Pramod Sharma - Founder of Napkin AI Talks Simplifying Visuals for Presentations

All right, welcome back to the Casey Adams show. Today I am joined by Pramod Sharma, the founder and CEO of Napkin AI. Pramod, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

I'm glad to be here.

Absolutely. Well, first off, I am not only very impressed by what you've built, but I know you are, you've been a multiple time founder and I know that your startup Napkin AI recently, fairly recently came out of stealth. And before we dive in, I'd love for you to give a quick high level of what Napkin AI is before we really dive into your story, the product and everything that you're working on.

Sure. So the idea behind Napkin AI is whenever we are giving a presentation, writing blog post or a LinkedIn post, graphics are always a big part of that experience. And so always it takes a lot of time to come with the right graphic. And Napkin is essentially trying to make it easier for you to create the right graphic. And the way it works is it takes you text. So for example, let's you're writing blog post, you can copy paste your whole blog post text paste into Napkin, press your button and it will give you a couple of different graphics that are ready to go. You can pick it from, you can customize them after the effect. And the idea is graphics are really powerful as a communication tool and we want everyone to use them lot more than happens right now.

I love that. That's really cool. And I think too just the idea of graphics, especially on social like they bring such a different level of emphasis to storytelling and everything. And I know just on the site and kind of seeing what the product is and the testimonials, like there's so many great use cases for it as you guys lay out and that's incredible.

Yeah. I think one of the things that we have seen is graphic done when it's like a shortcut for communication.

Yeah.

Or convincing somebody, getting somebody excited because it just because humans are very visual. So we make sense of visual information much faster. But you have to put energy into getting the right graphic. And that's where the Napkins idea is. We want to create the best possible graphic for you. Not just any graphic.

And you know what they say, right? A picture is worth a thousand words, A graphic is worth a thousand words in terms of the, you know, the right graphic for the right meaning. So it's incredible where did this idea come from and what led to, you know, making this the next venture you want to start and work on. Because I know your previous company, Osmo was Acquired, which we'll get into. But what led to, you know, wanting to work on Napkin and what opportunity did you see to really pursue this?

Yeah, one of the things that so this, this came from our personal experience, me and my co founder Jerome and what we have seen as we were building osmo. Big part of our job was communication, like trying to figure out what to build next. Somebody's going to come, give us a page, we're going to reading documents, reading research papers. And every time we engage in that sort of experience, we always realize we naturally look at graphics first and you might have the same experience. For example, somebody sent you a research paper on a given topic. The first thing many of us do is we look at a graphic to make sense of is it worth reading further. So graphics like a shortcut. And we saw that as something really powerful. But then if we have, if you, if you have somebody internally presenting Napkin, presenting an idea internally, it's just a lot of work. So people just don't do it. So we know it's something great, but we just don't do it. And I saw that the work could be so much more fun, much more engaging if somebody could create the right graphic. And we realized the cost of doing that was just too high in terms of the skill, the time required and little thinking required is just too much. And people just don't have that much time. Especially at workplace you are not going to, you're not going to spend like research paper. You might able to spend time because you might take a couple of months writing a research paper, but let's give a presentation for an idea that you're just pitching. And he probably had like two hours and, and you had to get the whole thing together. And, and that's, that was the genesis of like this is something, this is great. Doesn't happen. We can make it happen. And, and there's of course the, the, the, the undercurrent of the progression AI and how a lot of things that tend that used to be very hard. Now LLMs can help us. A lot of other technologies can really help us make sense and we can automate them. So I got very excited with the idea of automation. It's like taking something that takes hours and sort of making it happen within seconds.

Yeah, no, that's so great. And I know you mentioned you and your co founder and previously, you know, creating OSMO and what, that, you know, what you learned and how that you know, helped ideate on what Napkin was and has become. What was OSMO for those that don't know and really take us back to the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey before we really dive into, you know, all things napkin, the industry AI. I want to just take us back to the beginning of what led you to first creating osmo, launching that company and of course, you know, get some context on what that was.

Yeah, sure, I can. So I used to work at Google before we started osmo and at that point my daughter was I think three and a half, long time ago, I think four year old and she used to go to this daycare and it was a really, the experience in this daycare slash preschool was very hands on and the daycare was really proud of the fact that they don't use technology for kids because technology is not good for kids. And I just found that to be kind of contradictory because I was working at Google. So I'm clearly pushing for more tech and my daughter, she wants more tech. So. So this isn't like something that I'm pushing on like she loves at that point. IPad was new, so she loved iPad and I see so much potential with iPad, but I could appreciate the thinking behind what was happening at daycare, which is more hands on, more collaboration, more physical interaction for kids. And I saw these two different ideas like idea of attack and engagement and the power of attack and the power of hands on and physical space and physical direction. And that's why the genesis, that was the start of this idea, can we bring it together meaningfully, something that you can make it accessible to everyone. And the way OSMO works is it's an app that runs on iPad and there's a small hardware that goes, that gets mounted on top of the iPad camera. And what it enables is users can use a physical space in front of an iPad. For example, you can make a drawing on a piece of paper. And now iPad OSMO game can see what you're doing and make it more interactive and fun. Just like you have a video game experience, but it's happening right in front of you in a physical space and then suddenly brings this magic. And we saw so much potential around it, so much engagement from kids and even teachers as well. Because it's rare for a teacher to say I want tech.

Yeah, yeah.

At least that's what I was hearing when we started osmo. And but with osmo that was a different story. Teachers want OSMO for kids because it's like they're engaged in something that's definitely been proven to be very positive experience for kids.

Yeah, that's incredible. So what you, you see this opportunity. You're working at Google I remember seeing as well, you were working at Nvidia as well prior to that. Is that right? That's right. So when you're, you know, you're working in tech, what led you to really making that jump to leave Google, start osmo and what was it about that time in your life that you felt like that was the right time to go start a company?

I would say, I think many of you listeners might connect with this experience leaving Google or any big, any company that doing well because it was doing incredibly well at that point. It's not an easy decision. It's just like it just have a lot of, I would say you have this sort of fear of like what's like there's one part that's really well established and it's actually an awesome part, another one you don't know yet. And I have had this twice now where I have something that works and I actually moved on to do something else. And what actually led to do that was, I wouldn't say it's a logical thinking as such, but more like you see something exciting that's pulling you out rather than you moving out. And I always like the thing that you, the new dream or new idea or whatever. So you're thinking is so strong, at least you see that clearly. That's like a no brainer. It's like, yeah, I should obviously do that because this is awesome. But if you don't have that conviction, it's very, very difficult. So I had this conviction both with Napkin and with Osmo. It's like I could see it, I could feel it now. Vaj, right? Of course not. I mean we have these like, we have these dreams and hopes and they, they're not always right. Your path changes dramatically. But at that moment I was pretty convinced that this is something that's great. I can see this, I can also see this as being a positive force in society as well as a strong business. So I could see this and you can say I might be hallucination, hallucinating at this point. But, but that was the conviction I had. Conviction was very, very strong. And same with Napkin as well. Our conviction is very, very strong that this is something very useful.

Absolutely.

So we should be able to figure out a way to monetize. Let's build a business around it or system around it.

Yeah, that's so great too. Like, I think the key word there that I picked up is just that conviction. Right. If you, it's one thing to See something. But that belief to really go do it takes a different level of commitment and conviction than just, you know, working on something on the side of pushing it down the road versus like, wow, I'm going to leave this high paying, great job, exciting company that's growing and doing well to then, you know, have so much uncertainty about, you know, the path and what you're building and everything there.

One more thing I will point out here is conviction. It's not something like I want to go, I'm going to build a conviction. It's like conviction is an artifact. If you spend thinking about a problem or whether it's researching, whether this building, prototyping, whatever you do, like you spend enough energy that you build conviction at the end of it. But conviction is purely an artifact. You don't go out and say I want to build a conviction. No, I want to explore this problem. And as you explore, at some point you're like, wow, this is amazing. So I remember still Rossmo days even before I left Google to start osmo. I remember there were weekends and nights actually like I used to go at some like 11:00pm to a, there was a tax shop, I think the name of that place was Tax off in San Jose. Okay. And I will go at 11. And it was really crowded at that point. There were a lot of, bunch of people just playing around with 3D printers and I would go there. I, I don't know what drove me to go there, but just fun I guess and just excited and I'll go there and start building stuff. And I was building the first time I use a, it's not 3D printing, it was a, some sort of a cutting machine. But you can have some kind of pattern and cuts your pieces in the right pattern and you do that. So I did stuff like that. This isn't like dreaming like I'm, I'm going for a walk and thinking. No, no, just two bunch of stuff and it's as you start building and you start doing, you sort of discover new stuff and then your conviction goes much higher. It's like, oh, wow, this is something real.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And something I, I'm thinking about. So you're working at Google and Nvidia even prior to that, like what led to going into tech and like bring us even back to childhood. Like were you tinkering with ideas and like wanting to go build companies or obviously be in tech or where did that, you know, early young life mindset around tech and building come from?

Yeah, I actually, I didn't Come from sort of building sort of a childhood. But was more. I loved physics very early on, the first time I got introduced to physics as a subject. And physics is very conceptual but it's very real. It's like something that's abstract and real at the same time. And so I always loved physics and I remember doing physics problems just for the fun of it actually. And that of course helped me a lot in getting into the right college as an undergrad. But it wasn't like hands on building. I didn't really have that access of tinkering. Maybe I could have done it if I had access. I didn't have it to be honest.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in a. I grew up in India. It was a small village. So it didn't have most things. It didn't really have much other than you could have get. You can get a book that's pretty much you can get there as in terms of like doing stuff. But I remember I had so many memories of just fleshing things out on a notebook just for the fun of it.

Yeah.

And I still, I still couldn't figure out this point why I was doing it. That's why I use the word fun because I think that's a very universal emotion. Lot of associate. And it was also true when we're building osmo even more so a napkin. Because napkin is like I have to. I'm going to do it again.

Yeah.

After knowing how hard it is, I'm going to do it again. And the emotion that brings you out is a fun. Some sort of fun. It's not like a. It's not really like a fun that's like having right there. But it's a feel like a secondary order effect of fun. Um, and that emotion of like you do something, you see an artifact, you see some outcome of this. Like you, like in physics, for example, you try to solve a problem and you did it and you have the like, oh wow, I did this. That's. That's an accomplishment of some sort and that's kind of fun. And I think that was my childhood. A lot of my childhood has been trying to figure things out in one way or another. And it's not something like I'm. I don't think I'm very intentional. Like, oh, I'm going to figure this out, I'm going to do this. Like no, no, this is like too much planning. Even with Napk, I don't think we had. We knew that we are going in a direction that it's Very exciting. But we don't really see this and it didn't really matter because that's not how I think. But in that moment there's this like, like a tiny little problem and you solve it and it's kind of fun. And then you keep doing it again. Again, again. Yeah, that has been my childhood. Yeah. And Google was a great playground for that, to be honest. It's like Google gave you an early days a lot of resources to do that. They had 20% project I was doing. I think I was making a really good use 20% project idea. So I was quite involved in a bunch of these 20% things. And again, like what drove me, maybe it's desire to figure things out and which is fun or maybe lack of like a better alternative. Yeah, that's the best thing I can do.

Totally. And something I want to, I'm curious about is you grew up in India, you said small village. What initially brought you to the US Was it college or where did you land when you came here to the.

U.S. yeah, I actually came to a college and I think that's a very standard path than something that I figured out. A lot of at least the college I come from, a lot of our seniors actually taken this path going to these colleges. There's this sort of aura around going to this really good college and trying to learn more and, and sort of. And for me it has been you read a book and you look at the author of the book and the fact you can meet an author of the book, a textbook. Oh my God, that's awesome. And it's actually happened with Napkin as well. We actually one of an author who had written books on the topic is Dan Rome. He wrote a book on visual communication.

Okay.

And we bought books for everyone in the team. Read the books. And then I sent him a message on LinkedIn. It's like, we love your books. I wonder if I can talk to you and just to like just chat on what you're doing. And funny enough, he responded to me within an hour and now we're talking to an author about this. So I, I had this sort of fascination of just a curiosity and that was I think a strong driving factor even to come forward studies and, and be next to those experts.

Yeah, absolutely. And something just to kind of tie in the whole story. I know we were talking about osmo and then obviously, you know, you seeing the opportunity for Napkin, which we'll dive more into as a founder, you leave Google and you know, you see this opportunity with OSMO and I believe you built the company for eight years and then you guys got acquired, is that right?

Right, that's right.

What led to, you know that exit decision and obviously talk me through, you know that process for you team product, what you learned from that going through acquisition and then obviously coming out of that and the other side and the mindset towards like your next project. Right. Because after that level of acquisition that you could go in many directions. And I know we talked on it briefly about in the discovering the idea for Napkin but yeah, like take us back to the moment of you're building the company. I know on, on LinkedIn you said you know Osmo's grew into 100 million ARR business. Talk to me about some of the growth and the experience learned and then obviously what led to obviously pursuing acquisition and of course lessons learned there.

Yeah, I think when we started osmo we knew what product to build but we couldn't really get our head around the broader context. Like this product has to live in somebody's life, somebody has to pay and how do you reach to these people how to distribute, how to build this whole ecosystem where this become a machine and that keeps sort of running itself. We didn't know that in the beginning. And so every time we a question ask like what is the growth Looks like to me is like we start understanding the system that OSMO is a physical product. And physical product have certain artifacts. Yeah, it's a physical plus digital products. But amortization was largely physical. It has certain mechanic of growth and spreading and how consumers perceive the values. Let's want to pay for it. So every time we're growing, we're learning more about it. And so we learned a lot about distribution in the process, which we didn't know what distribution actually when I was Google I would never think about the word distribution because Google you just put it a link on google.com and you get out there knows you. So we learned a lot of retail distribution. Retail was a big part of it working with retailers. And then the second thing you learn a lot very quickly is this concept of inventory which is like if you're selling a physical product, you need to make enough copies and put them in a warehouse so that when somebody asks for it, you can give to them rather than I'm going to build one for you that doesn't work. So now you have this concept like a retail is one sort of area and the second area become sort of inventory. And we learned it, we kept growing and raising money and showing the traction that we are growing very quickly. And the third area that we also learned is there was a seasonality with the category we were going after. And these three things made us convinced that we need a lot more capital to grow than we had access at this point. And so we had this sort of an opportunity where like here's this, another sort of an acquirer. There's a company that can acquire Nosmo and they can put lot. They want to put a lot more capital to grow as fast.

Yeah.

And that's sort of convinced her that this is. Again, I couldn't have figured this out or me and my co founder, we couldn't have figured it out earlier on. But once you're deep into economy you realize the systematic sort of bottlenecks and capital was big part of that. And, and that that we were very kermish. Like well if you want to grow, we need a lot more resources.

Yeah.

Given the problem we are working on. So exit is actually the right criteria. Clearly a lot of things are very dynamic in startups. So this one of the option. And that option panned out. So we decided to do that. And after, even after acquisition, that's what we did. We actually, I spent about two years before we left to start Napkin. We invested more, we grew the product sort of line. Yeah. And a lot more stuff happened. So that was a great sort of experience. There are challenges of course, like always challenges. But, but the one, the one thing I learned in the process, and I think this is one I have a huge appreciation now is every problem has certain artifacts, certain attributes. Unless you go deep into it.

Yeah.

You don't really, you don't really know. I have another example which is like we. I worked for the last couple of years to build a house from scratch.

Wow. And oh my gosh, how was that experience?

I didn't know that actually. It was like whole like I can, I can talk for hours on that one. But like even like you didn't know that you, you have very little idea. You think you kind of know that and you start like get seeing the process and it's like you know more about this. And so a lot of the decisions we made in the startup when we were building osmo, there were a lot of them had a lot of context. Like decisions had a lot of context. They were very specific to the space we are in. And at some point I realized like I can actually innovate a lot more. I can have a lot more fun. And that's when the idea of Napkin actually we got excited about an Idea like we can actually pure digital. So the product might be a path for us.

Yeah.

Because now we can go much, much faster. We want to work like make amazing new things happen. And that sort of drove us to leave OSMO behind.

I love that. And I want to change gears a little bit and talk about obviously something important for a lot of founders, which is raising capital. I know that I saw that you guys came out of Stealth, you raised 10 million and you've obviously have experience raising capital in the previous company. And that's something I like to talk about a lot on this show when I sit down with founders that have raised is, you know, the process for you and what you've learned, the do's and don'ts. Because, you know, I think there's a world where there's a lot of glorifying, just raising capital. And the reality is, you know, in this market and how things have shifted, it's like, how do you build a growing, profitable business? And you know, we saw a lot pan out through 2021, 2022, with companies raising so much and obviously it not panning out always in a favorable outcome. But I want to talk about your mindset and the team's mindset and you know, your process of raising capital, what you've learned, the do's and don'ts for founders that you can maybe shed some light on and then of course dive more into all things Napkin.

It's a big topic. Huge topic. I think before I go into sort of my views on, on fundraising, I think one of the things that I've been so convinced now is at the end of the day, you have to build something people love. And if that doesn't happen, nothing else will really matter. And making something that people love is so hard, it's incredibly hard that you want to be careful not to get defocused. It's very easy to get lost because it's so hard. So you don't want to get very defocused. And that's one of the artifact of fundraising journey for a lot of people is you can easily get so sucked into fundraising that you forget that you're supposed to build something people love. So you want to be very careful about fundraising from that aspect that you might, if you're not careful, you might get sucked into this new challenge that you love as a founder. Founders love challenges. And it's like I raised the money, that's like I'm winner. But not really. You haven't actually, hopefully you haven't forgotten. The whole point is to make something people love. And so the one or I would say one or two things I've learned in the whole fundraising is it's a very personal decision for an investor to back you or to back the idea. And the way what I've seen seem to work very well is somebody, you have a conversation with somebody, they get so excited on what you're building, like that specific person at a firm, that they become the champion. They pull you out rather than you selling. It's very difficult to sell. But if you can get one or two people in the whole ecosystem to get very excited about the problem space or how you have solved it, or an opportunity, then it's much, much easier. If you think that everyone will get excited about this because your pitch is so strong or your product so strong, that doesn't work. That's actually a recipe for a lot of disappointments because it never happens. And so in my experience, what I've seen is I've always been lucky to find somebody in multiple rounds over the years where somebody was just excited about and they understood on why this is an interesting opportunity. So your goal is really finding that one or two or three people and you that understand the space, that's really important. So for example, somebody is not aware of the context in which your problem makes sense, then you're just going to waste a lot of time.

Yeah.

So I, I think of fundraising and finding that one or two person that understand the context in which your problem really makes sense. And if you find it's a lot easier and that's different than I'm going to just catch anyone and just push them and they will see this magic.

Yeah.

I have not seen that to be very successful.

That's great context. It's like getting, you know, you said the word lucky, but just to find the one person, the champion of your idea and your story. And you know, again, I like that you said a personal thing as well, because that's. I think it is. Absolutely. And that's great context. I appreciate you sharing that.

So we have seen the same thing with the products. Sorry, one last. We've seen the same thing with the products as well. Like when we launched Napkin early on, very early on, we found couple of creators who are so excited about it. In fact, in a language that I don't even speak.

Wow.

In Japanese language, somebody just like we had product does not work in Japanese. We do not speak Japanese. We are not talking Japanese at all on our website or anywhere in any communication whatsoever. But somebody but just excited they Excited, they start talking about it and they started asking us, literally like sending us a lot of messages that you have to make this in Japanese. And then after two weeks we had a version that actually could create graphics in Japanese, native Japanese language. I think three, four weeks actually do that. And they, they pull you out. And. And so maybe for fundraising sometime the recipe could be. If you put yourself out there, maybe somebody will pull you out is more likely. And that's why people say this is numbers game. A numbers game. Because the chance you just increase your odds.

Yeah.

Of finding somebody that this excited about it.

Absolutely. No, that's great. I was curious about the name Napkin. What led to picking the name Napkin? Is there a story there or did you guys just come up with it and stick with it or what's the story there?

Actually, we tried with a couple of different ideas from the get go. We wanted something that represents the idea of graphics made easy and we had a couple of different sort of metaphors for that. And the Napkin was actually very exciting because there's this sort of phrase of back of the napkin. Like many, many times you're just fleshing your idea quickly. You just draw something on Napkin.

Yeah.

In that instance. So Napkin has this sense of ease. You're not spending more than a two minute on a napkin. But compared to, compared to like using Aero Photoshop to draw something out there, you're going to spend a lot of time. But Napkin has the sense of like something is fast and quick, but it's very engaging. I've really seen somebody says like, I drew something on Napkin and their budget. Engaging.

Yeah.

So Napkin has this lot of these attributes around simplicity and engagement.

Yeah.

And we just loved it.

I love that. No, it's a great name. I was like, yeah, this is great. So talk to me now. Go ahead.

Yeah, as a founder, which I like, as you do any of the founders, once in a while you get lucky as well. And for Napkin, Napkin AI was available. I was really surprised. Like what nobody has thought about Napkin AI. It's not like I'm gonna go out and buy it. Like, oh, so we pay like, I don't know, 80 bucks a month or something. Like the very minimal price you pay. And as a founder, it was like a little small win is like, oh, wow, okay. Like creativity paid off somehow. Like nobody's thought about AI and Napkin and visuals and. Yeah, that's how that was the start of the company.

I love that. No, I'm a big. I love all things domains like my company. It's listener.com and me like 10 months to, you know, go back and forth get the domain. My last company, media kits, mediakit.com, we were just all things domains have always been. I'm fascinated by them and obviously just love following stories. You know, you see OpenAI acquired chat.com about a week or so ago. I just love following stories like that. So what does that. Do you follow any domain stuff yourself or like where do you not.

I. I don't follow domains but I do. I'm generally very fascinated with this idea of a brand. Yeah. And the reason I'm fashionable with the idea of brand is the way I think about this is we have so much going in our lives, all of us so we can own. We can't pay attention to everything. We can only pay attention to few things. And if you make it easier for me to pay attention to something that's good for me. Thank you for doing.

Yes.

Like, like I, I want to be thankful because you thought about stuff so that first you build something interesting, then you think thought about like how do I make it easiest, how to make it very easy for me to pay attention to. So I love brand and then the domain name is a big part of the brand.

Absolutely. I love that. So talk to me about, you know, coming out of stealth with Napkin and bring us to today in terms of the team, you know, kind of what the feedback that you've been getting so far, you know, this as you said, it's, you know, it's. You can be so in your own bubble. It takes someone to pull you out to give you ideas whether that's Japanese version of Napkin, like bring me through, you know, since launch, what you've learned, you know, team size, etc. And just bring us to where N is today.

I. I think so. It has been a completely transformative experience. And the way I describe this experience is I was. No, no, I as a founder of the founder. The founder, we were sort of driving this idea forward. Like we were the drivers of this idea. So you feel like responsibility that I'm a driver, I need to be careful on how to set direction. And now we are no longer the drivers. Our users are driving us forward. And last three months the story is our users are telling us exactly what to do. They're not been asking us what's your roadmap is no, users don't care. Users have been very vocal on this is what you should be doing. And we have done, we have made like three big launches and we have three more Coming up, six launches. If I was driving, I wouldn't have come up with those six launches. It wouldn't have made sense to me like why that's the most important things. And now it was like 100% convenience. These are the most important things. That's a fundamental shift on pre launch versus post launch. A post launch where users actually are engaged. And so the direction has fundamentally changed. Other thing that has been really, really inspiring is.

We.

We knew that graphics are. People want simpler way to get graphics but we didn't realize how, how mass this problem is, how wide this problem is. And what has happened is lot of creators on, we've seen on TikTok and YouTube and there's so much content on napkin out there right now. And because people sort of connect with the problem and then they talk about it. And the one thing I do after that is I actually every time there's a video or LinkedIn post, I go through every single comment. I just find like so inspiring because now I can see exactly what, what do we need to do? Yeah. Or what do people understand? What do users are able to understand, what they are not able to understand. And ultimately we have so much data to work with. And that has been a day and night in terms of like how you run, how you think about what do you do daily basis. So almost like every day I wake up in the morning, I see ton of comments across multiple places and we use Intercom for our communication support, customer communications and with an app you can leave a message and we get so many messages and many of them are super encouraging. And that's again is something that I'm extremely thankful because you just don't have to do that. They don't have to. It's not their job to encourage the builder of course but it helps, it really helps. Like in the morning I wake up and our French team has posted some of the messages we receive on Intercom into a slack channel and I go through them and suddenly that's the start of my day. Yeah, it's a really great start of the day when you have a positive message from a user that's like great job, keep doing it, do more of this and a lot of users will write the message on. I love. What are you guys doing? I know you're a small team working very hard, but here are the three things you should, you should think about improving. It's such a well written messages and again that has been a big change. Our team is very small. It's 11 people team. It hasn't actually changed in last year or so.

Okay.

Because that's one thing I have learned from my previous experience is you don't need large teams to build things that are magical. You need a lot of creativity and collaboration and back and forth, but you don't need a large teams to build this initial magical thing.

Yeah.

I'm so convinced on this one now. In fact, it helps you if you're a very small team. So the reason we have done three launches already in last three months and we have three more in within next two months and these are significant effort is because such a small team, we just bring so much energy, figure things out, move on and we don't waste any time. So almost like there is no management. I am the only sort of person who can call themselves as a manager some way. But it is, it's been incredible. I just can't even imagine how quickly we moved on. Many of these ask. So we're going to continue to stay small in terms of the team. We have a massive number of users, massive amount of feedback and we are iterating very quickly. I don't think it's going to help us. We have large teams and that's a very different way of building. And that, that, that to me is, is something that's, it's a new way of thinking about startups. I know on your podcast you talk about like, how is it changing to build companies? To me, the, this is a formation change you can make. Small teams can do great things. In fact, it's easier to do great things. A small team.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I love that. And I know there's, you know, I've heard Sam Alton, Sam Altman say how he thinks there'll be a one person billion dollar company one day in terms of just the efficiency that AI brings to the table and how you can really, you know, leverage the tools that are out there today. So I love to hear that you guys are, you know, maintaining this. You're scaling creativity and in collaboration, but the team remains, you know, mighty. You said small but just efficient in a sense.

And, and by the way, I wouldn't take any credit for this because I want to scale that team. We have raised money so it's like very natural for me. It's like, yeah, we should scale. So I go back to my team and ask my team, okay, so what should we add more people to? And consistently the answer of the team is like, no, we are doing great, why do you want to disturb us? Yeah, and this is like so Crazy is, I could imagine somebody says, I'm doing this thing, if I get five more people, I will go five times faster. Can you do that? Not a single time.

Wow.

We see this response from our engineering team and most of us engineers, and we don't. And, and that's awesome because then the person who is not asking is also responsible for not letting me hire, which I want to hire more people. I want to grow this thing in terms of going faster. But. And, and that's like, it's kind of interesting because. Very empowering in the sense, like, I'm not making the decision. So it's very empowering. But at the same time, it's also easy to. For me to manage because I'm not asking teams like, yeah, do like, people are just like, picking stuff, coming with an idea, doing it, moving on.

Yeah.

And everyone who has worked in big company like osmo, we, at some point, we grew to a large number of people understand the concept of efficiency. Very, very bad.

I love that. I want to ask, in terms of just obviously you're building a company in AI, I want to ask on the personal side, over the last year, two years, how has AI made your personal life more efficient and how have you incorporated it into your own workflows, personal routines, etc.

Yeah, I think when I started engaging with lot of tools, I thought, I'm going to get more efficient. That's kind of normal sort of narrative. It's like, oh, I don't have to spend time writing this email because I would ask AI to write for me. And as you asked, as you were asking, I was thinking live. And actually it's not the efficiency. I think I'm spending more time thinking through problems because I can easily get a different point of view. It's much, much easier to get different point of views. Even with Napkin, I had a very concrete use case. My daughter was. She was writing sort of a research paper for a school project.

Okay.

And she wrote in and she. At some point, she's like, I want to add a visual to a couple of visuals. And I saw that actually the next one is. So my first reaction was, oh, let me give it to Napkin and see what it brings out. And it wasn't like, I want one thing, but I want to see what. Like, how is Napkin thinking about this problem and what does it come up in? And I spent a lot of time, like, with my daughter in this case. She is like, wow. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't think about that. And then so we went through this and we eventually picked like a two images. But it wasn't like exactly like it takes you five seconds to get the two images. No, but the journey was very, very different. And that's what I've been sort of my experience with AI now is because I have a certain amount of time, I am working for X number of hours. So it's not like suddenly I'm going to work now X, Y2 number of hours. Yeah, no, I'm going to work X. But I do more because I'm iterating, I'm fleshing things out much, much faster and AI tools are perfect for this.

I love that. That's great to hear too. And I think too I love the, the use case with your daughter of like having, you know, that own use case and personal experience with the product and the thought that's awesome.

I spend so much time, only thing I do is I'm using the product myself or testing it or I'm reading feedback from users or talking to them. That's my job. And so if somebody's thinking of starting a company, my job isn't that fancy. Actually it's pretty simple. Talk to users, look at the comments, request and then use the product. And everything else is much faster than like setting a direction is trivial because I already know what's broken. So that's like a five minute conversation. It's like, yeah, we should be doing it but. But that's so, so different. And that's what I. We have been trying to focus in small team is like that's what the most essential thing to do.

Yeah, yeah. I want to. A couple more questions here. When you think about just moving into 2025 and the year ahead, what excites you the most when it comes to the opportunity, the space, the team, just in terms of the roadmap or things that you can discuss. Would love to hear kind of the excitement from you and the team and kind of what you love. Looking forward.

For us, when we started the company we had this notion of graphics like picture is worth a thousand words or graphics worth thousand words. But as we spend more time in the problem in this space, we realize not all graphics are created equal. The graphics that are, that reflects the label of thinking and the design sort of finished the design thinking. So the, the visual thinking and the design has gone into making something really capture the idea in amazingly well. That's a great graphic compared to an average graphic. So now as a company we really understand now that we are not in the business of generating graphic for the users. We are in the business of generating the best possible graphic for users. As if you had an army of designers, army of visual thinkers. How will your presentation, how will your blog post, how will your LinkedIn post will look like? And I can see that happening now. I can see enough automation, enough sort of ingredients in AI technologies where we should be able to replicate having a large team helping you create something that is no way you would have done on your own. And that's our focus, we call it internally visual quality. Like our focus is quality of visual, quality of visual generation. So 90% of energy is just that. So Napkin is very, very simple to lead this, make it easier for people to create more compelling graphics.

Yeah.

How hard that could be?

Yeah, it's hard, absolutely. I'm sure that's super exciting. A question I want to ask just throughout your journey of building startups, what's been the most important thing you've learned about yourself through the hardships and the ups and downs that come with startups, what are your top lessons that you've learned that you can look back on and really point to that other young founders, you know, maybe they're going to learn themselves, but specifically towards just like the personal growth aspect for you?

I think this is really obvious to me. For me, and this has been we all think we are flexible minded or we are very adaptable, we learn very quickly or we are open minded. But I realized it's extremely hard to be that it's a human nature or the way we build. We tend to get stuck to ideas longer than we should. And one of the things that I have been practicing is more likely than not you're wrong. So if you think you are wrong 30% time, I'm telling you you're wrong 90% of the time and in my case I'm wrong 99% of time. And it's actually very true. So the one skill that I've developed now is I'm constantly asking myself this question, am I wrong? And how do I know that I'm wrong? I can't talk to somebody about this because I know for sure I'm wrong most of the time. So a lot of the again, if you go tactics like even building an apkin, if you go like nitty gritty of actual design of the product, actual messaging of the product, those things have evolved over time. They were not the way they are today, what's in the market. And the only thing I've done as a skill is I've learned how to learn essentially Or I'm trying to learn how to learn.

Yeah.

Because I'm not. I've given up on the idea that I know what's the right thing that just beyond. Beyond me and, and the way to do that. You have people around you which are really, really smart and they are, they are not scared of you. They, in fact they don't. They are indifferent on how you think. Yeah. They just have their opinion. And I, every single person in the company, at least that's a culture I'm, I'm striving to is independent thinker and it's never been the case. I will send out a message to some. Somebody who I have a meeting and another side is like, yeah, that makes sense. It's very, very rare. I never see that. Okay. Because I. Everyone around me knows and we have the culture now that we are going to help each other to by questioning.

Yeah, I love that. That's such a good takeaway to end on as well. And I appreciate you sharing that.

No, thank you.

But before we wrap up here, I want to give you the opportunity for, you know, for founders that are out there, for builders, for people that are, you know, interested in what you are building at Napkin. Where's the best place that they can obviously learn more about the product, reach you, ask you questions or the team and just learn more about all things Napkin AI.

Our website is definitely the best place to start Napkin AI. Go to Napkin AI, sign up, use the product. And once you use the product and if you have ideas, feedback, you can reach out to us at teamapkin AI. You can ping me on any of the social channel or the company. We are always responding fairly, fairly regularly and we are always looking to hire people to help us, people to have people helping us out. So I'm very, very open for any feedback how we can do this better. The space is very new. The visual, the generation of graphic that helps people communicate much, much better is not a space that has been fleshed out. So I'm very aware that we're still scratching just the surface of it. So I would love to hear, I would love to hear from anyone who has ideas for us.

I love that. Well, I'll be sure to link Napkin down below and promote. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Really inspired by you, your story and excited about what you're building, man. And I look forward to hearing a lot of the feedback from the listeners. And if you are listening and you made it this far, please do go check out Napkin AI down below. I'll make sure to link, promote social channels, LinkedIn, so you can reach him as well as the website itself. And promote again. Thank you so much for taking the time today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for having me. It was fun.

Of course.