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SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis, and here we are. It's month six of the pandemic, and we are not slowing down. We are continuing to run the podcast. We are continuing to invest in startup companies because we believe this is our civic duty. Entrepreneurship and creating jobs is going to be critically important over the next two or three years, and jobs are created not by politicians, not by NGOs, not by wishful thinking, not by retweeting, not by virtual signaling.

SPEAKER_05: No, jobs are created by founders, founders who start companies, and then create opportunities for people to have high-paying jobs, job security, and hopefully equity in those companies to create wealth and have people live the American dream.

SPEAKER_03: This is one of the things that concerns me in the world is that many Americans have given up on capitalism in the American dream. They have good reason to. I understand. They feel that the system is rigged. They see Jeff Bezos become worth a ton of money, and they think it's unfair, and they see headlines that because the stock went up today, he made $10 billion in a day or something, which is just factually incorrect. But sure, I'll let people have it. It does make people feel the system is rigged. I get that.

SPEAKER_06: But what you have to understand, if you're hearing my voice and you're listening to this startup, I am giving you permission to take risk. I'm giving you permission to start a company. I'm giving you permission to get rich, get powerful, and to change the world. And guess what?

SPEAKER_05: You don't need anybody's permission, let alone mine, to do this. In America, we still have an open playing field. Is it fair? No. Is the opportunity equally distributed? Of course not. Can you hit bad beats? Can you have bad luck? Can you have started on third base with a trust fund? Of course. All these things can be simultaneously true, but you can change the world with just two or three of your friends accumulating some goddamn skills on all these free services out there, and then taking those goddamn skills and having the chutzpah to start a company and see if you, too, can change the world. And guess what? 70% chance of failure, which means if you do it three or four times, you're guaranteed, in my mind, to have some level of success. That's my rant. Let's get back to the program. We have been doing this Next Unicorn series pretty consistently now, and we challenge ourselves to look for companies that we think have the potential to become a unicorn.

SPEAKER_03: What's a unicorn, you ask? That's a company that is valued at a billion dollars. For a company to be valued at a billion dollars, they need to have about 50 to $100 million in top line revenue. And a high-growth startup would get credit for 10 to 20 times top line revenue, maybe 50 or 100 times their bottom line. So if you had 10 million in profits on your 50 million, you might get 100 times that and then have a value of your company of $1 billion. Why does this matter? It doesn't. It's just a benchmark. It's just some goalposts that people randomly put out there, and it stuck because billion-dollar companies tend to not be a fluke. And so what we've challenged ourselves to do in this series is find what we think will be the next unicorns, the sunicorns. And we've had an amazing run with this series. Some people really love the episode with Zero Mass Water, episode 1102. Definitely worth checking out. Other people really love David from DeGreed or Ben from Caffeine or Nikki from Homebound or Daphne from InCitro and formerly Coursera. Speaking of education and adding to your skill set. So it's been a great season. And today will be no different. I first heard about Loom a couple of years ago, maybe three or four years ago, when salespeople started to send me, instead of emails, email threads where, hey, can we show you our SaaS product? They started sending me Looms of their startup decks where they would present their company and put a little circle with a video in it. And I said, well, this is super compelling. It's a video pitch made just for me.

SPEAKER_06: And you didn't ask if you could pitch me. You just sent me a video. I thought, that's pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_09: And the CEO and co-founder of Loom is Joe Thomas. And he joins us here today on This Week in Startups. Hey, Joe, how are you doing?

SPEAKER_11: I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_08: And where are you right now in the world? Looks like you're in Cape Cod based on that wainscoting behind you. You're in Cape Cod?

SPEAKER_12: You're on the Cape? I've stayed in the Bay, actually. Stayed in the Bay.

SPEAKER_13: One of the holdouts.

SPEAKER_05: And it has been pretty disastrous here in the Bay Area for the last couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_08: Are you in the city or are you in the larger peninsula area?

SPEAKER_15: I'm in the city. I'm in Russian Hill.

SPEAKER_08: Explain to people what life was like in the heart of San Francisco in, let's say, the fall

SPEAKER_20: of 2019 versus what it's like now at the start of the fall in 2020.

SPEAKER_22: It's really interesting to watch the evolution of San Francisco because there have been good

SPEAKER_24: and bad things, actually, that I've shared with my wife who I'm in the startup tech scene. So this is the best place in the world for me to be. I still believe that to be the case. But my wife is in fashion, which there isn't a super vibrant community here in San Francisco on that front. So I've had to find the silver linings. And in the fall, let's just say September, it's a beautiful time of year in San Francisco. I got to walk to and from work every single day. It was a 1.2 mile walk. I brought my dog to the office every single day. We had now at that point, 25 people that would go into the office. And so it was a really great time for Loom. It was a great time for myself as an individual. But then as February and March rolled around and things started to change in a very material way, work from home became a thing. And what's interesting is that I personally am a big believer in having an office presence. And I really like having that separation of home and work. And things changed pretty drastically as a result of COVID. So I could go into that. But you asked me about fall of 2019. And I felt like it was-

SPEAKER_08: And what is, so you have this perfect life.

SPEAKER_03: Things are going great. You're walking to your office. There's a camaraderie and esprit de corps in the office. And now everybody's at home, assuming you've been sheltering in place and maybe not taking a lot of risk and going out. Although you seem like you're kind of a young guy. You're probably in your 30 or 35 or something, I take a guess. Yeah, 30.

SPEAKER_08: You're 30. And so you want to get out and live your life. You have very low risk.

SPEAKER_03: How have you managed that risk and going back out and being social? And do you feel like for young people, let's say under the age of 50, you should be allowed to just go back to the office and take tests and wear masks and socially distance? And are you frustrated by all of this? Because it seems like your chances as a 30-year-old of having a bad outcome with corona are extremely, extremely low, yet you're being asked to shelter in place and to not run your company as you would like to, which is in person.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, one of the perspective changes that I've actually had, and to be clear, we have a remote first cultural value. So we actually ran a survey when we were five people in a San Francisco apartment. And we learned that 80% of our professional power users were using it to communicate with those that they don't have a shared office space with. So you had mentioned- You're talking about your customers. The users of our product. Yes. Yes. And so those salespeople that are reaching out to Jason to sell them their services, you don't see each other in person. And that was true for internal communication as well. So we were actually really powerful for distributed teams. And so the next five hires we made were all remote in nature. And what's been interesting for myself personally, in terms of sheltering in place and working from home, I actually love the ability to work from home as CEO and maybe do it for like two, three, four days out of the week because it just allows for a much more flexible lifestyle than compared to September where I was a little bit anti-remote. So I've actually come around to this power to the people, flexibility is everything. And so I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm gung-ho and want to take extra risk. And we've done and followed the leads of the Googles and Facebooks of the world that said it's at least until July 2021, but it could be in perpetuity that you can work from home and it's really up to you. And so I think from a risk profile perspective, and to answer that question more directly, I've tried to do my part in society, which is actually minimizing the spread. And so you have your quarantine, you hang out with a certain group of individuals, and you actually minimize your kind of like seeing people as much as possible. And when you do meet up, you do it outside. So I'm trying to do my part in society. I'm trying to do it for as long as we need to until a vaccine comes. And so I'm not racing to get back to the office.

SPEAKER_38: And you see a world where now that you've seen your company succeed, remote first and

SPEAKER_08: work from home, you see a world where you move to a hybrid, where maybe people come to

SPEAKER_07: the office two or three days a week and work from home two or three days a week. Is that what I'm hearing in your go back to work plan?

SPEAKER_29: So we've always been that way, actually. So we are that five people in San Francisco apartment, the next five hires we made were

SPEAKER_24: all remote. And we've actually been-

SPEAKER_43: So it's not a big jump for you, yeah.

SPEAKER_24: No, no, we were actually, when we decided to go full-time remote, we had done things like remote week, where every other month we would spend an entire week remote. Nobody was allowed to be in office.

SPEAKER_29: And so when we actually transitioned into full-time remote, it was relatively easy because all of our communication principles and practices, you know, we learned from organizations like GitLab about what remote first asynchronous communication best in class looks like. And it's also part of the change that we're enabling in the world. So important for us to talk through that.

SPEAKER_46: When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about that change and how, while most

SPEAKER_03: companies were really scared of what would happen during the pandemic, I think you're one of the lucky companies that your product became more valuable when a larger number of people went to work from home. Obviously, doing screen captures and explaining things is a lot easier on Loom and doing a screen cast, second only to probably doing it in person. And when you do it in person, you don't have the archive of it. So it's not documented. So it's a double benefit to using a Loom. When we get back, I want to understand how your business has grown through the pandemic

SPEAKER_09: and then what Loom actually is and who, what the use cases are when we get back on the screen service.

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SPEAKER_03: Let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_07: All right. Welcome back. It's the next unicorn series. Our soonicorn series. Joe Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Loom is with us. If you don't know what Loom is, you can go to loom.com and download it right now.

SPEAKER_08: I think my best description of loom is it's a Chrome extension that lets you create a screencast where you can walk through a deck, walk through a website and show people something with your little circle of video, a picture in a picture saved. And you don't have to then do any video post-production.

SPEAKER_03: It just makes that screencast for you and lets you send it to somebody very quickly and effortlessly. And then the audience for this is either people doing training, pitching something that's in a deck, which could be a salesperson or a corporate partnership, or even a fundraising process. Did I describe the product correctly?

SPEAKER_24: The way that we talk about it is actually it's video messaging for work. And we're on all platforms, desktop related at this point. So we got Chrome extension, we have a PC app, we have a Mac app.

SPEAKER_29: And really, the reason why we're bringing video messaging to work is because it combines the expressiveness of video, like seeing somebody's face and hearing their voice is much more powerful than reading a plain text message.

SPEAKER_24: And it can be more efficient and effective from an information exchange perspective.

SPEAKER_56: So the efficiency is...

SPEAKER_55: Do you need to get that doorbell?

SPEAKER_56: I'm so, so sorry. Don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_07: Well, this will be a funny moment in the work from home episode.

SPEAKER_08: All right, so you got your good eggs delivery. So you pitch it as video messaging, as opposed to the way I perceive it, which is screencasts. Explain to me that difference, because if I remember correctly, the initial positioning was more like doing these screencasts, correct? Or am I wrong? Has it always been video messaging? And then what does that mean in terms of practical differences of how people use the product?

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, so I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent right now and might be relevant

SPEAKER_24: to the early stage. Companies that are building out their marketing is that when you're actually creating a new behavior in the workplace or new behavior in general, you have to be very utilitarian and direct about what it is functionally that your software provides. So in the earliest days, we described Loom as a screen recorder that layers on your camera bubble and audio and makes it instantaneous for you to share videos. So right when you're done recording, we had a patent on our infrastructure. You click that done recording button, it pops open a new web page, you grab that link and you share it. And that's how we marketed it to the world. But now that we're about four years into this and that it's less about, am I going to use video messaging at work and more around what should I be using it for? So people are already leaning in. You can actually go more aspirational from a marketing perspective. So that's where we start to get into video messaging. And because it's more expressive, and it's more efficient, it's less functional in our marketing and more aspirational in nature. So that's how we've kind of evolved the marketing over time.

SPEAKER_08: And the key innovation here is that ability to do the picture in picture on the screencast.

SPEAKER_03: So you could say, hey, I did this recently with our marketing department. I was like, here's how I want you to, I'm going to walk you through how I want you to

SPEAKER_08: interact with people from the This Week in Startups account. Go ahead and follow them or then go find them on LinkedIn and follow them. And then I want you to reply to one of their tweets. I want you to thank them.

SPEAKER_03: I want you to DM them and ask them if they want a t-shirt or a mug to This Week in Startups. And by doing that, instead of just typing it into Slack, I make a video, I drag and drop the video over into the Slack room. And I say, hey, watch this video. Then we put the video on the Notion page. And now we have it for all time. If you join the company, you leave the company, my instructions on how to behave on social media has been saved in that loom. That documenting process is once you've got the cognitive overhead and figured out of how to make a loom or to make any kind of screencast, boy, does it become second nature, correct? That's the behavior of trying to get people to embrace is documenting everything.

SPEAKER_22: Absolutely. I think it's about knowledge transfer, right?

SPEAKER_24: So when you think about the different ways that you exchange information with others throughout the course of the day, you have video conferencing, what we're doing right now. But that's, as you already highlighted, ephemeral in nature. You have plain text messages being email or Slack messages. And then you have your plain text write-ups where it's a Google Doc or a Notion document. All of these things are really great ways of exchanging information. But when you can bring the expressiveness of video and the relative ease of documenting something complex in nature, and then putting that and making it available to individuals, because part of the innovation, huge shout out to my technical co-founder, Vinay, of the instantaneous availability, like when you record something, it's actually we're competing with your ability to start typing a message. When your understanding is that you can record something actually faster than it is to type up a message, that's when you start to use loom as second nature. So that cognitive overhead is actually largely associated with, do you believe it's more efficient than typing up a message? And can you see yourself on screen in that little camera bubble at the same time without being too distracted by it? But especially in this shelter-in-place world where people are working from home and on video conferencing all day, they've gotten used to that.

SPEAKER_08: That's become the biggest lift to your business, I would assume, is that at home, people didn't even have their webcams plugged in, or they didn't have a lighting setup. And now here we are in month six of working from home. Everybody has bought a proper microphone, a proper microphone stand, a nice camera, or they've at least figured out how to have a quiet room with Ethernet and make their streaming work.

SPEAKER_03: So you benefit from that C-Change that Zoom and others and work from home were pushing, correct?

SPEAKER_22: Yes, that is absolutely right.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, I believe that it was more about the fact that you were having to communicate with people that you don't share wall space with. That was the primary benefit versus the actual hardware itself. I mean, it's the evolution of technology. One of our bets was that the cameras within laptops would actually become natively better versus having to buy an external camera. And they have. They've become... Absolutely. But the key benefit was actually less about the home setup and more about the fact that you have to communicate with people that you're not sitting right next to. That's where Loom becomes disproportionately valuable.

SPEAKER_05: If your business was at X% in February, let's say 100% of your business in February, what percentage

SPEAKER_03: were you at by August, let's say September? Did you grow 50%, 100% since the pandemic hit?

SPEAKER_09: And what was the increase in growth when people started to shelter in place and work from home?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, this was... I mean, we were incredibly fortunate because some other industries like travel and hospitality were hammered at the beginning. Yeah, went to zero. Went to zero. Yeah. We were fortunate to be the opposite, to have an order of magnitude increase of engagement on a platform. And that's as measured by the number of video views that were happening on a weekly or monthly

SPEAKER_39: basis. And that happened over the course of three weeks, which in and of itself, it's kind of a crisis because if our infrastructure wasn't...

SPEAKER_38: Wait, in three weeks, the number of videos doubled, you're saying?

SPEAKER_29: Uh, we had our video views over the course of three weeks was up by 10x.

SPEAKER_08: 10x? Yes. In three weeks, you went 10x, which could cause server problems or other issues. And they did.

SPEAKER_13: And also... And they did. And our support staff was not...

SPEAKER_24: Like, we didn't have enough folks on that front. And so we had to do similar things to Zoom at the beginning of this, which is that, you know, you shut down feature build out and you just focus on making sure that the system is up and running for our user base.

SPEAKER_09: So if you went 10x in the first three weeks, where's the business today, six months later? Did you maintain that kind of pace? And did you go 1000x in the last six months or 100x in terms of Loom views?

SPEAKER_78: What's been...

SPEAKER_09: You can be honest with us about the numbers. It's okay.

SPEAKER_81: It's only 200,000 people listening.

SPEAKER_29: What's beautiful about Loom is the inherent virality of it. So in order to get value, you have to take that link and share it with somebody else.

SPEAKER_24: It brings them into our ecosystem. And so, you know, we've seen continued growth from that initial pop. I mean, it hasn't been 10x over the course of three weeks, like, since March. Definitely not. But we're definitely pretty far into the future from where our model is projecting us to be.

SPEAKER_09: Got it. And so revenue is way up. And that feels a little weird to be in a pandemic. Maybe even feel a little guilty, as I kind of inferred from like, hey, you're watching restaurants go to zero, travel go to zero, and here your business is doubling or tripling every couple of months. It's a little bit of a weird feeling, yeah?

SPEAKER_41: Yeah. And so when we were actually...

SPEAKER_24: We knew that because when we looked at our user numbers at the beginning of this year, when certain countries were actually being impacted by it before the US, which has about 65% of our user base is still US-based. But we did have users in China. We do have users in South Korea. We have users in Italy. And so when we isolated our user cohorts to those countries, we saw that order of magnitude increase on our platform. And so what we did was we said, if Loom can be disproportionately valuable to people who are trying to navigate this work-from-home situation, what can we do that's very simply the right thing? And so we actually looked at our pricing and packaging model, and we removed the limits on our free tier. It was 25 videos per user. We made that unlimited. We took the price of our pro tier, and we cut it in half from $10 to $5. And then we made our pro tier free for all of education, for nonprofits, and for those

SPEAKER_13: that were reaching out that their businesses were materially impacted by COVID. And so it was a super-

SPEAKER_87: That's a nice thing to do when you're benefiting in a pandemic, and you could have that weird

SPEAKER_07: feeling, which I've had talks with a lot of founders about that weird feeling.

SPEAKER_08: You can also go do good in the world, right? And you can go try to help people. When we get back from this quick break, I want to ask you the stupid question a lot of VCs ask you, and you must have gotten incessantly, which is, how is this business defensible when people have replicated Loom's business dozens of times? There's many competitors and copycats of your product. I used one recently on my Windows machine, like some Snagit or something, because I was making a videocast, and it just happened to, somebody happened to recommend it to me, and I tried it.

SPEAKER_03: How is this business defensible, and how do you answer that question when VCs ask it when we get back on This Week in Startups?

SPEAKER_90: Let's get down to brass tacks. LinkedIn Jobs is going to give you $50 right now, because you listen to this podcast.

SPEAKER_92: That's $50 off your first job post, terms and conditions. Of course, apply, because they're giving you the $50. But we get so many great testimonials from you, the loyal This Week in Startups audience. You tell us all the time about how you find perfect hires using LinkedIn, and one of our founders who listens to this podcast, Jay, is with a company called 10 Golden Rules. It's a boutique digital marketing agency, and he just needed another account manager. Sometimes your business is growing. You need an account manager. You need somebody to manage all of these fabulous accounts, and things are going well for Jay over at 10 Golden Rules. And after he identified his two top targets, Jay noticed, oh, LinkedIn, yum, yum. He's got a mutual connection. You know what that means? You can do a quick reference check, and that's what Jay did. And then Jay was able to hire a great account manager over Zoom through the power of LinkedIn. And you know that power that LinkedIn has, because they have over 690 million members across the world. I mean, it is the standard. If you want to find great people, you just go to LinkedIn. You know it. And they screen all the candidates for the hard and the soft skills you're looking for while putting your job post in front of the most qualified members every day. They get that repetition, and they're looking for jobs like yours. And sometimes you might even get a passive job seeker.

SPEAKER_90: LinkedIn.com slash unicorn. You're listening to the next unicorns. You're getting 50 bucks off. 5-0. Fiddy. From your boy, Jay Cal, and from our friends at LinkedIn, just go to linkedin.com slash unicorn and get that $50 off your first job posting terms and conditions apply, because they're going to give you $50 for just typing in this URL. LinkedIn.com. It's already in your browser cache. You know linkedin.com is in there. All you got to do is put a slash unicorn at the end, and you get the 50 bucks. That easy. All right. Let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. It's the next unicorn series. This is our 9th of 10th next unicorns, unicorns, and Loom is definitely in that cohort, having

SPEAKER_08: raised from some of the great venture capitalists of all time, Sequoia, who co-led the last round. And then, you know, new seed investors, our friends at COATUE, C-O-A-T-U-E. They're some sort of giant hedge fund that then decided to, for some crazy reason, to give like $600 or $700 million to Matt Mazzeo to go spend on seed stage investing.

SPEAKER_98: But Matt is the one who did your deal, correct, Joe? Is that right? Am I right?

SPEAKER_29: That is correct. We work with Matt. We work with Lucas Swisher. And then we work with Thomas Lafont, who's one of the co-founders of COATUE.

SPEAKER_09: The big COATUE, like the overall giant COATUE, the hedge fund or something, right? There's some sort of hedge fund?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. Yes. So they started out as a hedge fund, New York-based. But then Thomas came out, and he's actually running the VC arm of COATUE for the most part. And his brother runs the hedge fund side of the business.

SPEAKER_103: Got it. This is what always happens with these hedgies.

SPEAKER_08: These hedge fund cats, they start buying up these big assets, and then they start looking

SPEAKER_03: at the emerging ones. And they're like, wait a second. We just bought this thing for $2 billion. And we can put $50 million into 40 companies. We're going to become pickers. And we'll see if they can pick. They seem to have picked a good one in Loom.

SPEAKER_08: Obviously, I know the answer to this, but I thought as a service to the founders, the new founders, Joe, who are listening, you're going to get this question about defensibility all the time. I could give the stock answer for you, but I want to hear how you answer it. So here comes Jerk, Jason. I'm a partner at some Jerk ventures. And, hey, so Joe, I saw there's 72 competitors, and there were three in the last Y Combinator class, and the Techstars class had one. And they're valued at $5 million or $10 million, and I could own 20% of that business. And they said they have a better product than you, and they're going to make it free. So how is this defensible?

SPEAKER_107: Go ahead, Joe. Are you talking to dipshit jerk, Jason, DC?

David Friedberg: How do you defend your existence versus competitors?

SPEAKER_24: Oh, man. I mean, this is-

David Friedberg: What's the best practice here?

SPEAKER_24: It's been a fun question to answer over the course of time, too, because you get different flavors of it. In the earliest days, it was truly like, why doesn't this product exist? And why isn't somebody like a Zoom or a Slack going to build this in-house themselves? And so how I always answered it is the fact that you have to believe, and what I think we did a really good job of is picking early investors that believe that this is a missing mode of communication at work, right? Like, this is a massive opportunity. And in order to get this right, you just have to focus on building a best-in-class product. And that takes disproportionate resource allocation to our video infrastructure is the most performant that exists for any asynchronous video recording and sharing. And then the second part of defensibility, if you have a best-in-class product, is you need to build a best-in-class brand around the product as well. So do folks look to you as being the thought leaders and the next kind of brand to trust? And then the third part of this is there could be death by a thousand paper cuts, but usually there's one or two winners in a space. And the one or two winners, particularly in B2B SaaS, are those that can serve the larger

SPEAKER_29: organizations. And so if we can be the market creators and market leaders in this space, then we can start to grab the biggest customers in the world. And as long as you grab those, there's pretty high switching costs.

SPEAKER_24: Like, it has to be a 10x better solution for a new entry to come in and steal the material market share from Loom. And so the question that we had to answer was less about kind of like the small upstarts that are copying us, which now we've kind of created an ecosystem below us that there will probably be more and more over time and more about how do we make sure that we're not just a feature and that we're truly a product and independent business.

SPEAKER_08: So if I can translate the needs of an individual user, like you needed to make a one-off video and you downloaded Snagit because you typed in screen recorder and capture and they bought the first Google AdWords and they, you know, paid $6 for that user to acquire them, that's not the same use case as, I don't know, Palantir or, you know, let's pick another company that's

SPEAKER_09: not as charged.

SPEAKER_08: But, you know, GE needs to create Looms for education across all these different groups and they have 7,000 employees who could potentially use it. They have a different need and you're servicing that need, which is to organize and to authenticate and to protect 7,000 users making 10 videos a month, 70,000 videos and a million videos over a year with a hundred million views, correct?

SPEAKER_22: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_24: Yes. So I think that this is where, you know, that inherent virality that I touched on too is really defensible in comparison to this Snagit to the world too, where, you know, you take a link and you share it with somebody else as a result of creating that content, it pulls you into the Loom ecosystem. So we're actually able to, like from a unit economics perspective, spread within organizations much, much faster because to date, we still haven't spent a cent on paid marketing and we're growing faster than we ever had before. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: So you're not marketing your service. Your customers are doing it because every time they send a Loom video, it's from a loom.com URL, is that right?

SPEAKER_115: Or it has the Loom logo on it or people can check to take the Loom logo off. How does that work?

SPEAKER_118: How do you think about that in terms of virality?

SPEAKER_24: Yep. We've actually, we believe that video messaging is really valuable to any existing workflow that you have. So whether it is sharing it in a Notion document or whether it's a Jira ticket that you created to document a bug or whether it's a salesperson who records and sends a video to somebody

SPEAKER_29: else, like we, that is how we actually spread across organizations is that they take a link and they share it to somebody else. And if they're curious enough, then they'll click through to the, they'll click through to the video and that'll be in the Loom ecosystem.

SPEAKER_120: Do you need to get that Good Eggs or Uber Eats? Is that your Belcampo Uber Eats burger? My wife got it.

SPEAKER_24: And this is, it's funny because she's, she works in fashion and as a result of it, she actually fits garments. And so we actually get multiple deliveries per day.

SPEAKER_29: So that way she can actually fit those garments and she happens to, to be, um, uh, the pattern

SPEAKER_13: maker. So it's like really important that she gets these dozen garments a day. So I'm really sorry about the doorbell ring.

SPEAKER_09: Oh, no, I think we, we are here in the, you know, month six of the pandemic and working

SPEAKER_08: from home means the delight of a dog or a pet or a child or a doorbell. And I think we've all let our hair down a little bit in that regard. And it's kind of fun when it happens, right? Like there was that famous CNBC where the kid came strutting in and dancing behind their parent and the father was like, oh my God. And the mom comes in and grabs and pulls the kid off. Now it's just like when my kids come in, I'm just like, Hey, say hi to everybody on the, you know, this week in Star Wars book club and here's my dog. Uh, so being put into a feature is your next issue.

SPEAKER_03: Uh, most people don't know this, but Slack has built in video and audio and it works pretty

SPEAKER_05: good. And when I realized we had it and we're paying for it, I started doing ad hoc calls.

SPEAKER_20: When you're in, um, a room on Slack, you can just press a button and it calls everybody

SPEAKER_05: who's a member of that room. Nobody even knows about this feature. Nobody uses it in our organizations. I started using it and everybody's like, yeah, we'll set up a zoom. And I'm like, why are we setting up a zoom when it's already built into this? Why are we paying for zoom? It was like, oh, well, zoom is a category leader has these other features. And there was a reason to keep it.

SPEAKER_03: Um, so maybe I'm answering my own question here, but what happens if zoom or Slack or other folks incorporate this into the product you sort of mentioned, that's the next kind of VC question you're going to get. How do you avoid becoming a feature in other people's products?

SPEAKER_124: Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, I do think that you, you highlighted a big part of it, which is having the best in class product is the most important thing. So, um, for Loom, it's making it, making sure that we have the most seamless, easy to use video messenger on the market. And we've continued to be that over the course of time. Uh, but that takes constant maintenance. The other part of it though, that's really interesting as, you know, Slack is used mostly for internal communication. They came out with shared channels. They're an investor of ours, which has been great. They've been amazing. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. They, they actually, there's three different videos that play in line. It's YouTube, Vimeo and Loom. And it's because they actually built something for Loom. So that way it recognizes a Loom link. And so, uh, we've worked really closely with them. If they were to build a video messenger in house, like, you know, that, that would be something that we'd know about in advance. Um, the other side of it though, is Zoom, you know, do they want to get into the knowledge documentation and sharing as a core part of their communication stack? And to me, I think that asynchronous communication is so fundamentally different from synchronous that building a communication and knowledge platform is from what I understand, not something that they're interested in. They're doubling and tripling down in synchronous communication. They're getting in the, the telephony space, like, and spending more recent sources there. And so for Loom, um, I think that we are going to do things like continue to invest in the integrations that we have. Um, I had mentioned that we're disproportionately valuable. And so if Loom integrates really deeply and makes it as seamless as that Slack integration that I talked about, share Loom link in the Slack ecosystem and it expands by default. Uh, I think that there's a really interesting defensibility. Yeah.

SPEAKER_127: I think that's why Slack isn't going anywhere. People are like, Oh, you can use discord or, you know, there's free Slack alternatives

SPEAKER_08: now. And I was like, yeah, but do they have that app store and can you have your survey monkey type form, whatever pipe into RSS feeds?

SPEAKER_03: Like every time you put that stuff in, it's like building this like house and you're building this intricacy. And it's like, after you've furnished and dialed in your home and you've got everything dialed in, like, do you want to move again and start that process over again? Most people don't. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know how you got the Instagram founders become investors in Loom.

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SPEAKER_08: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. Our guest today is Joe Thomas. He is with The Loom, loom.com.

SPEAKER_03: And you got a really interesting group of investors, including the Instagram founders. When did you get them and how did you get them as investors in your company?

SPEAKER_24: I think that VCs and partners can be really great at identifying really great operators to join you on the cap table and join you on this journey.

SPEAKER_29: And so with respects to our series B, Andrew Reed said that Kevin and Mikey are excellent in terms of angel investors, that they do a relatively small volume of deals and that they spend a

SPEAKER_24: decent amount of time with folks and are hyper responsive. And so in terms of building out a visual communication platform, they built it for a consumer, obviously, and we're building it for the workplace, that they could actually help us identify what are the key cognitive and psychological mechanisms that can help create this behavior. Because they introduced photo sharing to the world. And then also Instagram stories was a huge leap. And maybe they weren't necessarily the innovators on that front, but they actually made it mass market. And that's what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_09: And what were those? What was their advice? Like, what are the things that have made it more natural for people? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_24: Look, I think that Mikey, in terms of talking to my technical co-founder, Vinay, and making sure that that magic feeling that's actually largely driven by under the hood technical innovation, like video is really, really hard medium to work with. And it takes constant vigilance. That has been a really interesting line of conversation. I think for Kevin and myself on the product side, we've actually talked more about kind of like product strategy and what are maybe the next major steps that we want to take. So maybe not the things that I can share openly right now, but I think that, you know, the original impetus when we were talking to them was like, how do we build visual communication into the workplace? But we've actually found that the core value that they deliver is more on the strategic and innovation side.

SPEAKER_38: So you did the CO2 round, which is your last series B.

SPEAKER_06: That round started before the pandemic, during the pandemic? So when was that round getting going? Because I know you did the closing dinner under the pandemic, correct?

SPEAKER_13: Yes, we did.

SPEAKER_24: So we had raised the series B with Andrew and Sequoia in September of last year. This round we called B plus, but it was at a different valuation was after the pandemic had started and we had started to see that order of magnitude shift in our analytics. And so we said, can we actually bring in a great new partner that can help us take it to the next level, as well as inject some cash in order to move a little bit more aggressively as a result of being further ahead in our model than we originally predicted. So when we went out to start raising that round of funding, that was in March and that was like late March. And then we closed it officially in May.

SPEAKER_03: So a pandemic hits, the world's in crisis and people are scared and you see, wow, everything

SPEAKER_08: is growing 10x in three weeks in terms of at least the number of views. And then eventually I'm sure the number of users signing up, et cetera, grows and you decide opportunistically, we should raise funding and we should go to market.

SPEAKER_03: Does that mean you did this round and you raised it without doing in-person meetings? And then how many people did you email and say, Hey, we're considering raising money because things are going, did you email five people, 50 people? How did that fundraising process work broad strokes in a pandemic?

SPEAKER_24: I mean, you know, Silicon Valley, when you tell one person that you're fundraising, the whole ecosystem knows. Yeah, it is weird. Yeah. We had told, we had talked to the board internally and just let them know that we were thinking about this. And then from there, we had been building relationships. I think one of the most important things for founders to do that I learned in the early days is be building relationships in between rounds. Do not try and like cold start any relationship when you're going out to raise a round. And so there was a short list of investors that we potentially wanted to work with. And it was starting to get to be at the valuation that we were targeting in that kind of more growth stage investor territory.

SPEAKER_29: And so I had reached out to a short list. We did all of the meetings remote. I actually said it was by far the most efficient round that I've ever raised because I was

SPEAKER_24: actually able to get a material amount of work done during it because I wasn't running around Sand Hill Road. I wasn't running from office to office.

SPEAKER_05: Ballpark, how many targets did you start with?

SPEAKER_03: How many meetings did you do? Would you start with 50 targets or 15? And then how many meetings did you wind up doing 10? I'm just curious, ballpark, to get one of these late stage rounds done, what's the actual diligence process?

SPEAKER_152: You should meet at least five people, 10 people?

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. So we ended up meeting with eight different firms. Oh, wow. So small group.

SPEAKER_24: Small group. But that's because we had done our research in advance of this and had built out our own light VC database. And then from there, what was really fascinating is, shameless plug for Loom a little bit. But after we did the initial meeting with the first two or three partners, we recorded a Loom that was walking through the deck as a leave behind. And we timestamped all the slides and we linked to the deck. And so we said, you can share this with your partnership. And we actually, as a result of having that leave behind and it being a really expressive and intimate look into the business of Loom, we were actually able to skip the partner meetings.

SPEAKER_39: And we actually went straight to term sheet. So, all right.

SPEAKER_154: How many term sheets you get? You get to eight meetings, you get eight targets, you get two or three term sheets, so you get four or five.

SPEAKER_07: But what does it look like when you get to that next level of deciding?

SPEAKER_41: Yeah, it was, you know, overall, term sheets are actually something that like there's the

SPEAKER_24: verbal and then there's actually getting a term sheet. We only got a handful of term sheets, but we had gotten a few more verbals than that. But I mean, I think one of the best things that you can do as an entrepreneur, especially when you're starting to get to that growth stage territory and you want to build great relationships is just setting proper expectations and communicating as clearly as possible. Like you don't want to lead people along. And so for us, we were like, look, there's a couple of firms that we're really excited about working with.

SPEAKER_29: We want to build a relationship. And so before we actually got to term sheets, we had kind of closed it.

SPEAKER_07: Narrowed the field as it were. Exactly. So you narrow the field and then you make a decision and you close this big round at a $320 million valuation. I understand. Congratulations on that. You're one third of the way to the Unicorn status, which doesn't mean anything, but people will obsess over it, obviously. Um, but what I thought was interesting is usually, you know, you do a big round like

SPEAKER_08: this, you have a nice closing dinner, VCs come out and they find some place with expensive wine, like, uh, you know, Michelin starred place. Uh, and they take everybody out for, you know, $500, $1,000 a person dinner, 10 people go, they spend five, 10 grand. And, uh, it's a big deal, right? And, uh, everybody has a really memorable meal, but you can't do that here.

SPEAKER_07: So my friend, Matt Mazzeo, who used to work for my friend, Chris Saka, uh, I think Matt was, uh, an intern for Chris for a while and then, uh, became his partner.

SPEAKER_08: And then, uh, now he's at KOTU and Matt's a really smart, considered guy.

SPEAKER_05: He decides that instead of a closing dinner, he's going to walk people through 36 questions that lead to love and intimacy, uh, questionnaire that I read on the New York times and he suggests

SPEAKER_07: this to you, the 36 questions that lead to love by Daniel Jones, January 9th, 2015. You can read it in the modern love column in the New York times and search for it.

SPEAKER_05: Um, but this is, uh, to fall in love with anyone do this, a study by psychologist, Arthur Aaron and others that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions, 36 questions. And the study are broken up into three sets with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one. Uh, the final task, uh, is staring into each other's eyes for four minutes with a suggested duration range from two to four minutes.

SPEAKER_06: But Ms. Carton was unequivocal in a recommendation. Two minutes is just enough to be terrified. She told me four goes really somewhere. So are you telling me, Joe, that you stared into Matt Mazzeo's eyes over zoom for four minutes? Did that actually happen?

SPEAKER_162: No, unfortunately, but I look forward to it. Not yet? Not yet.

SPEAKER_05: Okay. But these questions were actually, it's like really good. Given the set one question, given the choice of any one in the world, who would you want

SPEAKER_06: as a dinner guest? I've heard that question before. Who did you answer? Who would you want? Jesus is the answer people.

SPEAKER_24: Bob Dylan, I actually, my, my grandpa, my grandpa was like my all time hero and he's no longer with us. And so if I could have one more dinner with him, that's who I answered. And I felt like that was pretty insightful for like, uh, and, and what we actually did to share a little bit more about it is that 36 questions is a very long, I have no idea how many questions you asked this time around, but like, you know, you can maybe get the 36 questions in over the course of three hours. So we said that we were going to stay in set one and we also had five people on the call. And so like, you know, we didn't get through all 36 of them, but we said that we'll get to set two and set three in the future.

SPEAKER_60: I like this a lot.

SPEAKER_171: The second question, would you like to be famous in what way? How did you answer that one, Joe? Would you like to be famous and in what way?

SPEAKER_24: I said that indirectly in the sense that I hope that I provide enough value to the world where I have recognition, but I don't want to have paparazzi in my face whenever I go out places. The good thing about building tech is like, unless you become Bezos, like that, that's not going to happen.

SPEAKER_07: I would like to, I would like to be more famous.

SPEAKER_03: I would absolutely like to be more famous. Really? Why? I would like to be famous for owning the Knicks and being the winningest owner in the NBA history. That's what I would like to be famous for. After I've become famous for being the greatest investor of all time. Those are my two goals. I love that.

SPEAKER_137: Two goals left. I saw that tweet storm and I love that North star.

SPEAKER_03: I just felt like, you know, people are just so unwilling to state what, why they're doing what they're doing. And for people who don't know what Joe's referencing, I just pinned a tweet storm as a, here's my plan. I'm going to invest for 10 more years. I'm going to try to hit 150, 200 investments a year. I'm going to try to hit the same track record of hitting a unicorn one every 30, 40, 50, 60. Even if it's one every hundred, you should be able to get another 1500 investments in over the next 10 years, which means another 15 to 30 unicorns on top of the six or seven I have already.

SPEAKER_05: That would put me in the 22 to maybe even 50 unicorns in a lifetime that nobody's ever done anything remotely close to that in the history of Silicon Valley. I believe as a single GPA.

SPEAKER_03: So that was, and then I said, the reason I want to do that is because I want to cash all those chips in and buy the Knicks when I'm 60, 65, and then be able to have 15 years

SPEAKER_174: left of life, hopefully, and win a championship for New York before making a telephone call.

SPEAKER_22: Go ahead.

SPEAKER_24: I was going to say as a kid who grew up in the Chicago suburbs during the Bulls heyday. So I was born in 90, which means that I was part of the Chicago Bulls.

SPEAKER_180: And I just, oh my God, the Knicks versus Bulls was incredible.

SPEAKER_24: I just got to watch the last dance that came out. And that is the best docu-series of sports of all time. And that's because I'm a Bulls fan, like an intimate Bulls fan. So you saying that you wanted to build the most winningest team with the Knicks, I understood exactly from like a community perspective what that would mean and why that's important to you.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. If you want to see a really good one too, Hoop Dreams was like the original basketball documentary. I don't know if you've ever seen that one. I haven't. But it's, yeah, watch Hoop Dreams. It was like a sort of Sundance darling 20 years ago, just about the up and downs of sports. But man, that series, you know, last dance, I think anybody who's an entrepreneur or was

SPEAKER_03: a fan of sports at that time, the approach that Jordan took to winning and his desire

SPEAKER_05: to win, which I think would be best described at any cost, at all costs. I do not care what I knock over, we're going to win or I'm going to die trying. Is that what your big takeaway from it is that winning solves all problems or that winning at all costs is a bad strategy because you might wind up a broken person where, you know, Jordan seems at times like a very troubled, broken person who is very emotional. I don't know if you noticed, but he cries very quickly at, you know, a tragedy or something touching that occurs. So it's obviously he's not at exact peace with his desire to win and the fallout it causes. Is that what you took away from it?

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. I mean, I think that anybody who has that innate fire to them, there's going to be people

SPEAKER_24: that don't have that match of fire. And I do think that there's a little bit of a wake that is left behind them that in that stage of life, he probably looks back and says that I could have done a little bit better in certain areas. But I don't think that a lot of times his answers were like, I don't necessarily regret it, but that doesn't mean that you can't have an emotional response to it. And so to me, like one of the key things that I took away as entrepreneur, and I actually wrote up this document. So I have something that's called like Joe's Execute that lives in Notion that has like key quotes that motivate me that have like formulas that I really pull it up.

SPEAKER_184: Um, and let's make a loom out of this one. Come on. I can, I can record you. Pull it up right now and read me some of it. Let's go. We have to get in there. Okay.

SPEAKER_174: Let's get in there. I want to know what's in your, what's in your Notion page. I mean, Joe's Notion.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. So I, I like there's certain things like I have four quotes at the top and I'll read them.

SPEAKER_39: Um, all humans are motivated to get along and get ahead. I think that that's like fundamentally.

SPEAKER_20: All humans are meant to get along. Motivated to. Motivated to. Get along and get ahead. In other words, we're aspirational and we're social creatures. 100% agree. Correct.

SPEAKER_181: Why is that important to you to remind yourself of that?

SPEAKER_104: Um, because I think that in terms of building a product like loom, where there's an expressive

SPEAKER_24: component to it, but it's also for the workplace. I think that we have to acknowledge what are the fundamental motivations for building any sort of product. And so keeping things relatively simple and understanding what root motivations are can help lead to product innovation. Um, so another one that I have.

SPEAKER_193: Whose quote is that? Is that just a random quote?

SPEAKER_24: Actually, I, I wrote that because I, there was a New York times series of articles. It was editorials. That was, what does it mean to be human? And they had professors, they had artists, they had business people all answer this question. Um, like Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe wrote up one of the answers to this. And so I read the series of 15 articles and I tried to synthesize what the core takeaways were from that. And I found them to be really fascinating. Um, so if you have a chance, you should read those 15 editorials.

SPEAKER_195: All right. What's your second quote on the Joe's notion page for life?

SPEAKER_29: Um, well, so this, this is actually like Joe's execute is largely tied to CEO responsibilities. But one of the ones that I heard is like, do the things no one, but the CEO can do. I think that it can get hard to get lost in like the day-to-day operations, but you kind of have to take a step back and say, is there things that only I can do?

SPEAKER_104: And that's one that I constantly remind myself of.

SPEAKER_199: What is the, what are the things that only the CEO can do in a company?

SPEAKER_104: Um, I think that setting the vision and mission for the company is something that I do with

SPEAKER_29: my co-founder Vinay. Uh, I would say recruiting a great executive team is something that only the CEO can do. I think that there's editorial responsibilities where you set the execution quality bar, uh, is something that you can actually have permeate down, but it largely is inspired by, uh, the culture that you set. And then there's also how we engage with each other as much as you like culture is something that permeates and builds from the bottom up for sure, but it's also largely founder driven. And so Vinay and myself articulated our cultural values when we were only six team members,

SPEAKER_47: including three co-founders.

SPEAKER_154: Um, those are the, what is the, if you had to describe it at its core, what is the culture

SPEAKER_03: that you've decided in how you work with each other, how you communicate with each other? What is that top down? Is it you drive each other, you push each other, you're cynical, you're funny. What is it? You're loving Kumbaya.

SPEAKER_18: You're brutal like Jordan. You're serious like Jordan.

SPEAKER_24: I'd say ask for more is one of the most cited cultural values, which is like, ask for more of yourself and ask for more of others. And it's also not being shy to ask for help when you need it, because I think a lot of inefficiencies in a business is when you kind of feel like you need to figure it out on your own. Lead with transparency is critical. Um, that you should, unless information is going to materially hurt another individual, having information open and accessible leads to trust. It leads to more efficiency, uh, in terms of faster decisions, better decisions. And to me, it also is just means that, um, when you're scaling as a business, like, can you actually bring folks on and they know the information that, uh, they need in order

SPEAKER_29: to do their jobs. So lead with transparency is like critically important.

SPEAKER_202: So in a way asking is a, is a core value, whether it's asking for help, whether it's asking

SPEAKER_20: people to step it up, uh, and then setting that quality bar. That's a very interesting one that people don't bring up, but it is true that the founders at some point says good enough, or, Hey, here's the quality of what we're looking for. And you should really explicitly state that. And I, it's very interesting. You bring this up. Um, I told my T I was trying to figure out with my team, how to communicate to them, the standard for customer support we wanted to have at the syndicate.com, which is our angel

SPEAKER_03: investing syndicate and I had gone to the Amman hotel, A M A N in Tokyo, when my book came out two years ago in Tokyo. And I stayed there and it's not cheap. It's like 1500 bucks a night.

SPEAKER_08: Uh, but it is the greatest hotel in Tokyo, uh, probably in all of Japan. And it's the greatest hotel chain in the world. It's a new kind of hotel chain that does what's called six star. You know, you've heard a four star, like the Ritz Carlton or whatever four seasons. And there's like five star. And then there's just like six star. The Amman hotel has like 40 employees for, or like it's 150 employees for 40 guest rooms or something. It's like five to one, six to one. And I said, that's the level of customer support I want. I want a Mon style. When you are at the Amman and you walk down to the front desk, there's six people there and one person walks up and you know what happens? Five of the people at the front desk walk up, surround the person, and they make a plan there for you to go get, you know, the best tempura and they just immediately, you know, somebody goes and gets you a moist towel. Somebody gets you some tea. The other person gets you, uh, the menu and, and all of a sudden you're set up in the best tempura restaurant, you know, on the outskirts of Tokyo in a townhouse, which is where we

SPEAKER_03: went and had the uni in shishito, no uni in shiso leaves. That was, uh, tempura for us in front of us. And it was outstanding.

SPEAKER_08: But anyway, that's like, I think a very important, and then there might be other parts of the business where you're like, Hey, yeah, in the office, good enough. Like we don't have to have like the perfect office or whatever.

SPEAKER_115: We just need to have the perfect Amman level service, you know, with the people in the syndicate.

SPEAKER_80: So we actually, one, one quote that you could potentially use with your support team that

SPEAKER_29: we said in the earliest day, we made our first support hire, but we were doing support ourselves as founders. And, uh, we just said support is a competitive advantage if done right. So, um, like we, we told the support team, you're actually like, you are a competitive advantage for us. And that's actually scaled to, you know, now our 10 person support team.

SPEAKER_127: That's a really interesting way to look at it.

SPEAKER_07: You know, JetBlue looked at it that way because when I interviewed the CEO of JetBlue, when they launched the company 20 years ago, when I lived in New York and he was out in Queens,

SPEAKER_03: uh, the founder, I think it was Dave Nealman.

SPEAKER_08: Anyway, he, um, he said that all the airlines had moved their call centers offshore to save money, Bangladesh, India, Manila, whatever.

SPEAKER_03: And, um, you know, people were having a hard time with, uh, accents and just cultural references,

SPEAKER_08: et cetera. And then he decided to do $15 an hour work from home in Utah. And he found, he got into the Mormon community and some other communities. And he just built this, like at the time work from home didn't exist, but he just said, we found single parents in, you know, the heartland. And we told them stay on the phone as long as you can, because, uh, we're trying to build our business through customer service. So if you get on hold at United, and then we pick up on the first one and we're kind to you and United is, you know, rigid and cold, we just score so many points.

SPEAKER_115: What's the third item on the list there of your top four? Or are we up to four?

SPEAKER_29: Um, uh, for my execute, like the quotes. You're, you're execute. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, I'll list the last two really quickly, which is take your seat as a leader, like sit royally as if you have every right to your role. I think one of the things that a lot of founders deal with is this imposter syndrome, right?

SPEAKER_24: So like you, you're like, who, who am I to be the CEO of like a $320 million company? And so I think that constantly reminding yourself that people are looking to you, people are looking to your leadership. And so take your role, um, take your seat. I think it's something that I learned from my coach, uh, Khalid Halim, who's amazing. And then the fourth quote that I have, who's your coach.

SPEAKER_154: You have an, you have a CEO coach.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: Uh, his name is Khalid, uh, Halim and he, he was, how did you find him? So we actually did a coach search the same way that you recruit an executive where we

SPEAKER_24: had talked to 15 different coaches and we went through like a series of interviews and then landed on Khalid and he was with Jerry Colonna. Um, so they, I've been friends with Jerry since 1994. So they built out Reboot together. Uh, he was one of the co-founders and then Khalid just broke out and started his own coaching firm.

SPEAKER_05: What's the best, so his best piece of advice to you was, listen, you know, you're in the captain seat, act like a captain.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah. I mean, it was something that I learned directly from him.

SPEAKER_29: I would say that like, is it the number one thing, uh, the most consistently valuable for

SPEAKER_24: sure. But there's also been individual situations where his advice is like insanely valuable that, uh, like 10 X valuable, but this is that imposter syndrome.

SPEAKER_05: You had that where you're like, Hey, do I deserve to be in this seat or did I just get lucky or is this just random Silicon Valley bullshit that I all of a sudden, you know,

SPEAKER_20: drank the Kool-Aid and you know, now I'm on the seat and thrown and maybe I don't deserve to be here. Did you have those thoughts in your mind, Joe?

SPEAKER_124: I think that it, it continues to evolve over time, but yeah, it's like, you know, when

SPEAKER_24: you work with exceptional executives that are best in class and their departments, like a VP of edge or VP of marketing or VP of design. And you're like, who am I as like a 28 year old to be managing, uh, those that have 25, 30 years and are like the best in their, uh, their discipline. And I think that that's when that quote became really valuable for me is when we brought on exceptional leaders and I had to be a relatively young CEO overseeing them. That's yeah.

SPEAKER_03: That is a very weird moment in time. I know when I had my, my first magazine Silicon Valley reporter and I was 27 or 28, I started to have people like Elliot cook and Carol Martesco. And these were 40, 50 year olds working. I would always say with me, but they would say for me and they were like my support team and they were 20 years, my seniors, but, um, you know, they want it to be part of something exciting. They want it to be something revolutionary. And sometimes it takes a young person to start that. And, you know, that, that is one of the great things about youth is that you can see something and just manifested in the world, not realizing exactly how much work it's going to be and how hard it's going to be like a magazine. And then all of a sudden these people come and they try to help you, right. And letting people help you is a big, I think that's a big unlock. That was a big unlock for me was learning how to delegate and letting people help me. Because I just felt like I had to make every decision. I had to put everything on my back. And now I'm the opposite. Now I'm like, make a decision, people, like, and then come to me with your decision and let me know, you know, if you have any, you need any feedback on your decision, but make a goddamn decision. Okay.

SPEAKER_115: So take the throne, understand you're in the throne for a reason. And what's the fourth one on your execute list?

SPEAKER_24: Personally, thank someone every week. Like, it's just a reminder. Yeah. And so like, I think that it becomes easy to get lost in the day to day again, but like these quotes are like, make sure that you recognize someone for amazing work that they did. Well, a week is a relatively long period of time, especially when you have like 100 folks in your team guarantee you saw something every day that you should be like, that was great work. Like, thank you. But a week is a guaranteed cadence that you saw something that you should thank someone for.

SPEAKER_07: You know, that is a big unlock. I had a friend, Sean Gold, still a friend. And he would call me and I'd say, Oh, what's up?

SPEAKER_03: Is everything okay? What do you need? And he'd be like, No, I'm just calling to check in on you. This is a relationship maintenance call. I'm driving in my car in Los Angeles. I'm stuck in traffic. And I haven't talked to you. And I'm going down my list of friends and just seeing who picks up the phone. And I like bookmark that. And I was like, Oh, and now when I'm driving home, you know, I'll just call Brian Alvey or Austin, you know, Capiche or just any friends who I haven't talked to in a while and just say, Hey, checking in on you. How are you doing? And man, it freaks people out a little bit when you check in on people randomly.

SPEAKER_08: But thanking them and showing gratitude, that's a huge unlock. I started doing that in the pandemic where I would just randomly call team members or just click on that button. And I really recommend this, this ad hoc, no agenda, just how are you doing call. Um, anything I can help with call and you just go into any chat room on your Slack and hit

SPEAKER_05: the phone and it just dials everybody. And if there's 12 people in the room and four pick up success, if two people, if one person

SPEAKER_108: picks up success and you say, Hey, have you done that before Joe, or are you going to do it right after this?

SPEAKER_104: We have, we have a channel called, uh, instantaneous fun where, uh, usually where like somebody will

SPEAKER_24: drop a zoom link in there and folks will just kind of like jump in and you'll, you'll have fun. My, my personally thanks someone every week, again, shameless plug for loom is I usually

SPEAKER_29: do it because I, I don't want to like interrupt their days. I'll just record a loom and send it to them and they can watch it on their time.

SPEAKER_207: And then they have that for all time. Imagine if Steve jobs had done that and like everybody, cause I don't think Steve jobs,

SPEAKER_236: I don't know if Steve jobs is known for thanking people. I know they gave people five and 10 year certificates. I think that was like an ad Apple. They, they, that, that was the praise they got was the, I don't know if you've ever met anybody who worked at Apple, but they have these certificates and they, they, their certificate

SPEAKER_152: is like anybody who worked at Apple and got one of those certificates, that certificate is within three feet of them when they're working.

SPEAKER_03: It is like the most meaningful thing in their lives is that certificate signed by Steve jobs and whoever else signed it, you know, eddie Q, whatever.

SPEAKER_24: Um, well, listen, uh, one, one thing that I'll just add really quickly, like you said, people will revisit it. I actually, you know, one of our executives hit the one year mark. Um, and he's been amazing because like you said, like, um, you know, he's a little bit older. He's been simultaneously like a coworker and peer and also like a mentor to me. And I shared that over the, a loom. And he told me afterwards that he actually had his wife come and sit down and watch that with him.

SPEAKER_39: And so like, I, I feel like this formal, like asynchronous sending it to somebody that can revisit it over time. It becomes this like cherished memory.

SPEAKER_05: Um, continued success for you, my friend. Uh, great job with loom. We love the product. And, uh, you're hiring right now for what positions?

SPEAKER_29: All positions, but like, of course, like the, the two most important, I would say is that,

SPEAKER_24: um, engineers, like we have a lot of innovation to do over here. And we're also handling a scale that very few companies get to handle. So really, really interesting, hard problems to solve. And then also we're starting to bring our loom for teams product to market. So sales and success.

SPEAKER_39: And we have kind of like the early foundation of a team, but you know, those that want to sell the next, uh, gen workplace communication platform.

SPEAKER_60: Well, now's the time to get on board. It's a $320 million valuation and they'll be going public at 32 billion.

SPEAKER_07: So there's a hundred X, there's a hundred X left to unlock in this bad boy. So get in there and, uh, apply to a job at loom.com. Uh, great job on the pod, uh, Joe. And, uh, who's your, who's your favorite player in the league right now? As we wrap up here with the NBA, who's, who do you like most?

SPEAKER_246: My God, you have, if you, or how about this? If you could build a team right now around any player for the next five years or seven,

SPEAKER_03: let's say seven, you got seven years window. Who do you build a team around right now? You can pick any player in the league and you get them on their, you know, seven year contract, you know, whatever that winds up being 25% of your cap hold, you can pick one player to build around for the next seven years, not two, seven.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, I know that I'm in the Bay area and this might be like a little bit of a cop out, but I still feel like Stephen Curry, like he's actually the next kind of like ringleader of exceptional talent. Uh, even if like he's not necessarily the like number one, three point scoring NBA player six, seven years from now, I do believe he has. Those leadership characteristics that can build a championship team. And he's also had that winning. I feel like knowing what winning is, is really important too. So I'd probably build it around him.

SPEAKER_207: I wonder how, what is he, is he 30 yet? He's gotta be 30 right now, 29, 30.

SPEAKER_251: What is good question.

SPEAKER_03: That's an interesting call. I think that's a really interesting call. So what you're saying is you might sacrifice the seventh or sixth year to go for the five great years right now, as opposed to people who might take an easy choice like Giannis or Luca, uh, and build around those two supremely talented individuals. So you're really getting on that train late. I like it. I like your call.

SPEAKER_80: But, but he also, he's not the type of, um, guard that drives the lane all the time.

SPEAKER_29: He actually has a lot of legs left in him because he stayed on the outside. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_204: So like even better than Vince Carter because Vince Carter was a dunker too.

SPEAKER_24: Well, that's a Derek Rose is like, I thought he was the next coming for the bulls and he

SPEAKER_29: just, he hit the lane too hard. He was too explosive. And then he suffered multiple career ending injuries. So like, I feel like Steph Curry actually has quite a few years left him. If he decides not to retire.

SPEAKER_08: Our next book club for those people who are in this week at startup fans, thisweekatstartups.com slash Slack. You can sign up for our Slack room. It's free and then we're having a book club next month in October. And the book we're doing is the hot hand, um, which you should totally read Joe because it starts with, or listen to, it starts with, uh, the story of Steph Curry and his breakout game at Madison square garden where he came off the bench under weird circumstances and

SPEAKER_115: had like a 50 some odd point game at the garden, the Mecca of basketball.

SPEAKER_262: It's a really good book. I'm going to get that.

SPEAKER_03: The hot hand. It just talks about streaks, right? And the whole controversy around streaks. But everybody goes through streaks, uh, and they also go through film directors, like the guy who did, um, the princess bride and he did two or three other films around that same time. Rob Reiner, um, had like, he had like three or four incredible huge hits, uh, and acclaimed films. A few good men, I think was the other one at that time. And, um, yeah, the princess bride became one of the lasting ones. Anyway, they go through that. But like everybody has that moment where they have the hot hand. And I was like, thinking about it with my angel investing.

SPEAKER_115: Like when I had that hot hand and I hit Uber, thumbtack and data stacks in the first seven investments, three unicorns in seven. It's a crazy, crazy run. Right. And then, but I'm looking at it now and I'm like, you know what?

SPEAKER_03: I'm going to have the hot hand again. You can have multiple hot hands in a career. Uh, if you just keep, if you have, if you have process, right? Where the, I think you have to have a process. And if you focus on the process, those hot hand moments happen, which is why Steph's been so good. And Clay's been so good. They have a process. They're just going to keep passing that ball and sharing the ball. Yep. And then that just leads to this crazy. I don't know if you remember that time.

SPEAKER_269: Clay, what did he hit? 12 three pointers or 13 three pointers. And it was like, he dribbled three times or something insane.

SPEAKER_24: Nuts. Um, by the way, this is, this is one thing that I was going to actually, loop back around to before the quotes was like one of my main takeaways from the last dance and Jordan was his ability to manifest that fire within him before every game. Like they told those stories where he would make up quotes. He would make up situations where somebody like trash to him going into the next game of the series. And so to me, I felt like one of the things when you're talking about process and continuing to show up and trying to hit that streak again, I feel like artificially creating that fire within yourself. Yeah. I'm going to force you to constantly iterate on that process and keep hitting it hard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_276: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: You got, you got to keep at it and you got to find some motivation. I think that's where he seemed petty at times, but you also will realize, oh, he was manifesting some competitive spirit in him. I mean, competition might be very base, low level motivation. Like it's not like some kumbaya save the world motivation. It's very low level, but it's also very powerful. When you feel wronged or aggrieved, like he felt by Isaiah Thomas, not shaking his hand. Like he's like, I'm going to take this motivation and I am going to ruin Isaiah Thomas's life. And I'm going to become the defining moment of his career when he didn't get on the dream

SPEAKER_236: team. And he's like, I took that personal. I love that gift. I took that personal. It's like, ooh. You do not want Michael Jordan taking something personal, John Starks the dunk.

SPEAKER_280: Absolutely not. All right, Joe.

SPEAKER_236: Continued success. Everybody go work for loom.com if you want to get your stock options now and have them

SPEAKER_07: 100X. That's not saying that, not Joe. You can't guarantee that, but I can guarantee it because I'm not an investor. So, uh, yet maybe I would be an investor soon.

SPEAKER_285: All right.

SPEAKER_07: Be cool, brother.

SPEAKER_285: Uh, stay safe.

SPEAKER_287: All right. See you, Jason.