“I’m looking for the next big thing – a heat seeking missile,” said Marc Michel, Managing Partner at Metamorphic Ventures and the investor in the hot seat at the 72nd Entrepreneurs Roundtable.
The presenters–Javuer Dutan of Novaux, Alex Cooper of Rezzcard, Nikki Lawrence of Gleem, Michael Zhu of Sickday, and Charles I. Blanton of Legends–had come to pitch to Michel in the hopes of getting not only a meeting with him, but also an investment in their companies.
CLICK HERE TO SEE WHAT THEY PITCHED
Novaux
Novaux founder Javier Dutan began this business after setting his restaurant up to start accepting Bitcoin as payment. It wasn’t an easy process and it took a fair amount of time but after he had finished, he began to see the rewards.
“Guys who pay with bitcoin are evangelists. They’ll tip well and keep coming back. They turned into some of my best customers,” said Dutan.
The process for setting up a restaurant to accept bitcoin was a long one for Dutan, so he set out to streamline the process in an attempt to make it as quick and painless as possible. While he does most of his work with restaurants, he does help convert other businesses as well.
Anyone who has seen Tested try to buy a bitcoin from one of the first bitcoin ATMs you will know that turning a bitcoin into cash can be a long and rather annoying process. Realizing this, Dutan has partnered with a company that will buy each bitcoin with actual cash. So the process looks more like this: a customer pays with bitcoin, the partner buys the bitcoin and you get cash.
Dutan has also partnered with a distribution network in order to increase his reach and the number of businesses he can help make the conversion into accepting bitcoin.
“We’ve built in other cryptocurrency, like doge coin, but we still mostly deal with bitcoin,” said Dutan.
Rezzcard
Rezzcard is a company dedicated to making it easier to pay rent. When landlords signs up for Rezzcard, each of their tenants gets a card. These cards allow tenants to pay their rent at the places where they would normally cash their checks. So there’s no longer a need for checks or money orders, and what used to be multiple steps has now turned into a single step.
“Convenience, reliability, safety, that’s what we’re going for,” said Rezzcard fouunder Alex Cooper.
According to Cooper, about half of the people who use check cashers have bank accounts but don’t use them, as they are inconvenient. Rezzcard is meant to make it easier to get access to financial services.
“We want to help the underbanks have access to more financial services,” said Cooper.
Legends Media
Legends Media founder Charles I. Blanton is looking to enhance the concert going experience with the Legends app.
“The Legends app will proactively deliver content based on not only where you are, the concerts you are currently at, but the concerts you have tickets for,” said Blanton.
Imagine this: you go to a concert and have a good time. Afterwards, you want to relive it, or perhaps just listen to the live version of a song you had just seen performed. Unless you were recording with your cell phone, you’d be out of luck, and event then, the quality would have been horrible. But now you can receive an HD recording of the concert you’d just seen, delivered directly to your phone by the Legends app. Not only that, but the app would deliver you content both before and after the concert. You’d have interviews, music videos and other things that happen around live performance..
“We’re going for continuous engagement,” said Blanton.
Legends Media is also planning a streaming platform for more music content for all devices and plan to charge consumers $5 a month.
Sickday
While sickday is another concert app, founder Michael Zhu isn’t planning for more engagement, but rather to make the process of finding out about concerts and performances you may be interested in much easier.
“We want to make it easier to find concerts, we’ll sync your music to help you find bands to go see. You’ll get constant updates about new concerts and shows,” said Zhu.
Doing this will involve building strong relationships with pretty much every venue in a given area, as, in addition to the larger venues, there are also a lot of more intimate and out of the way venues where bands and other acts tend to perform.
“All of the concerts will be laid out in a calendar view, to make it easier to view,” said Zhu.
There will also be a custom radio station playing songs from acts that will be performing live in your area. They’re presently in beta and planning to go live in September.
Gleam
According to Gleam’s founder Nikki Lawrence, there is about $30 billion in diamond jewelry currently looking to be sold by individuals.
“There is no place for individuals to sell their used jewelry, especially if it’s valued between $500 and $50,000,” said Lawrence.
That’s where Gleam comes in. Gleam is looking to become the go to place when it comes to buying and selling second hand jewelry. In order to do this, Gleam is looking to hire a number of top appraisers and gemologists to aid in authenticity and verification.
Gleam will be positioned to consumers as a place to buy and sell second hand jewelry, but they will also act as a market for manufacturers and other companies to sell directly to the consumer. In that way, Gleam is looking to become the Amazon of jewelry.
