Adam Renklint - How should founders navigate through VC and grow a startup with intention!

Just because software is made for business or for productivity, it doesn't have to be void of personality, that it can actually be delightful and a little bit fun. You know, you can think of it the difference of going into work in a gray building and sitting in a cubicle all day, or having an open space with sofas and then a ping pong table. Like, we want to be in the ping pong table kind of, uh, world where, you know, you, you can nurture your creativity. So that has, uh, been part of everything we thought about when building Pitch.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different for every founder facing this crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse, worthless. If you find yourself here or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. Ever heard of Wunderlist? It's a popular to-do app everybody loved back in, you know, back in the day. I was like one of the, one of those users who crave about Like the way they shipped, the founders, they shipped the team and the way that it was acquired for Microsoft and how the founders came back with a bunch of amazing products. And my next guest started as a Java developer, if I'm not wrong, at Wunderlist. JavaScript developer at Wunderlist. And now he's the co-founder and CEO of one of my favorite products on the planet. pitch.com. And I can't tell about this guy how much I admire the way they treat themselves, they express themselves on the internet and treat customers, the investors and everybody else. So with self-awareness, with intention and whatnot. Without further ado, I'm so pumped to welcome Adam. Welcome to the show. How are you feeling, Adam?

Well, I'm all flattered after those kind words. Very happy to be here and talk a little bit with you.

Yeah, I'm excited to dive in. A lot of, you know, a lot of, a lot of, uh, there are like a lot of highs and lows in your journey as a, as a founder, co-founder of Pitch. So let's, let's all dive into that. But I was telling Adam, and I want to tell publicly, uh, uh, when this is, when it's going live right now, I'm a big fan of Pitch. So I used to be like a Keynote noob. Like, I used to like, you know, fancy about Keynote, but once I discovered pitch.com back in 2020, I'm like, that's it. I've presented so many decks. I've given talks. All my talks, if you observe, go back, look at the recordings, it's all pitch.com. Like it's all live, it's all the internet. So I have proof that much. That's the love I have for the product because of the elegance, the care they kind of taken care of the customers and Yeah, I'm just like, big fan, Adam. What an amazing work you guys did in the past 5, 6 years. It's been a joy to look, you guys progressing. And right off the bat, let's talk about the— I know a lot of things happened in the past couple of months, 3 months down the line. Christian Weber, he's the co-founder and he was the CEO. and he posted a lot of updates and the change and the reboot. So right off the bat, let's talk something that's fresh, like what's happening at pitch.com. And I saw one of your tweets about taking 2024 with intention. So I really would love to unpack about a lot of things that happened in the last 3 months.

Yeah, sure. Suddenly realized together with our investors that we had been struggling for quite a while to live up to the expectations that our last funding round had put on us. We, we experienced some, like, if you could call it light hypergrowth, that, that put us on that track. But then after a while, realized that our product, the market that we're in, and the way that the world looks right now, that it's not a good and healthy fit for us. And a lot of companies are figuring out the same thing, you know, when they raised at the peak of the hype in 2020 or 2021. And a lot of companies are shutting down. So we, together with our investors, had the good fortune of being able to make a deal where we, we founders kind of bought back the company. We still have investors on board, but at a much smaller stake, meaning we've also changed what our aspirations of success looks like.

Right.

I like to think of it as we were fighting to own the whole cake, and now we are very happy to just get a decent chunk of it. And this has changed our mindset completely, I would say, within the company, because We were scrambling to find like 1 or 2 unicorn features that would just change everything.

Right.

And with removing this pressure of trying to hit a very high exponential growth curve and really searching for sustainable growth and working towards becoming profitable, we've changed our mindset from just trying to manufacture or find that growth to really listening to our customers, building the things that are sometimes very obvious that they need to unblock them from growing. So I would say that in the— so Pitch reduced from 106 to 36 people over one day. Wow. And the next day we started working on the new company. Basically. So we're now like shipping away. Yeah, it's a good vibe at Pitch right now. It's very, very much more like feet on the ground rather than having these massively, you know, very conceptual plans or anything. So we're trying to stay grounded and, you know, take every day as it comes.

Right. Feels like, feels like going back to early, early stage, you know, startup vibes, you know, with The mentality to produce more, ship more than think about growth and, you know, take off that pressure, you know. So first of all, I like to tell this because not very, not many companies or startups have that level of self-awareness, right? I saw so many startups. I was part of a startup who was at a hypergrowth. They laid off people. Oh, like, you know, they're not doing well. So it's that self-awareness. Like, you know, I think it's not about laying off people. It's about— that sucks. It's always like, you know, people are people, right? That's the end of the day. I think they're more important than anything else. But I feel it's best for everybody because you're not faking it. Like, you're being very authentic to yourself and, you know, to the employees. To investors, everybody, to customers as well. I think I love the transparency and very few kind of take a step back and like, let's reevaluate. You know, it's a, it's an awkward thing when, when it comes to doing something like that, because Twitch at that point is like, it's big. It's not like a, it's not a, it's not a small startup, right? So you have a lot of eyeballs, a lot of hype around, product is amazing. I have so many questions, so I just want to appreciate, you know, you for sharing that, as well as like, you know, the team, whole team. You guys have that innate quality of doing things in the right way, not because— yeah, because— or doing things just for because it has to be done, right? So appreciate you for sharing that. So many questions, so many questions. So let's start off saying I definitely want to ask about the self-awareness bit a little bit, but what does success look like for Pitch in the future?

Yeah, success looks for us in our rebooted state as gaining independence, meaning profitability, and doing that through sustainable and controllable growth. Like, I like to think, like, in hindsight of, of the machine we were trying to build in the past, you know, we were throwing all kinds of crazy things or, you know, trying to pull growth levers, uh, but we, we didn't really understand the machine. Mm-hmm. Uh, and the, I think the beauty of having this much simpler setup is that of the 36 people that are, that are pitched now, We can all reach into the machine and very concretely move a lever or a cog to stretch an analogy. And it's very tangible. I think one thing I would like to add to what you were saying before is I think there's a big difference from just starting up. We're small as a startup, but we're building our future success on the work of everyone who has been at Pitch before. So if you think of us now in a startup formation, we've inherited a world-class product. We were part of building it, so we didn't only inherit it, but so we're not starting from scratch. So an important aspect for us now is how do we take that responsibility of inheriting that product and making the best out of it. And that is getting— making sure that we're independent and sustainable. Of course, we want to grow and have more users, more diehard fans, like you were explaining, but in a more healthy way. Where we can focus on, you know, building the best product for our existing and near future users. I think some one thing that happens when you're searching for hypergrowth is that on every step of the ladder, you're kind of supposed to ignore your existing users to search for a new tranche of users somewhere else. So, and I think that's very different for us now. Yeah. Because we're really focusing on what our current users need and how we can make them, their teams grow and their usage, of course. And that is, you know, a much smaller stepladder towards growth in a more sustainable way.

So how— I have to ask this, like, I don't know, you've been on other podcasts. I don't know if some people asked about it, but how are you feeling as a human? Like, you know, you saw like a big curve, you know, in the last— from 2018 when PitchFund, you know, was founded, raised a total of $130 million plus somewhere north. Yeah. That's massive, right? It's not— it's no joke. And you saw a lot of highs with Christian, with the rest of your co-founders, and now you're like again going back to the roots. So how are you feeling like as a human? What are your feelings? Or, you know, how are you going through day to day?

Yeah, I would say that most of all, I'm incredibly excited. Like, we were able to used this reboot moment to turn the company around and to simplify everything. You know, when you're over 100 people and you're— we were actually 180 at our peak, you create all of these processes and red tape and bureaucracy to try to manage that you're so large. But having been able to go back down to 36 people, it's almost like When we started out, when we were all sitting in one room and you could shout across the room to get something done, you know. So it's a much— yeah, I'm very excited about that part. I'm also like having to restructure company, laying off people. It's never fun, but I can honestly say that I'm proud over how we handle it. I'm grateful to our investors who were willing to work with us to make sure that the company can stay alive and that we could provide everyone who was leaving Pitch with a decent severance package. So no one, I mean, you see how layoffs on Twitter sometimes happen in the US where people are just left without any kind of income from one day to the next. And I'm proud that we were able to do it in a way that Everyone who left pitch on that day, on January eighth, I met several of them afterwards. Recent as recent as last week, and they're all good spirits. So there's no no bad blood. So I feel yeah, it's not all my work, of course, but I'm proud that we could handle that in a way where you know you're not burning bridges and you're you're putting humans first, even though. You have to make a business decision about how to ensure the survival of the company.

That's the key. That's the key. Humans, people. At the end of the day, I think people matter because we are creating products for people, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So it's all about them. That's something that I learned from founders like you. It's to prioritize, do it in the right way. Even though we bleed, it's fine, but you just have to do it in the right way. Are you scared with this new reboot? What is that like? You've kind of like you said, there is no pressure, but you also have to find the path to build a business, to find growth again, to find So are you scared, like, as a founder and as a CEO?

No, I wouldn't say that I'm scared about that. So I've definitely had moments of terror along the way, of more about taking over the role of a CEO. As you mentioned, Christian Reber, he was our CEO for the first 5 and a half years of the company. And before that, I worked with him at Wunderlist for I think we worked together for 5 or 6 years then before we were acquired by Microsoft. So I had some pretty big shoes to fill, let's say that. And this was daunting, but I made a very conscious decision of trying to do it my own way, which is of course informed by everything I've learned from him over the years, but also kind of infused by a different mentality. I'm much more of an engineer archetype, I would say, than he was. Yeah. And about Pitch's future, so I wouldn't say that I'm scared. I'm really curious, I would say. Like, we have 36 people that are like world-class creatives, marketers, And part of the job as a CEO and product leader is to find talent and to unleash that talent in a direction. So, yeah, I would say more than anything, I'm curious and excited to see what this small group of people can accomplish together once we now have removed you know, things like career frameworks or mandatory performance reviews. We're working in a much more, in some ways, chaotic way, but without there being chaos. Right. And I think that is the environment where truly creative people, people who love to create products, who want to put themselves in the product and want to craft the product rather than mass producing something in a factory where they can thrive.

I love the fact that you're basically accepting the reality as is, and you're excited to take the next challenge with what we have. Right. I feel there is, again, sense of self-awareness. I want to ask about your role as a CTO prior to, you know, the last 6 years to now CEO, like what does the transition look like? You said by yourself, I think you seem like a builder, like not getting into those other things, you know? So of course you have to have your own decision-making frameworks and all that, but as a technical person and now more of like management, you know, that's not the right word, but at least on the leadership side. Where you have to make, you have to take shots, make calls for the whole company, right? So talk to me about that transition. What are some things that you learned as a CTO that you're implementing as CEO? And what are some frameworks you're following right now?

Well, so I think it's been said that the role of the CTO in a startup that keeps on growing is one of the roles that changes the most. Like, I started as a tech lead who were just, you know, trying to help guide a handful of engineers and worked a lot on hiring and then all the, like, all this process I'm talking about that we're finally rid of, I helped create it in order for us to be able to grow our team.

Right.

So I've definitely learned something about which parts of the things that people are advising you about to listen to. And I think as in my, my role as the CTO, and especially in the beginning, I was much less, yeah, much less confident about listening to my gut feeling about things.

Yeah.

And I think that that's one thing that I've really learned from Christian over the years. is that, you know, if you, if you have a gut feeling, you need to kind of introspect and understand why that is. That doesn't mean that you should just be, you know, just always saying what comes directly to mind or, or not thinking a decision over. I'm a huge fan of just sleeping on anything for one night unless it is urgent to just see how you feel about it the next day. I'm not sure if we would call that a framework, but a very healthy practice. I would call it to not— yeah. And I think a benefit that I have that you might not have when you're starting a company up from scratch is that I have a great team around me. Not just the entire team, but a leadership team where we have Vanessa, my co-founder, who also worked with us already at Wunderlist. And we have some more new additions. So having a mix of really experienced people that you are getting to know over time, and then some others that you have known for a very long time where you can trust them with anything, and you have a, let's say, a connection or a bond that you've built up over years that you cannot create with with someone over a short amount of time. Having those people around you to help kind of massage how you see things is, I think, super important. If I had to do this job alone, I think I would struggle. I would struggle with feeling if, you know, is this the right call to make or not?

Hmm.

But having having these people around, uh, and then sometimes anyway making the complete opposite decision, uh, but after having examined it from, from multiple directions together with them. I think that is, um, a superpower that leaders everywhere should have. Um,

and

I—

I like that.

Yeah, I think that's— as I was growing up, so to say, as a CTO, I had moments where, especially in a fast-growing organization where you kind of, you don't want to disturb others, you know, people are off doing their thing. So you kind of tend to be a little bit more isolated. And now in my role as CEO, I see myself as like a person kind of in the middle with connections out to everyone to understand what is the pulse of the company to make sure that we're all aligned. That's really one of the main points of the job, right? To make sure that we're all dancing to the same music, even though we have different ways of dancing, but it has one rhythm.

I like that. You've talked a lot about playing long term, and you seem to stick with people for the longest term. Like, you know, from 2011, where you started Wunderlist to where you are right now, you have surrounded yourself with the same set of people. Talk to me about the philosophy of playing long game in startups.

Yeah. So I think you mentioned a few times, and I completely agree, like the It's all about people, right? And I think the benefit of sticking together for a long time is that you really get to know each other. And I remember when we were starting Pitch that some outside advisors were really confused. Why do you want to start a company with 8 people? It's really too many. But we saw it as our kind of superpower that we were 8 people that had known each other already. Some of us for a decade, others for a few years. And we've we had seen each other under very stressful circumstances and how we react and how we behave to kind of solve solve problems and try to have a win-win mindset. So I think that that's the most important thing, and then kind of the reason why. Pitch has ended up having this constellation of founders also is that once you get past that early stage when you get to know someone, when you work with someone where your lives are very separate, then you get to another level where you can So I keep saying, using the word trust. It's not just about trust also, but like predictability. You know how people are going to act. You're not afraid of having any, any conversations because you have that level of trust and understanding. And yeah, having also Grown up at Wunderlist together in a way. We were also in similar stages of our lives. So the contrast between Wunderlist and Pitch is quite big, where at Wunderlist we were we were doing sometimes 12-14 hour days, and a lot of us were new to living abroad in Berlin. Was a like a big party vibe, whereas at Pitch. Like half of the founding team, we have kids, we have family lives. So it was also very explicit for us to that we wanted to make this a place to work that was not about crunch mode, that was about sustainability. I think that's also kind of the conflict that arose in the last year when we realized that we've set ourselves on a path that. was very far from the original way that we wanted to work together, uh, in a, in a not so healthy way. So being able to reset that, um, has been, uh, great for us. Um,

talk to me about that. I'm, I'm really fascinated by that. One of the things you said, setting expectations, right? It's so key for yourself as a company, and if you have investors, to your investors. And to customers, you know, you have users. Talk to me about that. When did you— it seems like from your, just like in, you know, the last answer in the last part, you didn't realize that you were in a slippery slope. You just caught yourself, hey, this is not us. You have to change certain things. So how did— not, not about how, but how should one caught them, you know, catch themselves like, okay, we are in a slippery slope now. How should one realize that this something is not right, you know? Or how do you, in other ways, how do you set expectations for yourself that you sometimes like forget and, you know, do something else?

Yeah, so I think it's very easy. We certainly got caught up in kind of the whole carousel of VC funding and flying high and feeling like if you can get funded, you've made it. And I think it's very easy to, yeah, to get caught up in something like that. There is a quote from Steve Jobs, and I promise I'm not a diehard Steve Jobs fan. No, he was a flawed person. But there's one quote or one story that really resonates with me, which is about you get up in the morning and you look yourself in the mirror and you think about if you're happy going to work, if the things that you're going to do are going to give you joy and satisfaction and then feel a feeling of fulfillment. And it's okay to not have that every day. Right? Not every day is awesome. We all have ups and downs. But if you feel that over any extended period of time, that's the moment to kind of zoom out and start looking at what is happening with my life personally, but also the context in which I'm in. And especially if you're a founder or a leader at a startup, like, How is how is that influencing others? Am I really in a situation where I'm doing my best work and and helping others to do their best work? I think if the answer to that is not yes most of the time, then you owe it to yourself and to the people that you work with to think about what is the What is the delta between where you're at right now and where you want to be? Your principles, your personal principles and maxims, but also everyone who starts a company, or I would guess that this is how it is in the beginning, you kind of start writing some things down, like things that are important. You probably have experiences from another company that you worked at where some things were not great and you want to change those. So looking back at those kind of founding principles and see if they still hold true, and some of them might be valid that they change, but I think often it is, it's just happening to us as we go along on the, on the roller coaster. But you should make a deliberate choice about it.

I love that. Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's one of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs as well. You know, if something's not right, you gotta ask yourself, you know, you have to change something. Yeah. Too many times. And I think that's a very important question you have to ask every single day. And I think the other, other important question I love from him, if today were your last day of your life, what would you do? Who would you do it with? And how would you like react or respond? Right? I think that's very important. That's key too, because Like I said, it's not permanent, it's not granted, but we often take things for granted and we just kind of lean towards doing certain things in a certain way. And I feel this particular question kind of resets, it's not there yet. You just have to be very intentional about it. Talk about, like, speaking about 8 co-founders, too many chefs in the kitchen. Have you guys ever, like, you know, fought about an argument? I'm sure you guys have some sort of arguments and some disagreements and whatnot. How did you operate as a team and what did you learn from it? Do you recommend having too many people as co-founders? A. Number 2, what are the downsides and the upsides?

Yeah, so I think I don't recommend having so many co-founders unless you've known each other for a long time. I think that is the most important thing. So it has to be a group of people that you really trust. And especially what I mentioned before, like, if you've been through hard times before and hopefully overcome them, but seen failure together, I think that builds a bond that is hard to replicate from doing founder dating or anything like that. And yes, we've definitely had many disagreements about things, but leaning back on that friendship that exists first has often helped us. Where in a situation where you're trying to dominate each other and you don't know each other that well, it becomes kind of a power play. Or a power struggle, and I think we've managed to avoid that by having that friendship as a as a foundation. But it should also be be said that we haven't operated as eight like equals in decision making from the beginning. Christian was the guy who one day after we had left Microsoft or some some people were still at Microsoft who had the idea let's. Let's have a dinner. It was so nice working together. Let's just talk about if there's something we could do to be able to have lunch every day of the week and build something cool together. And he was in the beginning definitely kind of pulling the rest of us in. And then as we founded the company and started working, some of us took more individual contributor roles and were really happy and excited about solving problems at that scale where it's about a feature or even as small as a bug. Whereas others like Christian and to some degree me in the role of CTO and Vanessa, as I mentioned, we look more— Taught the helicopter view of the company. Like if we take that step now, what does that mean five steps from now? So, and that I think we we did something good in that we made that quite explicit as well. But as a founding group, we've almost every week met for an hour to just talk and see how. How we feel about things are going and also act a little bit as a, as a mini informal mini board for the leadership team, which has always included some, some people from the outside who have joined us. Um, yeah, so I don't even remember what your question was, but I

think you answered

it.

You answered

it.

You answered the upsides. Uh, you saw, you kind of expressed, um, you know, having 8 people, too many chefs in the the kitchen, that analogy. It's so fascinating, Adam. I have to tell you this.

Yeah.

It's so fascinating that to see a group of individuals with a lot of self-awareness coming together in one room, egoless in doing something together. Right. I think one of those stories, I think maybe people write later. It's so fascinating. I have to tell you that it's so hard working together egoless with so many people is freaking hard. Yeah. It's impossible, I would say, because there are like too many opinions, personal agendas coming to picture. And, you know, and you guys like had a steady direction in Once you're not going in the direction, you also know that. That's so fascinating. It's like you hit a lottery in a way. I'm kind of positively jealous.

Yeah, well, that's great. I mean, I guess I give the impression that sometimes that everything is super easy. It's definitely been hard also along the way. I think that But reflecting on why it was hard, it was that for whatever reason, at some point, we were not looking at the same map or like I said before, like dancing to the same music. Yeah. I think they're really important, as you were mentioning in the beginning, like being self-aware. And then when you have that level of trust with people that you've known for over a decade, that you can also talk very openly about, you know, what is the music you're dancing to right now, and kind of make sure that you find, uh, a new beat together. And that might be different than what you originally had, or can— it might be a synthesis of that you all think. But I think the most important thing when you're trying to do something like this, trying to create something, um, is that you're walking in the same direction. Because as soon as you're not, it's not just that progress will be slower, but it will feel painful as well. You will have conflicts around things. So being able to face those conflicts head on and resolve them, and that almost being like one step higher on the ladder of priorities than building the product itself. Yeah, I think that is an important step to make sure that the product in the end also becomes something that feels like it's made by one person with a really giant brain. Yeah. So it's, I keep coming back when I talk to people about pitch to craftsmanship.

Yeah.

on a spectrum from art to, to, uh, something that is developed in a factory, mass-produced. Definitely want to be at the center, but like one step towards art, actually.

Yeah.

In that everyone who builds the product should be able to put themselves into it. And we should, we should, um, think about what we want the world to look like. Then create the software that helps with that rather than just mass-producing features.

And I have so many questions.

Go for it.

I love the craftsmanship as a mindset. Not many people or founders have that. It's about Yeah, it's all about sometimes making money and doing something without care and without attention, without attention to detail. You know, I want to talk about that, but let's go back to your lunch dates with Christian and rest of the people. When you were part of those lunch dinners and lunches, Was pitch always the idea, or have you kind of— you guys explored other ideas too? I'm curious about what other parts of, you know, the industries or the problems you wanted to solve.

Yeah, so it wasn't the only idea. It was the strongest one from the beginning, I think, looking at it from a business perspective. where, you know, we know that there are millions, billions of slides being recreated from scratch all the time. And we had had to do a lot of that at Microsoft where, you know, we were acquired, but we were sitting in an office in Berlin, not really part of the bigger Microsoft and trying to then to integrate and to, yeah, be able to get approval for certain things. So we created a lot of— PowerPoints, painful as it was. So it's also what I meant a little bit with like, think about what you want the world to look like and then try to create it. Because, you know, it was very bureaucratic and everything looked terrible. And we were, you spend so much time just moving boxes around where you actually want to persuade someone to, you know, see the world as you see it. So that's, that was how we started thinking about building Pitch. There was another idea that we were really keen on and exploring, which was building a virtual office. So this was in 2017. It was before COVID and most of the world went remote. But we had this idea, we'd worked a little bit remote while at Microsoft and Wunderlist, of being able to put people closer together even though you're separated. So building some kind of virtual office software where you have rooms that you can go into. And some people have built things that were very similar to the idea that we have with like this. top-down 2D world where you really walk around with a character. I think I was at a virtual conference like that also where you walk around to different stages.

Yeah, I think there's this tool called Gather, Gather Town. Yeah, wrong. Yeah, they do this very well. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, that was one of the other ideas we kind of explored. But, and the whole idea of revamping presentation software and kind of bundling the whole presentation lifecycle, uh, I have to say it wasn't initially super exciting when we first— because we associated so much with the pain of PowerPoint. But the more we thought about it and, uh, convinced ourselves that we can actually make something that is not just 10% better, but 3 times as good, uh, or 10 times as good, uh, if we want to be super bold. We got really excited about that idea. And of course, we have to start from scratch. So there's a joke about Emacs. I don't know if you heard it. Like, Emacs is a great operating system. It just needs a text editor that is decent. And I think that you can use the same for PowerPoint. Like, PowerPoint is a great operating system. It just needs some good presentation software because you could do everything with PowerPoint. You can probably, you know, find recipes and— Launch a rocket, but making a presentation is really hard. So we wanted to focus on making presentations. And we also saw that so many people were using a bunch of different tools to not only create their presentations, but send them out to someone and see how they react. And we wanted to bring that all together into one piece of software that handles the whole lifecycle. So this idea got us very excited. And, you know, I think we built the first prototype in 2 days or something like that. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then it was just snowballing from there. Yeah.

How much of, how much of you guys pursuing Pitch as a, as a next big thing involves— hate is a big word, but the hate towards working at Microsoft. Because if someone who doesn't know you go to pitch.com and they used Pitch and we ask them, hey, one of them, one of the founders who built this, pretty much all of them who built this used to work at Microsoft. I feel Microsoft is better now in terms of design, but back then it sucked, right? Like it's so bad. There is no life in those products. Nobody would have believed because I think there is like kind of a, like a 180-degree difference of you working at Microsoft with Christian, rest of the people to like what you built at Pitch. It's so elegant. It's so user-friendly. It's kind of intuitive. You don't need like any learner's curve. It just, you just open it, sign up and you can figure it out. So how much of the, how much of pursuing Pitch involves like hate towards that? Or is that, is, do you, do you, again, hate is a strong word, but do you like not agree to certain design standards or product level standards at Microsoft that helped you build Pitch?

Yeah. So I would say that it was very. very much a part of Pitchit's culture in the first few years. Our first Wi-Fi passkey was rest in peace PowerPoint. But it's much like, you know, the underdog story is something that's really motivating. And I think when you want to gather a group of people, having a common enemy is something that's very powerful.

Right.

I mean, obviously, like Microsoft is a huge company. They're doing some amazing stuff. They're still doing also some really crappy things. I would say that like the, their ability to copy another company's software with lower standards is, you know, maybe not their greatest achievement. But yeah, I think that's not something that we talk about much anymore. Most of our users are actually switching over right now from Google Slides, from Keynote, and some from PowerPoint. Like, I think that thinking about Microsoft is not part of our life really anymore. And Microsoft is such a big company that they do so many things. Some of it is really awesome. Their videos with this really nicely rendered pastel colored 3D things, you know, it is visually very pleasing. Not their software doesn't really feel like their marketing material. I think that is fair to say.

Yeah.

And their ability to, or an inclination to just copy things. You know, it's not necessarily something that people who build things from scratch look up to. But I do think they're a massively important player in the market. Yeah. And there are probably people that are also, that love PowerPoint. I think there are a few, but—

Let's talk to them.

Really, really into that. Yeah. So, I think going back to what I said in the beginning about the cake, right? Our new perspective that we can afford to have because we're much smaller is that we don't have to think about overtaking PowerPoint necessarily, but carving out a slice of the market that is for us and for users to really appreciate great design, ease of use, a big library of templates which look good. Their PowerPoint templates did well, but they're all, yeah, they just don't look very good. Yeah. So I think there's space in the world for both David and Goliath as long as they're not rubbing.

Just not colliding with each other.

Yeah, exactly.

No, I 100% agree. I feel startups are always positive sum. you get to— once you bring a fresh flavor, that's your market who appreciate that. I'm not going to use PowerPoint again forever, for sure.

Yeah.

Right. There's like, that's, you know, I said the same thing with Superlist as well after watching the demo and, you know, the product. I'm like, I'm going to say bye to the Apple Notes because this is what I would love to use with my wife for certain things. Personally as well, and where I can also find things that I can do for my podcast, my professional life as well. So it's kind of like a blend of— so I now became this user, but I was like— so there is always ways, and the pie is big in one way.

I'd say that the pie is also even just growing all the time. Right. So it's, yeah, there's plenty of cherries for everyone.

Talk to me about Pitch as a product. So you've said that you've established certain processes before which you get rid of right now. I want to know how you feel about that, but as well, what is the direction when it comes to product? Like, how do you guys take an idea or a feature? I absolutely love Pitch, the design elements of Pitch,

you

know, and the way they can change for every slide versus one slide. There are like subtle, simple things that you use. I'll share some of my decks. They're very simple, elegant. I use always the Pitch, not the animation per se, the aesthetics, like, you know, elements that Pitch offers.

Yeah.

as my expressive ways to express the slide without me talking about that particular slide.

Like stickers?

Yeah, the stickers. That's like a visual representation of the element of a slide, right? I love those elements. So talk to me about the whole product that works at Pitch. How do you take from an idea to feature to you know, bringing it to real life? What is the process looks like now versus back then?

Yeah, yeah, I would preface it with saying that something that started already at Wunderlist was this idea that just because software is made for business or for productivity, it doesn't have to be void of personality, uh, that it can actually be delightful and a little bit fun. You know, you can think of it the difference of going into work in a gray building and sitting in a cubicle all day, or having an open space with sofas and then a ping pong table. Like we want to be in the ping pong table kind of world where, you know, you can nurture your creativity. So that has been part of everything we've thought about when building Pitch. And the stickers is a good example where You know, you had that in chat software, but it wasn't really something that you had in any other kind of software. And we just wanted to bring in life and like make it really easy to express yourself with the stickers and reactions and things like that. I'd say how we look at creating something, it has changed quite dramatically. Partly because we've reduced so much in size, but also reduced a bunch of roles. Like we don't really have a big, yeah, but 36 people, we don't have a lot of product managers. We have 2, but they're more like handymen that can tackle any situation and supporting rather than these the more traditional view of product management where you're, you know, maybe, you know, crunching numbers on data and trying to uncover some, some deeply hidden insight. Right now, we're really focused on what is it that we've been neglecting over the years by focusing on trying to find this unicorn feature that is just changing the growth curve exponentially. And that means for us talking to our customers, which we've always done, but we're doing it to a much larger degree now. Mm-hmm. And understanding what is their immediate pain point. So not thinking about an imaginary future user, but existing ones. And we We always think about, especially when it comes to our editor, in layers. And if you've used Pitch, you've probably seen this.

Yeah.

The first layer is very simple, where you select a block, you have an inline editor to do the most common tasks, or you even have this quick menu, Command+K, and you can just type a command and it will just do something for you. Should be very convenient and It doesn't offer so much flexibility, but it's very easy to reach for. And that is for the majority of users. Then going one level deeper, we have much more flexibility, much more power, more like a traditional design tool where you can change basically everything. And it's been a core philosophy to keep these 2 things separate. So that a user who is, you know, I don't know, they're a sales rep or a marketer or something like that, that they don't have to face the question of like, what font size is this exactly? Because it's already been set up in a template and they are focusing on what should I write here to make sure that my prospective client gets it? Yeah. So having that, those kind of layers is super important. And yeah, in practical terms of how we build things, we tend to build very small to begin with. I think that we're really not unique there, but from not the first weeks, but let's say the first months of Pitch, we built our own system integrated with GitHub to create builds for every commit so that you don't have to pull down the code and run the compiler and make a build locally. And we wanted to do that so that we could have really fast feedback loops and not just within the engineering team, but also with our designers and marketers. So we've done a lot of, let's say, explorative development where You have an idea, you explore it over a day or a few days, you have something that is kind of working, and then you can hand it out to the team. Or you might even merge it and put it behind a feature flag so that we can get the flow of feedback coming because your first idea is rarely the best one. It needs to be massaged through usage. And yeah, I think that is a critical part of like having short feedback loops, trusting your gut about where that idea should start, but listening also to others of how it should develop. That might be users or internal pitchers. Yeah. I think that those are the core tenets. And one more really important thing is I think it is easy as a software development team to get into the mindset of trying to make something perfect, of like going into isolation and just tweaking away, changing things, adding more stuff. And for us, since the very first Yeah, build that we shipped, we've had a regular cadence where every— for a while it was every day. At some point that got too much with the auto-updaters and everything. But at least every week we are shipping to users. So nowadays it's a mix. Most code go out every day. Some are held back up to 6 days. But I think having that rhythm is really important for especially engineers, but everyone else as well, to feel like the work that you're doing, it matters, matters enough that you should get it into the hands of people that they can start benefiting from it.

Momentum. I think that's the, that's the key. That's oxygen for any startup, right? Like, you have to keep pushing the product that helps you know, marketing team to narrate something to the users, and that helps users to experience something new from a product standpoint. It is kind of like a full circle that comes along. And, you know, yeah, I love the way you explained, you know, listening, but also listening to the users and to your gut. I think that is like the right balance where you can find and, you know, do the next things. Pitch is one of the amazing, amazingly designed products. It's so elegant. It feels like, you know, for some reason Apple did it, you know, with the aesthetics and everything. It feels like that. So like, you know, crisp. Where do you guys get the inspiration from? Is there like a, I don't know, like, you know, some things that that you guys do on a recurring basis that keeps the energy fresh, you know, the creativeness fresh?

Yeah, I mean, I think what we all do at Pitch is we use a lot of products. We really try a lot of different things. And I think there are a lot of well-intended but not well-designed products out there. And I think As you try things out with a critical mindset, you also develop some sort of intuition for things. But, and in the end, I think it also comes down to iteration and knowing what you're iterating towards. Like what principles are you coming from or what goals are you going towards? We don't get it right on the first try either. But I think if you're able to develop a good taste, then you can try things out and see how they feel with that taste applied. And if you don't have that taste, for example, if you're just one of the thousands of companies that just copy Linear's website with the flashy black and purple, but you don't know why you're doing it. You cannot continue to iterate on that at all because it didn't come from any kind of original thought or even understanding of why you would do it. So yeah, really trying to think about that and also Um, you know, going back to first principles, like we've had many times over the course of Pitch's history and probably at Wunderlist as well, where, you know, you work on some, on something and then you realize, oh, we've gone too far, like we've added too much stuff, it's not simple to use anymore. Uh, so everything that you, you do, it has to pass the, the smell test somehow of being simple enough, understandable enough. And sometimes if you're working on something, that's not obvious to you because you, you know, you fall in love with what you're doing. And I think there it's really important to have a team around you where everyone has developed that taste and a similar taste so that you can help each other out with, you know, reining something in if it goes too far. And yeah, I think the last point I would make is you shouldn't hold anything too dearly, like not put anything on a pedestal. So we had a way of looking at pitch, like we designed it in a way and we really loved that design. But over time it also aged and it was copied by a lot of people and it kind of lost the thing that we had fallen in love with. But it took us a while to actually, in that specific scenario, to look ourselves in the mirror and be like, we have to redo this almost from scratch to come up with something new that we can fall in love with and our users can fall in love with. So I think that is an important aspect to be able to develop conviction about something and fall in love with it. But still have the ability to let go at some point as well and reinvent yourself,

man.

Otherwise it becomes stale.

Yeah, I love the detachment and the attachment to craftsmanship, but detachment to a point where if it's not better, you just have to let it go. And I think there is a level of balance that you have you found within you and your team. It's so fascinating. Do you guys copy, or in other words, do you guys steal? You said like a lot of— and what's one of your favorite products that you admire about, apart from Pitch, of course?

Yeah, well, I mentioned Linear, for example. I think this is a fantastic product that just took the traditional project management, issue management

Yeah.

Cut it in half. Just removed it.

Destroyed it.

Yeah. But in a very elegant way, we use it every day. We manage like almost everything that we do there. We are not on Superlist yet because we are very integrated to GitHub and things like that. Yeah. Sorry, I forgot what was the first question.

Do you guys steal? Do you guys, yeah, or copy or, you know, get inspired like, okay, this product, this, very well. We have to do it as well.

Yeah, I mean, of course we're inspired by everything around us, so we're not this kind of unicorn design-driven team that just invents everything from scratch. That would be unfair to say. We definitely are inspired by things that are happening around us. I think we try to be mindful about what we want to be original, and especially when it comes to to features, like we built a lot of stuff over the years that you can consider just to be like pure necessities out of a feature parity point of view where, you know, you build a house, it's going to need walls, it's going to need a few windows, and it's going to need a roof and a door. Then many other things are optional. But we try not to to reinvent every wheel because that would be a waste of time and put our focus into the deliberately into the things we want to be different. And for other things, we really look at what is another similar tool doing because most of our users are coming from Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint. Nowadays we get users from some of the newer tools like Tome and Gamma as well. that realize they don't really have a full-fledged editor. So everyone comes with some kind of baggage and some kind of habits. So for a lot of this baseline level stuff, I think it's important to, to not be too opinionated and, you know, change all the shortcuts because why the hell not? Hmm. But rather be respectful of the context in which your software is being used and the people that are using it and meet them where they are. So that doesn't mean that we would copy something one by one. I don't think that would be like, again, going back to what I was saying about design and knowing why you did something is a foundation of being able to iterate on it. Mm-hmm. But taking inspiration from something and then trying to simplify it down. And then you end up with something that is more yours in the end, because you've made your own decisions about what are the essential parts of it. And then kind of fit it into how, how the rest of your software works. Because I think that's also sometimes an overlooked part about building software. You're building a model of some kind of mini universe and having this be as predictable as possible for users will help them to reach their goals. So, you know,

it should make, it should feel like it's obvious, you know, it shouldn't feel like, you know, you pasted something from somewhere else.

Yeah.

It should seem seamless.

And consistent. I think you can see an example of the opposite in some software from the, like, the big FAANG companies where you have a different team working on one part of the sidebar than another. So you have different icons for the same things or different ways of navigating with your keyboard or whatever. It just feels like it's a bunch of different things put together, a Frankenstein's monster, rather than something that was designed from the ground up.

Yeah. With care.

With care, with intention.

Yeah, with intention. It's, you know, some of the other questions— talk about the craftsmanship. I think, you know, I'm having a lot of fun because these are the topics I genuinely care about, like product doing with the sense of care and with the sense of detail, putting that level of attention towards little things, delighting users. These are all kind of clubbed into one big giant umbrella that comes under craftsmanship. Why do you care about what you put outside with some level of— there is a joy like you find it when you do that. So talk to me about— you've never worked anywhere, if I'm not wrong, apart from the universe you're part of in the last— What? 12, 13 years, you're always part of this particular group.

Yeah.

So where did you kind of, you know, do you have that, uh, there is a childhood story that we, you know, want to share about craftsmanship, or what is something that like that helped you make those kind of decisions or choose that path?

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't have any like childhood story or like, uh, superhero or villain origin story that explains everything, I think, unfortunately. But I think it's more like experiences that I've had over years, and especially as an engineer. Like, I would say that when I started working with Christian and the rest at Wunderlist, I was like, I was living for closing tickets. It was an adrenaline rush. I would take any ticket, if they were smaller, the better, and just get them done. I was a one. And then over time, you learn to appreciate other qualities. I think that their quality was not necessarily my biggest concern. It was speed and momentum. Mm-hmm. But as I was working on building Wunderlist, I got into a situation where the rest of the team switched over to work on Wunderkit, which was supposed to be a big suite of tools all in one. And the Wunderlist team ended up being me and my now co-founder Eric, who was then a QA engineer, and one of the co-founders of Superlist, Marcel. who was also doing QA and some community support. So we were sitting in a room, it was me and the 2 QA engineers. So the ratio is quite unusual. And that kind of made me trade off that speed of getting things out the door, although I think it's still important, but like for really thinking more deeply about how something is supposed to be used. And I think that there's a luxury in building software that you yourself would use. I think I really admire people who also can build for completely different audiences where they wouldn't use it themselves. That's a different kind of skill. But when you're building something that you would use yourself, you can draw a lot of inspiration from how, you know, how you would want it to use, to work. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's just kind of just grown over the years. This—

It's an acquired skill is what I'm getting from.

Yeah, it's both. It's like learning to be an artist of some kind, like, In the beginning, you paint things, but you have no idea what is good, right? And over time, you are exposed, or you should expose yourself to a lot of other art or music or designs or whatever it is, and build up a taste for what you think is good or bad. And being both critical and self-critical, but allow yourself to try a lot of things. And I think that way, You refine both your, your taste of, of things, but also your ability to be able to create something that lives up to that standard that you, you have in your, from your taste. So yeah, there are no shortcuts, I think, to that. It's like, like with most things, a lot of practice, deliberate practice.

Intentional.

Yeah. And then I'd say that the final thing is if you surround yourself with people that are similar in their mindset, that is also kind of a self-reinforcing kind of act.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think it's very hard to be that kind of crafts person if you're in a context where Your soft— everyone else is kind of manufacturing software in a factory, right? You will be— you will not be happy.

I like the way you portrayed that analogy of, you know, I think some software seems like they produced— they want to produce, they want to mass produce it. It feels like even though, you know, they're not, it feels like they want to do like a larger, you know, quantity versus You know, you give up your paintbrush to an artist. There is only like small canvas. You just have 1 or 2 shots. So you have to have a lot of care and attention what stroke you're going to take. So I think there is a big difference between those 2 lines of thought. And I'm fascinated again, a group of people coming together on that. single agreement. Okay. We all want to be artists, not, you know, working at a factory.

I wouldn't say artists per se. I think like, but more towards that on that spectrum, right? Where art is things that you just create for the pleasure of creating it or for the pleasure of looking at it. I think we're definitely the whole founding team and me as well, we've always had a mindset that we want to create things that are useful, delightful and useful, which I would say like—

Solves problems.

Yeah. Yeah. If you go too far towards art, which are very many impressive examples of as well, but you lose that usefulness. It's not— it's about emotion more than utility. I think it's The balance that we've tried to find is having both and not building software that is fun and delightful to use, that makes you feel good, but still lets you accomplish something to solve a problem.

Speaking about solving problems, what's next? What's next for Pitch? How are you guys, like, with the group of 30+ people? Short, lean, singular vision, attacking, producing, shipping. So with all this philosophy and the whole reboot that happened recently, what are you really excited about putting in the world in the next few months, years? Where do you see Pitch going from here as a company, as a startup, as a business?

Yeah, well, so I think the last year, year and a half was exciting, not just in pitch, but in the world, in that we saw this, uh, AI technology become commonplace. To go from something that, you know, us technology nerds were looking at for the past few decades of different iterations of it, but suddenly was something that my mom would ask me about because she had an opinion about it, has heard about it. I think we are at an incredibly interesting point in time. Where this like artificial intelligence is becoming mainstream. But I think we have not found the right interfaces to work with it yet. So I think that is something that will also be a part of pitch in the future of finding, you know, not the obvious way, obvious ways where you're writing a long prompt and getting something back that is done but not satisfactory necessarily. Like finding ways where we can collaborate with AI, of extending our team with new perspectives that we didn't have or new capabilities that we can direct and work together with. So that's something I'm excited to explore with Pitch. The domain of slides, which is very unstructured absolute canvas where you don't have a lot of inherent meaning between things. It's very much up to the observer. It's a tricky field to work with AI, but I think we have some really interesting ideas of how to bridge that gap and not have to make the same trade-offs as some other presentation software tools has made. So where you limit the freedom of expression to be able to have the AI, you know, fill out the blanks and more think of an AI agent as yet another teammate who's actually working with you and has the same capabilities, but a vastly larger, you know, brain and frame of reference than you have. So not replace humans and their creativity, but kind of unlocking another step in that. Yeah.

So I kind of hearing this back to back, you know, with a lot many founders who repeatedly saying the same thing. And some people are saying that some people are, you know, some founders are there like kind of AI is going to Not replace is the wrong word, but at least it's going to do work for you. But this is an angle I'm very fascinated about or interested about, particularly about AI is going to give you a head start. It's going to help you go from— you don't have to go from 0 to 1, probably 1 to 2. And the 1 to 2 and 0 to 1 is going to be— that's like the assistant, the agent, whatever it is that you build. kind of very intrigued by that fact because it's self-aware. Again, you're not selling too much. You're basically selling what AI is going to do, right? Like, not overselling it or overpromising it or showing something fancy where it is going to, like, if you're a writer, it's going to write everything for you. No, it's going to give you like a head start in terms of a couple of paras maybe. frame it, you change it, you be the editor, you know, or AI be the editor, you kind of like collaborate. I think I like that approach. And probably we never know. I think probably 5 years down the line, it'll work for us. You know, we don't have to do anything. Naval said this many times, you probably will have time to put something creatively, you know, you paint or you write like for the joy of writing and AI is going to take care of everything, but it's far away in the future. I'm excited, Adam, and this has been like a very fun, inspirational conversation for me. You have like a sense of calm, composed, balanced approach when it comes to product, when it comes to like talking to people, taking decisions and doing things the right way. So I appreciate you. Any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

Well, I very much enjoyed having this conversation with you. Yeah, no, I would maybe like, for anyone listening, kind of want to give a hint towards this idea of thinking about things as craftsmanship much more. Mm-hmm. I think, you know, there is an argument to be made for taking off-the-shelf UI libraries and off-the-shelf this and that and just compose it into something, which is more of this factory software I was mentioning. But I would implore anyone creating software to try out just building it from first principles, trying to build it more or less from scratch to see how that feels and see how your, your users, be it your, you know, close family and friends that are willing to put up with, with what you create, uh, to try it out and see how, how different the reaction is. Because I think, um, people are— it's easy to sell that approach short because the other factory approach is faster in many ways in the short term. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that would be something that everyone should try out and then make a decision for themselves if they, you know, that's not for everyone, but make a conscious decision and maybe even go even further and like try out the art part as well. There's some, you mentioned that now with AI, there's actually a lot of really cool applications of AI where you can use the new technology to not just create, but also explore art. Like,

I

think a little bit what is happening is that we're going from a creator economy slowly towards a curator model where we can have AI generate so many different things for us, but it still has no taste. So developing your taste and being the person that looks at the computer screen and trains your AI in saying, you know, this is good, that could be better, that thing sucks for this reason. I think there's also a lot of, yeah, joy and a lot of things to learn from that kind of approach. So explore the whole spectrum of how to create software and don't just get stuck in one corner.

Yeah, I love that advice. I think we can close on that. Beautiful advice. Thank you, folks. Again, appreciate you, Adam, for coming in. Appreciate you all for joining, listening, giving us your time and attention. Hopefully you learned one or two things from this conversation and take inspiration and implement in your particular life. But stay tuned. We have some awesome guests lined up in the podcast and we do this for you where we find ways to inspire you. in a little bit. So hopefully see you next time. Stay building, stay shipping, and doing your thing. Cheers. Cheers.