Pilot

what the heck is SLAM?

Glossary

SLAM Ventures: Venture Foundry focused on building great products powered by AI.

Minutes: AI Meeting minutes - a SLAM product

JotBot: AI-Powered Writing - a SLAM product

Derrick: Co-Founder SLAM

Declan: Co-Founder SLAM

Phillip: Co-Founder SLAM

Rajveer: See Below*

*I’m Rajveer, a wannabe ‘creative’ who accidentally went to graduate school for engineering. Most of my time was spent scrolling on X, writing, and asking people for the DS278 problem set solutions. I found myself working an adult job, yet I yearned for a creative outlet to have my voice heard. That’s where Declan, Derrick, and Phillip came in. I've written about them before, specifically a piece about JotBot for UC Berkeley's MEng writing competition. One thing led to another, and now I've been tasked with telling the story of SLAM: our people, products, and journey.

As a newly minted member of the SLAM squad, we met up this weekend to hang out. We caught up over coffee and a long walk through UC Berkeley’s campus. “What’s been up with you guys!”, I asked them. “Uh, we went to Kauai”, Declan replied. “Surfing, running, and unknowingly meandering in the meadows by our corporate lawyer’s house”. “That’s cool, what lawyers?” I probed.

As we wove through the curved paths along campus, they filled me in on the happenings prior to me joining the team: calls with said business lawyer, info sessions with data privacy compliance reps, managing the SLAM assistant in Mexico, and the ups and downs of their entrepreneurial journey. A common denominator I sensed throughout all our conversations was optimism and belief in the uncertainty of running a business.

UC Berkeley is a beautiful place—one that optimizes for certainty. For some students, the allure of Cal is the prestige paired with the funnel into a well-paying career. Our co-founders are, dare I say, a ‘defective’ minority of students who have said no to the status games. They are here simply to build and be around other makers.

I say 'defective' because they chose uncertainty over a guarantee. JotBot, SLAM’s AI-writing product had gained some traction but reached a begrudging plateau. Minutes, SLAM’s AI-meeting-transcription app diverted attention from the main cash-flowing project.

They explained to me how the success of their apps teetered on the performance of their social media marketing content. “The strategy was to pay influencers to make videos about our products as a top of funnel” Derrick explained. However, the view counts and conversion rates of these videos were firmly outside their locus of control. The only certain thing was the payment that had to be sent out to the Tiktokers (regardless of the sub-500 view count).

The way they explained it sounded scary. The banking app was exclusively showing withdrawal notifications, Mom and Dad were begging them to go back to school, and their peers were landing esteemed jobs at reputable companies.

Bzzzz Bzz Bzz (That’s the banking app again).

Deposit? From Stripe? For the new AI-Meeting app?

Holy shit one of the Tiktoks has 300k views.

It’s driving a ton of traffic, and converting them to paying users.

The funnel is working…

It’s hard to predict when things will work and when they won’t. One of my favorite quotes about

business is as follows:

“When the lion roars, fight the urge to turn and run” - Mohnish Pabrai.

It’s easy to turn and run when your social media strategy isn’t working, your numbers are flat, and your parents are telling you to go back to school. The lion was roaring, but they didn’t turn and run. An important lesson, and a trait that is at the core of our team’s ethos.

The SLAM apps are now profitable, but it hasn’t always been this way. And even if something goes unexpectedly wrong I bet that we’ll be fine, because our Co-Founders have a skill more that’s more valuable than money. The skill to hunker down and keep shipping, even when things get hard.

We are currently working on Minutes, which you can download in the App Store. We are looking to grow our team, specifically with “generally cracked people”. So if you’re cracked, apply here.

With this blog, I hope to tell our team's story through the lens of an optimistic technologist and writer. Products diffuse into irrelevance, companies wither away, but great teams fight entropy to keep things alive.

Will SLAM succeed? Only time will tell.

-Rajveer

Andrew: Software Engineer at SLAM Ventures

Sabrina: Growth Marketer at SLAM Ventures

Jason: Making (Custom) Merch for SLAM Ventures