised. We had 2 options Sep.22, and Sep.29. For us being at Seoul, we had to attend the interview between 3AM and 5AM. We figured that preparing more make better results, so we chose Sep.29 3AM for our interview.

Need of Update

We filed an application with our text-to-sound product, but our product changed after the application. So, we figured that we need to give updated information to the partners before taking any questions. We thought that a brief update presentation would help delivering the problem we are solving and how we iterated from the text-to-sound problem to the “real-time game sound effect SDK” we are building right now. The email we got said “Treat the interview more as a conversation than a pitch”, so we kept the update materials really short and even considered a case where partners just wanted to start asking questions.

Practice, Practice, Practice

For 11 days, I didn’t write a single line of code(which is first ever since I founded OptimizerAI) and only practiced speaking and making my thoughts clear. This was my “the first fundraising” in my life. First funding we got from KREW Capital in July was completely led by Young. (One day, he went on a meeting with them and 2 hours later he told the team that the deal has been made)

Speedrun was only on their second batch, so there wasn’t much information about it. Only thing we knew were the partners interviewing us.

We searched for writings, podcasts, youtube videos about the partners and tried to figure out what questions they will ask, and which values they prioritized. We were able to find some podcasts and youtube videos of Jon, Andrew and Jack speaking. We figured that Jon and Andrew wanted an early team that dreams big, is fast iterating, is engineering-based and gives certainty that they can find PMF within their fundings.

We thought that we were really fit for these values. We started with an AI-based short-game platform, even though we have no metrics or tractions yet, but we are team of all engineers, we work 14 hours a day, we talked to all kinds of game studios and we iterate really fast based on user insights.

Practice, Practice, Practice

We first organized all the user insights we obtained from talking to people, and the process of our product iterations. We prepared a short presentation of 6 slides to deliver this effectively. Starting by answering YC questions(which are really good questions), The next 10 days was just countless repetition of “15-min. mock interview and feedback” loop within our team. Young and Simon threw all the possible questions about our product, demand, market, vision and more. I also prepared a lot about myself too. Things like what was the hardest thing that you have done, how did you solve them, …etc (But no personal questions were asked).

The Interview

The interview day came. I had a good sleep and did final mock interviews with our team. Our team had prepared for every single case we could think of, but I was still quite nervous. It was 3AM, and I was in a zoom meeting with people I only saw on youtube videos. Starting with the intro that I practiced dozens of times, I asked if I could share a couple slides. Andrew told us to go ahead, and that made me somewhat comfortable.

After I talked about how we iterated and what we are doing right now, they stopped us and wanted to ask questions. Jon asked the first question: “Is your product understanding the game scene and giving the sound effects from your sound library?” I misunderstood the question and was saying that’s correct. At that moment, Young was looking kind of awkward, so I immediately knew I understood the question wrong, and corrected it that our product is “fully generative”.

There were around dozen questions(Can’t remember them all…).

Did users actually want a SDK such that it involves zero human efforts?

What if people are satisfied with only 95% of the sounds and want to edit 5% of the sounds?(As we are building a fully real-time product)

During what phase of game development does the game studios need your product?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your team?

If you succeeds with your game sound effects product, what else will you do?

This kind of tech can be used on other services like “interactive VFX tiktok for 3d creators”, are you going to focus on games? or consider other domains like this?

After answering these questions, questions stopped for a while. Being less nervous, I saw the clock and 12 minutes have passed. Questions after that were like “Have you raised funding?”, “Where are you located”.

After 15 minutes which felt like 2 minutes, Simon and Young were super excited saying that I nailed the interview. Since I felt that I delivered all the important aspects about our idea and the team, I had no regrets. we had a couple drinks at 3:30 in the midnight and took the next day off.

Catch Up?

We were waiting for the results as the email said that they will get back to us with the results in 1~2 days, but there were no emails for 4 days. It was at Oct.3rd morning, when I got an email from Andrew that he wanted to catch up with us.

We thought that he had further questions about us and our product. I had a trip scheduled in Oct.4~5, so we just decided to make a zoom call on that day, 1AM in the midnight. I rushed to the office and began thinking about what could be the topic of the call. We reorganized evidences of user demand and thoughts about our vision to build an ai-native game engine.

At 1AM, the result was quite unexpected: The call started off with Andrew informing us that we were officially part of Speedrun 2024! 🔥🔥 After that, 30 minute call was about the investing terms and me asking questions about Speedrun. At the end of a zoom call I did a virtual handshake with the partners and later received a greeting from all partners from a16z!