speaker-0: We won product of the day, product of the week, product of the month, 1,200 users onto the platform and learned very quickly that all of that was awesome, but no one. This is a really noisy process. Insight is given to us around every corner, whether we want it or whether we don't.
speaker-1: And there is a process, it's already documented, all you gotta do is learn it and all you gotta go do is do it. It's pretty straightforward, right? You just need to have your thing, just make a deck, just do the deck, say the deck, practice it, say it, and then just go talk to people and it'll all come together.
speaker-0: You Just get the f*** out that. And I'm definitely listening to more podcasts about superintelligence and the rate in which it will replace humanity. And I don't mean just like entry level work. mean like off the
speaker-1: Yeah Hey, wait, what was that? Is this is this beer 30 or is that is this coffee 30? OK. I wish we're this off right.
speaker-0: I wish. Yeah. You know what? On the next one. On the next one, you and I do.
speaker-1: have to create. Yeah. Nice. Amazing. Good to see you.
speaker-0: can see it too, man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally. Happy Friday.
speaker-0: Happy Friday. This is always fun. And by the way, that's what makes the Beer30 comment, know, viable. I understand that especially with me, I guess it doesn't matter that it's Friday.
speaker-1: It is 2 o 6 p.m. on a Friday, right? So this is not unreasonable for...
speaker-0: It wouldn't be so I have a neighbor. have a really good friend of mine. He he's a real estate agent. ⁓ And, and so his weekends are Monday and Tuesday. So it always jars me when when it's noon on Monday and and Nate's out there like water in his lawn with with like a stack of natty lights starting to pack.
speaker-1: Roasting hot dogs and do it doing a cannonball into the pool. You're like what I'm just having Nice
speaker-0: Yeah, I'm just trying to get my mail, brother. ⁓ man, all good, all good. How are you?
speaker-1: I'm good. good. ⁓ Quite a month, quite a time. All the things changing. This is the month that AI decided to wake up, which is crazy. ⁓
speaker-0: Our dreams are coming true,
speaker-1: It is easy. It's easier to code agents. I'll say that. It is definitely.
speaker-0: And I'm definitely listening to more podcasts about super intelligence and the rate in which it will replace humanity. And I don't mean just like entry level work. mean like, off the
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. Did you read the article that was the guy that wrote the everything has changed? Yeah. was such a good POV.
speaker-0: Yeah, I did. And I and I liked it. I liked it. And it was interesting because I've consumed that. And like I mentioned, like a couple podcasts around like AI safety and transparently, for the longest time I just kind of live life like this where I'm like pedal to the metal. Don't think about it. Like, like, let's just roll and see what happens. Well, I think for the first time, I'm taking a step back and going, okay, the gap the ground we're gaining is excellent. It's phenomenal. Right. But we are starting to teeter on the edge of the point of no return. Right. And I'm all for things changing on all four things evolving. ⁓ But I also do like being human. like the idea of my kids being human. Yeah, I love this planet. I would love for us to continue to exist and stay here. And I might be like a little bit of a doomer right now. But ⁓ But I just I've heard so many really good reasons for why we should just kind of think about this a little bit more. And the best example or the best like analogy I heard was around like cloning, right? In the late 90s, you know, we as a species like cloned another species, we we cloned a sheep, a female sheep, and then you know, the exact way we were able to create the exact same sheep and and pretty quickly. Everyone around the world was like both enamored and well, should not do that anymore.
speaker-1: I think this sounds like it's going to be about three of me running around and I think that's like, you know what I mean? What does that mean for me as an ego, as a soul? What does that mean for like, you know, yeah, what does it mean for my place in the world and the universe? Yeah, no, totally.
speaker-0: 100%. Right. And I think, you know, I don't know, cause I, you know, when, when that happened, I was still just like riding my bike around the neighborhood, picking my nose. So I don't remember anything about what it felt like at the time where something was cloned for the first time. But I do feel like this is similar, but different. It's not like everyone had like just a little bit of cloning technology in their home and they could like taste it and be like, but this is great. Right. It was happening in very, in a very solid, environment. Right now, like, you know, we were talking about it earlier. ⁓ There are still a lot of people who have not touched and experienced AI, for but there are millions that have, right? And it feels almost like this immovable force with with very potentially not guaranteed, but potentially, you know, significant consequences.
speaker-1: Well, and I feel like I've always been, I mean, I was going to say slightly obsessed. I'll just say obsessed with like from a technology perspective and where things are. I dived deep into it and you know, it's first time I heard about blockchain and then, you know, an Ethereum and Bitcoin and then, and then I bought some Ethereum and I made a contract and like, like I want to sort of understand these things at a fundamental level. But this is the first month in which it feels so magic because I think I've, I think I've created like 12 Projects this week, you know what I mean? Like and I'm not saying like I sketched out an idea like there's there's a number of them they're like 80 90 percent done and Then but conversely that means that I know that there are others that are infinitely beyond me in terms of understanding You know what mean? So then you're like, how am I gonna hang on? The hell I'm hanging on the side of this truck and I know it's about to go like warp speed and do I have enough grip strength? Where's my seat? You know what mean? Like I'm just trying to figure out how to like, and then how do I also help, you know, my kids, you know, get ahead of it in the, in the way that they're nine and six, which sounds like you shouldn't have to worry about it for a while. And it's like, I don't know if you're not native to this, like if you decide to get native to it 12 years from now, like that's, uh, that's not going to work.
speaker-0: But what have you guys decided is your parenting approach?
speaker-1: Oh, it's, it's my wife and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum, which means that we make the yin and the yang together. I am the one that like, uh, you know, we would go to the beach and, and everyone would go down to the beach about 45 minutes later. I was so bored. I just wanted to go out and play Mike Tyson's Punch Out on Nintendo. And I just wanted to sit out there and play. And my mom was like, we drove all the way to the beach. It's so sunny. It's so beautiful. But yeah, but in my brain, like I'm just like, I'm thinking about how to get past. Soda Popinski, you know, whatever, like I'm just like, that's what's happening in my brain. I can't just be like, you're right. It's so nice out, you know? And so I had this thing and, and that's what sort of led, that's what sort of fueled me to want to learn and absorb and learn and absorb and get to this place. And I feel like you kind of have to, or a lot of people, especially knowledge workers are going to have to get to that place where you just, you're thirsty to understand and grow. Because if you sort of watch it, it's going to get so fast that it's going be hard to like catch on later. And so we do a balance. mean, I, you know, I boys and I play ⁓ wobbly life together and Nintendo and, know, and, and we've got a Legion and we'll play games together. And then we also, my son, you know, and I work on projects with Claude. So he sort of gets the idea, or if he's like, can you look up on YouTube how to do this thing? I'm like, no, you can ask Claude how to do it. Cause you already have a wobbly life. project and he's like, ⁓ yeah, so he's typing out and he's like, where is the magic key or whatever it is. And just even starting to, I think for them, what I'm scared for is, is I don't want, ⁓ I know my parents, the computer was not the refrigerator, right? For me, the computer and the refrigerator were both sort of native when I was growing up in my like, you know, past my teens, but This is going to have to be native to them. It can't be a thing that they heard about. And so I just I'm I'm always a little hesitant to be like, let's just let them grow up. when they get into their teens, they can start getting into this stuff that now changes weekly.
speaker-0: Hold on. That's nuts, man. Like it, we struggle with this a little bit too. Um, yeah, I feel very fortunate. Both of my parents were, um, um, in tech. Uh, my mom was a lifer at Hewlett Packard. Uh, so like, you know, tech was always in our lives. And I think very similarly to you, I, I spent a lot of time just thinking about problem solving.
speaker-1: So anyway.
speaker-0: Right. and being able to do more things with the technology I had available to me. You know, a couple good examples. I at one point tried to build a skate park in my backyard and hypothesize that it wasn't working because it didn't. My plans were not correct enough, but I could build better plans on the computer without realizing it was. Truly because I couldn't have the resources. ⁓ You can't skateboard on cardboard boxes. But I'm with you, right? And it's totally changed, though, kind of the way I encourage my kids and what I encourage them to spend time on where maybe if this were 10 years ago, I'd really go deep on their obsession with like ⁓
speaker-1: Yeah, nice.
speaker-0: with like Legos and like engineering and building blocks and albeit we still do a lot of that and encourage a lot of that because I think that's really, you know, great. ⁓ But now it's now we spend a lot of time like just going, okay, why do you think that happened? Why do you think like more like deeper, sometimes abstract, critical thinking thought challenges that I think are going to be really important when you've got all of you know, all of this intelligence at your disposal, but you're, you know, to a certain extent, still going to need to orchestrate. Maybe, maybe not. all the way. Yeah, if the answer is maybe not, you're going to need to critically think like, what is the purpose of your life? Right? And
speaker-1: We'll find out. And maybe we'll all just be in floating chairs like on Wally sipping on, ⁓ you know, the the drinks going like, what we have a pool. ⁓
speaker-0: Love that.
speaker-1: I want to hear about Atlas. this is the purpose of Xero. And why I started this. When I started Stackless, really thought, one, I wanted to document the journey. But also, I'm so curious about this process of I've got a thing in my head. I think it needs to be brought into the world, or I think I can solve a problem, or I think I can build something. And you buy a domain name. And then you go, okay, what should I do next? You know, whatever. But like from that point forward, I think has always fascinated me. And so ⁓ I love what you're building with Atlas. And I think, you know, what I'd love to know, guess, starting out interesting segue that you were said that your parents, Kate, you know, were in tech is sort of some of your upbringing that may have led to entrepreneurial and tech, you know, as a focus.
speaker-0: Well, that you know, that's another thing I feel really grateful for my my parents for. You know, they were they were very entrepreneurial. But yeah, the we I joke about this with them sometimes they're very caged entrepreneurs. Where you know, they they have all of the traits to be entrepreneurial, but also you know, became adults and became parents and in the late 80s, early 90s, where, you know, you really, they really felt like the best thing for them to do was to go get really good but stable jobs. And, and, ⁓ and be able to provide at all times for what ended up being a ⁓ six person family with very active kids who all did a ton of activities. And it actually wasn't until my dad was 5354 that he started his first business. you know, and, and, and my mom now is like, semi retired because she helps run a farm. And so like, you know, they're, they're, very, but because of that, any, you know, anytime we had ideas, entrepreneurial or not, anytime we had ideas, there was no like, Hey, dude, that idea kind of sucks. Yeah. Or like, or like, go on, she go do your homework. Right? Yeah. There was a lot of like, Hmm, that's really interesting. Like, where'd that idea come from? Why? Yeah. Why? Why do you think that would be important? Do you think other people would find that important? lot of like really, you know, deep critical thinking and a lot of that I, ⁓ you know, not just my mom, but I hand off to my, to my dad too. He, ⁓
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: You know, he was the inspiration for the Atlas logo. So my dad ⁓ actually made the NASA astronaut program. And about a week later, my mom told him that she was pregnant with me and so, and let him move in to Houston. moved to Washington, DC and my dad got a software sales job selling into NASA. And, you know, he reminds me of it often. ⁓ But he had that like, ⁓ you know, mathematic engineering training with this obsession with the uncertainty and unknown of space, right? It's kind of led him into you know, obviously, he was a grateful dead fan. And it just led him into like all of this, you know, abstract thinking and and and it rubbed off and he spent a lot of time kind of leading me down that path and ⁓ And so because of that, feel really grateful that as I grew up, I was able to look at not just problems, but things that I loved and I did not feel limited by any like expectation or social norm. So, um, transparently like the first business I started, um, I was, well, you know, if you, if you don't count that just like mowing lawns when you're 11, uh,
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ that was my favorite. I was good at that. ⁓ I make tight turns. I wouldn't leave any little like kind of corner.
speaker-0: Yeah, gosh, it was it was excellent when I learned how to like checker the the grass right I had a sorry I was an aside because we started on beer 30 I had a neighbor one time when I was 14 pay me 20 bucks and then asked me like how many racks of beer I was gonna go buy with it and I was like, sure. I've never had a beer before.
speaker-1: Yeah. That's great. ⁓ ⁓ my gosh.
speaker-0: But but but so so besides that, you know, I start and because my parents were so open to a lot of things like no one in my family played music, but I played music where I learned how to music and and I started a band when I was, you know, 12 and we were just messing around in garage. But by the time that I was 15 and a half, 16, I was in a band that ended up going and playing overseas and touring and traveling and all kinds of stuff. And ⁓ Granted, it wasn't a very good business. lost a lot of But you know that when you start a band and you think of a band very much like a startup, you have to get through some really shitty shitty times. Empty rooms, a lot of rejection and you have to sell yourself.
speaker-1: Creativity and branding and entrepreneurship and hustling and moving gear and lay all the logistics and yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. So like, you know, it, that was, you know, and I, I actually credit my, my grandfather a lot for this. It was a big support system for me there. He was one of the first ever sales engineers at IBM. ⁓ they went by a different title at this point, but he thought this was phenomenal. He would tell you like, he didn't have, he didn't have an ounce of music in him, but he was fascinated by the business side. Uh, and so him and I would spend a lot of time on that. And, um, for all intents and purposes, like I, I played music professionally and I toured and, you know, last tour I was ever on was a headline and warped warped tour. Uh, but for all intents and purposes, like they were all failures. None of those tours made money. And you, I tell you what, like you get a lot of good times and a lot of good memories, but then you come out the other side, like eight years later and you're like,
speaker-1: Nice. Yeah,
speaker-0: Shit man, I've got a lot less money than when I started.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: But it's funny how that will end up, you all those things that you tried in those pieces. feel like all things that you end up bringing to entrepreneurship that you subconsciously and sometimes consciously know that you end up putting into practice. It's super interesting how, especially with starting business and being an entrepreneur, that you really lean on just about every ounce of experience that you've had in related and non-related fields.
speaker-0: Yeah, I have this conversation with one of our investors the other day. ⁓ You know, I think especially like in this, in this phase, ⁓ I've got a, I've got a good contact. His name's cam duty. runs, ⁓ he runs, ⁓ brickyard in Chattanooga, which is kind of like a, ⁓ a live in, ⁓ accelerator and, ⁓ and their whole thing is, you know, it's, ⁓ you gotta get through the trough of sorrow, right? And they didn't, it didn't create that. That's a, I can't remember if it was Christiansen or Sullivan. can't remember whose that was. but holy mackerel, like, you know, you're gonna launch you said like, you buy your URL, you launch your company. And especially nowadays, you know, your LinkedIn is gonna blow up, people are gonna be like, how yeah, they're gonna
speaker-1: Also, do not tell anybody your idea because they will take it and just like run with it. They can take it and raise so much money off of it just off the word about the idea.
speaker-0: you but but what you're you get, you get through this initial bump, right of excitement, and that some of that might be just like, ⁓ excitement and vanity metrics, some of it might actually be like some customers and stuff, but no matter
speaker-1: It's also like it's uncharted brain space even for yourself and that you're always so aware. Just like if you move to a new city, right? The first year everything is fresh and you're like watching everything or whatever. It's when that piece wears off and you don't have money yet or product market fit. A hundred percent. And that, you know, or whatever. And so you don't, then you don't have that juice and that adrenaline of the freshness to sort of bolster you. That little, that The curve is just rough.
speaker-0: ⁓ and that's where I feel so grateful for the months I had to sleep in the back of the 16 passenger van and like live $13 a per day.
speaker-1: Wow.
speaker-0: Yeah, granted, those are still fun times, right? But like, you you take a lot, you said it, you take a lot of these experiences, right? And, and if you've lived through things like that, there's, you know, there's adversity everywhere. But and by the way, it doesn't have to happen. It doesn't have to come to you from like, this terrible thing happened to me. Right. But it but almost always it comes from, from that we're taking some sort of risk that didn't exactly play out. the way you thought it would. Right? And like, no matter what, your startup will not play out the way you thought it would. And you will hit the trough of sorrow. I mean, every it's like, it's like fan fiction. Now to look at these lovable and the cursors of the world and like, have your head explode and be like, Whoa, overnight success. But like you have to really go back and do your research and see that. ⁓ dude.
speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah.
speaker-0: those companies have been companies for like five, six years, right and they're
speaker-1: all feels like Clueless these days, right? Like it feels like the guy that made Clueless was sitting around on his couch and was like, ooh, I got an idea. And he sort of like, he spends a day or so in hacker mode and then he has this thing. And then all of a sudden it's just like, he's a Silicon Valley darling. And you're like, wait, don't. Don't take the Instagram version. have no idea what's behind that. And I guarantee you there's a lot of hustle and other stuff in there. But yeah, it looks like that from the outside.
speaker-0: You know, read Hastings had a really good, I don't know where this was like in a book he wrote or some blog post, but he had a really good, he had a really good anecdote about when he started his first company, he took an investment from his dad. But when he took that investment from his dad, he said, Hey dad, like, you know, on average, takes three to five swipes at this to get it right. And you clarified he's like, I don't mean, like, we're gonna, you know, pivot three or five times. He's like, I mean, we're gonna, I'm gonna run and build three different companies and run them into the ground and fail them. You'll probably be at all successful with something right. And I think it's like completely lost right now. And I think it's an important reminder that, you know, the you know, we've got all these great solutions and all these great tools and technology that allow us to do things faster, but we should like, think about this and the fact of like, well, it doesn't make us successful more often, it just makes us fail faster and therefore perhaps we can get to something successful a little bit. We still got to go through all the fucking ass kicking.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally. So let's parlay it into Atlas. Where ⁓ was the moment? What were you doing before? Before the idea, before the inclination, before that ear worm, that bug got in your brain and you were like, ⁓ I got to, this is something I got to do.
speaker-0: Yeah. So, ⁓ we, well, this is the third company I've started. ⁓ was fortunate enough to, to sell one in the past and talk about butt kickings. That was a, that was a big one. and, ⁓ and in that process, I, I, I got hooked up with the founders, ⁓ from Pendo. They actually, ⁓ worked out the same coworking space that I did. And, ⁓ I had a few mentors inside of that company who were helping me through, um, kind of like the, the step down from, from my last one. And I feel so grateful for this moment, um, where, you know, the leadership of that team was like, Hey, what are you going to do next? I was like, well, I gotta go start another company, man. Like I just got my butt kicked. I gotta prove that I can get out there and actually do this. And they were like, we, we believe you can, if you spend a few years, you know, in the front row learning from a few guys and girls who have done this before. Right. And, and, and we promise we'll keep you in the front row if you join us and continue to deliver value above and beyond. Um, you know, it's like a handshake agreement. It you know, we all kind of said like two years and then go out and start another company. Um, that two years turned into 10 years. Uh, wondering how I got here. Like, I feel so so grateful because I think they, you know, Todd and Chas, you know, kept so good on their promise. ⁓ I'd like to feel like I did the same, but I had the opportunity to, to, to lead some of our first sales teams to build our ops and enablement team to run our European business to lead ⁓ North American sale, you know, parts of our North American business that were that were very substantial and important. ⁓ And while all of those were excellent, you know, I got to, I got to sit with Todd, like in small pieces participate in his fundraising and much larger piece.
speaker-1: Nice. Yeah. That's invaluable.
speaker-0: Yeah, I get to ask him tons of questions. I had access to information as long as I kept it discreet that no one else, very few other people in the business had, but purely just because I was learning, I wanted to be a better entrepreneur. And Todd and Eric and Rahul are excellent entrepreneurs. ⁓ And I also got to six times at Pendo participate in changing our business model. Yeah, not nice. No, it sucks. man.
speaker-1: Nice learnings. Like it's good to go. But to go through that and come out, obviously, once you do your own thing is now, know, the optimistic and the optimized path to take.
speaker-0: Percent. Well, that and it was very clear to see one like this. It kind of was a forward thinking company. We were working with AI and had alternative business models before the Gen I Gen AI boom. But they were all things. I'm sorry. From a business model perspective, there were things we did in name only because we really couldn't facilitate it or we didn't have the resource time to ⁓ build. in true like usage based tracking for monitoring purposes into our into our product. And so like what what ended up being the I don't want to say like the aha moment because it was like multiple aha moments where this one was really like, you got to do something about this is we had a small little company called Anthropic come in to buy parts of Pendo. No, granted, this was 2021, 20, 2021 or so 2022. And, and we had everything agreed to, we had the cost of the contract agreed to, we had redlined everything we had. The only thing we hadn't agreed on was how we would charge them. Pendo's business model at that time worked on a monthly active user basis. Anthropic was coming in to buy more like more of Pendo's product for qualitative research, trying to understand how users actually felt about the product via MPS surveys and other things. And so these two things didn't match up because they were going to literally be millions and millions of users that Anthropic didn't want data on, didn't need data on, and wasn't going to use that data, but we were still going to charge them that way. And so very simply, they were like, could you just charge us based on the amount of MPS survey results? that we get, you know, kind of like a pure usage somewhat of an outgap based scenario. And our teams are like, yeah, sounds very fair. Right? That's that's excellent. Let us take that back. Took it. I took it back to the engineering teams on on finance and the sales operations teams. And after some deliberation, they were like, you could ask him to come back in six months. That's when we'll be able to support that we'll start and start to build now. And ⁓ long story short, we we lost anthropic to one of our big errors. I think that's actually very large contract for them right now. But having worked on that business model, having presented options and opportunities to price like this, you know, just a few months before and having been rigid, it was like, dude, we got to like, things are rapidly changing. Where the buyers want to pay for software, and now so much AI in in ways that more reflect the value they're receiving as opposed to like seats or access or something along those lines. ⁓ And nobody is armed and ready for that. Right. And so ⁓ we're very fortunate that that Pendo itself is a product analytics solution. It's ⁓ from a a technical perspective, it's extremely elegant, it's wonderfully flexible. And it gave us a a great idea and a great blueprint for how to go build something similar into, you know, a billing infrastructure type format into a product where it'll teach you how to price and package. It'll allow you to deploy any business model. So all that being said, I, you know, it was a, that was a big moment, but it was really a lot of little moments leading up to that big moment where it was like, okay, this has been a really painful process. And we're still not winning the things that we should be winning. So we should do something to fix that.
speaker-1: I love that because I can even visualize the beginnings of the ideas of Atlas in that moment when you're a startup and you're the visualization of the case study, especially you're a startup founder or you're selling for a startup team and the client goes, hey, could we pay you in this way? And that you sort of jump forward to the moment where you can go, yeah, yeah, Like, yeah, that's fine. Like, I'll work it out. and that you just go back and that you can just move the pieces around and then just do it versus being like, we have to deliberate, we have to redo our company and we have to like, you know, the ability to just like, customize a few things in a few ways and just get the money in and then sort of like, you know, figure it out after.
speaker-0: And by the way, what was crazy for me is for the longest time, I thought this was a Pendo problem, but I couldn't, I couldn't marry these two things where I mean, Pendo, albeit I've worked there for 10 years and I'm very biased. Like I love that company. I love that product. I love that business, but like we were so, so I'll say we were on the forefront of everyone. were super innovative, right? We always pushed the boundaries. Right. And, I just couldn't make that fit with this idea that this thing, like this was, this was where we were clunky and legacy and, you know, corporate. And I was like, that doesn't, so like, let me go see if this is a problem everywhere else. Right. And like, yeah, like we did 110 interviews before we actually launched the company of, ⁓ know, companies like Pendo in and around that space and, overwhelmingly. Right? People came back and said, Hey, we're building new product. It's got some of this new AI stuff in it. We have no idea how to price it. And what we have from a billing infrastructure perspective won't handle it. Right? And we would share that anthropic antidote with them. And we'd say, Hey, let me tell you a story. Does this resonate with you? And almost always like we I've still got the notepad like 90 % of the time people said, Oh, stop. Stop here.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: those. And so, so it was, it definitely, definitely crazy to me that I just couldn't couldn't fathom that this was a Pendo problem. But it was even, I think more wild when I learned that it was a much bigger problem than just Pendo.
speaker-1: When did you make the decision to make the jump to start on Atlas?
speaker-0: I gave Todd, so ⁓ Todd Olson is the CEO of Pendo. ⁓ I gave Todd the standard six months notice. I was leaving for joint benefit. April, 2024.
speaker-1: ⁓ no, that's exactly when I started sacklisting. Wonderful. April 4th.
speaker-0: You and I were just Jones and a
speaker-1: Totally and I did I was actually working for a consulting company and I basically just said by the mine wasn't mine wasn't unnoticed as much as it was like by the way I have this thing I'm working on and if it ever is a thing I have to go do the thing so like just know that we're not doing this forever together just like That that thing will become a thing. So I'll keep you updated. But like that was my
speaker-0: love that. But yeah, I think I think that's a great way to to go into it to transparency. Big fan of transparency. ⁓ yeah, mine was my you know, Mine was similar. Todd. Todd. I love by way of bald my eyes out. bald my eyes out. ⁓
speaker-1: I bet 10 years you bet you've been in that in that company in that culture.
speaker-0: or I met my wife at pendant. So it was like it was a big, big deal. But like, and I'll share it, he won't listen, but he'll be mad at me if he does like Todd Todd cried a little bit too. We're very good friends too. So like, have him over often. And so anyway, we, you know, when I told him, I was like, Todd, and this was in April, I was like, I found the thing. And I'm gonna go build the thing. And he replied, Finally.
speaker-1: Nice.
speaker-0: That's great. It was like, when are you leaving? I goes September and he goes, what like
speaker-1: you realize as a startup, I need as much runway as I can get that's humanly-
speaker-0: exactly. was like, Oh, we got this million dollar deal that's gonna hit at the end of August. And a stay through that. And he was like, fair enough. I was like, Look, I also, I I've been here for 10 years, it'll be, you know, it'll be a shift for the team when I leave. And I want to ensure that the people coming in behind me and the people rising up like have a good opportunity. Yo, to to to take try to take what's in my head and put it in there. So I was like, dude, strap me into a chair and just like zap it all out of me. Like, especially in startup world, 10 years of tribal knowledge is unbelievable. mean, we're gonna quickly move into a ⁓ an era where it doesn't matter, right? It's all going to be on our Mac minis and shit. But like, but I did want to make sure that, you know, I left the place as as well as I could, it was partially financial, but also partially like, It had given me just such a good ride and Pendo gave me so much that, ⁓ that, you know, that, that six month period, that September timeframe was really what worked well from my boss and where the quarter break was. And it just, it just aligned best for the company as well. so, yeah, non-standard, should say six months, but yeah, but it was, it was good. felt, I felt.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally.
speaker-0: awesome about it. I hope that there are more entrepreneurs that come out of Pendo. It's a very entrepreneurial company. Hired a lot of entrepreneurs, really encouraged people to have bias, to act, to build things internally. think I might have built like three or four solutions at Pendo with Tiger teams that still drive tons of value internally today. And so I'm excited. I really hope that that more come out of come out.
speaker-1: That's great. So you set off on your journey. You've got six months where you're sort of, you're doing the side build thing, right? So you're starting to put things together. what was the moment when you were like, where were you at when you left Pendo? Where were you at in the process from an Atlas timeline perspective?
speaker-0: So we had. We had like the bare bones of a product built. This was right as, you know, the AI IDs were becoming good enough, but still really sloppy. You it was like, yeah, I could punch in what I want, but I still have to do the same amount of work just from like a QA perspective. ⁓ Fast forward to where we are right now. And you just told me you were like, I just this just go drink coffee. would come back in it. So
speaker-1: QA yourself and don't tell me to look at it until you have fixed it. And I did that this morning. Like it was it was circling on itself a little bit and I realized that I was in haiku instead of in opus. And so I switched to opus and I said do me a favor. I was like I've been circling around haiku for the past like 10 minutes and I was like can you just go check this and test it before you send it to me and only send it to me if it's fixed. And so it just sort of like did the thing that it was like, I got it. And I clicked it. I was like, that's it. And then I moved on. Like, it's so crazy to be able to.
speaker-0: I haiku he's fired.
speaker-1: I love Haiku for the really quick, cheap stuff because you'll get done with a session though and they're like, this session cost you $18. All the operational stuff where you move these files around and tell me what's in here and just read through the file or whatever. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. had a team meeting the other day and one of my, you know, I was, I was bragging about, ⁓ I was bragging about my, my ability now to write code and, ⁓ he has since nickname mean hook who, but, ⁓ yeah, you know, so we, had this bare bones product, but really what it was, was a backend event ingestion engine. the time I left, it was an invoicing engine.
speaker-1: ⁓ nice.
speaker-0: It was a very minimal front end, like really no features. What we were working on was this. I, we kind of, you know, uh, I would say September to April, you know, it was really hard, really, really hard because we went immediately into trying to sell companies that we were most familiar with, like the pendos and the air tables of the Those were the kind of things that Pendo we had been working with and we had spent a lot of time validating this idea with them. So a lot of our early build was back end focused. How do we scale up to handle billions of events, which we did successfully, but we somewhat overlooked the political nature of a business model and pricing impact. The other area that we had spent a ton of time and for whatever reason, just kind of looked beyond. Maybe it was like trauma that we had blacked out. But you know, pretty quickly, we started successfully testing this stuff with massive amounts of data. And we would go into, you know, the the pricing teams, the amoeba, the committee that that business model and be like, we're ready, guys, let's do this. And all of a sudden, 50 people at once for like, we're not doing that we're doing usage, we're not doing that we're doing credits, we're not doing We're just like, yeah, ⁓ no, like, whoa, dude, we really fucked up here. Like, we don't have a lot of money. can't like, this is going to take us nine months to try to sell one of these deals. And maybe we can get two or three of them. But like from a startup perspective, we're not going to get the app bats or the learning that we need. If we start up here, we just, you know, we're not, you know, we're not a Silicon Valley darling. We were great at Pendo, but we weren't the founders. No one's pumping $10 million into us on an idea. We're happy to really scrappy. So selling into these guys and girls is just not viable. And it was a two quarter learning process. And so we made a really hard pivot ⁓ or decision to hard pivot. our ICP around March, beginning of April to say, you know what, we value ⁓ repetition, we value learning right now. The most important thing we can do is get people into the platform and using it regardless of the scale we built it for so that he can start understanding what is most important. And at the same time, were, you know, I was really starting to shift my opinion of like which companies you know, over the next five years are actually going to survive. And I start look at these these new like vertical specific AIs that I think just have a much better chance of crushing it than, you know, some of these slow, low growth, public software companies that we originally were focused on. so so we we
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: And by the way, we hadn't commercially launched the product before this point. were primarily working in like a pretty open stealth. ⁓ And, and so in June on product hunt, we launched, we launched commercially the product for the first time. ⁓ We won product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. We within the span of six days, put 1200 users onto the platform. And and learned very quickly that all of that was awesome, but no one wanted to pay for it.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's great.
speaker-0: So it was it was all of like all the vanity stuff that you hope for, right? All of you like we had it on one side. We were like, dude, we are now we're moving now we're a real startup and on the other side we're like, okay, but has anybody has anybody actually paid for it yet? yet. So it was, you know, that was and so then we then we had to embark on the like, kind of like the next iteration, which was like, okay, there's, there's a there's something here, right? There's something here, but we need to find the epicenter of solve the pain. You know, but in a way that that is valuable enough that people will pay for it, you know, with a group of users that will pay for it and you know, admittedly, I think we're still very much in that like post product hunt phase. You know, we, spent an, again, a quarter kind of focused on that builder class to learn that, okay, those aren't going to be. And so now over the last two quarters or so we've really focused on, you know, pre seed seed, a little bit of series a vertical specific software companies, ⁓ you know, providing them not just with like billing infrastructure and and insight on their business model, also like, ⁓ consultation and pricing and packaging workshops and accelerators. And, we're finding this, this real, this real great foothold in this spot where companies are, you know, they've got customers there's, maybe they haven't found product market fit yet, they're transactions and they're starting to realize that, Hmm. the my business model might be an element of this product market fit thing. ⁓ And, and I really need, if I want to, if I want to, if I want to cross the chasm, I really need to figure this piece out too. And so that's where, you know, I wouldn't say we found product market fit by any stretch. No way. Like I just, ran our ICP by, ⁓ by, by my good friend Lindsay the other day and she just goes, ⁓ my God, what are you going to sell to the whole world? She's like, that's way too big, dude.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓
speaker-0: ⁓ And I really appreciated ⁓ the candid feedback. ⁓ She wrote me like a like a whole paragraph and and at the very end goes, Okay, but this one part that was cool. Okay, okay. But yeah, so we're very much like, very much still in that process of like, okay, how do we buy a shout out to to Lindsay Rios, she's an excellent fractional CRL if anybody is in need, but
speaker-1: Hahaha.
speaker-0: We're still very much in this phase of like, okay, who are we best for? And how do we go and monopolize that very small segment of the market so that we can own that and jump to the next larger concentric circle of users?
speaker-1: That's awesome. I'm interested. So when did you start the idea for starting the accelerators?
speaker-0: So we worked ⁓ with a marketing consultant. name ⁓ is Alper Maskelyou and he's out of London sometimes. He's out of Saudi or he's out of the Emirates the other half of the time. And ⁓ this guy is excellent, man. And it was really his idea ⁓ to, he was like, hey, you guys are great coaches. ⁓ You know, we, we for, for the whole year, we've been transparently like monetizing a customer success motion and, but more doing it on a one-off basis. People buy the Atlas product and we encourage them to buy, you know, an Atlas accelerator. And so not only are you getting everything from a, from a software perspective, but we're essentially going to come in and replace, you know, a half a million dollars, Simon Kutcher engagement. And most of our customers can't afford Simon Kutcher at this point. So it's great deal for them. They're like, heck yeah. And I remember a call with him where he goes, so I have this idea, but it would mean doing like 10 to 14 accelerators every month, every two months. Like, are you up for that? And I was like, yeah, of course. This is like one of my most favorite things to do. sit with customers and learn about their business and puts us in touch, you know, in touch with what they're trying to do a heck of a lot more. but, and, and so transparently he was like, okay, I, you know, I, I can't remember where he got the inspiration from, but he did see, um, he did see this somewhere, somewhere else. Um, and, uh, and he was like, you know, his big thing, and this is what stuck with me. His big thing was this, um, He's like, some of the best marketing right now is obviously like education based. He goes, but it's all based in fear. People are afraid of AI. People are afraid it's going to change their jobs. People are afraid are overwhelmed by AI and where to start. Right. And, you know, his firm belief was especially entrepreneurs who are so good at tackling their fear. are still still have a lot of that fear that they're going to reach out for help with. Right. And, you know, we're we've definitely identified that trying to understand how to from a business perspective, scale your AI product is a really big challenge right now, whether you are a startup or an enterprise company. This is a brand new technology with new costs, new margin, your expectations. probably brand new metrics that we look at instead of things like ARR. So it's massive, massive, I think, know, shifts inside of the business. And there's a lot of avoidance to like the inevitable tide coming in because of this fear. so Alpers strategy for us that he led was how do we take down these walls? How do we answer this fear?
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: with really great content, programs, things that put us in the forefront, one-on-one with the customer whenever possible. These are not novel or brand new things, but I think the way that Alper foresaw going about this was different, was unique. It meant we had to do a lot of things that didn't scale immediately. But transparently, you when you are in it for the long haul, when you're in it for the long game, when you're building infrastructure, ⁓ you have to be ready to do a lot of things for a long period of time that maybe don't scale. so all the credit to Alper, man, like he he crushed it here.
speaker-1: That's awesome. Where do you see Atlas going?
speaker-0: I've spent a lot of time on this this week. ⁓ You know, I think I think I've got two perspectives here. And admittedly, like I'm working on picking the one that I've got the most conviction around. So you'll get both. The first is, I think, pretty generic, where we actually see a slower adoption. We start to see diminishing returns, or maybe like, I'm forgetting the law, but where you can only improve something so much. And we start to see that happen with our models. For whatever reason, we don't crack super intelligence or whatever it is. what we get is really great technology that makes us like a hundred times more efficient, but there's still tons of human involvement with the act of buying and selling. which point Atlas is gonna continue to sit at the center of that and help teach people how to psychologically appease their buyers when it comes to selling their goods and services and, and, very immediately build the infrastructure that's needed to execute everything from sale forward. I think that's the least I think, I think that's probably not as likely to happen as a world I see where the the agent market, the market where trillions upon trillions of agents are constantly at work, interacting, interchanging and transacting is like an unfathomable multiple size bigger than like the economy as we know it today. And like very much what I see needed in that realm. is a trust layer very similar to the way like Visa is a truck layer for our transactional world, right? Visa isn't actually a payment processor. It's not a right payment network Visa. You swipe a card and it's the it's the ⁓ trust layer that says that person buying is who they say they are. They have that money in the bank, trigger the bank account for the purchase, right?
speaker-1: on big difference between Apple and Google, right? The Google Play Store is sort of open to anyone. ⁓ And Apple, you at least sort of know that this has been vetted to a degree.
speaker-0: So exactly. so I think like, agents are going to need the same thing, but it's all it's all going to be very different from like, what we're used to being identified and validated on like, you know, first and foremost, you're the most basic thing is going to be to, you know, for a ⁓ buyer and a selling agent to have parameters and requirements that they work with them. Right. And this there's like the, know, pretty simple, like agent RFP and a and a selling a selling FP or whatever you want to call that right. But those agents are going to come and instead of like a psychological negotiation, they're going to look to try to find the intersection of what equals the best deal for both parties. And then there's going to need to be a execution layer that not only bills and invoices, but ensures that whatever has been agreed upon can be tracked validated, ⁓ you know, go into aberration if needed to. ⁓ if needed to. like in that world, I see Atlas being that trust network that helps agents ⁓ negotiate, arbitrate, validate what's actually happened to be able to pay and then execute all those things or all of like the monetization infrastructure post engagement, post service delivery. ⁓ That is a little bit of like a futuristic take, but I see that. love it in like the next two to three years.
speaker-1: Yeah, no, I love it. That's What if you so as a a as a parting gift to either aspiring or early entrepreneurs, if you if you had to go back to the, you know, the the week you just knew or, you know, or the first week that you dove into building Atlas, like what's one thing that you would you would tell kind of that version of yourself?
speaker-0: Yeah, I think this is a really noisy process. I think we get we get taught so often to seek so much data and so much validation. And by the way, it's like given to you know, feedback and insight is given to us around every corner, whether we want it or whether we don't.
speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. And there is a process. It's already documented. All you got to do is learn it and all you got to go do is do it. It's pretty straightforward, right? You just need to have your thing. Just make a deck. This is so easy. Do the deck. Say the deck. Practice it. Say it and then just go talk to people and you'll it'll it all comes together.
speaker-0: Right. It just happens. I would go back and I would tell myself like, hey dude, so many of the things that you're thinking about and feeling right now are right and you just need to shut everything else out. Admittedly, there's been too many times where I have just been like, nah, but that person's really smart. Maybe I should think about that a little more.
speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, I love that. ⁓ totally. And then I've had that actually a number of times where I've thought like, ⁓ this is the expert, this is the person that really knows. And then later a future version of me goes, I actually didn't know what they were talking about. But there's so many different versions of you that are learning that through the process. ⁓ And I also, I call bullshit on things like, I've been told things like, The idea that you had for your startup in the very beginning, it's going to change a thousand times. It's not even going to look like what it was in the beginning. And every day I'm like, nope, I was right from the beginning. Like, I'm telling you. And all it is is that I'm stand, I am standing where I should have been and everyone's coming this way, but everyone's pointing to me going, why are you standing all the way over there? You're weirdo. You know what mean? It's like, so I agree. I love that idea of how much noise. I think what I've tried to do also is just make enough quiet and silence or give myself enough distance or, or be sort of ⁓ easy on myself to like, if it's noisy and I, and I can't seem to make a decision, I can't think I'll go take a nap and then I'll like watch something on Netflix for a while. You know what I mean? Like I just separate and I'm like, it's because there's too much noise that I can't, I'm not, I'm not able to listen to that, that sort of voice in my head.
speaker-0: I would take that advice from you now. I'm gonna take that advice from you now. gonna go do a crossword puzzle. That's what I'm gonna do.
speaker-1: Now it's beer 305, right? See?
speaker-0: I'm gonna, you know, I've got a few more calls, but I'm not going to be apologetic. Awesome. know I've taken you over, man, but I'm so grateful.
speaker-1: I'm thinking on them. Amazing Yeah, no, this is great. Thanks for coming on. Always a pleasure. And I appreciate the stories and the insights and the conversation as always.
speaker-0: I appreciate your friendship, man, and always love talking to you regardless of what we're talking
speaker-1: And there is a process, it's already documented, all you gotta do is learn it and all you gotta go do is do it. It's pretty straightforward, right? You just need to have your thing, just make a deck, just do the deck, say the deck, practice it, say it, and then just go talk to people and it'll all come together.
speaker-0: You Just get the f*** out that. And I'm definitely listening to more podcasts about superintelligence and the rate in which it will replace humanity. And I don't mean just like entry level work. mean like off the
speaker-1: Yeah Hey, wait, what was that? Is this is this beer 30 or is that is this coffee 30? OK. I wish we're this off right.
speaker-0: I wish. Yeah. You know what? On the next one. On the next one, you and I do.
speaker-1: have to create. Yeah. Nice. Amazing. Good to see you.
speaker-0: can see it too, man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally. Happy Friday.
speaker-0: Happy Friday. This is always fun. And by the way, that's what makes the Beer30 comment, know, viable. I understand that especially with me, I guess it doesn't matter that it's Friday.
speaker-1: It is 2 o 6 p.m. on a Friday, right? So this is not unreasonable for...
speaker-0: It wouldn't be so I have a neighbor. have a really good friend of mine. He he's a real estate agent. ⁓ And, and so his weekends are Monday and Tuesday. So it always jars me when when it's noon on Monday and and Nate's out there like water in his lawn with with like a stack of natty lights starting to pack.
speaker-1: Roasting hot dogs and do it doing a cannonball into the pool. You're like what I'm just having Nice
speaker-0: Yeah, I'm just trying to get my mail, brother. ⁓ man, all good, all good. How are you?
speaker-1: I'm good. good. ⁓ Quite a month, quite a time. All the things changing. This is the month that AI decided to wake up, which is crazy. ⁓
speaker-0: Our dreams are coming true,
speaker-1: It is easy. It's easier to code agents. I'll say that. It is definitely.
speaker-0: And I'm definitely listening to more podcasts about super intelligence and the rate in which it will replace humanity. And I don't mean just like entry level work. mean like, off the
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. Did you read the article that was the guy that wrote the everything has changed? Yeah. was such a good POV.
speaker-0: Yeah, I did. And I and I liked it. I liked it. And it was interesting because I've consumed that. And like I mentioned, like a couple podcasts around like AI safety and transparently, for the longest time I just kind of live life like this where I'm like pedal to the metal. Don't think about it. Like, like, let's just roll and see what happens. Well, I think for the first time, I'm taking a step back and going, okay, the gap the ground we're gaining is excellent. It's phenomenal. Right. But we are starting to teeter on the edge of the point of no return. Right. And I'm all for things changing on all four things evolving. ⁓ But I also do like being human. like the idea of my kids being human. Yeah, I love this planet. I would love for us to continue to exist and stay here. And I might be like a little bit of a doomer right now. But ⁓ But I just I've heard so many really good reasons for why we should just kind of think about this a little bit more. And the best example or the best like analogy I heard was around like cloning, right? In the late 90s, you know, we as a species like cloned another species, we we cloned a sheep, a female sheep, and then you know, the exact way we were able to create the exact same sheep and and pretty quickly. Everyone around the world was like both enamored and well, should not do that anymore.
speaker-1: I think this sounds like it's going to be about three of me running around and I think that's like, you know what I mean? What does that mean for me as an ego, as a soul? What does that mean for like, you know, yeah, what does it mean for my place in the world and the universe? Yeah, no, totally.
speaker-0: 100%. Right. And I think, you know, I don't know, cause I, you know, when, when that happened, I was still just like riding my bike around the neighborhood, picking my nose. So I don't remember anything about what it felt like at the time where something was cloned for the first time. But I do feel like this is similar, but different. It's not like everyone had like just a little bit of cloning technology in their home and they could like taste it and be like, but this is great. Right. It was happening in very, in a very solid, environment. Right now, like, you know, we were talking about it earlier. ⁓ There are still a lot of people who have not touched and experienced AI, for but there are millions that have, right? And it feels almost like this immovable force with with very potentially not guaranteed, but potentially, you know, significant consequences.
speaker-1: Well, and I feel like I've always been, I mean, I was going to say slightly obsessed. I'll just say obsessed with like from a technology perspective and where things are. I dived deep into it and you know, it's first time I heard about blockchain and then, you know, an Ethereum and Bitcoin and then, and then I bought some Ethereum and I made a contract and like, like I want to sort of understand these things at a fundamental level. But this is the first month in which it feels so magic because I think I've, I think I've created like 12 Projects this week, you know what I mean? Like and I'm not saying like I sketched out an idea like there's there's a number of them they're like 80 90 percent done and Then but conversely that means that I know that there are others that are infinitely beyond me in terms of understanding You know what mean? So then you're like, how am I gonna hang on? The hell I'm hanging on the side of this truck and I know it's about to go like warp speed and do I have enough grip strength? Where's my seat? You know what mean? Like I'm just trying to figure out how to like, and then how do I also help, you know, my kids, you know, get ahead of it in the, in the way that they're nine and six, which sounds like you shouldn't have to worry about it for a while. And it's like, I don't know if you're not native to this, like if you decide to get native to it 12 years from now, like that's, uh, that's not going to work.
speaker-0: But what have you guys decided is your parenting approach?
speaker-1: Oh, it's, it's my wife and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum, which means that we make the yin and the yang together. I am the one that like, uh, you know, we would go to the beach and, and everyone would go down to the beach about 45 minutes later. I was so bored. I just wanted to go out and play Mike Tyson's Punch Out on Nintendo. And I just wanted to sit out there and play. And my mom was like, we drove all the way to the beach. It's so sunny. It's so beautiful. But yeah, but in my brain, like I'm just like, I'm thinking about how to get past. Soda Popinski, you know, whatever, like I'm just like, that's what's happening in my brain. I can't just be like, you're right. It's so nice out, you know? And so I had this thing and, and that's what sort of led, that's what sort of fueled me to want to learn and absorb and learn and absorb and get to this place. And I feel like you kind of have to, or a lot of people, especially knowledge workers are going to have to get to that place where you just, you're thirsty to understand and grow. Because if you sort of watch it, it's going to get so fast that it's going be hard to like catch on later. And so we do a balance. mean, I, you know, I boys and I play ⁓ wobbly life together and Nintendo and, know, and, and we've got a Legion and we'll play games together. And then we also, my son, you know, and I work on projects with Claude. So he sort of gets the idea, or if he's like, can you look up on YouTube how to do this thing? I'm like, no, you can ask Claude how to do it. Cause you already have a wobbly life. project and he's like, ⁓ yeah, so he's typing out and he's like, where is the magic key or whatever it is. And just even starting to, I think for them, what I'm scared for is, is I don't want, ⁓ I know my parents, the computer was not the refrigerator, right? For me, the computer and the refrigerator were both sort of native when I was growing up in my like, you know, past my teens, but This is going to have to be native to them. It can't be a thing that they heard about. And so I just I'm I'm always a little hesitant to be like, let's just let them grow up. when they get into their teens, they can start getting into this stuff that now changes weekly.
speaker-0: Hold on. That's nuts, man. Like it, we struggle with this a little bit too. Um, yeah, I feel very fortunate. Both of my parents were, um, um, in tech. Uh, my mom was a lifer at Hewlett Packard. Uh, so like, you know, tech was always in our lives. And I think very similarly to you, I, I spent a lot of time just thinking about problem solving.
speaker-1: So anyway.
speaker-0: Right. and being able to do more things with the technology I had available to me. You know, a couple good examples. I at one point tried to build a skate park in my backyard and hypothesize that it wasn't working because it didn't. My plans were not correct enough, but I could build better plans on the computer without realizing it was. Truly because I couldn't have the resources. ⁓ You can't skateboard on cardboard boxes. But I'm with you, right? And it's totally changed, though, kind of the way I encourage my kids and what I encourage them to spend time on where maybe if this were 10 years ago, I'd really go deep on their obsession with like ⁓
speaker-1: Yeah, nice.
speaker-0: with like Legos and like engineering and building blocks and albeit we still do a lot of that and encourage a lot of that because I think that's really, you know, great. ⁓ But now it's now we spend a lot of time like just going, okay, why do you think that happened? Why do you think like more like deeper, sometimes abstract, critical thinking thought challenges that I think are going to be really important when you've got all of you know, all of this intelligence at your disposal, but you're, you know, to a certain extent, still going to need to orchestrate. Maybe, maybe not. all the way. Yeah, if the answer is maybe not, you're going to need to critically think like, what is the purpose of your life? Right? And
speaker-1: We'll find out. And maybe we'll all just be in floating chairs like on Wally sipping on, ⁓ you know, the the drinks going like, what we have a pool. ⁓
speaker-0: Love that.
speaker-1: I want to hear about Atlas. this is the purpose of Xero. And why I started this. When I started Stackless, really thought, one, I wanted to document the journey. But also, I'm so curious about this process of I've got a thing in my head. I think it needs to be brought into the world, or I think I can solve a problem, or I think I can build something. And you buy a domain name. And then you go, okay, what should I do next? You know, whatever. But like from that point forward, I think has always fascinated me. And so ⁓ I love what you're building with Atlas. And I think, you know, what I'd love to know, guess, starting out interesting segue that you were said that your parents, Kate, you know, were in tech is sort of some of your upbringing that may have led to entrepreneurial and tech, you know, as a focus.
speaker-0: Well, that you know, that's another thing I feel really grateful for my my parents for. You know, they were they were very entrepreneurial. But yeah, the we I joke about this with them sometimes they're very caged entrepreneurs. Where you know, they they have all of the traits to be entrepreneurial, but also you know, became adults and became parents and in the late 80s, early 90s, where, you know, you really, they really felt like the best thing for them to do was to go get really good but stable jobs. And, and, ⁓ and be able to provide at all times for what ended up being a ⁓ six person family with very active kids who all did a ton of activities. And it actually wasn't until my dad was 5354 that he started his first business. you know, and, and, and my mom now is like, semi retired because she helps run a farm. And so like, you know, they're, they're, very, but because of that, any, you know, anytime we had ideas, entrepreneurial or not, anytime we had ideas, there was no like, Hey, dude, that idea kind of sucks. Yeah. Or like, or like, go on, she go do your homework. Right? Yeah. There was a lot of like, Hmm, that's really interesting. Like, where'd that idea come from? Why? Yeah. Why? Why do you think that would be important? Do you think other people would find that important? lot of like really, you know, deep critical thinking and a lot of that I, ⁓ you know, not just my mom, but I hand off to my, to my dad too. He, ⁓
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: You know, he was the inspiration for the Atlas logo. So my dad ⁓ actually made the NASA astronaut program. And about a week later, my mom told him that she was pregnant with me and so, and let him move in to Houston. moved to Washington, DC and my dad got a software sales job selling into NASA. And, you know, he reminds me of it often. ⁓ But he had that like, ⁓ you know, mathematic engineering training with this obsession with the uncertainty and unknown of space, right? It's kind of led him into you know, obviously, he was a grateful dead fan. And it just led him into like all of this, you know, abstract thinking and and and it rubbed off and he spent a lot of time kind of leading me down that path and ⁓ And so because of that, feel really grateful that as I grew up, I was able to look at not just problems, but things that I loved and I did not feel limited by any like expectation or social norm. So, um, transparently like the first business I started, um, I was, well, you know, if you, if you don't count that just like mowing lawns when you're 11, uh,
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ that was my favorite. I was good at that. ⁓ I make tight turns. I wouldn't leave any little like kind of corner.
speaker-0: Yeah, gosh, it was it was excellent when I learned how to like checker the the grass right I had a sorry I was an aside because we started on beer 30 I had a neighbor one time when I was 14 pay me 20 bucks and then asked me like how many racks of beer I was gonna go buy with it and I was like, sure. I've never had a beer before.
speaker-1: Yeah. That's great. ⁓ ⁓ my gosh.
speaker-0: But but but so so besides that, you know, I start and because my parents were so open to a lot of things like no one in my family played music, but I played music where I learned how to music and and I started a band when I was, you know, 12 and we were just messing around in garage. But by the time that I was 15 and a half, 16, I was in a band that ended up going and playing overseas and touring and traveling and all kinds of stuff. And ⁓ Granted, it wasn't a very good business. lost a lot of But you know that when you start a band and you think of a band very much like a startup, you have to get through some really shitty shitty times. Empty rooms, a lot of rejection and you have to sell yourself.
speaker-1: Creativity and branding and entrepreneurship and hustling and moving gear and lay all the logistics and yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. So like, you know, it, that was, you know, and I, I actually credit my, my grandfather a lot for this. It was a big support system for me there. He was one of the first ever sales engineers at IBM. ⁓ they went by a different title at this point, but he thought this was phenomenal. He would tell you like, he didn't have, he didn't have an ounce of music in him, but he was fascinated by the business side. Uh, and so him and I would spend a lot of time on that. And, um, for all intents and purposes, like I, I played music professionally and I toured and, you know, last tour I was ever on was a headline and warped warped tour. Uh, but for all intents and purposes, like they were all failures. None of those tours made money. And you, I tell you what, like you get a lot of good times and a lot of good memories, but then you come out the other side, like eight years later and you're like,
speaker-1: Nice. Yeah,
speaker-0: Shit man, I've got a lot less money than when I started.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: But it's funny how that will end up, you all those things that you tried in those pieces. feel like all things that you end up bringing to entrepreneurship that you subconsciously and sometimes consciously know that you end up putting into practice. It's super interesting how, especially with starting business and being an entrepreneur, that you really lean on just about every ounce of experience that you've had in related and non-related fields.
speaker-0: Yeah, I have this conversation with one of our investors the other day. ⁓ You know, I think especially like in this, in this phase, ⁓ I've got a, I've got a good contact. His name's cam duty. runs, ⁓ he runs, ⁓ brickyard in Chattanooga, which is kind of like a, ⁓ a live in, ⁓ accelerator and, ⁓ and their whole thing is, you know, it's, ⁓ you gotta get through the trough of sorrow, right? And they didn't, it didn't create that. That's a, I can't remember if it was Christiansen or Sullivan. can't remember whose that was. but holy mackerel, like, you know, you're gonna launch you said like, you buy your URL, you launch your company. And especially nowadays, you know, your LinkedIn is gonna blow up, people are gonna be like, how yeah, they're gonna
speaker-1: Also, do not tell anybody your idea because they will take it and just like run with it. They can take it and raise so much money off of it just off the word about the idea.
speaker-0: you but but what you're you get, you get through this initial bump, right of excitement, and that some of that might be just like, ⁓ excitement and vanity metrics, some of it might actually be like some customers and stuff, but no matter
speaker-1: It's also like it's uncharted brain space even for yourself and that you're always so aware. Just like if you move to a new city, right? The first year everything is fresh and you're like watching everything or whatever. It's when that piece wears off and you don't have money yet or product market fit. A hundred percent. And that, you know, or whatever. And so you don't, then you don't have that juice and that adrenaline of the freshness to sort of bolster you. That little, that The curve is just rough.
speaker-0: ⁓ and that's where I feel so grateful for the months I had to sleep in the back of the 16 passenger van and like live $13 a per day.
speaker-1: Wow.
speaker-0: Yeah, granted, those are still fun times, right? But like, you you take a lot, you said it, you take a lot of these experiences, right? And, and if you've lived through things like that, there's, you know, there's adversity everywhere. But and by the way, it doesn't have to happen. It doesn't have to come to you from like, this terrible thing happened to me. Right. But it but almost always it comes from, from that we're taking some sort of risk that didn't exactly play out. the way you thought it would. Right? And like, no matter what, your startup will not play out the way you thought it would. And you will hit the trough of sorrow. I mean, every it's like, it's like fan fiction. Now to look at these lovable and the cursors of the world and like, have your head explode and be like, Whoa, overnight success. But like you have to really go back and do your research and see that. ⁓ dude.
speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah.
speaker-0: those companies have been companies for like five, six years, right and they're
speaker-1: all feels like Clueless these days, right? Like it feels like the guy that made Clueless was sitting around on his couch and was like, ooh, I got an idea. And he sort of like, he spends a day or so in hacker mode and then he has this thing. And then all of a sudden it's just like, he's a Silicon Valley darling. And you're like, wait, don't. Don't take the Instagram version. have no idea what's behind that. And I guarantee you there's a lot of hustle and other stuff in there. But yeah, it looks like that from the outside.
speaker-0: You know, read Hastings had a really good, I don't know where this was like in a book he wrote or some blog post, but he had a really good, he had a really good anecdote about when he started his first company, he took an investment from his dad. But when he took that investment from his dad, he said, Hey dad, like, you know, on average, takes three to five swipes at this to get it right. And you clarified he's like, I don't mean, like, we're gonna, you know, pivot three or five times. He's like, I mean, we're gonna, I'm gonna run and build three different companies and run them into the ground and fail them. You'll probably be at all successful with something right. And I think it's like completely lost right now. And I think it's an important reminder that, you know, the you know, we've got all these great solutions and all these great tools and technology that allow us to do things faster, but we should like, think about this and the fact of like, well, it doesn't make us successful more often, it just makes us fail faster and therefore perhaps we can get to something successful a little bit. We still got to go through all the fucking ass kicking.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally. So let's parlay it into Atlas. Where ⁓ was the moment? What were you doing before? Before the idea, before the inclination, before that ear worm, that bug got in your brain and you were like, ⁓ I got to, this is something I got to do.
speaker-0: Yeah. So, ⁓ we, well, this is the third company I've started. ⁓ was fortunate enough to, to sell one in the past and talk about butt kickings. That was a, that was a big one. and, ⁓ and in that process, I, I, I got hooked up with the founders, ⁓ from Pendo. They actually, ⁓ worked out the same coworking space that I did. And, ⁓ I had a few mentors inside of that company who were helping me through, um, kind of like the, the step down from, from my last one. And I feel so grateful for this moment, um, where, you know, the leadership of that team was like, Hey, what are you going to do next? I was like, well, I gotta go start another company, man. Like I just got my butt kicked. I gotta prove that I can get out there and actually do this. And they were like, we, we believe you can, if you spend a few years, you know, in the front row learning from a few guys and girls who have done this before. Right. And, and, and we promise we'll keep you in the front row if you join us and continue to deliver value above and beyond. Um, you know, it's like a handshake agreement. It you know, we all kind of said like two years and then go out and start another company. Um, that two years turned into 10 years. Uh, wondering how I got here. Like, I feel so so grateful because I think they, you know, Todd and Chas, you know, kept so good on their promise. ⁓ I'd like to feel like I did the same, but I had the opportunity to, to, to lead some of our first sales teams to build our ops and enablement team to run our European business to lead ⁓ North American sale, you know, parts of our North American business that were that were very substantial and important. ⁓ And while all of those were excellent, you know, I got to, I got to sit with Todd, like in small pieces participate in his fundraising and much larger piece.
speaker-1: Nice. Yeah. That's invaluable.
speaker-0: Yeah, I get to ask him tons of questions. I had access to information as long as I kept it discreet that no one else, very few other people in the business had, but purely just because I was learning, I wanted to be a better entrepreneur. And Todd and Eric and Rahul are excellent entrepreneurs. ⁓ And I also got to six times at Pendo participate in changing our business model. Yeah, not nice. No, it sucks. man.
speaker-1: Nice learnings. Like it's good to go. But to go through that and come out, obviously, once you do your own thing is now, know, the optimistic and the optimized path to take.
speaker-0: Percent. Well, that and it was very clear to see one like this. It kind of was a forward thinking company. We were working with AI and had alternative business models before the Gen I Gen AI boom. But they were all things. I'm sorry. From a business model perspective, there were things we did in name only because we really couldn't facilitate it or we didn't have the resource time to ⁓ build. in true like usage based tracking for monitoring purposes into our into our product. And so like what what ended up being the I don't want to say like the aha moment because it was like multiple aha moments where this one was really like, you got to do something about this is we had a small little company called Anthropic come in to buy parts of Pendo. No, granted, this was 2021, 20, 2021 or so 2022. And, and we had everything agreed to, we had the cost of the contract agreed to, we had redlined everything we had. The only thing we hadn't agreed on was how we would charge them. Pendo's business model at that time worked on a monthly active user basis. Anthropic was coming in to buy more like more of Pendo's product for qualitative research, trying to understand how users actually felt about the product via MPS surveys and other things. And so these two things didn't match up because they were going to literally be millions and millions of users that Anthropic didn't want data on, didn't need data on, and wasn't going to use that data, but we were still going to charge them that way. And so very simply, they were like, could you just charge us based on the amount of MPS survey results? that we get, you know, kind of like a pure usage somewhat of an outgap based scenario. And our teams are like, yeah, sounds very fair. Right? That's that's excellent. Let us take that back. Took it. I took it back to the engineering teams on on finance and the sales operations teams. And after some deliberation, they were like, you could ask him to come back in six months. That's when we'll be able to support that we'll start and start to build now. And ⁓ long story short, we we lost anthropic to one of our big errors. I think that's actually very large contract for them right now. But having worked on that business model, having presented options and opportunities to price like this, you know, just a few months before and having been rigid, it was like, dude, we got to like, things are rapidly changing. Where the buyers want to pay for software, and now so much AI in in ways that more reflect the value they're receiving as opposed to like seats or access or something along those lines. ⁓ And nobody is armed and ready for that. Right. And so ⁓ we're very fortunate that that Pendo itself is a product analytics solution. It's ⁓ from a a technical perspective, it's extremely elegant, it's wonderfully flexible. And it gave us a a great idea and a great blueprint for how to go build something similar into, you know, a billing infrastructure type format into a product where it'll teach you how to price and package. It'll allow you to deploy any business model. So all that being said, I, you know, it was a, that was a big moment, but it was really a lot of little moments leading up to that big moment where it was like, okay, this has been a really painful process. And we're still not winning the things that we should be winning. So we should do something to fix that.
speaker-1: I love that because I can even visualize the beginnings of the ideas of Atlas in that moment when you're a startup and you're the visualization of the case study, especially you're a startup founder or you're selling for a startup team and the client goes, hey, could we pay you in this way? And that you sort of jump forward to the moment where you can go, yeah, yeah, Like, yeah, that's fine. Like, I'll work it out. and that you just go back and that you can just move the pieces around and then just do it versus being like, we have to deliberate, we have to redo our company and we have to like, you know, the ability to just like, customize a few things in a few ways and just get the money in and then sort of like, you know, figure it out after.
speaker-0: And by the way, what was crazy for me is for the longest time, I thought this was a Pendo problem, but I couldn't, I couldn't marry these two things where I mean, Pendo, albeit I've worked there for 10 years and I'm very biased. Like I love that company. I love that product. I love that business, but like we were so, so I'll say we were on the forefront of everyone. were super innovative, right? We always pushed the boundaries. Right. And, I just couldn't make that fit with this idea that this thing, like this was, this was where we were clunky and legacy and, you know, corporate. And I was like, that doesn't, so like, let me go see if this is a problem everywhere else. Right. And like, yeah, like we did 110 interviews before we actually launched the company of, ⁓ know, companies like Pendo in and around that space and, overwhelmingly. Right? People came back and said, Hey, we're building new product. It's got some of this new AI stuff in it. We have no idea how to price it. And what we have from a billing infrastructure perspective won't handle it. Right? And we would share that anthropic antidote with them. And we'd say, Hey, let me tell you a story. Does this resonate with you? And almost always like we I've still got the notepad like 90 % of the time people said, Oh, stop. Stop here.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: those. And so, so it was, it definitely, definitely crazy to me that I just couldn't couldn't fathom that this was a Pendo problem. But it was even, I think more wild when I learned that it was a much bigger problem than just Pendo.
speaker-1: When did you make the decision to make the jump to start on Atlas?
speaker-0: I gave Todd, so ⁓ Todd Olson is the CEO of Pendo. ⁓ I gave Todd the standard six months notice. I was leaving for joint benefit. April, 2024.
speaker-1: ⁓ no, that's exactly when I started sacklisting. Wonderful. April 4th.
speaker-0: You and I were just Jones and a
speaker-1: Totally and I did I was actually working for a consulting company and I basically just said by the mine wasn't mine wasn't unnoticed as much as it was like by the way I have this thing I'm working on and if it ever is a thing I have to go do the thing so like just know that we're not doing this forever together just like That that thing will become a thing. So I'll keep you updated. But like that was my
speaker-0: love that. But yeah, I think I think that's a great way to to go into it to transparency. Big fan of transparency. ⁓ yeah, mine was my you know, Mine was similar. Todd. Todd. I love by way of bald my eyes out. bald my eyes out. ⁓
speaker-1: I bet 10 years you bet you've been in that in that company in that culture.
speaker-0: or I met my wife at pendant. So it was like it was a big, big deal. But like, and I'll share it, he won't listen, but he'll be mad at me if he does like Todd Todd cried a little bit too. We're very good friends too. So like, have him over often. And so anyway, we, you know, when I told him, I was like, Todd, and this was in April, I was like, I found the thing. And I'm gonna go build the thing. And he replied, Finally.
speaker-1: Nice.
speaker-0: That's great. It was like, when are you leaving? I goes September and he goes, what like
speaker-1: you realize as a startup, I need as much runway as I can get that's humanly-
speaker-0: exactly. was like, Oh, we got this million dollar deal that's gonna hit at the end of August. And a stay through that. And he was like, fair enough. I was like, Look, I also, I I've been here for 10 years, it'll be, you know, it'll be a shift for the team when I leave. And I want to ensure that the people coming in behind me and the people rising up like have a good opportunity. Yo, to to to take try to take what's in my head and put it in there. So I was like, dude, strap me into a chair and just like zap it all out of me. Like, especially in startup world, 10 years of tribal knowledge is unbelievable. mean, we're gonna quickly move into a ⁓ an era where it doesn't matter, right? It's all going to be on our Mac minis and shit. But like, but I did want to make sure that, you know, I left the place as as well as I could, it was partially financial, but also partially like, It had given me just such a good ride and Pendo gave me so much that, ⁓ that, you know, that, that six month period, that September timeframe was really what worked well from my boss and where the quarter break was. And it just, it just aligned best for the company as well. so, yeah, non-standard, should say six months, but yeah, but it was, it was good. felt, I felt.
speaker-1: Yeah, totally.
speaker-0: awesome about it. I hope that there are more entrepreneurs that come out of Pendo. It's a very entrepreneurial company. Hired a lot of entrepreneurs, really encouraged people to have bias, to act, to build things internally. think I might have built like three or four solutions at Pendo with Tiger teams that still drive tons of value internally today. And so I'm excited. I really hope that that more come out of come out.
speaker-1: That's great. So you set off on your journey. You've got six months where you're sort of, you're doing the side build thing, right? So you're starting to put things together. what was the moment when you were like, where were you at when you left Pendo? Where were you at in the process from an Atlas timeline perspective?
speaker-0: So we had. We had like the bare bones of a product built. This was right as, you know, the AI IDs were becoming good enough, but still really sloppy. You it was like, yeah, I could punch in what I want, but I still have to do the same amount of work just from like a QA perspective. ⁓ Fast forward to where we are right now. And you just told me you were like, I just this just go drink coffee. would come back in it. So
speaker-1: QA yourself and don't tell me to look at it until you have fixed it. And I did that this morning. Like it was it was circling on itself a little bit and I realized that I was in haiku instead of in opus. And so I switched to opus and I said do me a favor. I was like I've been circling around haiku for the past like 10 minutes and I was like can you just go check this and test it before you send it to me and only send it to me if it's fixed. And so it just sort of like did the thing that it was like, I got it. And I clicked it. I was like, that's it. And then I moved on. Like, it's so crazy to be able to.
speaker-0: I haiku he's fired.
speaker-1: I love Haiku for the really quick, cheap stuff because you'll get done with a session though and they're like, this session cost you $18. All the operational stuff where you move these files around and tell me what's in here and just read through the file or whatever. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. had a team meeting the other day and one of my, you know, I was, I was bragging about, ⁓ I was bragging about my, my ability now to write code and, ⁓ he has since nickname mean hook who, but, ⁓ yeah, you know, so we, had this bare bones product, but really what it was, was a backend event ingestion engine. the time I left, it was an invoicing engine.
speaker-1: ⁓ nice.
speaker-0: It was a very minimal front end, like really no features. What we were working on was this. I, we kind of, you know, uh, I would say September to April, you know, it was really hard, really, really hard because we went immediately into trying to sell companies that we were most familiar with, like the pendos and the air tables of the Those were the kind of things that Pendo we had been working with and we had spent a lot of time validating this idea with them. So a lot of our early build was back end focused. How do we scale up to handle billions of events, which we did successfully, but we somewhat overlooked the political nature of a business model and pricing impact. The other area that we had spent a ton of time and for whatever reason, just kind of looked beyond. Maybe it was like trauma that we had blacked out. But you know, pretty quickly, we started successfully testing this stuff with massive amounts of data. And we would go into, you know, the the pricing teams, the amoeba, the committee that that business model and be like, we're ready, guys, let's do this. And all of a sudden, 50 people at once for like, we're not doing that we're doing usage, we're not doing that we're doing credits, we're not doing We're just like, yeah, ⁓ no, like, whoa, dude, we really fucked up here. Like, we don't have a lot of money. can't like, this is going to take us nine months to try to sell one of these deals. And maybe we can get two or three of them. But like from a startup perspective, we're not going to get the app bats or the learning that we need. If we start up here, we just, you know, we're not, you know, we're not a Silicon Valley darling. We were great at Pendo, but we weren't the founders. No one's pumping $10 million into us on an idea. We're happy to really scrappy. So selling into these guys and girls is just not viable. And it was a two quarter learning process. And so we made a really hard pivot ⁓ or decision to hard pivot. our ICP around March, beginning of April to say, you know what, we value ⁓ repetition, we value learning right now. The most important thing we can do is get people into the platform and using it regardless of the scale we built it for so that he can start understanding what is most important. And at the same time, were, you know, I was really starting to shift my opinion of like which companies you know, over the next five years are actually going to survive. And I start look at these these new like vertical specific AIs that I think just have a much better chance of crushing it than, you know, some of these slow, low growth, public software companies that we originally were focused on. so so we we
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: And by the way, we hadn't commercially launched the product before this point. were primarily working in like a pretty open stealth. ⁓ And, and so in June on product hunt, we launched, we launched commercially the product for the first time. ⁓ We won product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. We within the span of six days, put 1200 users onto the platform. And and learned very quickly that all of that was awesome, but no one wanted to pay for it.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's great.
speaker-0: So it was it was all of like all the vanity stuff that you hope for, right? All of you like we had it on one side. We were like, dude, we are now we're moving now we're a real startup and on the other side we're like, okay, but has anybody has anybody actually paid for it yet? yet. So it was, you know, that was and so then we then we had to embark on the like, kind of like the next iteration, which was like, okay, there's, there's a there's something here, right? There's something here, but we need to find the epicenter of solve the pain. You know, but in a way that that is valuable enough that people will pay for it, you know, with a group of users that will pay for it and you know, admittedly, I think we're still very much in that like post product hunt phase. You know, we, spent an, again, a quarter kind of focused on that builder class to learn that, okay, those aren't going to be. And so now over the last two quarters or so we've really focused on, you know, pre seed seed, a little bit of series a vertical specific software companies, ⁓ you know, providing them not just with like billing infrastructure and and insight on their business model, also like, ⁓ consultation and pricing and packaging workshops and accelerators. And, we're finding this, this real, this real great foothold in this spot where companies are, you know, they've got customers there's, maybe they haven't found product market fit yet, they're transactions and they're starting to realize that, Hmm. the my business model might be an element of this product market fit thing. ⁓ And, and I really need, if I want to, if I want to, if I want to cross the chasm, I really need to figure this piece out too. And so that's where, you know, I wouldn't say we found product market fit by any stretch. No way. Like I just, ran our ICP by, ⁓ by, by my good friend Lindsay the other day and she just goes, ⁓ my God, what are you going to sell to the whole world? She's like, that's way too big, dude.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓
speaker-0: ⁓ And I really appreciated ⁓ the candid feedback. ⁓ She wrote me like a like a whole paragraph and and at the very end goes, Okay, but this one part that was cool. Okay, okay. But yeah, so we're very much like, very much still in that process of like, okay, how do we buy a shout out to to Lindsay Rios, she's an excellent fractional CRL if anybody is in need, but
speaker-1: Hahaha.
speaker-0: We're still very much in this phase of like, okay, who are we best for? And how do we go and monopolize that very small segment of the market so that we can own that and jump to the next larger concentric circle of users?
speaker-1: That's awesome. I'm interested. So when did you start the idea for starting the accelerators?
speaker-0: So we worked ⁓ with a marketing consultant. name ⁓ is Alper Maskelyou and he's out of London sometimes. He's out of Saudi or he's out of the Emirates the other half of the time. And ⁓ this guy is excellent, man. And it was really his idea ⁓ to, he was like, hey, you guys are great coaches. ⁓ You know, we, we for, for the whole year, we've been transparently like monetizing a customer success motion and, but more doing it on a one-off basis. People buy the Atlas product and we encourage them to buy, you know, an Atlas accelerator. And so not only are you getting everything from a, from a software perspective, but we're essentially going to come in and replace, you know, a half a million dollars, Simon Kutcher engagement. And most of our customers can't afford Simon Kutcher at this point. So it's great deal for them. They're like, heck yeah. And I remember a call with him where he goes, so I have this idea, but it would mean doing like 10 to 14 accelerators every month, every two months. Like, are you up for that? And I was like, yeah, of course. This is like one of my most favorite things to do. sit with customers and learn about their business and puts us in touch, you know, in touch with what they're trying to do a heck of a lot more. but, and, and so transparently he was like, okay, I, you know, I, I can't remember where he got the inspiration from, but he did see, um, he did see this somewhere, somewhere else. Um, and, uh, and he was like, you know, his big thing, and this is what stuck with me. His big thing was this, um, He's like, some of the best marketing right now is obviously like education based. He goes, but it's all based in fear. People are afraid of AI. People are afraid it's going to change their jobs. People are afraid are overwhelmed by AI and where to start. Right. And, you know, his firm belief was especially entrepreneurs who are so good at tackling their fear. are still still have a lot of that fear that they're going to reach out for help with. Right. And, you know, we're we've definitely identified that trying to understand how to from a business perspective, scale your AI product is a really big challenge right now, whether you are a startup or an enterprise company. This is a brand new technology with new costs, new margin, your expectations. probably brand new metrics that we look at instead of things like ARR. So it's massive, massive, I think, know, shifts inside of the business. And there's a lot of avoidance to like the inevitable tide coming in because of this fear. so Alpers strategy for us that he led was how do we take down these walls? How do we answer this fear?
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: with really great content, programs, things that put us in the forefront, one-on-one with the customer whenever possible. These are not novel or brand new things, but I think the way that Alper foresaw going about this was different, was unique. It meant we had to do a lot of things that didn't scale immediately. But transparently, you when you are in it for the long haul, when you're in it for the long game, when you're building infrastructure, ⁓ you have to be ready to do a lot of things for a long period of time that maybe don't scale. so all the credit to Alper, man, like he he crushed it here.
speaker-1: That's awesome. Where do you see Atlas going?
speaker-0: I've spent a lot of time on this this week. ⁓ You know, I think I think I've got two perspectives here. And admittedly, like I'm working on picking the one that I've got the most conviction around. So you'll get both. The first is, I think, pretty generic, where we actually see a slower adoption. We start to see diminishing returns, or maybe like, I'm forgetting the law, but where you can only improve something so much. And we start to see that happen with our models. For whatever reason, we don't crack super intelligence or whatever it is. what we get is really great technology that makes us like a hundred times more efficient, but there's still tons of human involvement with the act of buying and selling. which point Atlas is gonna continue to sit at the center of that and help teach people how to psychologically appease their buyers when it comes to selling their goods and services and, and, very immediately build the infrastructure that's needed to execute everything from sale forward. I think that's the least I think, I think that's probably not as likely to happen as a world I see where the the agent market, the market where trillions upon trillions of agents are constantly at work, interacting, interchanging and transacting is like an unfathomable multiple size bigger than like the economy as we know it today. And like very much what I see needed in that realm. is a trust layer very similar to the way like Visa is a truck layer for our transactional world, right? Visa isn't actually a payment processor. It's not a right payment network Visa. You swipe a card and it's the it's the ⁓ trust layer that says that person buying is who they say they are. They have that money in the bank, trigger the bank account for the purchase, right?
speaker-1: on big difference between Apple and Google, right? The Google Play Store is sort of open to anyone. ⁓ And Apple, you at least sort of know that this has been vetted to a degree.
speaker-0: So exactly. so I think like, agents are going to need the same thing, but it's all it's all going to be very different from like, what we're used to being identified and validated on like, you know, first and foremost, you're the most basic thing is going to be to, you know, for a ⁓ buyer and a selling agent to have parameters and requirements that they work with them. Right. And this there's like the, know, pretty simple, like agent RFP and a and a selling a selling FP or whatever you want to call that right. But those agents are going to come and instead of like a psychological negotiation, they're going to look to try to find the intersection of what equals the best deal for both parties. And then there's going to need to be a execution layer that not only bills and invoices, but ensures that whatever has been agreed upon can be tracked validated, ⁓ you know, go into aberration if needed to. ⁓ if needed to. like in that world, I see Atlas being that trust network that helps agents ⁓ negotiate, arbitrate, validate what's actually happened to be able to pay and then execute all those things or all of like the monetization infrastructure post engagement, post service delivery. ⁓ That is a little bit of like a futuristic take, but I see that. love it in like the next two to three years.
speaker-1: Yeah, no, I love it. That's What if you so as a a as a parting gift to either aspiring or early entrepreneurs, if you if you had to go back to the, you know, the the week you just knew or, you know, or the first week that you dove into building Atlas, like what's one thing that you would you would tell kind of that version of yourself?
speaker-0: Yeah, I think this is a really noisy process. I think we get we get taught so often to seek so much data and so much validation. And by the way, it's like given to you know, feedback and insight is given to us around every corner, whether we want it or whether we don't.
speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. And there is a process. It's already documented. All you got to do is learn it and all you got to go do is do it. It's pretty straightforward, right? You just need to have your thing. Just make a deck. This is so easy. Do the deck. Say the deck. Practice it. Say it and then just go talk to people and you'll it'll it all comes together.
speaker-0: Right. It just happens. I would go back and I would tell myself like, hey dude, so many of the things that you're thinking about and feeling right now are right and you just need to shut everything else out. Admittedly, there's been too many times where I have just been like, nah, but that person's really smart. Maybe I should think about that a little more.
speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, I love that. ⁓ totally. And then I've had that actually a number of times where I've thought like, ⁓ this is the expert, this is the person that really knows. And then later a future version of me goes, I actually didn't know what they were talking about. But there's so many different versions of you that are learning that through the process. ⁓ And I also, I call bullshit on things like, I've been told things like, The idea that you had for your startup in the very beginning, it's going to change a thousand times. It's not even going to look like what it was in the beginning. And every day I'm like, nope, I was right from the beginning. Like, I'm telling you. And all it is is that I'm stand, I am standing where I should have been and everyone's coming this way, but everyone's pointing to me going, why are you standing all the way over there? You're weirdo. You know what mean? It's like, so I agree. I love that idea of how much noise. I think what I've tried to do also is just make enough quiet and silence or give myself enough distance or, or be sort of ⁓ easy on myself to like, if it's noisy and I, and I can't seem to make a decision, I can't think I'll go take a nap and then I'll like watch something on Netflix for a while. You know what I mean? Like I just separate and I'm like, it's because there's too much noise that I can't, I'm not, I'm not able to listen to that, that sort of voice in my head.
speaker-0: I would take that advice from you now. I'm gonna take that advice from you now. gonna go do a crossword puzzle. That's what I'm gonna do.
speaker-1: Now it's beer 305, right? See?
speaker-0: I'm gonna, you know, I've got a few more calls, but I'm not going to be apologetic. Awesome. know I've taken you over, man, but I'm so grateful.
speaker-1: I'm thinking on them. Amazing Yeah, no, this is great. Thanks for coming on. Always a pleasure. And I appreciate the stories and the insights and the conversation as always.
speaker-0: I appreciate your friendship, man, and always love talking to you regardless of what we're talking
