Raising Capital As A Female Founder With Jess Loren

Jason Kirby: Hey everyone, welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. Today I'm excited to have Jess Loren on the show with us, the founder and CEO of Global Objects based out of LA, who actually we met through our newsletter, Fundraising Demystified, when we did a special on Women's Month or what it's like to raise for women in the US. And I'm excited that she's on the show to share her story.

Jess Loren: It's hard, Jason, it's hard. Thanks for reading my email.

Jason Kirby: Well, I am, yeah, definitely want to talk about that and the story of what it's like raising capital as a female entrepreneur in today's market. But I think for, know, to kind of kick things off, I would love for you to kind of tell everyone a little bit about what it's like being in LA as a woman raising capital.

Jess Loren: Being a woman in LA in general is an interesting concept, but being a woman in LA in a startup raising capital, now we're adding levels here, Jason. So, you know, I think it's, we're in the show me, you know, show me, show me, show me city. So I think it's just showing up. You know, I go to every networking event that I could possibly think of and I've created a community.

Jess Loren: So, you know, I operate in the tech space as well as in the entertainment space. So I am a producer by trade first and foremost and then got into tech and entertainment. So I'm in the academy. Yes, I'm an academy member and then I was like I joined the board. So I was able to do that and I organized events for the academy. So then I got into more events and then I'm also on the visual effects society.

Jess Loren: and then also was just recently voted into the board. So I'm now on the board and handle events for visual effects society. And I'm also part of the producers guild. So I really take a stand in becoming integrated into communities, into a sector that I wanna flourish in. So having those connections and being able to ask people, well, I need to get to this person or this person. So on the entertainment side, I've really done an interesting job of getting into the boards and, offering as much as I can to the community. So I have a large studio here in North Hollywood. I open it up quite often for education events and bringing people, and it's all about community.

Jess Loren: On the tech side, taking what I knew in entertainment, created an event called the Production Summit. So kind of bringing in the world of tech and entertainment together. Production Summit, we've been doing it since this year will be our fourth year. And I've worked with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and AMD on that particular event. I also wanted to ingrain myself into tech and find who works in media and entertainment on that side. And obviously what's happening in AI in media is a large conversation across the board. So we talk a lot about those topics in production summit every year as well. So community is very important to me and getting on boards and getting involved.

Jason Kirby: When do you have time to build the company?

Jess Loren: So Jason, I'm also a mother of three. So that is something. So I do have to balance family time and travel time and the company and then my commitments to community and boards. So it's a lot. I think we have agents now, right? Agents. I personally am definitely taking those and using them to the best of my ability and helping with my schedule. I have a lovely project manager assistant and an amazing team. So we just make it work.

Jason Kirby: And, you know, just, I'm sure everyone's curious, like, you know, are you building these agentic AI solutions for yourself? Are you having your team build them for you, hiring them out? Like, how are you creating the time with that kind of schedule and commitments?

Jess Loren: I feel that the best agents can only be built by yourself because you know yourself the best. I actually had an opportunity to speak with his name is John Weisner and he's a global black belt for Microsoft for high performance compute and AI. And he said it best to me the other day. He's like, Jess, co-pilot is the UI for AI. So like the simplistic form. He said he, Satya had said that to him in a crowd. So it's credit to Satya, but I heard it from John.

Jess Loren: But I did want to say, you know, it just really boiled it down for me of like, okay, my user interface, how can I make the best thing for me? Well, only I can do that. So, you know, for mine, I've uploaded five years of emails that I personally wrote prior to, you know, things being able to be written for me. I took as many text messages that I could find that I've written. I've written a book. I uploaded my book.

Jess Loren: So anything that I had crafted or created or presentations that I had done, I put into my particular model. And I have to tell you, it is very good. It has down to, I'm very bubbly and quirky. It knows my jokes and it's done a really great job. So have I deployed it yet to answer my emails? No. But what it does, it can set up a suggested email reply in your inbox and kind of sit in your drafts you can send it out from there. So there's little things that you can set up now that I don't think the everyday person necessarily knows about yet, but it's coming. The robots are coming. The robots are here. I'm ready. Go ahead.

Jason Kirby: I know it's amazing. No, it's just amazing. It's just like for me, it's like, do I find the time to like, you know, get that, you know, get caught up in analysis of like, how do I make this like tweak tweak? And I'm like, okay, this is highest and best use of time. I had like stop myself because it's so cool. So much fun to kind of like go in and try to optimize your digital twin, which we've seen so much content on. I'm like, okay, how do I, how do I go about doing this? Then next thing I'm buried, you know, trying to crank out things that actually, you know, keep the lights on.

Jess Loren: Yeah.

Jess Loren: My entire business is about digital twins. That's all I eat, sleep, breathe, everything now.

Jason Kirby: Well, let's talk about it. For context for the audience, tell them a little bit about global objects.

Jess Loren: Yeah, so at Global Objects, we're digitizing the world. And I know that sounds like a great big job, right? But if you boil it down and going back to like Noah's Ark, say when you're trying to take two copies of all the animals on the planet, stick them in a boat to make sure you have preservation, right? So that's what we're trying to do for the digital world is we are scanning real life items like this calculator that I have on my desk, scanning it. We do it with blue laser, photometrics, photogrammetry, LIDAR, and then we have a photorealistic digital twin.

Jess Loren: And that digital twin right now is we use it for media entertainment. So we place it into worlds to create digital sets. But these twins are also good for manufacturing, for training, simulation, and the future of robotics like we're talking about here today. So the robot can understand how to grab this, not crush it, to make it very simple.

Jess Loren: Why did I come up with this idea is I came from tech, got into entertainment, melded those worlds for tech and entertainment. And I saw the event of the show, The Mandalorian. And that was created through a process called virtual production. And my husband is one of the world's best visual effects artists. And I said, how can we take your knowledge base with mine, with entrepreneurship, tech, and now entertainment, how can we create a company where I said to him, said, I want to press a button and I want to be in our living room and go to Egypt. How can we make this happen?

Jess Loren: Like you understand light, you understand everything to do with how the camera reacts for visual effects and all of that. How can we do that? So we had reached out to many different people. We got an LOI for twenty million dollars to open our own virtual production stage. We then found out I got pregnant. So it just wasn't like the right time for me. And to be honest, the person who gave us the LOI wasn't the right group for us. So it just didn't feel like the best fit. So I'm a woman. I base a lot of things on my feelings or my hunches or, it just, great. Everyone's like, my God, we got $20 million. It wasn't the right fit. So we said no. My husband did not want to say no. Let me tell you.

Jess Loren: But what we learned is, OK, if we had opened this stage, COVID happened. So we would have opened the stage, and then the pandemic came in, and we would have been sitting there with a beautiful stage with no one to film inside of it at that time, that particular time. But what we said is said to Eric, the original story concept is I want to press the button and be in Egypt. OK, I understand that we need the walls for that, but who's making that content?

Jess Loren: And so that's how we came up with the idea of global objects is to create environments and to collect and scan the world of environments, as well as all of the objects that exist in the world in the most photorealistic way possible. So when we raised our seed, we set out into R&D mode to figure out photoreal.

Jess Loren: So through our process of blue laser and photometrics and photogrammetry and what we're doing with LiDAR and now with Splats, we've spent quite a bit of time figuring that out and we have delivered on that promise of photoreal with all of our digital twins where we have interest from Microsoft and HP and Nvidia and all the big names that you want to be associated with. We have that right now.

Jason Kirby: Well, think what it does to training models and training robots and when you actually have the accuracy in terms of color, depth, weight, you know, versus what would be generated in say like a video game, like Unreal Engine that, you know, easy for people to create those assets, but to have the actual real asset could be a lot more material value to a greater landscape of.

Jess Loren: Exactly. If the future of our world is we're going to put it in the hands of robots, I want those robots to understand the best version of the world, right? And do we really want them training on, you know, data that was supposed to be or created by an artist and maybe there was an artistic expression on that data? You know, we want to make sure that the data is based on the real world, that things that actually existed. So that's what we're building our data set on is the real world.

Jason Kirby: So let's talk about this. You got a $20 million term sheet. You said, no, seems like it played out for the best. But then you decided that you, you know, one of the continued to pursue this and you need to go raise a seed round, which you raised $5M. Walk the audience through kind of when you realized that you needed to raise money and kind of what was your process to go and secure that capital.

Jess Loren: Yeah, so when we turned down the $20M, that wasn't an easy decision. But I had my child and then COVID... [continued detailed seed round narrative including Vatican connection and investor rationale]

Jason Kirby: Think entrepreneurs have a lot to learn from you. Appreciate your self-awareness and your maniacal focus on delivering on your dreams. I find it absolutely fascinating. You've been a wonderful guest. What would be the best way for people to learn more about you or potentially try to reach out to you?

Jess Loren: Yeah, so I'm crazy about LinkedIn. So reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you. Message me. If you're in Los Angeles, I host a ton of events. So I have a community called TechMeOut. Check me out, but check me out. So feel free to join my newsletter. I definitely talk about what I'm doing in entertainment and tech. And we host production summit in Los Angeles every year. If you have any interest in AI or what's going on in entertainment, feel free to reach out and attend that, we're gonna be doing that in October of this year. But yeah, LinkedIn, catch me on LinkedIn.

Jason Kirby: Beautiful. We'll make sure to leave a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes down below. Jess, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it.

Jess Loren: Thank you, Jason. Have a great day.