Peter Franklin

Hey everybody, I'm Peter Franklin. Nice to meet you. I'm the co-founder of BistroCat.

BistroCat is the world's first automated wet cat food feeder. You can load up cups, kind of like cake cups, load nine of them, and we will feed your cat wet food automatically.

We started BistroCat about four years ago. We're about four years in, we have numerous patents, we've gone through multiple designs, and we're about to ship to production.

Absolutely. No other product on the market can serve fresh wet food, so we're the only product that can do that. You know, we were opening the cans by hand — you cut your finger, it smells, sometimes you have to put half of it back into the fridge. No more. All you need to do with us is, you receive the pods, you put the pods in the machine, it lasts multiple days, and all you need to do is just hit a button and sign up on the app.

Cats are nocturnal eaters. So they do like to eat at night. You can set on the app any time for your schedule that you want to feed them. You can feed them maybe in the morning and at night, or in the morning, at noon when you're eating lunch, and also at night. You can get rid of them coming to wake you up at 4am because they want their delicious wet food. Instead, we can automatically feed them. They can sleep in, you can sleep in, and then you get more time to play.

I'm a cat owner.

I have one cat. Her name's Gracie and I'm unbiased — she's the world's best cat.

She has definitely been the guinea pig. We've also tested with a lot of cats — cats of all ages, kittens. We even tested with a three-legged cat. All cats love BistroCat and enjoy it.

AI has changed every piece of our business, from customer service to software engineering to hardware engineering. Every single department at BistroCat uses AI and is getting incredible efficiency gains from it.

Thankfully right now we really don't have direct competitors. There are some other options on the market that will serve wet food. They come in two flavors. One is where you can load the wet food by hand into a drawer that opens. You still are stuck with a lot of the pain from just feeding traditional wet food. You have to handle the wet food itself. The wet food can spoil in the containers. You have to deal with cleaning out those containers that can be sticky and kind of gross. So we don't really consider that a competitor.

The other kind of option to serve wet food in the market is refrigerated food. It may come in a different form factor, but it's refrigerated, and then it's maybe heated when the cat eats. There's a lot of negative health impacts from that for your cat. When you reheat the food, it loses a lot of nutrients — it's a very well-studied phenomenon. So we don't recommend that. We don't recommend having to deal with the food with your hands. Really, BistroCat is the easiest way to get your cat to eat healthy wet food.

We don't have a specific target in mind. The more cats that we can have get BistroCats, the more healthy cats there are out there, the more pet parents can understand their cats and their eating behavior and their health. So really the sky's the limit. We'd like to be in all 50 million U.S. households with cats right now.

God bless them. First of all, God bless them. Right now, we recommend buying a different BistroCat per cat so that you get the maximum longevity out of the pods. We are in development with some RFID technology and some camera technology that will identify the cat so that it knows which cat to serve, and ties into the smart analytics of which cat is eating the food so that we know which cat has consumed how much food.

We're all about culture. We want people that share our values, that are aligned with making a healthy cat and a healthy household. That's absolutely our number one goal. Beyond that, we think everything is teachable. We can teach a person to cook, but can't teach someone who knows how to cook value. So we really hire around values.

We look for that human connection. We think the human connection is what will thrive and survive in the era of AI. When we all have access to these super tools and the super intelligence, what do you want? You want to come to work and believe that you're aligned with the people that you're with for your mission, for your day-to-day lives, and that they're there to support you and you're there to support them. I don't see that changing. I think that's critical.

I think it's caring about the cat and the cat parent and putting them first. It's driven a lot of our decisions. Everything from, why didn't we choose to be refrigerated food, to how do we present ourselves online — it's all about, we want the cat and the cat parent to be healthy, to have fun, and to have great lives.

I think diversity is key, and that applies to all things. So if someone doesn't have a cat, maybe they will have a cat later. That perspective is valuable to us. We need all of these perspectives and we want that in our company.

Thankfully, that really hasn't been an issue. I think hiring the way in which we hire and for the values that we hire, we have sort of a stickiness built in because we know that people care about who they're working with and they care about the problem that we're working on. So conversations around comp and around all of those things, they get easier because we're aligned in our mission.

In my opinion, the capability for AI fluency trumps everything else right now. You may not have played with the tools. You may not know what's recent and things are changing rapidly. But if you're not up to date in the last three months, you're arguably pretty out of date. Not everyone right now is in the circumstance where they can be up to date and continue to monitor those things, and that's okay. All we look for is that you are open to using these tools, you're not scared of the future, and you're willing to learn.

I think watch out for people who think in short-term games. You want someone that is playing a long game with you, that knows there's going to be ups, there's going to be downs, and you're aligned for the long-term vision. If you get a sense that they want to take and not give, that they're playing a short-term game, they're likely not a good fit for a small startup.

I've been a member of Founders League for three years.

Initially, it was the people that drew me in. Drew and the others are just really, really great at fostering a community, and I wanted to be a part of that community. I wanted to meet more founders and have a peer group. It's hard sometimes for founders — we're a lonely animal. But having a group where I could go and have peers and talk about my real problems, it's really, really nice.

Oh, all kinds of ways. Everything from, I have a lot of friends I can go to for advice now, to friends I can just talk and be myself with. I think there's a lot of value in that connection. I've asked, "Can I meet someone who does X or Y?" and everyone's always willing to lend a hand to that.

I think there's been a lot of ad-hoc games just with the community around it, and I've really enjoyed that. Taking a break in the middle of the day just to play an hour-long game — it just resets you, puts you into the right mindset. I've gotten a lot of value from that.

I've been playing pickleball since 2014 probably, so a little bit longer than a lot of folks. My parents belong to a retirement community and I learned how to play there. I used to just get absolutely wrecked by 75-year-old women. And now I go back and I enact my revenge, now that I've played a lot more, and we always have just such a great time.

The level of play at Founders League is unmatched. You can find anybody from any level, and you will never be the best. So it's great to have that competitiveness. And there are higher-level players who will play with you, who will teach you things and really make it a competitive game and not just monetize you. That's also really great.

I think my play style is a little bit aggressive. I came up playing tennis, so they call me a banger, if you will. I like to hit the ball hard. I like to attack. That's really my play style. It seems like a lot of pickleball has trended towards that play style. I think it was frowned upon maybe three or four years ago — there was a lot of emphasis on dinking. Now obviously dinking is still important, but it does seem that people are realizing the benefits to occasionally speeding up the ball.

Last year I was in about the middle of the pack, but I had a lot of fun.

This year, definitely going to win. I decided. So excited to play again and to give it my all.

Yeah, the quick sell is: everyone needs a community. Everyone needs a community. You may feel alone in your mission and alone at your company. You're not alone. There's a lot of people that are trying really hard, that are learning the things that you are, that are having the challenges that you're having. Come and be a part of that community, and you will not feel alone.