Broadening Product Offerings - Nick Patrick - Radar - Episode #61

We have the most diverse team we've ever had and best culture, highest morale, highest cohesion we've ever had.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Today's guest is a pioneer in the world of location technology and infrastructure. Before becoming a founder, he honed his skills as a product leader at top companies including Foursquare and handy. In 2016, he co founded Radar, which has since become the leading all in one location platform, powering location based experiences for some of the biggest brands in the world. His company's technology reaches hundreds of millions of devices and processes billions of location events every day. He's raised over 85 million from top tier investors to bring this vision to life. Please welcome co founder and CEO at Radar, Nick Patrick.

Thanks for having me, David.

Very excited. We're going to jump right into it. First question, what is the one thing you've done, big or small at Radar, that's had the biggest impact and you'd absolutely do again if you're CEO of another company in the future?

Yeah, I think for Radar it was going multi products. I think conventional startup wisdom is to focus, focus, focus, do one thing really well. And I think in the earliest days that's definitely true. But we've grown the fastest and been the most differentiated and had the most success when we've increased product surface area and gone multi product. So we started as a geofencing platform supporting all sorts of different geofencing use cases for a variety of consumer apps. But even pretty early on, a lot of our customers were asking us, hey, can you power our store locator? Can you power this map based experience? Can you help us with these other use cases? And the more we've increased product surface area over the last couple years, the more successful we've been. So would be thoughtful about when to do it, but would definitely, definitely do it again.

How many years? So you started 2016, when was the second product released?

Yeah, even in the early days. So we started as a geofencing platform. There were lots of different use cases we served, we worked with restaurant apps to geofence restaurants.

To do what? Can you explain kind of what is that?

Yeah, maybe you want to send a push notification with a coupon when somebody is near one of your locations. Maybe you want to understand when somebody has arrived at a retail location to pick up their order, Things like that. So We've always supported multiple use cases. I remember one of our earliest enterprise customers said, well, hey, we can use radar to geofence every McDonald's location, but can't you guys just tell us where the McDonald's locations are? Can't you just give us that data? So we said, well, cool, we'll let you create custom geofences, but we'll also have out of the box point of interest data and help you do place visit detection. So even in the early days, we had different APIs, different building blocks, different use cases, and at least for radar, as a geolocation company, we've become more and more differentiated and grown faster and faster the more we've increased our product surface area.

One of the things that I have seen in my own experience and that I've seen other people talk about, and this is why people say don't go multi, multi product too early, is it can be distracting and it can take away from the core that you're, you know, how do you manage that? How do you have different teams that move the different products forward? How do you decide how to make the investments? Because that, that has literally, in my own case, I think that was one of the worst periods of time, was when I went multi product. And all of a sudden I felt like I wasn't pushing one boulder up the hill, I was pushing three boulders up the hill.

Yeah.

At the same time, you know, I.

Would say a couple things. One, you want to be thoughtful about how you're sequencing things and not spreading the team too thin, but you also want to be super customer driven. So if you have customers asking you for something, it often makes sense to build it. As long as you're not getting too far outside of your swim lane and you're sort of working towards your vision. We had this thesis particularly when we went really, truly from a one product company with a geofencing platform to a three product company with a maps platform and a geo compliance solution that counterintuitively, it would actually make things feel less complicated. And that turned out to be the case, I would say, primarily because it just made us more differentiated. Right. And yes, you have to build and maintain more stuff, but ultimately, if your sales processes are easier, your customers are getting more value out of your solution, you can offer bundled pricing that's really compelling to folks, like everything just ends up feeling easier. So a lot of our maps platform competitors, they just do maps. They don't do geofencing. A lot of our geofencing competitors, they just do geofencing. One narrow use case. So we now have not just one door to knock on for our top thousand prospects. We have three or four. They may be working with a legacy vendor for one use case they can consolidate onto Radar. So it's definitely harder. You have to have a team that can execute against that really well and is kind of comfortable with that level of complexity. But overall I would say for us at least it's made things feel a lot easier, really.

Tactical question, in terms, you mentioned pricing, did it take a while to get pricing correct when you went from one to multiple products? Or are you running that same pricing packaging that you were doing back then? Did you do that internally? Did you hire someone? Cause pricing feel when you go multi product, it really. Yeah, a lot change. You can do bundles where you couldn't do bundles before.

Yeah.

How do you think about that?

Yeah, I think, you know, at least on the geofencing platform side we've always priced in terms of we call monthly tracked users. So it's effectively how many monthly active users are opted into a location where radar is powering some use case for them. And it's, you know, tied to value. It's relatively easy to forecast. You understand how many monthly actives you have and something like a API call based pricing model, it's like, you know, I want to send a push notification whenever somebody's near a Starbucks. Well, how many times do you have to track their location, do that? It's kind of hard to understand and in a way you want to sort of like defer that to radar. On the maps platform side where we're competing with, you know, Google Maps APIs and companies like Mapbox, they've always priced like per API call. It makes more sense. It's easy to forecast how many page loads do you have where you show a map. But I think you can sort of bundle those together into a single enterprise offering for some of our largest customers and they're able to say, hey, I have one vendor that I'm only doing map stuff with. Let me unlock a lot more. Maybe I have two or three different kind of maps and location API vendors. Let me consolidate. One thing that's interesting is we entered the online sports betting space recently with our geolocation compliance and anti fraud offering. And historically it's been priced per API call or per location check. And we brought our MTU based our user base pricing there. And I think at first people were scratching their heads and they were like this doesn't make any sense, this is totally different. But actually the whole Vertical is shifting there and there's a big legacy incumbent that's kind of, from what we've heard, updating their pricing model to, to match ours. That is actually had a lot of success. Yeah, I think like the, you know, DraftKings, FanDuels, Bet365 etc. You know, you need to understand which country and state your state they're in because it's only legal in certain countries and states. You need to make sure they're not spoofing their location. You need to be compliant. Fundamentally, it's a geofencing use case. And yeah, there's all sorts of interesting geofencing schools across all sorts of different verticals.

Very cool. So you come from a product background. I mean that is where you grew up and that's, you know, what you're passionate about when you think about this product. Can you give me like from day one to today, how involved are you in the product kind of decisions? The. How deep do you go? When I talk to product minded CEOs a lot, some of them are like, I still check every screen that goes out. I still check, you know, like how, how talk about that.

Yeah, quite involved. It's honestly what I find the most fun. And I spent a lot of time thinking about product and product marketing. You know, I would say we've gone through different phases over time. You know, we've had a product team with product leaders and product managers. We actually decided to get rid of the product function a couple years ago, which, you know, I'm a product guy. So it was sort of a, sort of a big maybe, maybe counterintuitive decision. Yeah. And we had some phenomenal PMs. But I think what we found is, you know, we had the most success when we had engineering managers, product designers that understood product strategy. They were close to the customer, they could think like a pm. When we got our, you know, customer success, solutions, engineering, sales teams, like directly interfacing with our engineering teams in sort of a healthy way. You have to put guardrails up and you have to prioritize and you can't say yes to everything. But when you sort of like break down those silos, you get everybody thinking like a pm. You get everybody closer to the customer and you have sort of the vision oversight from, you know, me, my cto, my co founder Kobe, great things happen. So we've, I think there's literally no PMs. There's no, no PMs. Yeah. And you know, I, I think the product function is sort of dying. It's it's, it's maybe changing. I think there's a place for it at, you know, larger companies. But I would say for us, you know, not having dedicated PMs and instead saying, hey, engineering managers like, you got to be able to think like a pm. You should be directly talking to customers, you should go visit customers on site, which, which we can talk a little bit about. We, we've had the most success and it's not for everyone.

Did you have to replace the engineering managers to like I'm saying, because that's a, it's a very specific Persona. Like engineering managers I've worked with, I'm, I'm not sure if how many of them would want to go visit the customer.

We, we didn't, we actually had some very product oriented engineers and engineering managers internally who I, who I think were sort of hungry to, to do more. And I think, listen, it's not for everyone. For some engineers, it's kind of a turnoff. I think you'd rather just sort of receive a spec, pick your next ticket out of the JIRA queue or the linear queue or whatever, write some code, write some unit tests and call it a day. And the thought of visiting a customer, jumping on a customer call or interfacing with the sales team is maybe not fun, but I think for us it's been really successful and we've built an engineering team that is customer focused. They want to ship fast, they're entrepreneurial, there's a lot of former and future founders. I personally am very hands on. I think it's in a way that's healthy. I was watching Brian Chesky, the Airbnb CEO, on a panel at Ramp HQ a couple months back and he was like, I think some CEOs are reluctant to be hands on and don't micromanage. But I think what he found is that when he was very hands off, folks would go off and do things and they would have autonomy, but then they'd come back three, six months later with something that was maybe going down the wrong path and you'd have to blow stuff up at that point. And so counterintuitively, actually like being hands on, short circuiting some decisions, you get everybody aligned faster. Ultimately, even though you know the CEO is involved in your day to day or week to week work, it ultimately leads to better outcomes and happier teams. That's at least our experience. I've worked for kind of less technical, non product oriented CEOs. Maybe it doesn't work for every CEO, but it's been very successful for us.

And when did you make this change?

We made the change, I want to say like the end of 2023. And we had a great year in 2024. It continues to work really well. I'd say if you really sort of decompose the PM role, there are a lot of aspects to it. There's the product strategy, what do our customers need, what should we build, there's communicating roadmap, there's kind of the project management of the, you know, linear tickets or JIRA tickets or whatever. But if you really sort of break that apart and say, hey, you know, the engineering managers do this, the CEO is going to play this role. We're all going to sort of collectively do this. You can, I think, survive and thrive without it.

And so you say the engineering managers or the engineers go to the customer, like go on site to the customers?

Oftentimes, yeah. You know, I will say, you know, there's something very unique about geolocation. I think for whether you're developing or testing or using a lot of SaaS, products or developer tools, you kind of never have to leave your desk. And I think for geolocation, if you really want to understand how location tracking and geofencing works, you got to get up and get out in the real world. One of our company values is walk a mile, as in walk a mile in the customer's shoes. I'll give you kind of two examples. We were working on closing a large fast food brand or group of brands. They wanted to use our geofencing platform to understand with really high accuracy. The minute a customer pulled into the parking lot, pulled up to the drive thru menu board, they didn't want any false positives in terms of are you in the next lane over or are you in the parking space? And our engineering manager for geofencing and mobile and our head of sales engineering literally rented a car and drove around Brooklyn and drove around to a bunch of different locations and refined the geofences. They shipped adjustments to the SDK and we won the deal. And now it's one of our largest customers. We also just closed a really exciting deal with one of the largest airlines in the US and we flew around and met their product teams and their operations teams at these hub airports. They were trying to understand a passenger's live location in the airport. Have you made it through security or not? Are you coming into international arrivals or are you sitting at the gate below? So understanding altitude or floor level, are you waiting in the lounge and the boarding door is about to close and in order to converge on the right solution, our engineering manager, some folks on our sales team, solutions engineering team, went out to these hub airports, set up the geofences, trained the models, calibrated the data, and it's our largest initial geofencing land in company history. So you don't necessarily want to have to send your engineering managers out to every single enterprise customer to win the deal. It's maybe not the most repeatable thing in the world, but I do think it's something that we do uniquely well and we talk a lot about it during the hiring process because it's like you either like this or you don't, and if you don't like it, it's cool. Go, go work somewhere else if that's exciting to you. I don't think there's any better place to work.

And there's another, there's another part of this that I think you're in the office, I think four days or four days. And is that kind of part of the same? Is it because of that, because of the.

I think so.

The fact that you're a geo.

Yeah, I think as a geolocation company, you know, our company mission is to connect the digital and physical worlds. A lot of the experiences that we power at the intersection of the digital and physical, you know, how are you using apps out in the real world, how are you using websites to find nearby places, things like that. So I think being in person, at least to some extent as a geolocation company is really important. Our annual customer conference is called Radar irl, as in, in real life. It's not streamed, it's, it's, it's all in person. And we, you know, we bring our, our most strategic customers and partners there in person. But yeah, I mean, like, I was the, I was the guy who was trying to reopen the office in like fall of 2020. I was like, you know, here's the guidelines from de Blasio. Like, spread the desks out, put the plastic sheeting up, you know, put the hand sanitizer out. And it took us another year and a half, two years to really get back. But we're now mostly back in person. We do most of our hiring in New York. I think your culture is a lot more cohesive when you're in person. I think you can collaborate and iterate a lot faster. I think you can test. We have Bluetooth beacons around the office and geofences set up. We talk a lot about dog fooding our own solution. So I think Being in person is really important. Listen, I think it's great to be remote as well, and maybe it works for certain companies or companies are a little bit further along or whatever, but at least for us, it's been really great to be.

And is it so. So basically you started in 2016. You were in person till 2020. Then obviously there's some break when Covid, and then you came back to in person, call it 22 or something like that. In that period from 20 to 22, did you hire people?

Not in New York, we did, yeah. We actually got to a point where I think like two thirds of the team was not in New York. And when it came time to go back to in person, it was tough. And we ended up kind of undoing a lot of that over the subsequent years. To be clear, we do have a lot of folks that are remote. They're doing a great job. I think now that we have a real sort of core team Nucleus here in New York, it kind of becomes easier to, you know, selectively hire folks maybe for more unique roles or strategic roles, or there's somebody just truly exceptional. But. But they have to be remote. We can, we can make it work now. But there were definitely a lot of learnings during the COVID period that we had had to sort of unwind.

I mean, I think it's a competitive. I honestly think it's a competitive advantage for companies today that are in person, that are around each other. I also think, I say all the time, I think if you're a young person coming out of school and you go and work remote for four years, five, like the first four or five years of your career, it's such. You're missing out on totally. Not just the work stuff, but the social stuff.

Yeah.

And getting to meet people that are going to be maybe your co founder later or maybe your, you know, you know, your best friend, your roommate.

No, totally. I mean, when we went remote during COVID it was like, it was kind of fun initially. And then it was like work is like a chat room and if I want to just, you know, riff with somebody on something, I got to set up a meeting and everything just slows down. You know, it's harder to meet people outside of your immediate team and immediate work streams and, you know, going back to this idea of like, make everybody think like a PM break down silos. You know, we have the most success when our engineering managers are collaborating directly with people on our customer success team or our product designers are, you know, whiteboarding with people on our solutions engineering team.

It's just.

It's. It's hard to facilitate that when you're. You're remote.

Do you. Do you get everyone together? Like, the whole company. Do you get everyone together on some cadence or.

We do. We do quarterly kickoffs. We actually just had one last week.

We just moved into the whole company.

Whole company. And we fly in folks that are remote. It's about 15, 20% of the company at this point, and it's great. And we definitely, you know, work to ensure that folks who are remote stay plugged in.

Right.

To folks who are in person. But, yeah, I think for all the reasons you describe, you know, we just had three new SDRs start last week. It's so beneficial to be in person.

Oh, my friend.

Meeting people around the. Oh, 100%. I can't imagine starting my career, you know, remote. Like, basically logging into a chat room every day.

Right. Which actually I see. I see with a lot of the companies I work with now when they're doing interviews, the people that it was hard to hire, they were having a hard time hiring in person. Now there's a whole crop of people saying, I graduated college in 2020. I've been working remote for five years. I want. Actually, of course, like, I want to come now into an office, because what have I been doing, you know?

Oh, totally myself. It's a big selling point during the recruiting process, and a lot of folks are, like, currently working remotely. I want to be in person. I want to have a connection to my team. Not everybody feels that way. I think we tend to filter those folks out during the application process or during the screen. But, yeah, it's a big selling point for folks who want to work at.

Yeah. So you mentioned before your co founder, Kobe. So how are you? How do your roles. Like, where do you divide your jobs?

Yeah, Kobe is the yin to my yang. He compliments me really well. You know, between Handy, the last startup I worked at, and Radar, I actually prototyped a few social app ideas as a solo founder. Terrible idea to be a solo founder, in my opinion. Also terrible idea to try to build a social app, but we can maybe save that for another podcast. And I was like, all right, I want to try to start a real company. I sort of reflected on personal experiences of things we had to build or problems I had to solve in previous roles. Kind of had this idea for a stripe for geolocation based on experiences at Foursquare and Handy, and I said, I'm kind of a product guy, CS undergrad. I don't know how to sell, I don't know how to distribute B2B SaaS. So who are the best people I've worked with previously that are just truly great at that and would be interested in starting a company and would compliment me really well. And Cobie was basically at the top of the list. So when I was at Foursquare on the product team, Kobe was on the sales team. He was on the BD team for a little bit. When I was at Handy, he went to be the first seller at mParticle, the CDP company here in New York. Had a lot of success selling enterprise B2B SaaS. He was also, I think, making pretty good sales commission over there. So it was kind of hard to convince him to come over. But ultimately we decided to team up. And so in the early days, Kobe was effectively the ae. I was sort of like the engineer and Sean and we worked really well together. And I would say, like, I've learned a lot about enterprise sales from Kobe. I can, you know, function pretty well in front of customers. I think Kobe also is, is a great product thinker so we can both flex kind of into each other's domain. But he's been, you know, a great co founder.

How long did it take when you, once you start talking to Kobe? What was the dating period? I would, you know, like, how long did it take before you decide, okay, we're actually going to do this?

Yeah. We had been talking about it for a couple months. We met up for coffee. I think we met up for, for beers at Blue Haven, if you know that bar down in soho. I think it was where I showed him the first prototype and like the prototype like stopped working. Like it stopped tracking my location on the way. I was like, oh my God, he's gonna think I'm a fraud. But we ended up deciding to apply to, you know, startup incubators together and if we got it or if it got serious, he was, he was ready to go. And we applied to Y Combinator, got an interview, didn't get it, ended up going with Expo Labs. I don't know if you know the Startup Studio Expo, it's from the Uber founder Garrett Camp back in the day, Naveen, one of the Foursquare founders, just, just a great fit for us. So once it became very clear we were kind of getting serious interest and could, could raise pre seed money, get into one of these incubators. He, he, he went all in. So I'd kind of been prototyping. We've been talking about it kicking ideas around for a couple months. We incorporated the company in, in May 2016 and really spent the next six months kind of drumming up initial interest, getting initial customers, figuring out how we wanted to price and then really kind of properly launching in early 2017.

And how did you get those first set of customers? Like did Kobe do that basically? And how did he.

Yeah, you know, I would be a terrible scr like cold calling, sending hundreds of emails, getting rejected. Like Kobe on the other hand is exceptional at it. So I think between, you know that outbounding folks and he had a lot of folks in his, in his network from his history as a seller. You know, folks would take coffee meetings, they would take a demo, they would say, yeah, I'm down to beta test this. We had a few folks, you know, playing around with the tool.

Did you do a real design partner kind of program or not? You know, some people say like this, not so much.

I mean I would say like we definitely talked to folks and it was, you know, we, we'd give them the pitch, we do a demo, they'd say, well, I really need X, Y, Z. I'd pull an all nighter, build it, you know, sleep until noon and then we'd come back and show it to them the next day. So we didn't have like formal design partners in that sense, but it was, we were definitely very customer driven.

So that person as an. I want to be specific on this because I think for early, early stage founders, which is a lot of people listen to this. It's those first set of customers that are. It's hard. I mean you have nothing really to sell them. And like when you were doing that, did they pay you at that point or you were just like those customers that said I want to see this. You would just say, cool, I'm going to go build this just to get them over that hump to pay us. Or you know, because some people, there's a whole. I've had some people say like you have to get them to pay you day one with no product. And then other people say, you know what I mean? The way I did it was gave it to for free until it was at a place where I thought I could char for it, you know.

Yeah, we got folks paying us pretty early on. I think, you know, we had like a $100 a month customer, $200 a month customer. We definitely had folks kind of kind of kicking the tires and giving us feedback. One of me and Kobe's kind of earliest not founder fights, but disagreements Was, you know, Kobe was very used to saying, is this a qualified prospect or not? And we talked to somebody and they were kind of interested, but they weren't really serious. And Kobe was like, we got to just DQ this opportunity and find somebody else who really wants to test it. And I was like, well, we could give it to them for free. And you know, and he was just like, we gotta focus on folks who actually need this, want this right now. And being rigorous about, you know, qualifying opportunities and focusing on the right, you know, subset of your target account list is really important. But to your point, like, it was, it was tough in the early days. We have a really exciting opportunity right now with, let's just say like a large pizza brand. And it was actually one of me and Kobe's first on sites way back in 2016. We had an amazing two hour meeting and talked about our platform and all the different use cases we could support. They were very impressed. And at the end of the meeting they were like this guys, this is really impressive. How big is your team? And I messed up. I said, you're looking at it. And it was just us two at that time. And they were kind of like, well, why don't you come back when you actually have a real team and you can support an enterprise customer? And we've been working on that account for years and we got them to talk to us again. But it's, yeah, it's tough in the.

Early days when you go, when I go back and look at the decks from like the very. You're almost in the emails, you can't imagine that that's what you were.

Yeah, you know, pitching like it's, it's, it's kind of embarrassing to look back at some of the early decks, but, but in a way too. Like I, I think, you know, history rhymes or, or history repeats itself. Like I think we, we find ourselves thinking about, well, let's update our homepage before our, our customer. What should we put on there? And you look back at early decks, whether it's fundraising decks or pitch decks or whatever, and you're kind of like, we used to kind of talk about stuff like that and let's go back to the future and, and pull some of that stuff in.

So, yeah, yeah, actually talking about the ideal customer, like de queuing customers. Has the ideal customer profile evolved over time? Gotten more narrow, gotten wider? You know, how, how has that evolved?

Yeah, I would say we've gotten smarter about it over time. I think when we started the company, we thought we were Going to be a stripe for geolocation and we were going to be having individual developers hacking around with this, taking into their company, sort of grow the account over time. I think what we found is that motion just didn't work for us. We had a lot more success with. People weren't calling it like PLG or bottoms up at the time but we had a lot more success with sort of a top down enterprise motion at least when it came to geofencing. And I think geofencing tends to be a higher maturity use case at least for our enterprise target customers. You know, the first thing a retail, you know, or restaurant brand builds for example, is a store locator, not really sophisticated geofencing and arrival detection for order ahead. So it's a higher maturity thing. There are privacy considerations and security considerations and they're trying to figure out how to prompt for location permissions in the, in the right way. So we've had the most success over the years with an enterprise top down sale typically to you know, product leaders or technical Personas. So think like VP of Product, Chief Digital Officer, cto. Increasingly I would say we're you know, building product for and adding value for, you know, marketing Personas, fraud teams, operations teams. So we are starting to think about branching out. But generally I would say you know, technical products, Personas within, you know, enterprise targets in, in a handful of key verticals. That's, that's where we've had the most success.

So to get here you've, you've raised you know, $85 million. You have some amazing investors in terms of their brands. Can you talk about kind of what that. Let's go to the very first round you raised. How much did you raise? Flag at the first.

Yeah, well we, we raised some pre seed money from xfar. Our first kind of proper institutional round was, was a seed round from Excel. They've been great over the years. Interestingly we were working with a different partner and then he left Excel and we kind of got to you know, pick our new partner effectively or at least sort of request one. And we said we want to work with this guy Voss. And Voss was, I think he led the series A in segments, the CDP Frame IO. He's been in some great companies and Voss has been a great partner of ours over the years.

How did you get that Excel round like cause Excel obviously top, I don't know, five investors in the world or whatever. How did you, how did you. Was that easy?

I got connected to a partner over there through an old friend from Microsoft. So a lot of it was kind of working through my network. I think a mistake that I made during the seed round was kind of like dragging it out a little bit. And I think you want to sort of compress it, create a sense of urgency. You don't want to over compress it and overdo it. I think we probably spoke to 15, 20 firms before we spoke to Excel. Had a pretty good meeting with them. Like, quite frankly, I thought it was like, just okay. And then the next day was like, we've already called three of your customers. We're super, you know, can you send over this data? And I think we had a term sheet within a couple days.

Wow.

So that was sort of another Learning is like, create a sense of urgency, create scarcity during a fundraising process. And also like, you're going to get a lot of signal within the first couple days. Like, are they leaning in or not? If you're having to chase somebody or they're ghosting you so you can't get them back, back on the hook. Sometimes folks need to do their homework or they're on vacation or whatever.

But when the person says, yeah, when you find a lead and you cross 20 billion of revenue, you know, come back and yeah, yeah, I'll be, I'm very interested when you get to that point.

Yeah. And I would say, like, you need to get folks up to speed on what you're doing. But I think by and large, like people either get it or they don't. And you're not necessarily going to convince somebody of your vision or your business, like, they're kind of going to get it immediately or not. It's really about finding folks who kind of get it, who believe.

So we had Excel as an investor as well. I'm curious from your view, they were in, as you said, first round, first real institutional round. Where do you see the value of a firm like Excel? Like obviously you mentioned Vaas, but as a firm, like, what is the value of having a firm like that?

I would say they've been a great partner to us over the years and they've kind of obviously have an early stage fund and a growth fund, but they helped us in the earliest days and they've helped us scale and think about what our path to being a unicorn and then some. Looks like we have a lot of great investors. We have had a lot of great early stage investors who are really helpful with kind of crafting early product vision or at least how we storytelled around it. Story told, storytelled, made intros to series A series B stage investors, but it's been tough for them to be helpful at the growth stage. We also have some great growth stage investors. Insight Partners led our Series C. They're very quantitative, they're used to scale ups and they're helpful in a different way than some of our early stage investors. And Excel's been really helpful with both. I would also say, you know, there's a couple different sort of investor or board archetypes. You've got the professional investors, you've got the former founders, you've got, you know, the seasoned operators. If I were to maybe bucket them three ways, we've historically had a lot of kind of professional investors, but once we were very founder oriented and so I think figuring out how maybe you have some diversity in terms of ways they can help, size, role they can play on the board in terms of, you know, advice they can offer is definitely helpful.

Who's the partner at Insight?

Matt Gatto here in New York. He's great.

And yeah, I think what's interesting also is what I tell founders. I'm curious if you've seen this is, you know, when you're going out for that first seed round to an Excel, it's about you, it's about your co founder, it's about the broad vision. But when you go to Insight and now it's a later stage, business growth stage. Like you said, now we're talking about numbers. Now, they could love you, but if the numbers aren't there, they're not investing. And I think it changes the fundraising kind of process and priorities, I guess.

Yeah, I think, you know, when you're, when, when you're selling to a customer, you're trying to do discovery and understand what, what a customer wants from your product, what's a good outcome? Like, it's important to understand what an investor is trying to get out of investing. Like, what are they underwriting to? What do they care about? What else is in their portfolio? Do you fit their thesis? What does a great outcome look like to them in three, five, 10 years? And so I think being able to understand that, speak to that, and ultimately you're taking their money, build towards that and follow through on that.

How do you manage your board in terms of, do you have weekly calls, biweekly, monthly, quarterly board meetings only? How do you handle the relationship with them?

Yeah, I think, you know, earlier on we did kind of every two months board meetings. Now we do it quarterly. We try to do it kind of like in the first month of a quarter so, you know, we've done our quarterly kickoff. We're kind of sharing, you know, the board version of that, how things are going, and we're also thinking, you know, a couple quarters ahead. I think we've had the most success when we bring kind of strategic discussion topics to the board as opposed to just, you know, having it be a readout of how we did. But there's definitely a lot of kind of texting and emailing back and forth between board meetings. I'm really bad at asking for help. That's like one of my shortcomings as a founder and a leader. But I think generally when you reach out to these folks for help, whether it's advice or intros or whatever, they tend to be quite helpful.

You have led this company through, in my opinion, and in conversations with CEOs who are with 30, 40 years of experience, like, this is maybe one of the hardest periods to have led a company through Covid, through everything that happened in that, the social, political climate, you know, all the way through to today, really. The interest rates, the end of Zurb. Like, I mean, it's really been one kind of punch in the face after another and. And on quick succession. How much of that have you. Kind of. How have you handled that as it. At. Because. Because I think as an employee, what I see with employee bases is that it's changed the dynamics between employer and employee through. Through this period because of all the challenges and the macro dynamics. Like, how have you handled that?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, Covid was, you know, a challenging stretch for our business in a lot of different ways. And there were a lot of companies that I think did really well during that stretch. We, back in 2019, I think we'd gone from like 1 to 3 million in ARR. We had a really great year. The year right before COVID we were working with retail brands, restaurant brands, you know, travel aggregators, helping them geofence, you know, restaurants, retail stores, stadiums, airports. And then all of that shut down. You know, we had a lot of our customers basically have their revenue go to zero overnight. So we were coming off a year where we, if I remember correctly, had basically tripled revenue. And, you know, that was kind of the plan that we had built in 2020 ended up being basically like a flat year for us, revenue wise. And we've since had a great couple years since then. But I think one big learning for me was just like kind of properly setting expectations with the team. And like, we missed every quarter that year because we just kind of expected our Growth rate to continue. Like it, like it had. I think if I had told the team like, hey guys, there's a fundamental dislocation in our business right now. You know, I didn't want to use the term pivot, but I think in retrospect, like we kind of pivoted or at least really, really changed strategy or this was the start of a lot of the kind of truly going, going multi product and just said, guys, that's, that's what's important this year. I think morale would have been a lot higher that year.

Cause you kind of, you're kind of on. An advisor said to me, when you in that situation, you're kind of like on a death march because you essentially are like, we're going over there and we're going to crush it and this is our goals. And then every quarter you just go to the team and you're like, yeah, and hit the goal.

Yeah, totally.

And the next quarter we still didn't hit the goal.

And there were, you know, there were other things that were challenging too. Like that was during a period where Apple and Google were every version of iOS and Android changing location permissions, making it harder to request location permissions. So we had a lot of success with these sort of like we just did our company kickoff last week. I said we're now in chapter three of Radar, but sort of the chapter one pre Covid use cases and you know, we're not growing, we're missing goals. We kind of have to change strategy, you know, attach to different use cases, do things differently. Oh, by the way, like, everybody's remote and oh by the way, like, you know, the world is falling apart and everybody's really stressed and having a tough time personally and watching the news and it was a tough year, but I think we came out of it stronger. We shipped new product, we made some changes. We were sort of more intentional about some aspects of our culture and we got through it. But yeah, it was definitely a challenging year.

When you talk about the culture, what were those aspects that you.

Yeah, there was a lot going on in the news in terms of social issues that year. And I think in retrospect a lot of it was well intentioned. But I think folks were like, what are we going to post about Black Lives Matter? And like, what is. What's Radar stance on gun control and abortion and all these things. And I was like, guys, like, we're here to build a geolocation company. Like, we're having kind of a tough year. Like we gotta, we gotta figure this stuff out, like, we gotta stay focused on that. So I think it took us a little bit of time. There were some folks in that year who did some things that I really admired. I don't know if you ever read Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO's mission focused blog post and you know, team, not family. We're going to focus on our mission. We're going to sort of not focus on social and political issues unrelated to our core mission. We've really kind of taken the company in a similar direction, been honest with kind of the current team and said, hey guys, this is what we're going to do, this is how we're going to run the company. A few folks self selected out. We try to be very upfront about how we think about that stuff during the hiring process so folks know what they're signing up for. Ultimately, it's been really successful. And I think for the folks who were sort of like, you know, I want to go to a company that invests more in social issues or whatever, you know, there were also one or two employees who were like, it's really refreshing just to be able to like settle that stuff aside and come here and let's build the world's best geolocation company and focus on that and focus on what unites us.

I would say a lot to the team, like, people ask me my personal opinion, they would ask me the company stance and my view is who cares what I have to say? I mean, if I was Mark Zuckerberg or if I was on, you know, like, I don't know, Google, Microsoft, like that's a different kind of conversation. But does anyone really care?

Yeah, I think a lot of people did and I do think that was more sort of the norm at the time. I do think things have, have shifted and I think we're in a world where folks just kind of don't expect the same level of, you know, outspokenness from their company necessarily. And it's not to say we don't think about, you know, political issues or whatever. You know, we're obviously going to have opinions about location, data privacy laws or geolocation requirements.

But they're relevant to your bit.

That's right. I think at the end of the day it's, you know, the business of business is business. We're here to build a big geolocation company. Let's all focus on that. And I think for a lot of folks that's really, really refreshing. And you know, it's funny, what is Radar doing in terms of DE and I and we had employees asking us to not put quotas in place. Sort of put quotas in place. And honestly, since becoming really mission focused, we have the most diverse team we've ever had and best culture, highest morale, highest cohesion we've ever had. And it's honestly been a really great change.

Yeah. Okay, so I want to transition to your background. But before we do that, where IS radar in 2028, in three years from three years from today, Where. Where is Radar?

Yeah, we have a couple of really exciting years ahead of us. You know, I mentioned we grew from being just a geofencing platform to launching a maps platform and a geolocation compliance and anti fraud solution. Historically, we've talked about Radar as location infrastructure, you know, APIs, SDKs, dev tools. The launch of our geolocation compliance and anti fraud solution really represented a move up the stack. Like less sort of SDK API layer, more application layer. We're investing a lot in the dashboard tools, workflows for non technical teams. And there's a lot of additional solutions for operations use cases or marketing use cases or location intelligence use cases that I think can exist at that application layer. I think there's a state of the world where we even go beyond that and maybe someday Radar's manufacturing GPS trackers or little beacons you slap on shipping containers or that all sort of fits within our geolocation solutions vision. But I think what I would say is continuing to invest in and deepen the value of our geofencing and maps infrastructure, but moving up the stack and building more at the application layer for these different use cases and less technical Personas. I think Stripe has done a really great job of this over the years. A lot of differences when it comes to payments. I think people think of Stripe as sort of the quintessential devtool APIs SDKs. But if you go look at their current set of 20 different product offerings or whatever, a lot of it is application layer solutions like subscription management, incorporating a company, anti fraud tooling. So really sort of broadening beyond, you know, APIs, SDKs, dev tools, and thinking more expansively about geolocation solutions for every industry.

I like that. Okay, so let's transition to your background. So did you always know you wanted to be a leader, an entrepreneur, a CEO? Is that like in your DNA?

Yeah, I always liked building stuff. I can't really say I came from like a family of entrepreneurs or knew a lot of entrepreneurs. You know, I was always into computers. I think I built a computer when I was in Middle school. And then, you know, first got into building websites in middle school as well. I was really into Pokemon at the time on Game Boy. So I had a website called the Pokemon Lab where I would, you know, basically draw new Pokemon in Microsoft paint. And I can still picture the website. That was like a nice kind of iframe, you know, sidebar nav over there. And I remember going into a Borders bookstore. Probably not.

I know Borders.

Yeah, Borders with my mom. And I saw like a Microsoft Visual Basics starter kit and that kind of started my journey, like learning to code. So I was really into programming in high school. When I went to college, I had kind of fallen in love with biology. So I actually originally was biology major, comp sci minor. I wanted to get a PhD in computational biology. And I worked in a lab a couple summers in college. And I hated it. Like I just go into the lab every morning. And it was one summer I was researching yeast flocculation, which is kind of the extent to which different strains of yeast clump together. And I was like pushing a button on like a spectrometer and like writing down. And I was like, this effing sucks. And yeah, I started talking to the professor I was working with about maybe I want to start a company or go into the biotech industry. And he was kind of like, don't, don't start a company. Like just go into academia and do research. And I just had this sort of like mid college crisis. I was like, I'd like to build stuff. I do want to start a company. You know, quite frankly, like, I want to make a lot of money and like have a nice house and be able to send my kids to nice colleges. And so I ended up applying early decision to, to business school. I went down the product management track because I felt like that was kind of a nice hybrid of like being technical and engineering, but also kind of strategy and being business oriented. And definitely, you know, a couple years out of school I knew I was sort of working backwards from starting a company. I was kind of waiting for like the right time, the right idea, a little bit of money in the bank, and again ended up kind of experimenting with a couple ideas, but it was really radar that stuck.

Right. Wow. What did your parents do?

My dad works in the petroleum business in sales and marketing. My mom was a stay at home mom. And my dad is, you know, he was always an incredibly hard worker, like super, super inspirational to me. But. But yeah, definitely, you know, he was like, cool kid, played soccer and lacrosse. He was like the Captain of his soccer and lacrosse team, president of his frat. I was like a computer nerd. I'm sure they were like, but wait, you know, where did this kid, where did this kid come from? But, but, but anyway.

And so what, what is it, you know, that drive you mentioned? Money and like, being able to provide for your family and everything? Is that your number one motivator? Like, what is it that that drives you, that motivates you?

Yeah, I, I just, I, I love to build stuff. I, I've always been really fascinated by the geolocation space. I remember when, you know, the iPhone came out and then Foursquare came out, and I was just like obsessed with, with this idea of location services. And honestly, they say before you start a company, like, pick on a problem that you'd see yourself pick a problem that you could see yourself working on for 10 or 20 years. And I think at the time it's very hard to think 10 years into the future. But I think it's such great advice. And honestly, I'm more excited about the problem space than ever. I'm more excited about the opportunity in front of us than day one. So I think for me, it's like building cool stuff and solving problems in this particular space that I'm really passionate about. You know, I have a wife and two young kids. Like, obviously, you know, I want to be able to provide for them and be comfortable outside of work. But for me, I think at the end of the day, it's building valuable stuff in domains that I think are really intellectually stimulating is kind of what's most important to me.

How has it been, you know, since you started the company? You've, I think your oldest is four, so you've had a child since starting the company and another one. Um, how do you balance that? Do you balance work and life? Do you, you know, you're commuting to the city every day. You know, you're, you're traveling, I'm sure for work. Every. Like, how do you balance, do you balance it? Do you think there is work life balance? Is that possible?

Yeah, I mean, as you know, it's, it's, it's a lot of work. It also helps you focus and kind of put stuff in perspective. I would say, honestly, the biggest thing is I've kind of time shifted my schedule. I used to stay up really late to get work done and prep for the next day. Now I'll wake up at 4am and crank through my inbox and get real work done before having meetings in the morning. I do think work life balance is important, but you also have to work hard. So using it as a forcing function to say what's most important to me, how do I prioritize my time? You know, how do I make sure I'm like setting aside enough time for my family. Weekends in particular are like, very important to me like personally in terms of like health and just sort of entering the week recharge, but, but also, you know, spending time with family and soccer class and swimming lessons and going out to lunch and dinner, love to cook, you know, stuff, stuff like that. So, you know, listen, I, I think when you're in your 20s and you're single, like, yeah, you can work 100 hour weeks and just kind of, kind of work yourself to death. Like I could do that now, but I think my family would, would hate me. So for me it's, it's kind of about like, how do I, you know, optimize my time, prioritize the right things, put stuff in perspective. And man, like when you have a tough day at work and not everything goes your way to like come in and have your kids run to the door and give you a big hug and daddy, we're so excited to see you. It's, there's, there's nothing like it. So, you know, it's, it's great.

Yeah. Do you have, do you have a role model or a mentor maybe or like a coach or you know, do you have some kind of a support system, let's say, or that's either earlier in your career or, or now.

You know, honestly, that's, I think I mentioned earlier, like, I'm really bad at asking for help. I've never had like a mentor or, or a coach, like nor have I really wanted one. Maybe that's a mistake or, or shortcoming on, on my part. I will say, like, my family's very supportive. My wife is not in tech. She's a doctor. And so to be able to like, you know, explain stuff that's happening at work and kind of get her like outsider's perspective on it. I remember explaining to her some of the stuff we were going through in 2020 and she was like, people behave like that. Like, that's crazy. Yeah. I mean, by the way, she never went remote. She was going to the hospital every day. But she's been very supportive. You know, I have a ton of friends that really mean a lot to me and some of them work in tech, some of them are entrepreneurs, some of them are VCs, some of them Work in finance. You know, one of them runs an H VAC company. You know, so my friends give me a lot of support and perspective as well. And there's a lot of great, you know, founder networks and, and resources. I think in terms of, you know, starting a company, running a company, there's a lot more out there now than there was 15 years ago. Right. And you guys, you guys are part of that in the work that you're doing here. But there's a lot more sort of, you know, wisdom out there and resources to lean on as well.

Okay, last question. Knowing everything you know today, all the experiences you've had, you go back to the very beginning of your career before your first job. What is the one piece of advice you would give yourself?

Yeah, I really. Two things come to mind. They're sort of interrelated. You know, I said one of our company values at Radar is walk a mile. Another is play offense. And you know, I think like be a driver, not a passenger. One thing me and, you know, sort of our exec team always talk about is like, you know, we hire people and like, either like people happen to radar or Radar happens to them. And it's like, you want, you want to hire people where like they happen to Radar, right. They're really good, you know, prime movers in terms of they're going to get out there, they're going to meet the full team, they're going to work to get up to speed quickly, they're going to get outside their comfort zone, et cetera. And you know, we've hired some people where it's like they kind of look like a deer in a headlights and maybe we need to do a better job onboarding them. But just sort of be bold, get out there, build relationships outside your team, you know, suggest ideas. And I think my second advice would be like, don't necessarily stay in your lane. Right. I think our, you know, we have great folks, whether it's on the, you know, the solutions engineering team or the product design team or the engineering team. That kind of unprompted by me or like building relationships and swapping ideas with folks on, you know, the other side of the org, so to speak. And those folks tend to be, you know, the most successful, have, have the most perspective, make the, make the best decisions. So just kind of putting yourself out there, getting outside of your, you know, your swim lanes, being a driver, not, not a passenger. I, I started my career as a PM at Microsoft. You know, I think we were in like the second year of a Three year ship cycle. It was a huge team. You know, I was working on one, one little small part of the product and I knew I wasn't going to stay there for, you know, forever. But I think in retrospect, if I had just kind of like put myself out there, more, reached out across teams, developed more perspective and been, been aggressive, I, I would have been more. More successful in my, my short time there.

Yeah, I like that. That's really, I think for people earlier in their career, that advice is because I think especially if you're in a startup, especially any company, but if you're in a fast growing technology company, the way you just said that is either the company happens to you, you happen to the company. Like you. We all know I can list the people in my career who have come in and changed the company when even their resume didn't.

Yeah.

Say they would.

Yeah, I would maybe say one or two more things come to mind. There's this kind of meme like you can just do things. It's like you can just do things. But also I would also say really understanding the person who leads your team, your manager, maybe your CEO, what motivates them, what's important to them. And it's not to say you should always just do what your boss tells you and nothing more, but really understand what's important to your CEO. If you're joining a startup, what do they value? What do they not value? If you ask them, they'll probably tell you they're a good CEO. I think they'll tell you. And, you know, obviously, like, be bold and be creative and think outside the box, but also like really understand kind of the big picture of like, what is your CEO trying to do? What is your team lead trying to do?

I really like that, Nick. Thank you.

Thanks, David. This is fun.

This was awesome. And I am sure, I mean, I have a long list of things I took away from this and I really appreciate you making the time to do this and doing it in person. I like doing these in person a lot more. So thank you for doing that.

I'm a big in person guy. My pleasure. Yeah. Thanks, David.

Awesome. Thank you everyone for watching, if you enjoyed or listening. Also, if you enjoyed, please share this with your networks and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.