Brian Swartz - On a mission to make remote work actually work!

middling and then, you know, failing stults of like, oh, I can make this thing 10% better, maybe 30% better or 50% better. But if you're going to ask somebody to change a habit and adopt a new piece of technology, it's got, you know, 10x is kind of the bar.

That's true.

You think about things that are truly, truly transformational and truly tip in a certain direction. You got to make something that's 10x better, not, not

Hey folks, thanks for tuning in to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast. I'm your host, Sharath. Today I have a 2x venture-backed founder who's working on a stealth startup, which we're going to get into details in this conversation. Brian Swartz, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

Good, Sharath. It's so good to be here with you today. Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. I'm excited to dive deeper into your founder journey, Neighbor Schools, the startup you built, survived through COVID and acquired later on, and the stealth startup you're building. But for folks who are listening, let me give you a brief introduction of Brian. Brian is a 2x venture-backed founder, like I said, who sold his company Neighbor Schools. I'm actually quite fascinated. I wish I would have learned about NeighborSchools last year when I was hunting for daycare centers for my kid. It would have helped a lot, you know, checklisting some of the daycares. He's currently working at a stealth startup. He's on a mission to improve connectivity and real-time collaboration among remote teams. I'm actually excited to unpack the story Brian has for us to tell. So right off the bat, I wanna ask the obvious question. You said you were a 2x venture-backed founder. We would love to hear about the journey. You know, what was your previous experience of building startups look like?

Yeah, thank you. It's a generous introduction. My— I think all— many pathways to entrepreneurship are different and untraditional, but mine is definitely untraditional. So I started my career in international development work. My first job out of school was doing economics impact evaluations of big international development projects in Uganda. So I was there for 2 years. And frankly, I saw a lot of things just fail. My job was to evaluate these programs, not to actually implement them. And so I'd be out in the field researching and trying to assess whether these programs were going to have long-term lasting economic impact on the communities.

Right.

And again and again and again, these projects would fail. And they'd fail for all the wrong reasons. Not because like, not, not because just like the economic impact was not as high or as good or as strong as we wanted. It's because like the device itself would fail. So in Uganda, I was evaluating a rainwater storage device.

Hmm.

And when the, when the shipping container of the devices arrived, in the port, we held the plastic up to the sunlight and there were holes, there were holes in the plastic. And so like,

for very unobvious reasons, you know, these projects get failed, right? It's not engineering or anything.

These are not, you know, it's not that like the question, the key question was like, if young girls didn't have to walk to the well, and could instead collect rainwater, would they, the families, be healthier and richer in the long term? And would kids be able to go to school more? Like, these were the questions we set out to study. And instead, you know, we just found like very basic implementation failures. And that was 2010 to 2012. And at the same time, so I'm sitting there kind of in my little concrete box of an apartment. And at the same time, I'm reading about the internet and startups. And at the time, one that really captured my imagination was Kickstarter. Mm-hmm. So in 2011, I think, I don't, it might've been a Series A or Series B, I don't know what, but Kickstarter is demonstrating that the internet can bring people together and really unlock economic opportunity and create new products and new services. And, um, and at the time I had never heard of Chris Sacca or Fred Wilson who did that, that round. But so I started reading these blogs and, and, um, and I became pretty, um, pretty obsessed with this idea of getting in, going and trying this out, seeing what this would be like. So, uh, in 2012 I moved back to Boston and, and I, um, I talked my way into a job, um, as a sales engineer at a SaaS startup here in Boston.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, I was pretty terrible at it at first because I didn't know anything about sales or anything about engineering or software in general. But within a year or so, I discovered product management and I'd kind of figured out that this is, this was what I wanted to do. And so the next, you know, next 4 or 5 years was kind of an understudy phase. I found a mentor in the co-founder and chief product officer, Sam Clemens. from that company. And so, you know, fast forward, I met my co-founder there as well, which I think, you know, is just incredibly valuable. I've worked with some really incredible people. So 2018, Cedric and I get back together, and we're both kind of ready to go. And we've been planning and studying and thinking about different ideas for a long time. And we finally had something that felt worthy of it. We had thought of a lot of ideas that we didn't want to pursue, right?

Right.

And we finally came upon the idea for Neighbor Schools because it felt like a real opportunity to build software to create economic opportunity. Back of the envelope, we saw preschool teachers getting paid $13, $14 an hour, and we saw our friends paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for childcare. And then one of my best friends here in Cambridge literally stumbled into a home daycare. I mean, there was one of these crazy families at the park said like, oh, have you considered this woman around the corner? She runs a daycare out of her home. And they're like, that sounds sketchy. They're like, it's legit. And I mean, you've got a young kid right now, right? Yeah. The first time you hear about something like this, you're like, yeah, is this real? And they met this woman who had this magical little daycare running out of her apartment, a block from the park, 2 blocks, 3 blocks from their home. And, you know, we're talking about all this over dinner a few nights later, and back of the envelope, they were going to pay 30 or 40% less than sending their kid to the big kinder— Kindergarten. nearby. And you do the math and you're like, oh my gosh, this woman's gonna gross like $100K to $120K a year. And she has costs and she's got all like, she's got expenses and her home is set. But what we said is like, oh my God, like, why isn't everyone working this way? Why is everyone not doing this?

Right.

And, and that was the, that became the question that was the starting point for Neighbor Schools. And it became a question that consumed the next 4 years of our lives in a good way, right? And we met some incredible women. I mean, and I say women because unfortunately it is a very gendered industry. You know, we worked in— we did this for years and we worked with thousands of childcare professionals and less than a 10th of 1% were male. So And so NeighborSchools started from this question of, can we create software that will unlock potential for people to go from being low-wage employees to being middle-income small business owners?

Right.

And if we can do that using software, wouldn't that be incredible? And so that, that's what we set out to do. And in year 1, we partnered with And built a software platform with about a dozen people who would go on to launch home daycares from scratch, and and it was incredible. And you know, basically every chapter, every kind of piece of opening a small business and and getting license and setting up the home and passing a home inspection and all this, as they walked through it, I basically. drove all around the state helping people do this stuff. And then we'd build software to do it the next 100 times, the next 1,000

times.

And we did that again and again and again. And then, you know, Q— God, the timing was crazy. You know, Q2 of 2019, we raised— or sorry, Q3, we raised a seed round. And we said like, all right, this— we've got something here. Like there's— there are people that want to be working this way and our software and our services enabling

Mm-hmm.

And we closed, we closed like kind of late in 2019. And 3 months later, COVID and the market shuts down. And all of a sudden, literally overnight, you know, providing childcare, like licensed childcare in your home became illegal overnight. So what we were— we went to zero. And we would largely stay that way for 12 to 18 months.

Wow.

And so, as a business, we went into kind of— we had 2 modes. We were not growing at all anymore, right? The question was, could we continue to help and serve our customers who now were looking to us to translate these terribly complicated COVID protocols? Right. And could we kind of keep our heads down and continue to build software and build out more of a whole product solution such that when the market came back, which we just had to trust eventually it would, when the market came back, we'd be in a better position to actually start to grow quickly. And it was hard. I mean, that was tough keeping a team motivated. Throughout that was very, very difficult. I think the thing that, that helped us do it was the fact that, you know, every day we were talking to our customers who were trying to navigate their own businesses collapsing underneath them, right? And really depended on us. So, yeah, I mean, COVID definitely threw a wrench in things. And it was a solid 12 to 18 months until we started to really see things open up again and we saw growth kind of come back to the business.

No, I can only imagine what you went through because it was such a hard time for everybody, you know, in their own way, right? Like it's a devastating period. I want to unpack so many things in that answer you gave. One is, so let's go back to Uganda. Because I want to understand what are some lessons you learned through that experience. Like you were kind of there to actually monitor certain important questions, like you said, but you were facing some basic implementations, right? Like how, what is something, what are the takeaways you took from that experience which you implemented in your founder life?

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't actually talk about the Uganda experience all that much. One of my biggest takeaways from my time there is just that the international development needs people who are all in on international development. And that might sound kind of silly and trite, but I think many of the failings come from the fact that the people, the Westerners who are leading these projects, live in comfortable places like Washington, D.C. and Seattle. Right. And they're not on the ground actually watching these projects fail,

like

just like seeing things like fail.

As is. Yeah. Without any filter.

Yeah. Right. They're right. They're reading, they're reading the monitoring and evaluation report 6 or 12 months later, the annual report that that one didn't fail, but they're not seeing it. They're not feeling that how stupid it is that these projects failed for predictable and obvious and preventable reasons. And so the money and the power is, is not local. The money and the power is very, very far away. And then the failures are local. Right. And so, I mean, part of why I left the field is that I knew after 2 years of living in Uganda, I could have come back to stateside. I could have set up, you know, in the suburbs of DC and I could have been a consultant for the rest of my life trading on my 2 years of quote unquote fieldwork.

Hmm.

And to me, that's kind of bullshit. Like, I think that the, what the industry needs is people who are committed to living abroad for long, long periods of time. And 2 years of field— I mean, think about it. If you did 2 years of building a startup and you're like, ah, now I'm gonna just be a startup advisor, most of the bullshit, like you don't know anything after 2 years, right?

Right.

Um, and so I think, you know, just like anything else, you just got to be all in on whatever your thing is. So,

you

know, after 2 years in startups, I knew something. After 2 more years, I knew a little bit more. After, you know, now 10, 11 years, I, I'd like to think that

It's a progressive journey. It's not like totally done.

No, totally. And I still don't consider myself an expert in this stuff. I just hope that this time around with our second startup, we make different mistakes and we've learned from some of our first mistakes.

Right. And so the other thing which you said in your previous answer about neighbor schools, was that a problem you saw for yourself? Meaning Did you have kids back then or how did you empathize with building something that, first of all, is it like, are you building for yourself versus are you building or you're taking an educated guess in, okay, there is a market, there is a problem, there's a gap, let's actually fix it with a solution.

I'm glad you asked, Sharath, because I did not have kids at the time. I've got a daughter now and another kid on the way.

Oh, congrats.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, and at the time I was building Neighbor Schools, my wife and I were struggling with infertility. So every so often, especially a VC would like to ask me, well, is this a problem you're solving for yourself? Do you have kids? And I would just have to say no. And that hurt a little bit, right? And both personally and professionally, I think my job— I was a product manager before I became a CEO, and I'm definitely a product-oriented CEO.

Right.

My job is to build that empathy and be able to relate and deeply, deeply give a shit about whoever I'm building whatever for. So no, I didn't have kids, and no, actually, I'd never worked a day in my life in a preschool, believe it or not. Mm-hmm. But that didn't in any way prevent me from sitting with preschool teachers and daycare operators and parents as they were going through their childcare search and feeling the stress of like, literally sitting with friends while they've got, you know, 3-month-old infants in their arms and they're like scrolling through the pages of care.com or Yelp even and be like, Good God, like, how do you, how do you trust anybody on these sites with your, with your kid as a first-time parent?

So,

right, uh, you know, I think the empathy part, I, I don't know, I think it's just, it's that part has to feel easy, right? Uh, if, if you're gonna go and you're gonna build for anybody other than yourself, I'd say, you know, what is nice with our new startup is that we are largely building for ourselves. This one, this one is, is, uh, You know, this one is selfish in that way. And it's funny because, you know, 10 years ago I worked in SaaS and at the time there was like SaaS for everything. It was just like, you know, we, at the time I used to joke that like, you know, so many people would sit around in a tech office and be like, you know what sucks around here? Like the staplers don't work. I'm going to build SaaS for staplers. I don't know, some shit.

Right.

But like, you know, people would just like look around them and anything that they could put their eyes on that wasn't perfect, they're like, I'm going to build SaaS for that.

Right.

Right. And so like SaaS kind of became just inundated with like kind of ideas that the margin. And I and Cedric and I, both of us at the time, you know, we're like, oh my God, we're not going to build more SaaS. Like, we're gonna do like something that has real-world impact. Like, and Neighbor Schools was obviously that, like, the real-world tangible impact there, like, was tremendous. Um, and then this one feels different because we realized in the last year or two that there's a real, real-world impact on this feeling of feeling disconnected at work, not feeling like a cohesive member of a team. I mean, this is not, this is not about productivity. You know, it's, it's more about job satisfaction than productivity. And it's more about mental health and our general well-being as a society than anything else. You know, we're really trying to build a piece of software that makes somebody feel something, feel connected to their, to their colleagues and to each other and to the mission. And so yes, we, you know, we will be a subscription software as a service. We will be a subscription model that will be our revenue model. But, and we will sell to businesses, right? But we are building this one because all of a sudden SaaS feels really personal. Like it feels really personal this time.

Nice. Yeah, I wanna like have a separate conversation altogether about the stealth startup, about the remote. Let's go back to a couple of things which you mentioned. One is, so I want to like just summarize one thing you just mentioned about problem not being solved for yourself, but you still have empathy.

Hmm.

I think there, my observation is if you're not solving for yourself and you have like an educated guess and you know there is a market and the gap and you can have the gut feeling of providing a solution. And you are talking to the users, potential users, I feel you should have great listening skills, like amazing, incredible listening skills, A. Number 2, you should have great ability to ask right questions to them so that they connect with you. And from the questions and the answers and the way you listen, you can kind of like grasp what they want and then you kind of build for them, right? So I feel like that's— I just want to summarize there after hearing your experience. So a couple of things you mentioned before even starting Neighbor Schools, you said you and Cedric, you both had some ideas that you thought would never work, right? Do you want to share a couple of them just for old time's sake? The things that you were like, okay, you know what, this is crazy, but

Sure. So, so, um, so in opportunity selection, right, you know, I, I actually think that, uh, you know, when I, when I talk to people who are younger and they're, you know, and considering a path towards being a founder one day, this is one of the things I encourage them to do is like, you know, get really good at like very quickly like writing up a one-pager on like an idea. Take an idea and like actually like stress test it for a few hours and like write up like the different elements of it. We had a bunch of ideas. Some— I think most of those ideas were bad. Well, they were all bad for various reasons. One of— but like, some of them, it'd be like a 10% improvement on something, not a 10x improvement on something,

right? Mm-hmm.

I think a lot of, um, middling and then, you know, failing startups are a result of like, oh, I can make this thing 10% better, maybe 30% better, or 50% better. But it, but, you know, we, you know, I think if you, you know, you can read about this, you know, there's plenty of examples of this, but like, if you're going to ask somebody to change a habit and adopt a new piece of technology, it's got, you know, 10x is kind of the bar.

That's true.

If you think about things that are truly, truly transformational and truly tip in a certain direction, like you got to make something that's 10x better, not, not 10% better. And so a lot of our ideas were kind of like marginally better, right? Um, the others were like places where I think, again, like it might be a really big improvement but a really small market and just like damn hard, right? Um, so like hard is fine as long as the market is, is enormous, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, you know, I think like a good example of this is like, um, the guys who did Plaid, right? You hear them talk about their earliest days, they were like literally hacking this stuff. People are like, is this legal? Is this against terms of service? And they're like, is it fragile? And so it was hard, but obviously enormous. And so you keep making incremental progress against hard and something could break your way. hard and small is just really, really hard, you know, it's especially in the venture model where, you know, you're raising money and you're kind of going after this, you're gonna, you have to invest ahead of revenue, you know, you gotta, you gotta re— if it's hard and small, it's very, very hard for the numbers to add up in the long run.

I love that, that point you mentioned, which is when you're validating an idea or evaluating an idea, Always think, is this idea going to serve or make a transformational impact, which is 10x, not 10%? If it's like slight improvements, I think that's a great way to have a self-filter for ourselves because we builders and founders, we just get ridiculous amounts of ideas and we all think there is no certain bar, right? So I love that. And Okay. So let's talk about the stealth startup. And the first question I'm curious about, if you want to maybe like, you know, give an elevator pitch or something like that, like what would that be like? What are you building? What can you give away to the listeners?

Absolutely. No, we're happy to be an open book. I mean, we're stealth really because branding is still in development and I have no imagery to put with it. So,

right.

Um, and we're moving very quickly, so by the time this gets launched, we might even be public by then. So, um, so we're building— what we're building is a new platform. It's a new app that you'll use at work to connect with your coworkers. Um, and, and we're very much focused initially on helping fully remote teams feel better connected to one another.

Okay.

Um, eventually I actually think that that distinction largely falls away because everybody collaborates through the internet.

Right.

Right. Um, I was talking to somebody at Figma the other day who started his career at Google, and we're talking through all these different challenges, and he just made the observation that, you know, At Google in 2010, they were not remote, but they were so big, they're distributed. And so, every day you're collaborating with people who they might be on a different floor of the building, they might be in a different building altogether. And so, they're effectively remote to you, right? You are distributed. And what we're after is helping that team or your team of 20 fully internationally distributed feel connected to one another. It's a feeling that we're after, right? Because we just funda— we fundamentally believe 2 things. One is that, um, most people are a better version of themselves if they just feel connected to a team.

That's true.

And the other thing we believe is that it's mental,

right?

I can feel deeply connected to my team and I can feel like we're all in sync and we have flow as a team, as a unit, and not share space with you, not share physical time and space with you. And we are building a platform aimed at helping teams feel that. Mm-hmm. So, um, it is, um, lofty and audacious for sure. Um, but we've also, I think through our experience of leading a team in the transition from, you know, we were an in-person team and, you know, in Boston prior to COVID, leading a team into that transition, you know, what I would call almost reluctantly remote. Cedric and I as co-founders, we love, we love working together. I mean, the two of us, we sat 5 feet apart from me next to, like, next to each other for, you know, 6 of the last 10 years. Like, we really like turning to each other and the energy, you know, high or low, like good, bad, or ugly. If things are going really well or things are going totally to shit, like feeling like you can turn to somebody is really, really valuable. Yeah. And, and so what we're after here, you know, we kind of have like 3, 3 kind of core concepts. One is the sense of transparency.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Um, I don't— I and other people in the organization, I don't want to feel blind to what goes on around here, and I don't want to feel invisible either.

Right.

I want to know that my contributions and my efforts are appreciated and recognized and And I don't necessarily mean that like big shout out, like the big rah-rah putting a spotlight. I just mean like the small stuff, right? When somebody asks you like, hey, Sharaf, how's that project going? Or how— I know you have been working really hard on that thing. How is it going? Like, these are these micro moments of recognition and attention that makes you feel seen.

The small wins.

And it's the small wins in those small moments. It's like these microdoses of attention and recognition that make you feel valued in an organization. So, so that's transparency. And then number 2 is trust, right? And trust is, is, you know, there's psychological safety and there's all these things, but trust is, is knowing that you will show up for your coworkers because they're going to show up for you. And that reciprocity and this, the sense of, of being being there for one another, right? Again, it doesn't require sharing physical space, but it does require some, some context, right? Just like a shared knowledge of, uh, and empathy and, and familiarity with one another, right? Yeah. There's a lot of research that shows that, you know, familiarity breeds trust, which breeds— or sorry, familiarity breeds liking, which is a prerequisite for trust and being able to be vulnerable.

It's very interesting what you said about, because a lot of the startups I hear when they talk about like remote solutions, they immediately tend to think, how can we make your remote team work 10x better in terms of productivity? Mm-hmm. It's like, okay, let's actually boost your productivity. Let's boost your outcomes. Let's boost your the way you work and get the results primarily, right? These are the tools. And I think for the first time I'm hearing someone like you, like a founder saying it's about feeling, it's about inclusiveness as a team, right? And that's very interesting to me. I think I want to dive a little deeper into how you are going to solve that. If you want to maybe reveal, is it like when you say platform, what kind of platform is it? Is it like a video platform or what was it about?

Yeah, it's a good call out. I think that focusing on productivity, I think, starts at the wrong end. I think, look, think about your own career. Think about some of the really high energy, high impact work that you've done just in the last year or 2. It's not times that you sat down and said like, okay, I'm going to crush this to-do list in the next 2 hours. Like, sure, you can do that. Like, but that's like quick hits. That's not like the big, impactful, meaningful work. The big, big stuff, it comes from feeling inspired by a conversation, an interaction, you know, something that strikes you in a certain moment and kind of feeling like you're ready to run on it. Right. And so these are feelings that set us up, I think, for our biggest meaningful wins in the workplace. In terms of what Swivel as a product is, Swivel is going to start out, um, as a platform that integrates all of your existing tooling. So as you go about your day as a remote worker, You're going to use your calendar to determine where you are when, and you're going to use Zoom to actually attend those meetings. And you're going to use Slack for either your chitchat or your serious kind of questions and answers, and for the fun stuff too, right? Most teams have the fun channels in Slack where people post photos of their kids. Right. You know, learning to walk or going for that hike or whatever the case may be. Um, you also have things like an org chart and you have KPI dashboards and you have, um, you have maybe, maybe you have, um, employee bios somewhere buried in a wiki somewhere that no one's seen in a very long time, right?

Yeah. On Notion docs. Yeah.

In, in a Notion doc, somebody very, you know, well-intentioned said like, oh, every time somebody joins the team, we're gonna have them fill out this about us, about me survey, and then we'll bury that somewhere that nobody will ever

see.

And Swivel is about bringing that stuff back together in a way that centers all of our work and our schedules and our what matters on the people and the teams that are doing that work. So at its core, it's a new way to visualize your company. And so it is a visual interaction. It is graphical, which is actually part of what makes it difficult to describe over a podcast is that it is visual by nature. Um, we recreate the pods of people that do the great work. So your marketing team is a pod of people, your sales team, your engineering team, your support team, right? These are pods of people. And, and in Swivel, you can visualize who does what around here. Mm-hmm. What do they do for fun? When can I next get 30 minutes with all these people at the same time? And who's running late for their one-on-one with me because they're still in a high-energy podcast interview with somebody? And what we're going for here is sharing context, which creates empathy. Right. So I will admit, as a CEO who has a back-to-back schedule sometimes, that I sometimes run late to my meetings, right?

Of course. We've all been there.

Well,

yeah,

we've all been there, right? And so, you know, how I think about it is that, say I'm running late for a meeting with my CTO, with Cedric, uh, because I'm meeting with you, right? If you were in our physical office, right, Cedric would see that we're still in that conference room behind that glass wall,

right?

And when I came out 5 minutes later and I hustled, like, I showed that I was like, you know, I was like, hey, you know, sorry, man, sorry I'm late, like That's me with Sharaf. He'd be like, hey, who's Sharaf? Like, what were we talking about?

Right.

Right. Just that teeny, like 10 seconds of context and conversations. Like, hey, is this guy, you know, does great community work at Thredo, runs a podcast. Cool. Okay, cool. Onto what we're onto. Right. In 6 seconds or less, Cedric has more interest, context, empathy for what I've just been doing.

Hmm.

And, and he's no longer pissed off that I'm running late for my meeting because he's got all that empathy, right? And so what we're trying to do with Swivel is bring back that context, that peripheral, right? The peripheral knowledge that is largely lacking in remote. And if we can do that, if we can do that, again, what we're after is a feeling, right? After this feeling of being part of a team connected to one another. Because I think the third thing that we're really big on is accountability. And for us, accountability is not accountability to the boss. Accountability is accountability to your peers.

Mm-hmm.

And I think, you know, I'd be curious, I should get your take on this, but if you think about the times in your career where you've worked really hard, right? How much do you feel like you were doing it for the boss, for your manager, your direct manager, versus doing it because a sense of kind of collective accountability with your peers.

That's a great point. Yeah, I think it's kind of, I think maybe 50/50. I would say some of the things that come from top down, we tend to work as a task and we just want to rush it out and like complete it. And the later 50 is like, Very proactive, right? Like we want to start something together with a buddy of mine in the team. Let's build something together, like a small feature set or like a content piece or anything. I think the self-starters, we have accountability to each other versus if there is a task being assigned, then it's more of like, yeah, you know. I have to be accountable or responsible. I think accountability is kind of like a two-way coin. One side is responsibility and the other side is actual accountability, right? If it is given to you, then it's responsibility. If you own it, then it's accountability. You see what I'm saying? So I think you answered your question. Yeah, I think Giving the transparency is really important. I feel remote, as a remote team ourselves at Thredo, we face same similar challenges. Like we don't have the empathy. Well, it's not intentional, unintentionally, we don't have the environment to actually have the empathy because we don't know who's having lunch, who's having dinner, especially when you live in the US and Most of the team living in like different time zones. We have no clue, like, okay, are they living in, are they having lunch or dinner at this time when we actually seek their attention or anything? Like you said, you're saying like, are they meeting someone potential that helps the whole company or they're just having like spending some time with their kids or doing like a flow state session with themselves, right? So I think we have to do these things manually and be very— we overcommunicate saying that, hey, we do these things so that people can feel empathy towards us. But I would love to check out Swivel and try to incorporate in our ecosystem and see how it works. But that's a great way of solving The remote culture. And while you were explaining the whole product, I got this one-liner that came to my mind, like one-line pitch. It's like, if you use Swivel, you live in an office without living in an office, right? You work at an office without working at an office. You know, it's like you can observe other people. You can actually— Yeah, I love that. see what others are doing. It's kind of like the glass walls, you know. So—

It's, yeah, it's right on. And I think, you know, maybe we'll get you in the beta because one of the things that, you know, we're launching private beta within the next week or so here. And one of the things that we're trying to actually figure out from an aesthetic, and I mean, we just believe that like design and aesthetic and UI for this is so, so critically important for it to feel instantly, um, comfortable and familiar. Um, and we're actually playing around with how much of the real-world analogies do we want to bring in. Should there be conference rooms or should they just be spaces where people meet, right? Should there be— should there be couches? Because like, you know, it used to be that like I'd hang out on the couch occasionally and people could like kind of like drift on by. And if I didn't have my headphones on, I was at the couch, it was a good indicator that like I was open for a little chit-chat. Right. Um, and so if executives want to host office hours, I mean, lots and lots of remote teams, execs host office hours all the time right now and nobody goes because nobody knows they're happening. Like there's no visibility there. Right. And so part of what we bring back is that visibility and that feeling of that there's something going on around here. So, uh, we'd love to, we'd love to get Thredo in it. Well, we can take that, take that one offline.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh, I love that. I, I, and A quick question. Why stealth? You know, when we live in a world where pretty much everybody's building in public, you know, I'm more of like a pro building in public type of a guy. Like, I've built my products entirely in public, very transparent. Everybody knows what I'm doing. Why stealth now in this day and age?

It's a great question. And I think we'll be out of stealth. really as soon as we have branding that we can slap on this thing. So, you know, if you, if you want to follow our journey, the best place that we're sharing it is on LinkedIn right now. Mm-hmm. There's tons of people who are very passionate about figuring out how to make remote work work for them and their organizations on LinkedIn. And so there's a really vibrant conversation happening there, and we are, we are starting to share Not just our perspective, but, you know, every week I have more and more founders reaching out to me to talk about exactly this, and we're starting to share some of those things there. So the Stealth, I think, is, is, uh, you know, we're— we literally started this project, um, February 1st, so, so we're less than 10 weeks in here. So very shortly we will have a website and, uh, a name and a logo that people can start to check out and sign up, sign up for the waitlist.

Awesome. Yeah, we'd love to check that out. And any— so it's a big transition. One thing I want to also cover is in this podcast, you went from solving childcare problems to a whole new level, which is working with remote teams, empathizing with them. And how did— what was the transition like and what made you think about after post-acquisition, of NeighborSchools? What was like your mindset when you're thinking about the next thing you're building? And when did this hit right on the

spot? Good question. So, you know, my co-founder Cedric and I, we've worked together, you know, like I said, for going on 10, 11 years now. And after the acquisition closed last summer, you know, we were with the acquiring company for the duration of the year. And during that time, we were trying to figure out what what would come next. And we really didn't know. We didn't know if we had the energy to go again or whether there was something, there was an idea that would be again worthy of it. Because like I said, we really only want to spend our time on things that truly matter. Right. So life is just too short to work on small things. So And then what happened? What happened is, so we're both kind of— he and I are both kind of morning people. And we got started on this idea that would eventually grow into Swivel. And we started to realize that every morning we made ourselves a little Slack channel. So, you know, again, to separate things out cleanly. And every morning we'd find ourselves both on Slack a little bit earlier and a little bit earlier and a little bit earlier.

earlier.

And, uh, because we wanted to get good cycles in on thinking through this problem and unpacking it from a product perspective and a go-to-market perspective and, and, you know, reading and researching and sharing ideas and just jamming on it. And, you know, eventually I think, uh, it got really early, like 5 o'clock, uh, became— and Cedric actually wakes up even earlier than I do, so, um, you know, he would be up in the 4 o'clock hour and, and kind of We'd sync up some days just before our day job started at 9 and we'd compare notes and I think eventually it kind of became pretty obvious that we were feeling more energized building again. Like we had it, we still had kind of that spark and that desire to build software that can solve real problems. And this felt like a real problem. So, you know, I think if not, again, if not for Cedric, if not for having like kind of a 10-year partner who's as all in with me on this as anybody could ever ask of any co-founder, I definitely wouldn't have done it again. But we both kind of started to feed off the energy of one another and became apparent that this one was really personal. You know, I'll tell you one last little thing here, which is, um, for Swivel, you know, on my mom's side, I got a big Irish family. So I'm the oldest of 13 grandkids on that side. So basically every year for every year for the last 5 years, and, you know, there's been somebody graduating from college and starting their career. Um, and part of this is like, you know, as those kids graduate college right now and they consider their careers and whether they, how they want to work and how and what they want to do. I think that the current, the status quo of remote is not good enough. Hmm. It's not going to give them the opportunities to have work be a really big and meaningful and valuable piece of their lives the way it has been for me since, you know, since I graduated. And I cannot imagine where I would be if I graduated in, or if I started my career in tech and, you know, what remote looked like in 2020, 2021, 2022. And so again, you know, this one is something that we are pretty passionate about working on.

Yeah, I love that. I love the behind the story. I think some point we have to bring Cedric into the conversation. I want to just talk to that guy and like, you know, both of your journey as co-founders for the last 10 years. It's been— I love those bonding stories because, you know, in a day where we live in, we need quick wins and people just tend to like, you know, stick for shorter term. Once we have the win, we just like, you know, rub off each other and like, you know, go parts ways. So I love, I love people hearing stories when people say like, okay, you know, I know this guy for Like 10 years. That's long. That's long. Tell me about Swivel in a much more detailed way. Like, you know, what are your next plans? Have you acquired funding? What's the current situation? Like, you have a team, maybe like, you know, you want to plug some things that you've never talked about and sharing with our audience?

Sure. Yeah. You know, again, we have not released any of it, so this will probably be our announcement, but we started February 1st. We have a really great group of investors who are backing us, almost everybody that we've worked with at our last startup. Mm-hmm. And just feel tremendously grateful that even in this crazy Q1 of 2023 that we've had, they quickly came together to back us in part because I think we handled the last one as well as we did. And they also see the potential in Swivel and what we're building here. So feel very fortunate to have that in the bank. We've got a, you know, we're going to be a core team of 5, really, really heads down on product and engineering. Our only goals right now is to build a platform that teams love. So, you know, we won't be investing in go-to-market or growth at all until, you know, I get 5 or 10 teams like Athreto or the other teams here in Boston that we're already talking to, or national for that matter. Yeah. So we're looking to partner up with teams of between about 30 to 200, 300 right now will be the crew, the teams that we initially launch with. Mm-hmm. And what we expect and hope to happen here is that we'll actually pretty quickly come to replace your calendar habit. If you think about how you use your calendar for most small intraday tasks, you know, you went to your calendar to click on this link to join me, you know, here today in Riverside, but it didn't add a tremendous amount of value outside of just like having a link for you at the right time, at the right place. And with Swivel, we're going to try to make that such a richer experience. And you will kind of throughout your day pick up this valuable context and build this empathy for all the great things that are happening in your organization, just going to your next meeting in the way that, again, in the way that you used to in the office, walking down the hallway to get to the next conference room, you'd bump into somebody or you'd see a meeting going on out of the corner of your eye. It would spark something. And so, You know, we are, we're heads down right now on, on product and, and build. Um, we want to see, we want to really, really nail that use case and work very, very closely with a small number of, of customers. And, and because what we do know is that, um, if it clicks, right, if we can really nail this use case, um, and we can really start to add value as, as you go about your day, Um, you know, the, the, the potential to scale that is, is incredible. Um, but we want to be very, very sure that we've, we built something valuable, especially in, you know, as, as you know, the funding, uh, environments are, are different. So we're not going to start to throw money at or, you know, pour fuel on this thing until, until we feel like we've really got

it. Yeah, nice. Yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward for, for, for testing the beta and like, you know, spreading the word as well. Before we close out, I want to ask like one last question. You've been through so much, you know, with Neighbor Schools, with the whole Uganda experience, and you worked in Boston at a couple of startups and you're building this Swivel right now. If you want to like maybe point out like 5 important lessons throughout your journey, to founders, like, be it from your Uganda experience or survival through COVID and keeping the customers intact as well as like, you know, the team and now building this new thing with new energy, you know, with same old people. What was like, what were the 5 things you want to mention or 5 important lessons?

Oh man. I'll take a stab at it. I'm not sure I'll get to 5.

It doesn't matter. Just like, I think the most important lessons that you want to pass along for the listeners.

Maybe the most important thing is to really believe in what you're building. and never lose faith in that. And I— but I think that that has multiple parts to it. I think some people over-index on what field they will work in, um, and I think you need to balance that with the people you're going to work with and what that— and what that work is going to look like. I think, you know, the outside of startup land, I think, you know, Um, a very obvious example of this is doctors, right? You know, people as a child, what you think being a doctor is versus what being a doctor actually is and what that looks like in your 20s and 30s, very, very different, right? Um, and, um, I'd say in startups, you know, now I, I talk to founders who want to work in climate or founders who want to work in who are actually, who are still trying to innovate in childcare. And I applaud those efforts tremendously. And it's not a but, it's an and. I think you just want to make sure you're working with really good people. Because I think that the through line here is it's Your day-to-day, you know, like day-to-day, what you do as the founder of a childcare, you know, startup is a lot like what you do as the founder of a fintech startup. You're hiring people, you're raising money, you're setting direction, you're motivating people, you're leading a team. Like those things are commonalities. And so what matters there is how is the caliber of the people you work with.

Right.

And so, you know, I'm not, you know, again, I want both. I want to work on meaningful projects, meaningful problems and projects with good people. And so I think that that would probably be like the single biggest thing if I think about, you know, my career to date.

That's nice. Awesome. Great lesson and a takeaway. I hope listeners get the gist of what Bryan is mentioning. Bryan, this has been amazing. I'm actually looking forward to try Swivel and help as much as I can in my experience and help you win, right? I love personally people like you who are in this game to play long. You know, and really try to build solutions for the better. So this has been great. Any last words before we close out the episode?

No, Sharath, it's been great to chat with you. Thank you so much for great questions. And yeah, you brought me back to a couple of stories I haven't shared in a long time. So it was real pleasure.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's the whole point of, you know, know, bringing that, unpacking the stories, right? Yeah. Thanks for tuning in for the listeners. And we'll be back with another episode next time. So stay tuned and check out other episodes I have. See ya.