Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the startup onion that you are listening to, dear listeners.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: I like onions.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Yeah, startups are a lot like onions. Let's peel back some layers. So I'm Ollie, I'm hosting today. I work for Codebase as VP of R D and I'm here with Alex. Do you want to say hi quickly?
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Yes. Hi there. I'm Alex, I'm a prode Scott. I live in Edinburgh and I'm the co founder and CEO of Playmaker.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Yeah, a proud Scott. But actually, tell us, where are you right now?
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Where am I right now? I'm in San Francisco. Proudly in San Francisco at the moment.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: I've even bought a I love sf t shirt for my son.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Have you noticed how everywhere sells t shirts here? It doesn't matter if it's like a bar or a bakery or whatever, they all have t shirts.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: To be fair, it's sunny, right? Everywhere sells jumpers in Scotland.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Yeah, we need to get some tech scalar swag, I think knitted chunky sweaters.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Tech scaler guernsey jumpers or something.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: So tell us a bit about yourself, your background before we get on to what you're doing right now. It'd be good to hear about you as a person.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: I've always been basically obsessed with entrepreneurship.
Kind of really early on, even when I was at school, if I ever noticed a trend in things that people were interested, there's always like weird trends at school with your friends, like, oh no, Pokemon cards or whatever. If I ever noticed a trend, I basically, I don't really know how it started, but I just remember going on eBay a lot when I was like twelve or 13. So this is like 2002, 2003. And I used to kind of just trawl through eBay and I sort of thought, if people are really interested in these things, why don't I go online and buy them in bulk and then sell them in school like a massive profit? Because people your age don't really necessarily know what it cost and they don't really care. They just want the thing that's in a craze right now. So I used to buy things in bulk and sell them in school. My best friend started doing the same, so we started sort of competing against each other. So we learned a little bit about how to run businesses differently to beat your friend, which is quite fun.
And then I started doing it actually on eBay as well, and reselling things on eBay, which I loved. So I probably did like 500 or so trades over the kind of years or so I was doing it and that kind of really got me interested in entrepreneurship. So I was always doing like little side projects, but ultimately I realized that the kind of the highest leverage form of entrepreneurship in my mind was a technology company. But given that, I always call myself a non tech generalist, so I feel like I can do pretty much everything that's not on the tech side. Obviously I have my specialties, but that's where I see myself. So after that my career was kind of, I worked at Accenture as a data consultant after my master's and then I worked at freshworks. We could talk about these a bit more if you want, but maybe just.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Tell us a bit more about freshworks and what they do.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah, so freshworks was really exciting for me because I joined Accenture knowing that it was like a large consulting firm and that I'd be put into different large companies. But ultimately it was like a stepping stone into the startup world. So from there I thought I'd be able to get optionality, I'd meet interesting people and that's basically exactly what happened. So they did training and they took me out to a place called St. Charles, which is in near Chicago, which is kind of I think, where Accenture's base is. And we met people from all over the world who were starting accenture that month. So there were like 100 people from London starting that month. It was pretty crazy. And people from Accenture, Bolivia and Poland and whatever. And one of the practice projects we were doing was to do with the Salesforce implementation. So I kind of got chatting to the guy who'd come over from the San Francisco office and he was a Salesforce expert. So we got talking about SaaS and software and Salesforce and all the other opportunities. And then after the whole thing finished, I went back to the UK and I just sort of stayed in touch with him and he emailed me like three or four, maybe two or three months later and said, I'm actually leaving. I was like, oh, that's a real shame because we built a connection. And he said, I'm joining this new startup called Fresh Desk, which is what his name was at the time. And I looked it up and said, this sounds really cool. Please let me know when they're opening an office in London. Because he was the first hire outside of India, I think, or one of the first hires. And then about three months later he introduced me to the person starting the office. So I became the second hire in EMEA for freshworks, who at the time were basically a customer support software tool. But since then kind of scaled out to become like a multi product customer engagement software company from Chennai in India. So it's cool.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Nice. Do you think you'll ever go back to Salesforce implementation? It sounds like one of the most stressful jobs I can imagine to be mean.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Fortunately, depending on the way you look at it, I didn't ever actually have to do that. It was just like the training. I ended up working in something that was probably more complicated, which was like a front to back data transformation of UBS investment banks kind of data flows. So that was my first day on the job in Accenture.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: That was my first project got, yeah, that's a big task to take on. And you were also at startup growing for a.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: So after freshworks, I was there for about four years or so and I loved it, but ultimately I wanted to get even earlier. So I was just trying to think, like, how can I gain the type of experience that will be helpful when I start the technology company that I plan on starting without any kind of downside risk, basically. So I got closer and closer to the very early stage companies as freshworks graduated through series c and D and e and f and g and H. And it went that far with them challenging my Alphabet on the spot.
And basically I started volunteering at startup grind, which is the world's largest startup community.
And I just loved it because you're just around, I mean, you know, it, working at codebase, you're around people that you love, like inspiring people who are doing things that you find interesting and who are trying to kind of change the way different industries are built. So it just kind of really struck a chord with me. And then shortly after I started interning, or not interning, volunteering, rather. At the London chapter, I found out they had a global conference out in Silicon Valley. So I basically said, can I volunteer at the global conference? Because I thought like, hey, what a better way to get behind the scenes than to actually volunteer? And basically you can go and help out as much stuff as you can, meet more people.
So I did that, and then I met the founder and CEO of Startup Grind, which was great. And fairly quickly we got chatting and he said, what do you do? Let's sync when you're back in London. And long story short, I ended up working there and he said, come on and help us build our startup program, which I did. So it was great. Loved it.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah, I love startup grind. It's been such a mainstay of the tech ecosystem in Scotland for so long, it's just been consistent and there and supportive and yeah, I love it. Shout out to everyone who organizes it. If you're listening, listening to this.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: It's not an easy job to run the local chapters, and there are 600 of them across the world in 120 countries.
When I was there, I don't know what it is now, but it was 250 events a month every month, and then not including the global conference, which is out here in Silicon Valley every April. So it was a busy time. But yeah, all the people who work there are just amazing people.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: I think we've got it in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Now I think there is Aberdeen chapter, which is just great. So loads of startup experience.
A non tech generalist, I like that.
I think I'm kind of one of those as me with no code. Like, I feel a little bit more technical than I used to, but I went to a talk just two nights ago here where it was about non tech generalists and how right now belongs to them, because all of these tools are empowering us to do everything. And you can be a sort of designer with canva, sort of a web developer with webflow or whatever, and it's a good time to be a generalist, I think so. And a good time to build products for general, but yeah, let's talk a bit about your startup.
Tell me about it.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so playmaker essentially is solving the complicated problem of making increasingly disparate customer data more accessible and more usable for go to market teams. So that basically means marketing, sales and customer success people.
And ultimately I was always in and around the startup ecosystem, always kind of working mostly in go to market, so mostly in those sort of marketing, sales, customer success type roles. But I'd also had the background of working in consulting, which is a certain type of, kind of operating. Even in a sales role, you can be a consultative salesperson. So I always had that lens on it and then also was doing that data transformation project. So I feel like playmaker for me is quite a good combination of all these things that I've been doing. And you hear people always talking about founder, market fit. But I think it's funny when you actually experience it and you're like, oh, now I see how this makes sense as a result of all the things I've done in the past.
So it's kind of like data plus decision making plus go to market.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So what kind of decision making, what kind of like actions come out of it?
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So ultimately we are helping companies to collect data from across the organization about all aspects of their prospects and customers. So that might be demographic and fermographic information from their customer relationship management software, which might be HubSpot, for example, might have some enrichment coming in from Zoom info to give a little bit more information than they already have in their CRM about that person or company data, about how any prospect has been engaging with the organization so far. So have they been on the website? What pages have they been on? How long have they spent? Have they been reading reports and white papers? And have they been on webinars, things like that? Have they listened to podcasts? You can track that. Anything that's measurable. Essentially, we can funnel into our decision making kind of model. And then to some extent, there are companies who have a free trial or freemium product led SaaS companies where there's also product usage data even before a customer is closed and start paying. So all of those things can be brought together to basically give people a pretty holistic view at any stage of the journey that a customer is engaging with your business of how likely they are to be a customer and how likely they are to be a very high paying customer. So if we can funnel that information to the sales marketing success people at the right time, with the right context, then they can make quicker decisions, basically.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: Yeah. We need to bring in a vp of sales, like tomorrow, and we're like 80% sure that means that this will close this deal. That's kind of how I'm picturing it.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's sort of like based on this prospect's behavior, either on your website or in the calls you're having with them or in the product, we think that they're pretty close to closing. They might need a little nudge over the line, basically. So whichever sales reps looking after this territory, reach out to them now and make sure that you help them in the right way.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Send them a gift basket. Send them a gift basket, that kind of stuff.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: A t shirt, jumper.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Cool. It is a problem I've seen in the companies I've worked in of just having all of these different data sources. Like you said, you have your HubSpot and then you have your intercom and you have your actual database over here and another database. It's just data everywhere. And so having a way to seamlessly bring that together and create action out of it rather than just a sort of dashboard or whatever, I think that just sounds so valuable to me.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a complicated problem, but really that's where the alpha is or where the opportunity is. I think if things are complicated. In a way, that's a good thing because it means that there's room there for someone to come in and provide a service that they can then productize, like software as a service. To do that.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: As you were talking a bit about for new customers, well, I can see it for churning customers and you're just like trying to predict.
I've seen a few tools that do this kind of thing. I think it's still like there's a lot to play for in that market.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think there are lots of companies that have come in and tried to replace the CRM or be another tool that one of the reps in this revenue or GTM team go to market team have to use. Ultimately, what we've heard from a lot of people we've been speaking to is that you're not necessarily going to come in and replace a HubSpot very easily. And if you are, it's going to be a really long, complicated sales cycle, which is not particularly good for early SaaS companies, especially if you're not focusing on enterprise, where you might be okay with having that longer sales cycle. So what we're trying to do is create something that is called headless or invisible. If you imagine it's not a tool that you necessarily have to log into, maybe the person setting up the lead scoring model or parameters that you want to help you decide what data you want to see. They might log in, but the actual reps receiving the information will receive it in their CRM initially or in like a chrome extension so that can just float over whatever tab they're already in. So we're trying to come into organizations without as much. Well, whilst reducing friction in that process as much as possible.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I think as someone who has, we use a million different tools in codebase and we try to sort of marry condo them away. Like if they don't spark joy, try and cut that SaaS tool and use a HubSpot feature rather than have a completely separate product. And to me, headless stuff is, for me, I've realized it's just, I just want to work in slack. And if you can have a thing that just talks to slack and tells me everything I need in slack, that's great and that's different for everyone else. But yeah, I love that stuff.
You haven't mentioned AI. We're in San Francisco.
Is there an AI angle to this?
[00:14:12] Speaker B: It's funny, I always think like, I don't like kind of bringing a technology to something and saying, look, let me try and find a problem to solve with this technology. I think it's better to, again, as a consultant, I think you sort of lead with trying to understand what people's problems are and then applying the tools that you have available to you, which obviously AI and all of its subcategories are many. But I think ultimately the main way that we're applying, for example, language models right now is in our integration layer. So obviously there are two parts to what we're building. One is delivering the insights at the right time to the right person. But obviously the part prior to that is centralizing all the data and making sense of it. And that's our integration layer rather than the activation layer, which is the former. And that really is powered by language models, the way that we've built it. So there are aspects of our product that we're sort of thinking about how to factor it in, but really it's about understanding where there are problems to which AI, the application of AI will really help advance those things, rather than just kind of bringing AI so that I can edit my pitch deck.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say we've been to a few pitching events here, and it's like it is just there for pretty much everyone of just like they have that slide about AI. Have you registered your AI domain name? It's hard not to get on the hype train while you're here, but you're right, it's another tool to solve a problem, and it might not be the right tool.
I'd love to know a bit more about the company itself. So you and your co founder?
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Yeah, there's two of us at the moment who are the full time co founders. We actually got a couple of early angel checks, so we've been using that to pay a front end developer as well. But yeah, my co founder is the CTO and I'm the cool.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: And so you're based in Edinburgh? Yeah.
How did you two meet?
[00:16:16] Speaker B: So I mentioned know a long time ago, I always kind of wanted to start a technology company. As a non tech generalist, you can use no code tools and so on and so forth. But ultimately I thought my skill set is better deployed on the things that I feel like I'm really good at. I don't think I can easily compete at the level I want to compete with people who've been coding all their lives. No code can take me so far, and I did a lot of mockups and things like that before my met effort, but ultimately realized that I needed a deeply technical co founder. So really, once I decided I was going to be like, this year, or this is last year I'm talking.
Once I realized that this year is the year that I'm going to officially start a company, I started talking to people in my network. I started looking in and around Scotland. By the way, I was in London for about ten or eleven years before I was in Scotland. So I had built a good network of people. But there's so many things that have got to align when you're starting a company, and obviously availability is the most clear one. Right? And so I think I realized fairly quickly that any of the people that I'd kind of labeled or put an asterisk next to that, maybe that could be a future co founder. Availability just wasn't possible for various reasons. So I thought like, hey, I'm going to start looking around Scotland and we can go into all the detail, but I'll give a quick summary first, which is that ultimately, I really struggled to find someone in person locally. And so I realized that I'm going to have to find a place where I can efficiently, as efficiently as possible, run a repetitive process to speak to as many people as possible, create a funnel and then find the right person from a kind of mass of people that I've spoken to. So just get nose to the grindstone, basically, and do that.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think often I hear co founder stories. It's very organic. We were sat next to each other in a working space. We met at an event, but you had built your funnel, you had built your sort of system for meeting people and were like, I'm trying to find. This is the rough Persona of what I'm looking for.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I wish it was organic. I've always been very envious of the people where they're like, oh, my co founder is my cousin and he's really amazingly technical. And he started another company before and he was free, or we work together and we just find. But it is actually rare to have that fortune. So I think ultimately, as with anything, if you really want to do it, you just got to get on with it. There's no excuses, there's no anything, you just got to do it. And as a go to market kind of person, I guess that's my lens on everything. So I just immediately thought, well, the most effective way to get a really high quality person out the bottom of the funnel is to put as much in the top as I possibly can and obviously try and manage the quality as well.
So really I realized that I needed to find something online and potentially consider a remote co founder, because I just couldn't. There was no real area or place to go to find co founders in Scotland.
So yeah, I found the Y combinator co founder matching platform, which is like, honestly a really amazing platform. It's essentially kind of like I've never actually used Tinder, but crossover between Facebook and what I understand tinder to be where you set up your profile, you talk about yourself and your background and your experience and your ideas, plural potentially. And the type of person you want to meet, set up some filters and then you can just basically swipe through profiles, favorite people and send up to 20 outbound requests a week. So I just repetitively, every week I made sure I did that, sent a tailored message and then figured out my conversion rate, booked calls and got going.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it does feel a bit like, I always think finding a co founder is like finding a partner, like a wife or a husband. And it's like people say, just go out and do it. And it's like how find someone you want to spend the next ten or 20 years or longer if it's spouse, hopefully with. And I think maybe we're the last generation of people who sort of met partners in the pub or whatever, and now it is all very efficient. You do have things like Tinder or whatever where I have to find who has a spreadsheet for her dating. And it's like you've kind of mapped that over to finding someone that you're willing to go on that journey with. And I'm sure. Did you meet, how many people did you have to have a Zoom call with before you met fa?
[00:20:56] Speaker B: There are so many things to align as we talked about, so it definitely is akin to kind of like, that's why they call it founder, dating, matchmaking, or all the same kind of terms apply.
You've got to think about, as we talked about timing or availability, the actual ability for someone to take a certain amount of time out of paid work, to work on something for long enough to get to the stage where they're either making enough money through revenue or able to get funding to carry on, and then risk profile, location and time zone, and ability to travel. And do they want to move? Do they not want to move? Are they interested in your industry? Are they interested in other industries that you really like them? And maybe you have to compromise. Do they have the right? It's not just someone technical, they might be an AR expert, but actually you need to build a SaaS tool. So there's lots of what programming languages do they know? And so on and so forth. So I kept kind of trying to draw on the expertise of people I knew in my network as to what type of things I should look for as well, and eventually ended up effectively creating a job description for what I was looking for so that I could constantly vet against it and some questions that I could ask but didn't. Run it like an interview. You run it more like a sort of organic chat. But you know, the key points you want to ask and get across early.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So you met faith in London. That's not too far. Great. You've got 4 hours on the train or whatever. But I guess this isn't a binary. But what's your opinion on? Is that a failure of the scottish ecosystem or is that a wonderful thing that you've built your company in a more sort of outward looking way? Sorry, the failure being not finding a co founder locally.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult one. Right. Because to answer your previous question, which I realized I didn't properly answer, you can send 20 a week. Right. So I was basically looking for the whole of summer, 20 outbound requests a week on the YC platform. I'd sent 20 religiously every week to people that I'd favorited and I sent specific messages.
Sometimes people have found other jobs and they forgot to take their profile down, and sometimes people are busy or they not really interested in your industry or whatever. But generally I found that from 20 invites I would get maybe ten responses and I would get maybe five calls. So I spoke to probably about 70 people.
Wow. Which is a lot of work. It is a lot of work, I have to say. I had multiple calls some days, five, six calls, and then you're obviously having second and third calls as well. So the trouble with somewhere like Scotland is also it's a small ecosystem, it's a small country, and within that, the default path for the most intelligent people is not often to go into the startup world. They go and work for more traditional companies, or people come in and they go to Edinburgh University, they go to Glasgow University or St. Andrews or insert great university. There's amazing places across Scotland.
They then go down south, or they go to America, they leave. So the trouble also is that the culture of work in Scotland is slightly different as well. So the pool of people is smaller. So maybe the sheer numbers you need to go through to get there is difficult. But I also think there's a lot more that we should and could do. And I say we because I feel like I would want to be a part of that process, because I feel like there can something I can give there just to make it easier for people to know that there are other people out there who want to start businesses where they are and all the details about them. So almost exactly like a co founder matching, but directly for Scotland that everyone knows about. So at least they can tell people and they know that they can find others that are similar to.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Do you know Charlie Warden, the Robin clubdown south?
[00:24:51] Speaker B: I do.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: He ran a thing, basically did this, and just kind of tweeted out a list of people who were filling in this. It's like an airtable form. It's just like everyone can access it, everyone can see it. It's like very, very simple.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: It's like Rob Gelp's one, right? And I think it's just ultimately starting there in a very lean and focused way is absolutely fine. I think it needs to grow more and more over time, and there also needs to be a culture of people, again, as I said, like the most intelligent people feeling like the path is to start as an entrepreneur, I think that's maybe an entrepreneur first phrase, which is that they try and make people in Singapore or Toronto, wherever they are, feel like that's the path they should take. And there are so many amazing intelligent people in Scotland, some of which are in the startup world, but many of which aren't. So if we can also get more people wanting to start companies because they feel like it's possible to do it in Scotland, then we should.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: For sure. That is a big part of tech scale and what we're trying to do is that very early stage, like, hey, I still have a job, I have responsibilities, I have kids and a mortgage to pay and all of that, but I could start learning a little bit and experimenting a little bit and seeing is there maybe some need for what I'm doing? And that just gives people a little bit. It derisks know, I think we have a lower tolerance for risk in Scotland than, say, here in Silicon Valley. We definitely do. And being able to help people feel more comfortable doing that stuff. Really important thing. And, yeah, big shout out to Rob Gell for doing the co founder matching stuff that he's been doing. Definitely. And there's a discord server as well that someone I saw set up as well for matching and great. You know, for me, I love seeing that stuff bubble up organically from the community where it's like people are just creating these things. And obviously it could be like a feature of tech scalar and maybe it will be in the future, but I just love seeing that stuff created by hardworking individuals within the community.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah, ground up stuff is ideal. It shows that there's desire there. I mean this stuff wasn't happening, or at least I wasn't as aware of it. Maybe before, but there has to be liquidity in the market basically. Right? Like what's so good about somewhere like entrepreneur first, for example, when they select the 150 people per cohort that they do, is that they really encourage people to sort of, they sort of crash people together and say, try and meet and test out co founding with as many people as possible during the first week or two weeks. And it's completely okay to be very upfront with the questions and qualifying people out very quickly. That needs to be happening more frequently in Scotland. Crashing people together and saying it's okay if you test something out, it doesn't work. And you guys don't invite together, go and meet someone else.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. Crashing people together, physically smashing them into each other, forms out of things happen there. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's great insight on the scottish ecosystem. Thank you for sharing that story.
What's next for you? What are your plans for 2024?
[00:27:57] Speaker B: So really, obviously we're at precede stage, so we're just trying to ultimately find the right product partners. Right. So we started building end of September. We closed our first customer before we'd written a single line of code. So that's where my no code stuff came in. I basically pitched based. I pitched them on the product using some wireframes and know, would you pay for this? Basically? And they said yes. So ethn and I have set ourselves a challenge to not write a single line of code that isn't being utilized by a paying customer. So we're trying to be very lean and focused, which I think is the right approach at this point. I think maybe that's where my scottish influence comes in.
Trying to be kind know, good with money and tight resources, thrifty.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: That's the thing that US Scottish people are.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: Yeah. But I'm very keen on building a global company from day one, but based in Scotland, an outward looking company for sure.
So really right now we're about five months in and we have some paying customers, but we're still in private beta. So we're looking for product partners, people who will give us their feedback on what they need so that we can factor that into our roadmap and be as customer led as we can with what we're building, because ultimately that's, I think, really the way that you get to product market fit more quickly.
So that's really the focus right now. And I think fundraising is kind of part of that. It's more an enabler. It's not a focus, it's something that you need to do in order to build things out and then hopefully scale once you feel it's ready. But yeah, the focus right now is figuring out the right things to build next and who exactly we're building them for.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And what's the thing holding you back there? What's like the bottleneck?
[00:29:45] Speaker B: I'm doing a combination of using my network either directly, reaching out to people I know, or getting warm introductions via people I know to others who are kind of target customers in our ideal customer profile, or doing outbound. I think ultimately the thing that's holding me back is not necessarily limited too much to being scottish or whatever. It's mostly just getting in contact with people. Right. It's a thing that you've got to, again, get your nose to the grindstone and make sure you meet as many people as possible who might have problems. Try and learn as much as you can. And even when you're doing that customer development, if they don't come on as a customer, you're still able to develop your perception of where you should build. So the thing that holds me back right now is just getting in contact with more people, basically, and learning how.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Many LinkedIn messages, connection messages can you send over day.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, whatever your measure of whatever your input metric is, I think I try and measure input more than anything else because that's what's in my sphere of control. So it's not just about charging at a wall. Sometimes it might be better to sit back and think about a more creative way to do it that has more leverage.
Content marketing or whatever is a really useful way to do that as well.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Coming to Silicon Valley.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Coming to Silicon Valley. So being here has been really helpful for me, honestly. I think I talked about this movie with anaise the other day.
By far, since I joined, when we moved back to Scotland, this has been like the highest leverage thing, just being here. I think the way that you guys ran it with sort of structure, but hands off, just encouraging people to do the right things. There's so much opportunity here. Someone can come out and if they're driven and enough, and enough of a self starter, which obviously people in the startup ecosystem are there infinite things to do. So being out here is great. And I really hope that it can continue as a movement for Scotland, for sure.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: Yeah, me too.
That kind of hands off thing. And the thing that just blew me away is I knew the people coming would be self starters and make stuff happen and all that jazz. But just every morning, the WhatsApp group that we have just being like almost at Palalto, most at Miller Park, I must have river at San Ante or wherever, just pitching, meeting people, networking, making customers. And there's just a sort of group accountability moment where everyone's just so busy that it encourages everyone else to be so busy. And I love that, definitely.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: I think getting founders together who are similar stages and putting them somewhere unique, like Silicon Valley, is just the best thing you can do. And there's just so much knowledge sharing organically by being around other people who are doing similar things to you.
And as you said, suggestions of I'm going to this event. I'm meeting this person. You should meet them too. Why don't you come along?
That's been literally nonstop since I landed on the twelveth until today. 2028 29th.
[00:32:57] Speaker A: It's pretty exhausting, isn't it?
[00:32:59] Speaker B: It is exhausting, but also energizing at the same time, which is a really weird balance.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
So most of the people that have been here have been kind of dealing with stuff back home between kind of seven and nine or six and nine in the morning, and then basically doing a full day's work here, meeting people, and then going to a meet up, pitching in the evening. And it's fun and great and you just feel that energy. But by sort of 10:00 you're just like, just exhausted.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: But you're sharing that with the other founders and that's what's great.
I think the fact that it's a time boxed thing, I kind of hate that phrase, but it means whenever something like this is time boxed, you know, I'm going to give it my absolute all from beginning to end because I can probably sort of take a breather a little bit once I get back, but I don't want to do it before I leave because I might be missing out on something.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that, I don't know, I always just get very enthusiastic when I come here. I think I might be an AI bro now, I'm sure. But I find you have mentioned it.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Five times or so in this podcast, so I think you are.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: Honestly, what's the effect? I want to start. I want to build something with it. I'll figure something out, but change your.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Name instead of Ollie, it should be like Aioli or something.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Aioli. Aioli.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: Lovely.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Garlic dip me on. Yes. Softer onion.
That's a terrible joke. But, yeah, I find that enthusiasm, like, it wears off. It's like, after a few weeks of being home, I'm like, I'm back to just sort of a slightly more. I don't know, a bit more of a downer view of the world. And it's just like, I think coming here regularly is just really important to sort of remind yourself that people are enthusiastic and want to do stuff.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And you see what other people are doing. Right.
The world around you is going on when you are doing whatever you're doing at home, wherever that is, or in the office, wherever that is. So it makes you hyper conscious of there's this kind of speedy ecosystem where everyone's doing this, that, and the next thing, when I am at home doing x or Y, whatever it is. So I think it's definitely a good influence on my mindset. I would say maybe you've felt the same. Just knowing what's going on out here more clearly whilst I'm at home, I think it will encourage me to think more clearly about things, make more targeted decisions and things like that.
[00:35:13] Speaker A: Nice. Cool. Well, let me ask you one more question. Just about what a good result of the next year looks like, 2024. Let's say, what be just a great achievement for you to achieve with the company by the end of this year?
[00:35:28] Speaker B: I think the pre seed phase, and I'm not necessarily talking about people who only raise precede rounds, I mean, like the before seed stage, ultimately you build a high conviction hypothesis of the way that the world should be and how you can fit into that world. But ultimately it's also about testing you haven't hit product market fit by nature of what stage you're at. So I think for us, we want to make sure that we always obsess about listening to the customers that we're speaking to and listening to the prospects we're speaking to, and have as many feedback loop, tight feedback loops as we can between now and the end of the year. To the extent that we feel we have a product that we definitely know there's a market for and we charge towards product market fit, hopefully being able to kind of see in the near horizon a seed round that will help us kind of scale up and hire more people to charge at that product market fit kind of horizon. So I think that's really the goal for this year.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: So learning more important than money right now, money. Nice. But learning the main thing.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Money is a measure of the value you're providing to people. So I think that's really mostly why we would want the money. Is this, like, it's validation that you're doing the right thing?
So, yeah, I would say it's mostly learning.
Proven in the form of validation coming from customers in the form of money.
[00:36:58] Speaker A: Cool. Well, fingers crossed. Well, thanks so much, Matt.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: Great chat. Yeah, thank you.
