Driving Global Innovation:Peyman Shahmirzadi’s Role in Redefining Startup Acceleration at Peachscore

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Peyman Shahmirzadi. He is the co-founder, COO, and head of Accelerator at Peachscore. They are a data-driven startup accelerator supporting early-stage businesses worldwide. Their mission is to make education, networking, and investment more accessible to every founder, offering a 12-week accelerator program that emphasizes AI-driven tools, mentor connections, and potential funding of up to $500,000 through their investment network. Under Peyman’s guidance, Peachscore has managed over 12 cohorts each year, empowering startup teams to revise their strategies and scale effectively. They’ve also introduced innovative technology that enhances efficiency, all while cultivating a large community of mentors and investors.

Peyman has extensive experience in operational leadership, strategic planning, raising capital, and program management, making him an expert when it comes to helping entrepreneurs navigate early challenges and seize new opportunities. Before we get into all this good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBak Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, co-founder and CEO, COO of Peachscore, Peyman. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Thank you so much, Anthony. Thank you for having me. I look forward to the conversation.

Anthony Codispoti : So, Peyman, you’ve worked with over 750 startups across 80 countries. Before you hatched the idea for Peachscore, what were you doing previously that eventually and uniquely positioned you to bring this idea to market?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Sure. I actually have a fairly diverse background. My career started as an engineer. I have a computer engineering background and I work for 4 to 500 companies such as HB where my career started and Philips and a number of different companies of various sizes. But recently, before Peachscore, I actually started my own startup and then I got into working with startups in an advisory consulting firm that I had as a partner with a friend of mine actually. And through that, I started really learning the side of working with founders, being able to see how we can support them.

I was initially looking at it from a business standpoint and investment standpoint. And then that led me to Peachscore. Actually, I met the founder of Peachscore at the very early stages of the company in the concept stage and I became one of his very initial investors. So, I think he met me three in Peachscore and sometime later, he asked me to join the company HelpScale.

And here we are. Several years later, we built the company we have today in the Accelerate program, which I’m very proud of. So, but through the combination of all these different things that I’ve done, various different organizations that I’ve been part of, anywhere from engineering to operations to marketing to program management throughout my career, this is a really natural fit for me in terms of being able to support founders on a number of different topics.

It’s always very interesting to work with founders on the regardless of the industry, regardless of what journey they’re on, being able to add value in terms of what they’re doing. So, that’s how I ended up here. It’s been a very interesting ride.

Anthony Codispoti : So, these prior experiences have really given you kind of a 360 view of what startups and the founders go through. That’s got you in a good position to be able to help them and coach them because you’ve been through what they’re about to go through or are going through. So, break it out for us. What kinds of services are you guys more specifically offering to your members? Sure.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : I mean, so several things. We’re very different than traditional Accelerate programs. First and foremost, we’re a technology company. We built the platform in order to be able to service our founders in a number of different ways. So, there is a educational component to what we provide, which is the 12-week Accelerator.

It’s both a combination of online learning as well as live workshop sessions, all curated and provided through our mentorship network that we have. These are executives that are either in the technology space, investments, you know, in terms of VCs or angels or even governments that are coming in and sharing their business, sharing their insights for our program. Beyond that, we provide a number of different types of tools available to our founders, such as marketing sites to being able to really look at, see what’s happening in the startup ecosystem, being able to analyze their company within an industry that they’re in to see who can be a potential competitor to a partner, to a potential customer to them, as well as tools for helping them raise funding, such as their Executive One Pager tool, or a Pitch Deck Analysis tool that we just released in which they can upload, our founders can upload their Pitch Deck and it will come back and give them feedback on the overall quality of the Pitch Deck and both holistically and per slide. And above that, we also benchmark every founder, every startup that comes into our program. So what happens is as companies come in and you fill out your Pitch Core profile, your company profile, we analyze your company and benchmark you against 600,000 other companies within the industry and we’re able to provide you a 30-page assessment report that’s done from an investor’s perspective, as well as we score every startup. And that’s how actually the company initially got started, is this benchmarking and scoring system. And then a few years back, back in 23, we added the acceleration aspect of it in order to be able to support founders.

Anthony Codispoti : So Pitch Score, there’s some kind of a score.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Absolutely, yeah, there’s a you come onto our platform, you get a score, the Pitch Score score. Absolutely, as well as the detailed benchmarking, which is amazing. In fact, that’s one of the, that’s the main reason I invested in the company initially back in the concept stage of the company was at that time, I was evaluating startups for potential investment. And the process, it’s one thing if you’re a VC firm and you have a number of venture associates, as they call them, to be able to do a lot of the legwork, a lot of the analysis.

But as an angel investor with limited resources, being able to analyze startups effectively is extremely time consuming. So when I met Alex, the founder of Pitch Score, he was describing to me the concept of being able to using AI, you know, and this is back in 2020, early days, right? Before AI wasn’t talked about the way it is today, you know, being able to build a system that can analyze startup companies and benchmark them and be able to use that for both its great information for the founder to really understand how an investor will look at them, but also it can streamline the due diligence process for an investor. And that’s what really attracted me to the company because I felt this is something that’s really needed, can really change the-

Anthony Codispoti : Can help you evaluate a large number of deals a lot more efficiently.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Exactly, much, much more efficiently. And it’s like a Swiss Armour knife for investors. It really is because, you know, back when I was initially just using the platform, even in its initial private launch, you know, far worse, the value of the company using the Pitch Score platform, it streamlined the entire process. It’s like my first meeting with the founder would have been like the fifth or sixth meeting the old way. So that foundation brought us to 2023 and we looked at really what else can we do in terms of supporting founders. And that’s when we built the acceleration platform that basically sits on top of the technology that we built to build support founders as we are today.

Anthony Codispoti : So can anyone join Pitch Score? Is this open to anybody or is there like a process?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : No, you have to apply. There’s an application process that you go through, but we are a data-driven accelerator. So the process is not like other accelerator programs where you apply and sometimes you have to wait months and sometimes go through several interviews. Our platform analyzes your application. So it’s a short form application that we take.

And we also look at data readily available to us within, you know, that’s publicly available on your company. Based on that, our engine makes a determination whether you’re a good fit for a program or not. If you are, it will give you your acceptance and you’re able to enroll immediately and actually get access to our platform, to our program. That same day, you know, so if you apply in the morning, you can be in office hours and start talking to us in the afternoon, which is really unheard of in terms of what we do. In the cases that our platform is not able to really decide whether you’re a good fit or not, it will send a message back that saying, somehow, for our team needs to speak with you. And then we do have a normal interview process that we go through that we talk to the founder to make sure the alignment is there.

Anthony Codispoti : So the process would be, I’m a founder, I’ve got an idea. My idea is for a new kind of calculator. Yeah. And so I go in there and I get some information about me, my background, and I explain what the calculator idea is. To some extent, yeah. To some extent. Okay.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : And then you can upload your pitch deck, you know, we’ll analyze that. You’re talking about what kind of company you have, are you raising money, how much funding do you currently have? You know, it’s a short form question there, but it’s enough information to be able to see whether you’re a good fit. Keep in mind, our goal is to, and what we do, we support founders from ideation up to Series A. Most of our founders are in pre-seed and seed stage, you know, so most founders are really looking for fundraising.

It’s one of the main reasons. Some are looking to scale, but we’ve had anywhere from a founder saying, I have an idea, doesn’t make sense to build a company versus those that have already, you know, close to raising their Series A, doing $4 million of revenue in the program, looking for introductions in the corporate world in terms of being able to scale their company. So our selection criteria is broader, and it’s the broader on purpose because our goal is to really support founders at scale globally. This is why, you know, we structured the program as we have.

It’s more inclusive, but, you know, there’s still a process you’ve got to go through in order to be able to get accepted and join the program. And I’m proud to say, I think we’re in 80 countries now, so it’s been amazing. I mean, meeting founders from all across the globe has been an absolute pleasure.

Anthony Codispoti : Is it challenging to work with folks in different countries because, I don’t know, maybe the regulations there are different? Or is the stuff that you’re helping them with sort of not at that level?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Regulation is not that much of a concern because of how we’re helping them. Fundamentally, every business that you’re trying to build requires some fundamental structure, right? Fundraising is pretty much the same everywhere. What’s different is the mindset of the investors. Their processes are different. Yes, regulations are different, but if how you speak to an investor is pretty much the same no matter where you’re investing. You’ve got to really understand things from the investor’s mindset. Why are they investing in your company?

It’s not because you built the best thing since last year, it’s because you’re solving a problem that needs to be solved and that market is willing to accept your product, accept your solution, and bear the price that you’re selling. And that’s very common, regardless of where you’re at. Now, different parts of the world have different challenges. The markets are different, the price points are different, the types of solutions that are acceptable are different, and the types of problems we see are very different. One of the things that was really pleasantly surprised by when I started seeing a lot of companies come to us from Africa, countries like Kenya, Nigeria, and so on and so forth, doing a lot of development around fintech. And it turns out that just money transfer, doing commerce in those regions is extremely difficult. So there’s a lot of innovative founders in those regions looking for ways to be able to help people in terms of being able to transfer. What we take for granted here, I can tell you some money right now, I can go do commerce online without even thinking about it, but those things aren’t readily available to you, to all the challenges that they have.

And seeing some of that stuff is really interesting, being able to see what’s happening in different parts of the world and what people are focusing on. But I haven’t seen regulation be an issue in terms of the conversations that we’ve had. Our founders, obviously, depending on the country that they’re in, they need to be aware of any kind of regulation or legal requirements that they have, but they come to us and ask us, how should we approach investors? What should I do in terms of pricing strategy?

How should I go to market with this product? What does it mean to really analyze the competitive landscape of my company? All from how does an investor looks at it? And that’s really the biggest thing, because founders, they may go pitch a lot. And typically what they hear back is, great job, appreciate it, we’ll get back to you.

That’s the normal response. And so the founders left with this sense of, wow, it is really good, but they don’t hear back. And they’re always wondering why they don’t hear back. So one of the things we do in our program, we actually share what the investors actually think. I look at every founder and every startup and when I speak into them in the office hours that we have, as if I’m a potential investor. And I actually share with them the thoughts that will come to me as if it was evaluating them for a potential investment.

Anthony Codispoti : And that’s, I think, So you kind of take the kid gloves off and you

Peyman Shahmirzadi : give them a little bit of hard gloves? Absolutely, exactly like it is, because I’ve had, for example, founders show me a pitch and I asked them, so what was the result? And they go, well, I pitched this on stage. I’m like, amazing, how did it go?

They’re like, everybody clap for me. Like, fantastic. So what was the results? Well, everybody loved it. Everybody told me I did a fantastic job.

Fantastic. So what were the results? And they go, what, everybody clapped? Afterwards, I had a lot of great feedback.

Fantastic. What were the results? And after a few times, they realized I’m asking the same question over again. They said, well, what do you mean? I’m like, what came afterwards? You got all the pads on the back, you got all the everyone clapping for you. What were the results of the pitch? And they’re like, well, nothing’s happened.

I haven’t heard anything back. I’m like, aha. So what you’re hearing is everybody appreciating that you took the time to come in pitch. But it didn’t resonate enough for anyone to want to speak with you further, to really dive in into your company, to really learn about you, your team, what a problem you’re solving, the product you bring into market.

So the conversation isn’t continuing forward. You know, most investors, and myself included, I got to catch myself once in a while. If I’m out and about and someone pitches to me, typically the response is, thank you, I appreciate it.

I’ll get back to you if there’s an interest. And the reason for that is, if you do say anything that you may be thinking, unless it’s super positive and say, yeah, let’s go have a meeting, the founder typically gets very defensive, right? And wants to justify and rightly so, they want to justify what it is they’re building. And then they’ll come back, well, no, this is actually you misunderstood.

This is what we’re doing. And then what the investor finds themselves in this little back and forth that they don’t want to be a part of. So that’s why most of the times you don’t hear the raw feedback. I mean, unless an investor sitting on a panel for feedback, and we do that by the way, we have those sessions where I bring in investors into what we call practice pitch sessions, and they listen to a pitch, and they provide raw feedback, you know, and they’re so founders are able to hear it, not just from us, but also others.

But typically that does not happen. So typically, it’s, you know, very pointed questions if they’re sitting on the panel. And so we really take the kid gloves off, as you said, and we tell it like it is.

Anthony Codispoti : And that’s really what they that’s what they need to hear.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Absolutely. And I tell them it’s a safe space. There’s no judgment. But if you want to really hear, you know, what thought of what investors see or hear when you’re speaking, this is what’s happening. And it’s quite eye opening for many of them.

Anthony Codispoti : I mean, that gives them a chance to pivot to make adjustments, if to maybe abandon the idea of if it leads them to the conclusion that it’s this isn’t worth pursuing. But at a minimum, they could make modifications to whether

Peyman Shahmirzadi : it is, you know, actually, what’s a couple of times what I’ve had actually companies that are doing great come in to see whether they want to raise money. Right. And you know, I always tell every founder raising money needs to be strategic. And all money is not good money. And every, every money yet comes with strings.

So you got to kind of remember this paradox. So I’ve had founders come in and say like I had one company, in fact, out of Washington, I believe, they were doing, I believe about $4 million of revenue. And they came into our program saying, Okay, we want to raise money. I’m like, why? Well, we’re trying to look to scale faster.

Fantastic. And as they went through the program, they really started understanding what it means to be a venture-backed company and having to deal with investors. And at the end decided, no, no, we’re doing just fine, growing organically. Not only the I do not want to dilute my ownership in the company, I also don’t want to deal with outside parties telling us whether we should go left or right. So that’s a great learning to come in instead of going and spending months and months building pitch decks and pitching and after a year, then deciding whether this is not the right path.

So you can short-circuit all of that. So it’s been a lot of very interesting discussions with a lot of founders. So every founder’s journey slightly different, but there’s a lot of commonality across

Anthony Codispoti : So somebody applies to the program if they’re accepted, they pay a fee. And how much is the fee?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : The application fee is $75. The enrollment fee is $2.75. So, you know, both this $350 for everything that we do. Then there’s no equity, there’s no warrants, there’s none of that stuff.

Anthony Codispoti : So you guys are not taking an ownership interest in any of the, really?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah, we’re doing that on purpose. See a lot of traditional programs, you know, they may not charge an upfront fee, quote unquote, and they’ll bring in a handful of cohort members, 15, 20, whatever it may be. At the end, all those members end up pitching to the program owners themselves and it’s a closed pitch. And then they ended up maybe one person gets a potential investment. And that investment comes in the form of here’s $120,000, but we’re going to keep 30 grand and 35, $40,000 of it for services that we’re going to provide you. So you get, let’s say, $85,000 a cash and we’ll take 10% equity, 12% equity, which is super expensive.

So but in the beginning, you’re like, well, this is a free program I’m getting in, but that’s, I mean, that’s the reason these programs exist. Yes, they do want to help founders, but they’re also looking for ways to invest at very high equity stakes in companies. So we didn’t want to do that. Really, our goal is to really support founders globally, at scale, being able to provide them education, access, advisory, mentorship, in a way that’s never been done before at a scale that’s never been done before. And part of doing that is to not make cost a barrier for them.

Right. So this is why we love our partners. This is why we really work with amazing partners throughout different regions of the globe. And with them, we’re able to really bring down the cost for the founders.

So for $350. And in fact, right now, I think our team is running a May bonus where they can actually even get 50 bucks off the application. The money is not the key thing for us that the founders pay, being able to provide the value to them. But, you know, it’s a, why isn’t it free?

Because free has a very negative connotation to it. You know, if you’re spending a few hundred dollars, you know, at least you feel like, yeah, I need to get my money’s worth out of this. And just by coming and participating, because you invested just a few hundred dollars, you end up seeing the value that we provide. I’ve had many cases where the founders spend one hour in office hours with us.

And they said, I just made my money back. And then some, but on top of it, we have like over $2 million in perks, discounts and credit from AWS and Microsoft and Carda and HubSpot and all these other amazing organizations. So it’s part of our program. We can come in and apply for those. So the money is not a barrier that definitely

Anthony Codispoti : we I was going to say at $350 a pop, there’s not much of a revenue incentive for you guys to provide the service. But it sounds like you’ve also got partners on the back end that are helping you do.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : And I keep in mind, we’re also a venture back company. We work with LPs a lot. And so we have investors ourselves. And also we’re working at scale, right? My goal is today we have almost 800 founders that have been part of our program. I, you know, I want to service 10,000 founders, imagine those numbers, right, to be able to really make an impact.

So one of the things that’s happening in the ecosystem that maybe not be readily knowledgeable by everyone that there’s over 4 million founders every year around the globe that are building companies looking for support. About half of them end up applying for accelerator program 1.6 million, I think the last time I saw the report. And out of 1.6 million, 48,000 or so get accepted into an accelerator program. And half of them 18, 20,000 or so actually get any sort of investment or help. So what happens to the 97% the 98% they really don’t have a way to be able to get the support that they and there’s amazing innovation, amazing founders all around the globe. And that’s why we’ve done what we’re doing because we saw there’s absolutely a need to be able to support this ecosystem in such a way to be able to really help these founders. I mean, I can get a founder sitting in India and Australia and connect them to investors sitting in Silicon Valley.

And they don’t have to travel anywhere. They can learn from these folks, they can learn from the expertise that we have around us. And the knowledge base that’s available. Whereas most traditional programs say, okay, you need to fly out come in and sit in the conference room for 10 weeks. And at the end of it, we’ll see if you’re one of the selected companies. And if not, then thank you for being a part of our program. That doesn’t work at scale. Right.

Anthony Codispoti : So that there’s a huge underserved population of startup founders. You said it’s only but like 3% that are actually sort of getting the attention that they’re seeking. So you’ve huge untapped potential.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I’m there. Don’t get me wrong. They’re amazing programs out there like YC, for example, they’re a global brand. They’re one of the amazing program and any founder that asked me I said, by all means apply to them. See if you can get into that program. They get 10s and 10s of thousands of applications, but only select, you know, less than 1% I believe, 1% or so. So if you can get into a program like that, absolutely. There’s many, I mean, I don’t knock any of the other programs for anything that they’re doing.

I think they’re all valuable. There’s so many founders that need support. But in terms of being able to support founders at scale in a different way, the traditional model just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work in terms of numbers. And given that we’re a technology company and being able to add all this expertise and tools and infrastructure on top of it, we’re able to have founders in a way that frankly…

Anthony Codispoti : Are most of the companies that are applying to your accelerator tech related?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : No, actually, I’ve had a candy company out of Turkey. I’ve had a water balling company here in the US. So we’re industry agnostic on purpose. Any industry that you’re in, we can find a way to support you depending on the support that you need. Now, there are some companies that they don’t lend themselves well, like for example, consulting firms. If you’re consulting firms and you say, I want to raise money, well, that doesn’t work because consulting firms, as I’m sure you know, they are human driven.

In order to be able to do more projects, you need more people typically. So they don’t scale in a natural way that a tech company would, or even a CPG company that’s product oriented would. So from an investor perspective, they’re not as attractive. For an investor to invest in a consulting firm, they want to be a part of that business. They want to be a business partner, not a traditional investment.

Anthony Codispoti : But besides that, any type of industry that we can definitely support. Okay, so I joined this accelerated program. It’s a 12 week program. So I’m going to guess it probably starts like once every month or so. So I kind of wait for the or it starts today whenever I want to get in.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : As soon as you enroll, you can start

Anthony Codispoti : regardless of the day and there’s online education and I get access to advisors to ask questions, office hours, that kind of a thing.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah, yeah, let me let me describe it a little bit more detail. So you submit your application, if your application is accepted, you can enroll immediately. Once you enroll, you get full access to the platform. And then you can come join the office hours. We have office hours twice. This is also very unique to us.

So twice per day. So we’re in California. I’m in LA. We run the office hours at 8am and 2pm Pacific time zone. Five days a week, unless there’s exceptions like yesterday was a holiday.

So we canceled it. But in the one year period, you got access to over 500 hours of office that you can come into and talk about anything regarding your company. I had a founder earlier today talking about I am looking to build this company doing this. Does this make sense? So we had that conversation versus another one that says we’re already in revenue. We need to scale faster. I’ve had conversations regarding co-founders, good, bad, and the ugly.

All kinds of challenges, legal challenges, LLCs versus secords, all of these activities. So the program is structured for you to be able to join immediately. Yes, there’s a 12-week accelerator component to it. But as I mentioned earlier, one whole year of support. And it’s based on your schedule, not our schedule. That’s also something very unique.

Anthony Codispoti : What does that mean one year of support? What’s the accelerator? The 12-week accelerator program is over. What is it that I continue to get access to?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Good question. So after you graduate, now you can take three months to graduate. If you’re ready, you can graduate in less than a month. We’ll analyze where you’re at. If you’re ready to graduate, let’s say you’re a late-state seed company and everything is set.

You’re really looking to scale revenue. We can get you graduated very fast. Once you graduate though, as part of our graduation, by the way, you attend a demo day that’s inclusive. We invite everybody. It’s not just to us. So we typically have a few hundred people intended from investors, corporates, and as well as government agencies that we work with. But beyond that, after that, we continue supporting you.

I have founders that reach out to me and say, I’m looking to do a partnership with someone. So can we talk about it? Does this make sense? I had a founder say, hey, I got a term sheet for potential investment. Can we review the terms together? So we’re providing that as an ongoing support infrastructure. Not only that, we also continue promoting you. We share your success stories on our website. We started actually a podcast to be able to talk to these founders to share their stories a little bit more and continue promoting them.

As well as being on our platform, you get immediate visibility within the ecosystem. You can go to our website under portfolio. You can see all of our graduated startups, pitch videos, pitch decks, pitch core profiles. Investors are looking at those. As well as we’re partnerships with companies such as DELUM where we’re integrating our benchmarking scoring system and collaborating with them. So that over 25,000 investors on their platform, they’re able to see startup scoring, startups benchmarking. So as you maintain your company’s profile on our platform, you get even broader visibility as well as all the support that comes.

Anthony Codispoti : So that large network of investors can come in and they can do a search and, hey, I’m looking for something in blockchain or AI.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : You can do that on our platform, but you can also do it on platforms such as DELUM’s platform where all these angel groups are and they use that platform for their back office. And as startups come in to apply for a particular angel group, that’s on that platform. That angel group is able to see, oh, what is this company’s, the startup’s pitch scores, what is their report look like? And that streamlines the entire due diligence. So from the founder’s perspective, it’s like being able to stay within our platform, our ecosystem, to continually maintain it.

And but I think the biggest value founders get post-graduation is the live support that they also get from us. I mean, they can come into office hours every single day if they wanted to, talking about every aspect of their company. I mean, that’s really unheard of to be able to just have someone to bounce ideas off of, to validate things, to review in some cases contracts.

I mean, we don’t necessarily do a deep dive in most things, but in whatever we can cover in office hours. And I have many, many founders that take advantage of that throughout the year.

Anthony Codispoti : So the funding doesn’t actually come from pitch score itself. It comes from your network of partners and investors.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah. So we have what we call pitch score capital, which is comprised of different angel groups that we work in, different angels, different investors. And their thematic thesis is based on the particular group that we’re working in. And they’ll come and say, I mean, last session that I had with them, they said, we’re looking for MedTech, Biotech companies in the US doing this particular set of criteria. We had startups meeting that requirement. So we brought them into a session to pitch to them directly to see if they were interested in investing. We basically provide input and all the due diligence needed for them to be able to make a decision. But beyond that, see, that’s what one venue in terms of being able to raise money.

There’s so many other opportunities. And our goal is to get our founders ready to be able to go on any stage in any pitch competition and pitch. We work on a five minute pitch on in a non vertical based pitch setting.

And that pitch, the way we structured it, you can, it’s kind of like an accordion, as I call it. If you go in and someone says you have 15 minutes, you can extend it. Someone says you have three minutes, you can shorten it to the key points that they want to cover. But that baseline five minute pitch really allows you to learn how to speak to founders, how to talk in terms of what the, how best to communicate what it is you’re doing so you can resonate with investors.

So that’s, I think, the biggest thing. And we’ve had many founders raise money, $3 million closing seed rounds. You see, actually, we’re starting to do a new page on our website to share all these success stories, pre seed close 150k, 350k.

You know, one of our founders, I mentioned, he came into the program looking to raise $3 million and he had raised 2.7 of it immediately after graduating. So, you know, there’s many success stories like that through the support that that will provide. So, and then we’re really proud of that being able to really get our founders ready to be able to really take advantage of what’s happening in the ecosystem.

Anthony Codispoti : So you kind of touched on this, you know, each investor or investor group, they’ve got their own thesis, they’ve got their own thing that they’re looking for. But aside from sort of those specific criteria, sort of big picture, what is it that you think investors are looking for in a startup idea? And what are they looking for in a founder?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Good question. Biggest thing is whether they can make money, honestly. You know, I tell this to our founders too, it’s like, it doesn’t matter if you’re an angel, family office, micro VC, VC, the reason you’re investing, unless you’re friends and family, is because you’re looking to see whether this is the right founder with the right company for you to make money. That’s what they’re looking for. Now, their thematic thesis kind of defines what that looks like, whether what industry is in what stage they’re in.

But fundamentally, it really comes down to that. You know, you asked about the founder, so what are the traits of the founder? Is the founder someone that has history of building companies or is this the first time?

And they’re both okay. But if you had a founder that’s a serial entrepreneur with exits in the past, obviously it increases the chance. See, the way I’d like to talk about this is there’s two levers that every investor looks at. One is risk, one is potential success. So as we’re evaluating companies, it’s like, okay, what’s the risk of you failing, me losing my money?

What’s the chance of you making it? And I’ll be able to make some money. So these two levers, I’ve had other investors tell me for me is fear. Fear of me losing my money and my greed of missing out.

It’s all the same. And you know, regardless of the type of investor that you are, it really comes down to these two things. And the things founders need to realize is every startup is simply a deal to an investor.

It’s just an opportunity. And what is there many of is many, many startups. So you could, our demo days, we have 15 startups pitching each time. You’re right. So there’s, and as I mentioned earlier, there’s 4 million startups globally out there.

So there’s many of you. So when you want to pitch, you want to make sure that you really understand the perspective of the investor and put the best pitch forward for it to resonate. And in their mind, and within five minutes, what’s the risk profile? What’s your success chances as compared to the other companies that I’m looking at. So an angel may end up looking at 25, 30 companies within a few months, write a check for one, you know, VC pool may be bigger because they might have 10 venture associates, each one may go analyze 20, 30 companies, but then at the end it comes down to, we’re going to write, you know, two checks a year, five checks, or sorry, another year, but a quarter, maybe, you know, so, but it all comes down to the same thing. So that’s the biggest thing we really work with our founders are to really understand that perspective. Why we say when you start your presentation, it shouldn’t be all about you, it should be about your customer and the problem you’re trying to solve for your customer.

Because as an investor, unless I believe that this is a real problem, it’s a big problem, the pain of it is really high enough, then why should I keep listening? So it’s these type of factors that we really look for. And so the founder themselves though, as an investor, I really look for a founder that’s really their vision, as you get to know them, both the vision that they have, their work ethic that they have, what they’re thinking of both today and tomorrow, how they’re thinking about it matters, and also how coachable they are. Right. I mean, that’s sometimes you meet founders that are dead set in their way.

And even if you try to help, you see there’s the resistance there. So some investors are back offish when they see that. So, you know, but those are some of the key elements that I think every investor really looks for.

Anthony Codispoti : Payment, what’s the biggest mistake that you see most founders make?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Not understanding the perspective of an investor, not thinking of the world from the viewpoint of their company only. You know, really, everything is about them and their company. not really being able to articulate who their customers are and what problem they’re having.

Why wouldn’t an investor care? Really missing that gap. I think that’s really key. And a lot of it’s not to their fault because if they were never on the other side of the table, it’s hard to put yourself there.

But you should be able to do that, at least with your customer, maybe not an investor. So not seeking help, that’s the other one. I see many, many startups or founders that after three or four years of trying it on their own, they finally say, you know what, maybe I should go get help. Maybe I should go get some advisors. Maybe I should go get some mentors. Maybe I’m missing something. When you’re first starting out, you may be coming from an amazing background.

Obviously there’s exceptions, right? They’re the one percent that they leave an amazing job, start something, and through the networks they’re able to really hit it out of the park. But generally speaking, most founders, when they first start, their immediate thought is, I know exactly what’s going to happen. If I build it, they will come. This is such a fallacy.

This is such a, not everybody has that kind of luck, frankly, and it’s luck, you know. A great example of that is, what was that app? The app during the COVID days. Oh my God, the one that came out with the whole radio shows that everybody was listening to, Clubhouse. Clubhouse app. You know, I was on that platform.

It came out, and it’s amazing. Sometimes these things happen at the right time and they go viral. And everybody gets on that and all of a sudden all these crazy valuations.

And so when Clubhouse came out right during when COVID started, we’re all stuck at home. And I get an invite from a friend of mine, you should join this platform. Okay, what is it? Let’s go check it out. And I go there and I was on there every day. I invited her. This is amazing. Let’s come in, let’s have conversations on all this stuff. And I got on many stages, I was talking about all kinds of stuff.

But when the world started going back to normal, no one was going back. And one of the things that I wondered when I was on that platform, how is this company going to make money? They were getting a massive user base, but for free.

Great model. But then they started, okay, maybe we want to charge users coming in. No, that doesn’t work. Maybe we want to do charge people that holds premium rooms.

They charge for other people’s to attend. And then as soon as they started really looking at this stuff, they’re, everything started falling. I haven’t been on that platform for many years. I really don’t know what the status is.

Hopefully they’re doing okay. But see, there’s things like that, you know, being able to really how you build a company for the right reason being able to really understand the customer and being able to really define what that customer’s pain is. And that pain is that high enough for them to come and look for a solution. You know, one of the slides that we actually don’t have in our flow is a slide called why now?

And I, you know, if you go to research online and say, what are some of the key slides you need to have? That’s one that always pops. So you got to say, have a slide, say why now? And I completely disagree with that. Because if you have, you articulate the problem from the perspective of your customer. So as an investor, I understand who’s having the problem.

If you’re a B to C is the few number of people is it or is it millions of people, if you’re a B to B is a few companies or is it hundreds of thousands of companies? What type of problem they’re having? What’s the pain that this problem’s causing them for me to be able to say, yeah, this problem is real is big enough and it makes sense. Then I know why it needs to be solved now.

Anthony Codispoti : And that’s really the way that you think about this is framing in towards of what, what problem are you solving? Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. How big of a pain is it for those people who have this problem?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Otherwise, if it’s not painful enough, then why would they want a solution? Right? It’s like, you know, sometimes we call it as, are you offering vitamin or you offering medicine? Vitamin could be nice, but the medicines because somebody’s sick. So in the same analogy, you may create in a product that a company may look and say, okay, this could be nice to have, but it’s not a necessity. You know, if I had extra money, extra budget, yeah, maybe I’ll do this, but it’s not core requirement. But if my business is failing, my sales aren’t improving, my op-ex is too high, I’m in danger of really losing a lot of millions of dollars potentially, or, you know, then I need a solution.

I need the medicine, right? Then, you know, who’s providing that for us? You know, so that is all of these aspects. And this is actually the conversation you and I are having is what we end up having during office hours. You know, when founders start approaching us and talking to us about what they’re doing and being able to speak with them from this perspective, and they go, wow, never even thought about it that way.

Anthony Codispoti : So you obviously get to see all kinds of businesses. I mean, you’ve got probably, you know, one of the best sort of big picture views of what’s going on in the startup space because of what you guys are doing at scale. Are there particular trends or emerging technologies that you’re seeing and or are particularly excited about?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Well, I think what I see is what everybody sees today. AI is very dominant in just about every industry. Now, whether it’s real AI or what people think is AI is a different conversation, but I’ve seen some really interesting stuff happening around AI that really solves big problems. I had founder that recently joined us when what he’s doing is built an AI to be able to digest cold case data and from law enforcement or insurance, right, being able to pull in massive amounts of data, whether it’s cold or whether it’s active and being able to very quickly provide actionable insights. That’s huge value, you know, and being able to really help that organization to be able to get to a conclusion on a particular case, sometimes in a matter of days or weeks, if not months or years. Huge value, you know, being able to around AI and robotics is another place that I’m seeing a lot of innovation. Really interesting stuff.

One of our companies builds robotics fixtures for dental dentistry schools. This was really interesting for me. I mean, when I met this founder, I was like, why are you doing this? He goes, well, do you realize that most dentists, and he’s out of Canada, but most dentists, when they become dentists, when they graduate, they actually rarely have worked inside of humans’ mouth. What do you mean? He goes, yeah, once they’ve worked in a dental office, they get to practice in people’s mouth.

Like, you’ve got to be kidding me because, no, that’s very prevalent. And by the way, he saw this because his spouse became a dentist, went through this. And he’s got a background in robotics and AI and all this technology. He goes, well, we can fix that. We actually build robotic fixtures that make the human mouth. He’s able to provide it to schools, universities, dental universities, for the students to be able to actually pretend like they’re working in a human mouth. So that’s the kind of thing I love. It’s being able to see a real problem, especially as human implication and building technology around it to solve.

I have another founder that’s actually very close to graduating. They built an AR platform for doing surgeries, being able to really look at the human. So you wear the goggles and being able to see the patient and actually see what the doctor needs to do from a VR standpoint before they actually start.

Anthony Codispoti : They’re looking at an actual patient with the AR setup or they’re looking at just a virtual patient.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : So very, very interesting tech. There’s another one actually. See, the human element to me is key. One of our other companies built a VR platform for training for the construction workers. People working with heavy machinery, heavy equipment on construction sites. Why did they build this company? Well, because they knew someone that got hurt very badly.

So they saw, well, we have a training issue here. And those are the kind of things that really resonate because it’s not only it’s a real problem, but it’s also a human problem. And being able to build technology around it, that can really help. So those are the things I’m excited about. Anytime I’ve seen companies that really look fine areas that from a human perspective, there’s deficiencies or challenges that technology can solve. I get pretty excited.

Anthony Codispoti : How about maybe one of your earlier, I’m going to call them students, one of your earlier accelerator participants that has now gone on to find a pretty substantial level of success.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Well, the one I mentioned that raised 2.7 million, it was in cohort one. I actually met…

Anthony Codispoti : Did you say more about what her business is?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah, yeah, they’re a climate tech company. They built technology in order to be able to work with manufacturers to be able to really analyze their carbon footprint and be able to help them reduce their overall statistical data behind what that manufacturer is doing and be able to help them reduce what it is they’re generating in terms of from climate impact standpoint. And I actually met him while I was at Germany. The German government at NRW is one of the partners that we work with and we actually took a delegate of startups there to be able to be at an event. And this founder was there from an Indian delegation, Schender. And when I met him there, we’re trying to raise $3 million to take this company to the next level.

And through our conversation, they ended up joining. And one of the biggest things that we worked on during the part, but it was part of the accelerator in the first cohort, was on his pitch. Getting it to resonate with investors, you know, being able to really articulate when you have such high growth rate in a financial projection, how best to communicate that. And he’s been doing great. In fact, he showcased on our website, the company is living since you can see them on our website and see what they’re doing.

Anthony Codispoti : And we’ve referenced the website a couple of times for those folks listening. It’ll be in the show notes, but it’s peachscore.com. Peach like the fruit with score. You mentioned before you’ve got your own podcast where you’re highlighting some success stories.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah, we have a few episodes under our belt. It’s been an interesting thing. What’s it called? Where would people find it? Right now you can find it on the peach score YouTube page. You can see it’s we’re calling it the honest hour podcast by peach score.

So it’s currently on the peach score YouTube page. And, you know, for us, we decided to do this for a couple of reasons. One, showcasing the companies is really important. Getting visibility to our for our companies as much as possible, you know, and also sharing their stories. One of the things you typically find in most conversations with entrepreneurs is talking to people that have made, so they have some notoriety. They made their millions. They built many amazing companies potentially, or they had that one major success, which is great, which is always really interesting to hear from them. What we wanted to do was look at this slightly different. What if I talk into founders that are going through the journey, they’re in their pre seed stage, they’re in their seed stage, they’re going through trying to understand how to do product market fit. What are the challenges that they’re facing?

What is that? So when you talk to someone that’s already built a hundred million dollar company, they’ll refer to some of those things, but their mindset and where they’re at in the world is different.

Anthony Codispoti : They’re past them. They’re not in the wrong moment of it.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : They’re not in the wrong. That’s the best way to do. They’re not in that wrong moment of it versus a founder that’s going, wow, I got six months runway left. I got three months runway left. What should I do?

How do I get approach product market fit? How much money should I raise? Or should I even raise my, all these things that I need a co-founder, should I get one or not get one? I need to build the team. I need to go hire someone out of Amazon and they cost $300,000. How do I raise money to do that? Should all of these things, being able to have those conversations, I think is very valuable.

Anthony Codispoti : Do you find it easy to get founders to talk about those present moment challenges? Well, as a founder, especially in a startup mode, like you want to present a good face and like, hey, like things are going well. We’ve got this bit of progress and

Peyman Shahmirzadi : now you’re kind of asking them to. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. But so far, I think we have three sessions on the robot. Okay. Yeah, I just, in fact, I just did the third session on last Friday and they’re short. They’re like 20, 30 minute sessions. So, you know, I see what I’m mostly interested in is them, what they think about the process, what it’s not necessarily their, their co. So we talk about why they built the company, what problem they’re solving, but more about from the human side of it. How do they see this? Why do they believe having like advisors is a good thing? What are the challenges that they’re facing? And, you know, and that they feel like this particular challenge that I’m facing today is a lot more important than the things I was worried about even months ago.

I was stressing over things that I shouldn’t have been. Right. It’s those, those things that I think are key.

I mean, you’re right. And a goal isn’t, let’s talk about all dirty laundry quote unquote, but it’s more about, you know, this talk about some of the things that you’re going through in terms of how it’s helped you, but as well as how it can help others. You know, like one of the questions I typically ask is, you know, as a founder, advices comes along a lot. You know, you know, what’s the value of views do they see in getting advisors, getting mentors? And then what do they do when they get conflict in answers? You know, you can easily grab 10 people around you that tell you 10 different things. How do you decide which one to take? Right.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, my hats off to you if you can get them to talk about sort of the present moment challenges. It was something that I kind of thought about doing early on with this podcast. And I realized that that’s sort of a tough spot to put somebody in, you know, on air because, you know, then you’re being super vulnerable in the moment. This is actually a really good lead in for my favorite question that I always ask my guests on this interview, which is what’s the serious challenge that you’ve gone through in the past? Payment. Yeah. How did you get through it? What did you learn? You know, how has it made you a better person today?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Well, when I built my first startup, I failed. So, and, you know, I built that company after I left the corporate world thinking I want to be an entrepreneur. I’ve walked up the corporate ladder many times in different areas and I want to try my hand up having my own business.

And that’s where actually the thought came in. I want my own business. And then I got into it because someone I knew proposed an idea and I said, sure, that sounds good. Let’s go try this knowing what I didn’t know. Now I would have done that so differently. I went into it very blindly, kind of believing and trusting things because they sounded good, not because of the hard data behind it. You know, picking team members that, you know, because of knowing them, not because of whether there’s alignment in terms of building a company and the strategic vision of it. So those things, you know, and during that whole thing, you know, started a company with few thousand dollars, made, you know, a few tens of k’s of dollars.

But at the end, it wasn’t going to get to where I wanted to, you know, what the vision I had in mind because of how it started. Because of the infrastructure that we built within that company in terms of scaling the customer base. You know, I learned about the customer base.

I thought I knew them, but six months into I started really knowing them. I’m like, wait a minute. This what we’re trying to do. This market can’t pay for it.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you be more specific about what it was that you learned?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah, we, the idea was to be able to serve the real estate agents that really, I should also phrase this is like back 15 years ago. So this is not recent. So back then, marketing was really shifting towards online marketing. A lot of the realtors that were in the business for 20, 30 years, they weren’t able to adopt, you know, adapt, I should say, excuse me, that whole marketing shift. So us having technical background, we said, okay, we can help them. We can build their online presence. We can be their marketing arm. You know, back then agents would get like a single page with a little picture and like a paragraph about them on their broker’s website. So we can change that we can give them their own identity and all this.

So that’s that was the approach. The, what we ended up, I ended up finding out is that most realtors fake it till they make it, you know, as many do there, they may drive Mercedes, but they’re not going to spend, you know, thousands on the market. They’re not going to spend thousands of dollars on websites, right? So understanding the market from the customer’s perspective is something out on the hardware there, you know, assumptions that I had made going into that business. As time went by, I started validating those assumptions and realizing which ones are true, which ones isn’t, you know, so towards that process, it really provided a different perspective in terms of what on-trends are. What entrepreneurship is and what’s the right way to approach it, you know, so and now I use that, you know, when I talk with our founders, I mean, like this morning I was speaking with the founder that just joined us describing to me the product that they’re building. And when I shifted the conversation towards the customer, I’m like, okay, if you’re the customer, these are the questions that would ask, how would you answer it? You would pause and say, well, I’m not sure. I got to think about that. It’s like, let’s go do that research. All right. So now I have like a founder that came and said, hey, I’m running surveys with different groups.

And I got two ideas for a business trying to see which one makes more sense. It’s like, amazing. Right.

I think so. That one particular experience for me, but it didn’t by any means remove my desire to go into entrepreneurship. You know, I knew that’s something I wanted to do. But what it morphed into you was not just building my own companies, but finding a way to help other founders. You know, one of the things I did very early in my career was as I was finishing my degree, I actually did an internship at Hewlett Packard. And they asked me to go back to my alma mater and teach there as part of a sponsorship from HB.

So I ended up becoming a like a quote unquote professor teaching a engineering course. And I did that for several years while I was living up there. And I really enjoyed that. And I never realized that about myself that, you know, having this in a, and it was really an interesting thing for me because in fact, the first semester I did it. The people in the class were my friends, my roommate and my ex professors. Now they’re sitting in front of me and I’m trying to teach them. And I was like, man, what can I teach these guys? And I realized just because I was in the industry for, I think at that time, nine months, what I was exposed to was so far ahead that what they had seen in academia, that there was value that I could see that. Okay, we’re starting the conversation here on day one by the time the semester ended, what knowledge I was able to partake. And that’s always stuck with me. So now, I mean, one of the things for us to go from just a pure benchmarking scoring system to add this accelerate program, add all this value, all this education into what we offer founders. It’s kind of a very interesting, you know, 360 moment for me.

Anthony Codispoti : Excuse me. So when you were going through that first startup, how did you get to the point of realizing this isn’t going to work? Was there somebody from the outside that was sort of like shining a light for you? Was it a sudden realization for you? Was it like a slow burn where you kind of eventually got comfortable with the fact that,

Peyman Shahmirzadi : hmm, what we’re doing here is it working? It became, I’m a quick study. And after several months, I realized this isn’t going to work mainly because the co-founder I had, our thoughts about being a building a company was very different. You know, his mind, you know, nothing wrong with it. It’s just, you know, everybody has their way, their thoughts behind how to build a company.

And what I had envisioned and what he had envisioned was slightly different. And not only that, the pressures of, you know, leaving a high paying job and building a company. Now you’re not, you’re leaving off your savings. So it’s like, okay, how much can I continue this before it can take off?

Will it take off? You know, and then seeing the dynamics with my business partner at that time, it became very evident to me that this isn’t going to work long term. I either got to completely pivot the company, build it differently, maybe going to other markets as well. And also, you know, from a company formation, from a partnership standpoint, that wasn’t going to work. So, you know, after, you know, I think it was nine months or so, I realized that this is not going to be as effective as I had thought.

Anthony Codispoti : Was there an emotional component there for you to deal with or were you being cold and calculated and like, ah, next thing? No, but it was mutual.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : But it wasn’t just me. It was, we both said this, I look at this is not going to work because of honestly, and what drove it was we can’t feed two households with this company.

Anthony Codispoti : Maybe not emotional between each other, but was there like an emotional component for you? No, no, no.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : You were able to separate that. Oh, yeah, that, that, I’ve never been emotional that way whatsoever. I mean, business is business. Life is life. I mean, for me, it’s got to make sense to invest your energy someplace, right? I mean, you invest, you know, all day long in terms of your energy, your, you know, your work. I don’t want to say it’s your life, but it’s a huge component of your life, right? You know, where you spend it, you know, it’s not only with your family. It’s not with your friends.

It’s like doing it. And when you’re building a company, it’s not just nine to five or eight to five, right? It’s nights, weekends, holidays, doesn’t matter. So, I mean, yesterday was a holiday and I was working, you know, so you have to be comfortable with that. You have to be okay with that. And if you realize that it’s not working, you have to be okay with pulling the plug, you know, so I mean, for me, I got to really believe in something.

I’m going to do, I don’t let go. I don’t bend the knee easily. But when I realize, okay, this is, this is not going to work. I don’t believe that it’s going to work. Once the belief is gone, then it’s immediate for me.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s pretty clean cut for you. So, up to this point, what are the biggest growth levers that you’ve been able to pull for Peach Score? What has contributed the most to that growth in the numbers of members? Absolutely. As soon as you guys added that. Absolutely.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : No, no, no. See, I mean, we built a company around the benchmarking scoring system, which, I mean, it’s a core part of what we do, right? But that by itself, it’s like, how do we get scale in terms of globally people recognize this as something they need? Where they need is, we need to help people. We need to really help founders in all aspects of them building their business. And that realization was absolutely huge. I mean, I remember the day vividly when the founder called me, when Alex called me and said, what do you think if you did this? And, you know, we talked for days trying to really understand, you know, and we didn’t want to do it the same.

And there’s, you go search online for accelerators, incubators, I mean, the lists are limitless globally. So the differentiation was one thing, but the value that was to me to us was really, really huge. The value that we can provide founders, now we can truly help them. You know, I mean, that that what I mean, it was, it was like, wow, this is it. You know, like for me, that was really huge. How do most people find you, Paymon? You know, personally or Pete’s score?

Anthony Codispoti : No, Pete’s score. Yeah. Pete’s score. Well, just, you know, look up Pete’s score. Pete’s score.com is the best way to find us. Sorry, let me rephrase the question. How do most people become aware of Pete’s score? So that you guys run in Facebook ads?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Is it from a marketing standpoint? From a marketing perspective. First, it’s through our partnerships. We love partnerships. I mean, if you look on our websites right now, it says Pete’s score plus DLUM. DLUM is a massive organization around supporting angel groups out of Stony. They’re one of our key partners. We also, we announced partnerships quite regularly because partnerships are key for business. Having the right partners can really elevate you. See, one of the challenges that every start, I mean, Pete’s score, you know, we’re a fairly young company. You know, one of the things that every young company has a challenge of is exactly that. How do people find you? Right? My goal is for anyone that around the world that says, okay, we need help.

Where should we go? Then I think, well, the YAC or Pete’s score. That’s what I want.

I want us, right now, actually, I think if you search for accelerators and chat, your PTR name comes up pretty high. It’s not the highest. You know, so getting our name recognition, getting people to know who we are is really important. And this is true for every startup. So to answer your question from a marketing standpoint, partnerships, that’s a great vehicle for any founder, any startup. You build the right partnerships. And see, I look at partnerships as building bridges, but I look at it slightly different. So partnerships, you typically say there needs to be a win-win. Absolutely. But I look at it and say there need to be a win-win-win. Three wins.

Well, how is that? Well, I need to provide a win to my partner. They need to provide a win to me. But combined, we need to provide a win to the ecosystem, to the startup community. And those are the type of synergetic partnerships that we look for. Companies that are completely aligned in terms of the vision that we have, in terms of the value and the support that we want to offer founders globally. And when you do that, your brand of earnest really rises.

Anthony Codispoti : It sounds to me like, especially with the introduction of the Accelerator program more recently, that you guys are already offering tremendous value and services to your members. What does the future look like? Are there other services that you want to offer? Is it sort of like we’ve got a core group of services where we just want to get the word out more?

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Well, no, there’s definitely that. We want to continue getting the word out. But no, I envision being able to have founders be able to utilize PIT score from the time they think of a company all the way onto Series A and beyond, and every aspect of it. We’ve been able to tie it to financial aspects of their being able to, through our partners, being able to open bank accounts, being able to manage their cap table, being able to all kinds of different things.

This is the thing I love. Because we’re a tech company, we’re not a services company purely. Because of that, we’re able to say, okay, how else can we help a founder? So one of the things that we just did, we introduced, I think I mentioned that earlier in our conversation, an AI-based tool to analyze a PDF pitch deck. So now, in the same way our benchmarking report, now you don’t have to sit down with an advisor.

You don’t have to go find a mentor. You can come onto the PIT score platform, upload your pitch deck, see the report, see what it says. And you can analyze that, go to the educational components that we talk about and then be able to do that. So we can do that in a number of different areas as you’re building your business. What type of entity structure should you have?

What type of bank accounts should you bank? Suggestions for that. Cap table management. All of these, and with through with our partners that we have, being able to bring in solutions all in one place, so you have a dashboard to be able to really manage your business. I definitely can see our company growing in that direction, being able to add more and more value to our founders. And then also for them to be able to gain visibility throughout the investment corporate community via their PIT score profiles.

Anthony Codispoti : And that will, they can renew their membership with us on an annual basis and they’ll continue to stay with us as we continue to support it. Paymon, I’ve just got one more question for you. Before I ask it, I’m going to invite everyone in to go ahead and hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app. Continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Paymon from pitchscore.com. I think we’ve already covered this next point, which is how can folks get in touch with you. It’s pitchscore.com or the pitchscore channel on YouTube.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Any other ways for folks to… There are us on Instagram. I think we’re starting to also get going on X and some of the other platforms. Me personally, the best way to get a hold on me is on LinkedIn. Always the pitchscore is on LinkedIn as well. And my email is paymonuppitchscore.com.

Anthony Codispoti : We’ll include links for all that in the show notes, folks. But last question for you, Paymon. What’s your superpower? How would you characterize that? A jack of all trades.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : I’ve actually had management at work where they call me that. Part of this, I don’t know how much time we have, but I can give you a little story. I graduated high school at 16. So when I graduated that early and my first time immigrant, my parents that came here, they really didn’t go to college. So for them, I was the first child graduating, trying to go…

I had no idea. And I was good in math. So I was like, okay, I need to apply to college because I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do when you graduate high school.

And I literally thought about it that way. So I want to sit down with a counselor. I’m like, I’m going to apply. It’s like, where do you want to apply? I’m like, I don’t know.

I mean, keeping my 16-year-old kid immigrated here. Like, yeah, it was four years, four and a half years earlier. I have no clue about any of this. And my parents didn’t know either. So it was, you know, going to a school counselor and they’re like, well, the school here. So I went to a California State University Sacramento. That’s where I grew up. And they’re like, it’s a great school. What do you want to study? I’m like, I don’t know. I was really want to…

I don’t know. I’m like, well, you’re great in math. You’re doing it. How about you be a math major?

Sure. So I went to Sac State as a math major. And I started meeting friends and they started asking me, what’s your major? I’m like, math.

They’re like, oh, fantastic. I want to be a teacher. I’m like, no, I don’t. Who says I want to be a teacher? And then, you know, I started really saying, okay, I got to really figure this out.

I can’t just let other people decide which way I want to go. And at the time, computers were really starting their personal computers. We’re talking 486s, you know, aging myself there. You know, I started coming out and had a lot of interest in using them. And so I started looking and Sac State actually very interesting school because they had a computer science program and they had started a computer engineering program. Right. And then they obviously had electrical, electronic engineering.

And at first I thought electrical engineering. Right. That’s the thing. But then I met students that graduated and then next fall they were back. And I asked them why they’re like, there’s no jobs. So I’m like, okay, I got to really figure this out. They were like, at that time, electrical engineering was like the fastest growing thing.

So the competition was too high. So then I started looking at computers. Science or engineering, what’s the difference? And I learned computer science. It’s mainly you become a program. You start coding and development engineering.

You get to do both hard branch software and that intrigued me. And that’s been something that’s in me all the time. I’m not satisfied with doing just one thing.

I, you know, it’s a constant growth. I got to learn more. I got to figure new things out. So it’s like, oh, I can do software and hardware. Fantastic.

So roll the clock forward. Now I graduate and I actually got into HP through a sponsored program. That HP was doing where they sent one of their management at the engineering group to teach a new program on ASIC design, custom chip design using Verilog. And they handpicked top 12 students out of the computer engineering program. And I was one of them and they said, you guys need to go into this program. We’re like, why? We’re graduate.

No, no, you guys better go in there. And what we didn’t know was a recruiting mechanism for HP. So most of us got hired into HP during that program. And I actually, at that time, I was doing that class and also in a class that I was writing an operating system for the graduation course requirement. I was really enjoying that.

Anthony Codispoti : Not a piece of software, but a whole operating system.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Yeah, an operating system, of course. And so when I got in it, this was so interesting because when they brought the HP management to talk to us to see who’s a good fit, when they asked me what I wanted to do, what I like doing, I was having so much fun in that, or this class, that’s what I talked about. And they’re like, okay, these guys are hard work folks. Paymon is a software folk. So they actually hired me to go into their software group. And I was like, that’s really interesting.

But I went in and I went in. It was so great because I was able to work in software, in firmware actually, not software, for doing low level code. And I got to do all kinds of new stuff, new innovations there. And then sure enough, nine months later, they asked me to go back and teach, as I mentioned. But then I was like, you know what, I want to do something different.

Imagine this. Two years out of school, I want to do something different. Like, sure, what do you want to do?

I want to do some hardware stuff. So the five years I was at HP, I did almost every engineering job that Division had. And I was able to move around. And that followed me throughout my career.

Anthony Codispoti : Jack of all trades.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : It’s what gives you that 360 view that we were talking about before. So I ended up, you know, throughout my career, been a software engineer, been a hardware engineer. Then I was like, you know, but a lot of it, I got to give credit to the management that I had. Because they’ve given it the opportunity to do it, regardless of whether because it’s very easy to say, no, no, no, we hired you to be this, you stay and doing that.

And they didn’t see it that way. And, you know, those first five years, and even when I left HP, I left HP to the started design center for Philip semiconductors. And when I did that, even there, I was doing different things. And it was like, you know, program management. I got into program management because management came and said, hey, we’ve got this giant project going on multiple sites. There’s nobody managing this whole thing.

Can you go manage this? I’m like, I’ve never done that. They’re like, you figure that’s good. And that’s how I got into program management. And after that was over, they’re like, hey, you know, we need some help in marketing.

You want to come and do it? So I ended up just, and I got this really broad background and experience. And now in Pete’s for, I’m able to talk to founders about all of these different aspects of building their company. So it’s really interesting how some early things in your career end up really helping shape how you can get back and provide value. Anyhow, sorry, long story, but paymon from pscore.com.

Anthony Codispoti : I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Peyman Shahmirzadi : Thank you so much, Anthony. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great discussion.

Anthony Codispoti : Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.