From 2 Weeks of Runway to $1B Acquisition: The Founder Playbook with Loom's CEO and Co-Founder

So the name of the talk is "From 2 Weeks of Runway, Which Is a True Story, to $1.5 Billion Valuation and Some of the Things That We Learned." So this picture, these couple pictures that you see are actually from the first couple weeks that we are starting Bloom. Smiles on our faces, having a really great time, thinking that we're going to take on the world. And then you fast forward about 8 months later. And this is 3 AM, was the actual timestamp on the photo. That is a twin mattress on the floor of my co-founder's bedroom. We were truly a few weeks away, not just in terms of the $25,000 that we had raised in angel money, but all of our personal savings as well. We had done a couple of massive pivots at that point. Neither of them had quite worked out. And this was kind of our last shot on goal that we were going to get. So we're putting everything into it. And we're missing our third co-founder who had essentially locked himself in his own bedroom for a week to rebuild a new part of technology that we hadn't had yet. So here we go, getting into the actual lessons that we learned. And I think that this is arguably one of the most important things that you can think about when you are starting a company and a product. Is exponential growth in market. Now, I wish I could say that we understood that importance as first-time founders going into starting Loom, but that was certainly not the case. This is more of a connecting the dots looking backwards than it is forwards. Um, but when we did actually pivot to the products that we are working on today and also the products that we were building before this, we had shown up to a whiteboard one day, the three co-founders, and we all had to bring three ideas to the table. And the one that we chose was to bring video to the workplace, although had very, very different applications. And the reason for that is that we had seen, and it was good, I would say, principled thinking, but it wasn't truly quantitative in nature. We had been using consumer apps like Snapchat and YouTube, and we felt like video was everywhere in the consumer landscape, but when we showed up at work, We were still using Outlook for email, and then it was Slack in the last kind of like 6 to 12 months before we started Loom. But video was truly nowhere to be found. And so Mary Meeker, she puts out an annual internet trends report, and that's the image that you see on the left. And video was actually the fastest growing sector of internet traffic, which was at 57% in 2012. And that it had gotten up to 64% by 2014. So not only was it a majority of internet traffic, but it was also the fastest growing. So we had launched in June of 2016, that was the 2014 report. Fast forward 4 years later, the 2 fastest consumer platforms on the chart you see are YouTube and Instagram. And in that window of time, about 2017, 2018, Instagram had added Stories, which is a more video-oriented product, and they ended up being the fastest growing. And the crazy part is on that middle image, what you don't see is TikTok because it really took over the world starting in late 2020 throughout 2021. And TikTok by the end of 2022 was the number one most trafficked site in the world, and it's the first video-only consumer platform. So this is just to convey how important consumer behavior is, and we wanted to bring some of that behavior to the workplace. And we thought that when we were thinking about how day-to-day communication and collaboration gets done at work is that you could see that there was a missing gap in the top right hand. So really what I'm trying to convey here is that if you're starting a company or you're still in the early stages of building a company, you should really think hard about, is there exponential growth in the market that I'm going after? Because it's much easier to ride a wave than it is to create one yourself. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] The second hard lesson that we had to learn is that you really need to make a product that's so good people tell their friends about it. And this is much, much easier said than done, to be clear. We had about 9 months of pain and trial and tribulation to show for that, but it is so worth it. And if you are trying to build truly a venture-backed company, this is absolutely critical to being able to do so. So the first product, when I was talking about building video at work, is that we, we built a company called Open Test, or a product called Open Test. And the thinking was that it was going to be this two-sided marketplace. We were going to get product experts like you all in this room, or a designer from Google, a product manager from Facebook, basically anybody from FAANG and then we were going to pair them up with companies on the other side, whether it's a design file or it's a code review or it's a product requirement doc. And we were going to create this two-sided marketplace for microtransactions to pay experts for their time. And what we did was we ended up building this video layer in the middle so that way it made it really easy to record that feedback and then deliver it to the people on the other side. What you can see, and this isn't actually the chart on the right, I couldn't go back that far in time to see what our analytics dashboard said, but this was essentially what happened when we launched on Product Hunt. You know, it went straight vertical for about 12 hours and then right back to zero after that. And even though we were getting friends and family that were telling us, "Oh, this is actually really interesting," in reality, when you put it out to strangers in the world, they were not telling other folks about it. So we went right back to zero. But we did— by putting ourselves out there, by putting a product in market, it makes a rich ecosystem to receive feedback from folks. And there might be golden nuggets of feedback that you want to keep pulling the string on. And so what did we actually learn? I talked about two major pivots. I'm going to kind of skip to the last one that we got to, which is what Loom is today. But we had built this video recording layer in the middle which was essentially allowing people to record a screen, have a superimposed camera bubble, and they wanted that dissociated from the two-sided marketplace. They just wanted a really nice screen recorder. And when we went to Vinay and we said, "Hey, man, by the way, second pivot, like, can we build this technology? Vinay— or Shahid and I will sit over here and wait for you to be done." He was like, "Yeah, I can do this. This is the easiest thing that you've asked me to do is just break out the video recorder from the actual platform that we had built." And when we did that, we ended up launching again on Product Hunt, call it about 2 months later, and that was in June of 2016. And the GIF that you see on the right is the fact that that same day a bunch of people were tweeting about what was called OpenVid at the time, arguably my worst branding mistake ever. People were so confused between OpenTest and OpenVid. But we did know that we had something interesting and special because We were number one Product Hunt of the day. But the real story here is that I had gone to one of my childhood friends' weddings that weekend. I felt so bad because we were running out of money, and I was one of the best men in the wedding, and so I couldn't say no. I knew that I was going to regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't. So I went to this wedding, and we had launched that night. And I woke up on Saturday, and I turned to my girlfriend, now wife at the time, and I looked at our analytics dashboards, and— We were having more videos recorded the next day than the day that we had launched on Product Hunt. I was like, "We did it. I don't know what we did, but we did it." Um, and so that was essentially what I think the principle is now, that a product so good that people tell their friends about it is essentially what was happening on Twitter, with coworkers. And so once you have that, it really does end up compounding on top of itself over the course of time. This is still the core growth engine of Loom today, which is that people record videos, they send them to others, and they get so much value out of it that they talk to one another about how they end up using Loom. And that's the core engine of Loom's growth today. So if you can think really, really hard and try and hit that bar that's incredibly hard to hit, it will end up compounding on itself over the course of time. All right, so it was— Initially, kind of like a massive market that it was a product so good that people tell their friends about it. Then you need to actually— when I was talking about the fact that we did it, but I don't know what exactly we did, well, then you kind of have to figure out what it is that you want to go after. What is the kernel of truth that you have found? What is the earned secret? And then how do you build an ambitious vision around it, a definitive view of the future, and that it can be huge if it ends up working. So when we were looking at the video landscape in terms of day-to-day communication via video messages at work, Loom was not the first entrant, not by a long shot. I mean, QuickTime had been around as a default software application where you could record your screen for literally two decades before Loom had launched. And when we started looking at the broader landscape, we knew that if we wanted to unlock the potential of video messages at work, it's a relatively complex undertaking. You needed to own every single step of the recording, sharing, editing, collaboration, storage journey because we knew that we weren't cool enough to build a consumer product. We knew that we wanted to build for work. And so by having to build for work, you needed to not only provide a communication tool, but you needed enterprise security and readiness. And when we looked at the broader landscape, there was nobody that was going after the holistic end-to-end opportunity. And when we started to actually pitch this version of the vision to investors, we had gotten essentially like a million nos for a very long time. But when we talked about going after this bigger ambitious vision, um, it was really valuable from an investor perspective. And so we actually started getting checks beyond $25,000. But I also think that it's really valuable from a recruiting and employment perspective because we also had a tough time recruiting folks as well. So you have to have a clear and ambitious vision once you end up knowing the kernel of truth that you're going to keep building against. And so you had seen this chart before. We have now just filled it in with the Loom logo in terms of going after async video we believed would be as important as video conferencing over the course of time. We also believe it'll be as big and important as synchronous text like Slack or asynchronous text like Docs and Sheets and Slides. And we truly believe that. Um, we think that over the next decade that async video will be as big as it is in the consumer landscape at work. And one of the things that I actually feel like we didn't do a great job of in the first 3 or 4 years, we actually did what I think a lot of founders and CEOs end up doing, which is the fact that when you're talking about the TAM, the total addressable market for your product and offering, you end up going to these websites that have white papers and you're like, what is the compounding annual growth rate, CAGR? And then you say, what percentage are we going to own? And it kind of feels like fluff because it is, you know, because a lot of times you're going to be building within a space in a sector that doesn't really have existing market, right? Like async video at work wasn't really a thing before Loom came along. And so I feel like 4 years on, we did a much better job of conveying what is the total addressable market for something like video messages. And we finally anchored on the fact that we are video, but we are also messaging. And the biggest, most ubiquitous messaging platform is email. So what if we took something that was like the amount of daily emails that are sent And then you kind of shrink that bubble down to how many are long-form emails that are sent, because Looms tend to be about 2 to 3 minutes in length on average. So it's a long-form message. It's not a 5-second message that you're sending to others. And then what if we only captured 1% of that long-form messaging opportunity? Well, then you end up with 3 billion daily Looms and 40 million daily creators. And so when it came to anchoring the total addressable market for Loom, when we finally made it a little bit more real, you know, a little bit more tangible that you could feel it, I feel like that to me was much more valuable than looking at these white papers and looking at the CAGR of something like telecommunications and saying Loom is going to take 0.5% of that and that's a $100 billion market. You know, like this feels a little bit more grounded and real. And so, could be huge if it works. I think messaging and storytelling that you do around a business is what helps you achieve its fullest potential. And that's what you try and do with total addressable market framing. Um, the fourth lesson that I think is more of one that we learned in the first two products that we had started that did not work out is that beyond our Product Hunt launch, we didn't really know how we were gonna grow. We were just kind of like throwing them over the fence and hoping that something would stick and work. Um, but when it came to Loom, the product that we're working on now, we had to get a little bit more principled around how we thought about our distribution strategy and how we are gonna grow. And I actually got a chance to do a session with Saastr in mid-2021 around a flywheel concept. Which is like what Amazon used in order to talk about and think about their overall growth opportunity. What are the key steps in the flywheel and how do you end up unlocking it and accelerating it to the best of your ability? And we ended up dragging and dropping that sort of framework to Loom in the early days just to know what were the key steps of growth. So if you want a more detailed talk on flywheel, you can just search Saastr flywheel and it'll go in depth there. But the core concept here is that we ended up mapping out what were the key steps for Loom because we knew that we had an inherently viral product. Again, people would record and they would share with others. And so our job, and still to this day our job, is how do we enable more people to record and share with one another? Because growth will generally take care of itself. So you map those key steps. You say, what percentage of resources are going against there? You have theories and thesis. As to what is actually the meaningful friction points and blockers. And then you remove those as much as you can over the course of time. And so our distribution strategy is just leaning into the viral nature of Loom. Now you, you end up adding on channels over the course of time, but when you are an early-stage founder and CEO, you truly only have time for one, right? And there should be one that's as directly aligned with your company as possible. And just go after that one as diligently and framework-oriented as possible so that way you can accelerate your growth to the best of your ability. But just be honest with yourself. I think that we tried to do way too many things in the early days around, oh, we're going to go after SEO, oh, we're going to go after integrations. And really time and time again, we've just learned the lesson that the more that we can make our beer taste better, as Bezos says, the more that we can lean into this core flywheel, that's the thing that unlocks the most growth for Loom. And then the last lesson that I'd say is why do startups win is ultimately team mindset and momentum. Those two different opposing pictures that I had shown to start with of like smiles and happiness and joy and then like hard work, grinding, like 11th hour sort of, we just got to keep going, is really at the core of us three co-founders was that we were like all in from the very beginning. We're going to do whatever it takes. And then what's really hard is building out a team that ends up adopting that same mentality and mindset. And it's really important that you think about as you're starting to make your first hires how you can make sure that that culture continues to grow with you as you all grow. But I think that the first thing that I'd start with in terms of why startups win, I think is really, I don't know if anybody out there in the crowd right now is in it right now and you don't know if it's gonna work and you might throw in the towel, is that I think that this is from Sam Altman where it's like one no versus one yes. And this is where for us, why did we start a company? Honestly, we talked about the fact that we were bad employees. We always kind of wanted to do our own thing while we were at the company. And we felt like as a company and as an organization, you want to be as aligned as possible. And we always wanted to do our own thing. So not that we were unemployable, we were just bad employees. And we got told too many— we got told no too many times at our corporate jobs. So what we did was we decided to build on our own. But we got way, way more nos when we were starting Loom. Like I said, 9 months was not just building products and being told essentially no by customers. But we had done about 100 investor pitches and again only had gotten $25K from 2 people. So that's a 2% hit rate. Um, 98% were just straight up nos, including from friends and family, by the way, which is like the hardest ones. It's like you, you go and talk to, uh, your aunt and uncle and you sit them down at Thanksgiving and you're like, I promise it's a real thing. And they're like, good luck. But anyways, I feel like it was 9 months of really hard work, and we just kept pulling on strings that we felt like were worth pulling on, and we just got the one yes. And that was everything. That was what enabled us to continue to build. And I think that that's where— why startups win is that corporations end up saying no a lot. To really good ideas, you actually have to probably get yeses all the way up the chain, whereas startups only need one yes, 1% of the time over the course of a year in order to build something of significance. So that's the first reason why startups end up winning. I think the other thing is that team mindset and cultural values end up being unbelievably important. And so we've had iterations on our values over the course of time. Of course we have, like as the team grows and evolves, as you bring on more diverse mindsets, you bring on more leadership who have seen things that work and don't work. Like, you want to be able to potentially evolve these over the course of time. But what I would say is that the core of them have ultimately stayed the same. And so we turned it into a phrase at Loom. Like, a Loommate is an optimistic owner who acts with velocity, keeping it real and human. And 4 out of 5 of these are actually the same as they have been. When we went to Mexico as a 7-person team and we came up with our cultural values and they stay true to this day. And so I feel like as a startup employee generally, you have to be an optimist a little bit. What I lovingly say is like a little bit of a screw loose because you are taking something that's a little bit harder in nature, a little bit more variable, but as long as you're in the mindset of like together we can, very powerful. When it comes to ownership at startups, it's actually literally true that you tend to be owners at the company because you own shares in the company. So you are an owner, and that everybody should act like one is like— I was in the New York office last week, there was a bunch of dishes in the sink. I just like rolled up my sleeves and I put them all in the dishwasher. It's like anything that needs to be done is that it's my responsibility is like the default answer. Velocity is the most important. Vinay, my co-founder and our CTO, he's like, this is my ultimate, ultimate, ultimate value. He's all about velocity, and it's a bias for action is so important is that you don't actually want people who go around and build a bunch of conviction from their peers and from executives of their team. You just want people who will get shit done. And the other part of it that I was talking about where we were a little bit not so great employees is that we wanted to get stuff done at our previous employers as, as co-founders of Loom, but we were doing it in our own ways versus aligned. And so that last part with purpose is almost as much for us as founders as it is for employees, is that we need a bias for action, but we need to be as aligned as possible. Um, the real part is saying the hard thing always. And I don't know how many of you in the audience actually are conflict averse. It's what my executive coach that I've been working with for 4 years told me in our second session is that, you know, your greatest superpower also tends to be your greatest weakness. I'm a deeply empathetic person, but that means I don't actually do the hard thing or say the hard thing to the person that needs to hear it. So again, in terms of a value that I need to like read on a daily basis, to be the best CEO that I can is that you're not always going to make people feel warm and fuzzy. Actually, that's not your job as a coworker, a peer, as a leader, certainly not as CEO. And so say the hard thing always. It's like the thing that I have to constantly be working on. And then the last thing is like you can do real, you can do velocity, you can be somebody who is an owner and like is constantly driving while also being a human. Is that you can do all of that with respect and compassion. And we always wanted to have one value that was mixed in, in terms of directly aligned with our product offering, which video messaging at work is that it's more human in nature. And so we wanted to make sure that that product offering was represented. But you can do all of those things with respect and compassion. Um, and when you have cultural values that end up being aligned with what it is that you're setting out to do with the world is that you win on big platform shifts, right? And for us, this is a roadmap of all the things that we've done over the course of time that it ended up being more ambitious, that we had more individuals to take on additional things, and that we needed to just keep driving against it. And it really is about those cultural values that end up keeping you accelerating even as you add more people over the course of time. So bringing it all together is that, you know, I wanted to say actually that this framework about what is most important as a startup, there is a talk by Sam Altman. I think that he, obviously being the president of YC for about 6 years, they think really, really, really hard about what it means to have a successful startup. Company, and I just took that framework and I applied all of the Loom stories to it that made it a little bit more real, whereas the talk is a little bit more abstract. But if you wanted, I highly recommend that you end up going to watch this because it is something that's truly profound in terms of the simplicity yet the realness in which the lessons are in terms of building a great company and a great product. So I'm not going to read them. We already went through all of these 5 lessons. And the one last thing actually before we go to Q&A is that there is a special announcement. You know, you got to take advantage of being up on stage sometimes. And obviously, of course, every company, every B2B SaaS is doing some sort of AI announcement. Like, we are no different. But as of today, we had the team hustling that by this talk that there should be AI features available to everybody on Loom who's on our starter free or business tier. And it is just the beginning. It's going to be titles that are based off of transcript that we apply to every video and that every video will have an automatic summary. We've been using it internally for a couple of months. It's been really, really powerful. But again, this is just the beginning. We have things like auto chapters, auto due dates. Auto action items that we're working on, cam and voice avatars that you'll be able to edit via the transcript. So if you want to delete a sentence and retype it, you don't have to rerecord, which is the number one pain point that we hear from users is that, damn, I nailed that 5-minute video, but I messed up that one sentence. Yeah. So we got that coming out and available to all of you as of today. It's a free beta. So this will actually be something that will be in an AI add-on at some point in the future. We're thinking end of August, early September. But Loom AI is available to everybody as of today. So with that, I think we'll go to questions, which there's the two mics right there.

I'm Michael from— came all the way from Japan. And like, very interesting presentation, very insightful. And I have one question about the— so Loom could be used for shooting videos in many workplaces. Have you ever thought about focusing on one category, for instance, sales or customer support, but you decided to replace it with all the use cases?

Yeah, it's a great question and one that we've wrestled with since we started Loom, which is that we are from our pre-seed investors. They wanted us to verticalize specifically with the sales persona because they're like, you need to build this set of features, and then you do it over the course of the next couple of years, you get to this ARR, and you get acquired by Salesforce. Yay! Everybody wins. But we thought that based off of the initial survey that we ran, we had seen that it was a truly horizontal distribution of folks that were using Loom and theoretically product-market fit, although it was a free product offering at the time. They weren't paying. But it was engineers and designers and product managers. It was sales, success, support. It was executives at the top of the company. It was like IC engineers at the bottom. And it was across a variety of industries. And we thought that very rarely do you get the opportunity to go horizontal after something and that we were going to take a big bet on that. Now, that was like I was saying, horizontal versus vertical was some of the earliest conversations that we were having. I also had a meeting with Bret Taylor, who's co-CEO of Salesforce, and now he's building his own thing again. And he had built Quip, which was a horizontal communication and collaboration platform. And he was saying where a lot of companies like Loom end up falling down or not reaching your fullest potential is you don't build the last mile product experiences because you end up building horizontal for everybody. And when you're building for everybody, the saying goes is that you're building for nobody. And so for the first time starting In H2, we're going to do 3-month sprints against certain ideal customer profiles, sales being the first one, because there's a shortlist of features that we're missing for them that could make Loom disproportionately valuable relative to building more horizontal features. And so I think that we could have started going vertical sooner. I think we probably could have started doing that at year 5 or 6 versus year 7, but we're doing it now, and I think that it really is most horizontal platforms miss those last-mile product experiences, and we're hoping to fix that over the next couple of years.

Thank you.

Hey, just wondering, what was the point at which you sort of decided— you have like a freemium offering— that you decided you need to shift the focus from acquisition of new customers to actually monetizing your existing customers? And what advice would you have for companies that are considering freemium versus free trials, et cetera?

Yeah, well, this is another part of the journey that I think maybe we didn't do a great job of because we had been building for about 3 years and we were still free at that point because video, and specifically video infrastructure, is hard. And when you have a team of essentially 12 people before we raised a Series A, and almost all of them were engineers. And I mean, Zoom is a great example of like a super saturated market. And they came along with a more performant video conferencing offering and that ended up taking over. That was one of our thesis for Loom is that we need the, like, the fastest, simplest, most performant video infrastructure. But that took all of our resources. So we went to go raise our Series A as a B2B SaaS company. And it's not like we were below the revenue standards that you typically hit. We had no revenue. At that point. And the Series A fundraise actually took a long time. It took about 4 months, 5 months in order to close it. And it was because we actually got a lot of nos up front when we got to the revenue slide of the pitch that we would go in and do in offices. And we were like, we're at zero revenue, but here's all these surveys that we've ran that tells us we will make money in a little bit. And they're like, no. So we actually— it was like 80%. Was a pre-filter based off of zero revenue. So all that's to say is we monetized late. But I think that for us what was really helpful is, I don't know if you're familiar with Reforge, they're like a growth academy. They have a really, really good program on how to go zero to one on the monetization front. And so some of the data that we were bringing to these investor pitches were like Van Westendorp price point analysis and MaxDiff surveys, and it was broken out by, size of company, and it was broken out by ICPs, like persona types. And here's the features that would be most valuable to engineers. Here's the features that would be most valuable to salespeople. Here's their willingness to pay. And so as structured of a data as we could get, we're bringing them to investor pitches. Um, and I think by going through that in a more rigorous way, we were able to understand pretty quickly is like, it's time to monetize, right? Like there, there's a shortlist of features that people are willing to pay for. But it was really a forcing function for us is that we needed to keep the lights on from a video infrastructure perspective. And we needed more money in order to hire more people in order to build the monetization-oriented offering. So that's why we went out for our Series A. But we had gone through that program. And that gave us the aha moment. It was time to build for monetization versus focus on freemium acquisition performance and infrastructure.

Thank you.

Yep. Hey, man.

I'm Mike from Waybook. Always been a massive Loom fan.

Awesome.

And it always has felt so well put together. So it's really interesting to hear some of the bumps. In your position now as CEO, what would you say are the biggest challenges that, firstly, you spend most of your time and that kind of keep you up at night?

I think that the CEO journey is a unique one in the sense that every quarter it feels like something radically different is at the top of the list. You know, like whether you're hiring for a certain executive in that 90-day window, it could be marketing one quarter and the next one is VP of engineering. And it's like they're kind of a world apart. And so I feel like I'm constantly getting a crash course on what is the next thing that I need to learn at a surface level just to be enough dangerous to enable experts. And so right now, I would say that for me, over the past year, the existential sort of crisis was the macro environment is changing. It was going from growth, growth, growth to growth, burn margins. We actually started talking about corporate efficiency metrics like burn multiple and rule of 40 for the first time in like a couple of years. And that was a really kind of abrupt pivot for the company more broadly. But now that we're a year on and we've gotten that foundation set, you know, the last board meeting that we had and like we're going through H2 planning right now is, okay, how do we take a lot of the hard work that we've done to set this strong foundation and get back to innovation a little bit more? And that's both from like a cultural perspective in terms of having trust that we can allocate 15 to 20% of our resources on bigger bets. And that's what you should likely always do as a startup is like take the big swings. And then from there, the other, the other thing that's keeping me up at night is that when you're a PLG self-serve business, you at some point need to actually have sales-led, especially after you're going after enterprise organizations, be approximately 50/50 of your net new revenue that you're generating. And we are far from that ratio and we likely have to close that over the next couple of years. And I'm a product-oriented CEO. I'm not a sales-oriented CEO. And so this is the thing that keeps me up at night in terms of how do I get myself to do this tomorrow because I don't want to. No problem.

Hi.

Hi.

That was actually my question, so it was perfect you touched on it. How has that evolved over time in terms of thinking about your PLG motion versus your sales-led motion? And what are your thoughts on it today?

Yeah. Interestingly, hired our first salesperson in January of 2020 because we were building our first Loom for Teams-oriented offering with an enterprise SKU that had your basic enterprise readiness like SSO and SCIM. And we knew that that was going to come out in 6 months. And so we hired somebody 6 months before that to start having conversations with customers to make sure that they'd be willing to purchase once this actually comes out. But then COVID hit in March of 2020. There was a lot of kind of, call it panic purchasing, which actually over the course of the next couple of years, based off of zero interest rate, like cheap capital became unprincipled purchasing processes, not just panicked purchasing processes. And so we had built our sales team and our organization around this freewheeling sort of like go out, close deals, Everybody was broadly hitting their numbers, but it was a lot of like bad behaviors and habits. Like, was this a thing that could actually scale? What happens if the market gets worse? Which it did, you know, and then things got tougher. And so, um, how do I think about it now? I think that when you're a PLG company like Loom, we ended up building out over the course of a couple years an enterprise traditional sales-led motion. Contact us, like we'll tell you that it's $45 per user per month, but we'll negotiate over the course of 4 or 5 calls. And then the range is like $6 per user per month up to like people just take the $45 at face value. And then you got a bunch of reps that are potentially like, oh, I'm actually going to delay closing the deal because I'm going to wait a couple weeks in order to see if I can get more seats at a higher price point. And that's not aligned with how to be most value-aligned with your customers, certainly not as a PLG company where it's mostly inside sales. So the big change that we made starting in October of last this year is that we reset to high-velocity sales model, which is like standardized price card. Like, this number of seats gets you this price per seat. It like removes the negotiation part. We can spend more time on value selling and making sure that we're not actually trying to sell more seats than you need today. We just want to know how many seats that you want, and then we're going to trust that we're going to expand over the course of time. And through that, I think it sets up the foundation for the relationship much much better than the first couple of years. And so we started making this transition to high velocity sales. It seems to be working, but it's been a hard change.

Thank you.

No problem.

Oh, hey.

What's up?

Hey. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the product as well. I use it still on the free plan. I noticed that you said—

Good, you get AI for free too. Amazing.

Yeah, I noticed you You kind of frame it that you guys replace email in some ways, or you are an asynchronous communication tool. There's a lot of buzz that I'm hearing that the way email works is gonna change. Gmail will now write full emails for me, compose them, send them off, and then you're kind of hearing this sort of dystopian idea that someone will then consume that email, read that email, and then reply without the human being ever being involved. You're a person who spends your life thinking about communication and the the way humanity communicates. Where, you know, do you have any insights into where are we going with this and how does Loom fit into all of that?

Yeah, I think that one of the things that we've thought about a lot, like from the very beginning, is that video is actually a really, really efficient way to encode knowledge. So we biologically evolved to just speak, you know, we didn't biologically evolve to like type or write. And so the problem with speaking is that it's relatively unstructured in nature, whereas writing is ruthlessly efficient from like getting it down to the kernel of the idea that you want and then sharing that out where somebody can consume it in the most compressed way possible. And so we've thought that video is very efficient from an encoding perspective, but inefficient from a decoding perspective for the person receiving. And, and the reason why I set all of that up is because there's something interesting about AI and essentially like synthetic communication that I was at an event a week ago. Greg Brockman was talking about, he's the CTO of OpenAI. He's like, every company will have an AI. They'll go out and they'll talk to each other, say like Loom wants to purchase Gong and like they'll just talk to each other and then it'll come back being like, here's the proposal, right? Like this, this sort of synthetic communication that you're talking about, the individual level will likely happen at the company level. And the interesting thing, though, that a lot of AI researchers are talking about is like, well, if the internet generally just becomes AI data, then we've essentially stopped in 2023 of creating net new knowledge for humanity. And then it just becomes this photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. And if like you've seen that, and you like photocopy something multiple times, it becomes much grainier and just shittier, is all you could say. And so there is some concern with that. I think that what's interesting about video being a really efficient way of encoding is what percentage of knowledge and life experience do you feel like you have that's documented in some way, shape, or form? And can a more efficient encoding for human knowledge that's mainly captured still in our brains— you know, it's not documented out in the world— can we actually enable people to get more of that knowledge out of their heads? And into the world. And so I don't know what happens like 5 to 10 years from now with AI. I don't think anybody does, you know? But I think with Loom and video, it's like the encoding part is what we think about a lot. And I think that there's a lot more knowledge to be captured.

Yeah. And in a way, with Loom, how it works at the moment is, you know, if I'm getting emails from people, I don't know if a human wrote it or not. Whereas if I'm getting something on Loom, at least I know that it's a human who spent a minute making it.

Totally. And I think that the thing that I avoided a little bit is because there's plenty of companies out there that do the digital and voice avatar. And so when it's not going to be uncanny valley pretty soon, you're going to get a video from someone and you're going to be like, is that real? And so I just want to say, like, text, yes, but video next. And so I don't know if that's always going to be true. And so I think that that's where we'll get into an interesting world. I've been joking around with some some folks that crypto may actually have its core use cases, like stamped authenticity of like, yes, I recorded this video. Yes, it's me. That's on the blockchain ledger. And that is when crypto might actually have its really, really important consumer application. But we'll see. Amazing. Thanks. Yeah.

Hi there. Thanks so much. Just to add on to that a bit, I wondered, We still take Looms and send them via email, and I wondered if you ever considered completely displacing email so that people were just doing Loom to Loom.

Yes, but I think that for us, for the first 5 years, one of our core product principles is nobody wants another inbox to check. You already have Slack, you have iMessages, you have like when does Loom reach a threshold of being another inbox? And even if we could do it from a business purpose perspective, is that the right thing for users and customers? And so we actually avoided it for a very long time. The only reason why we ended up building comments along the video timeline, which essentially creates an inbox for you to check, is that people were telling us over and over and over again, it's like, I just want the most efficient way to leave a comment at a specific timestamp of a video. If it's a comment, At the end of a video, I'll just go back to Slack and email and respond there. But it's like way more efficient than me having to like type up the context of like, here's where I'm at in the video, can you explain a little bit more here? So that's the only reason why we built comments, which is essentially the first step into being another inbox. And then some of the other things that we talked about, like there's been plenty of consumer products out there over the course of time that allow for async video conversations. It's like you record, then somebody records next, and the next person records. And none of those have reached mass adoption. And I think it's just because doing an async video conversation is hard. It's just not very efficient. And when people pick up workplace communication tools because it makes them faster and better at their jobs, that's the two things that people pick up workplace communication tools. Trying to do an inbox that is based off of async video messages back and back and forth. It just never hit the tipping point for us. And then the last thing I'd say is like the resources that wasn't building the inbox, we actually went really deep on integrations. So, you know, when you paste a Loom link, there's 2,000 platforms in the world that expanded into Loom video inline because we replicated the YouTube model where it's like you don't always want to click a YouTube link to go to YouTube to watch it. You just want to watch it right there inline. And so there was always something that was more valuable for our customers, which is like we're an invisible window that sits on top of anything. We're a link that you can share anywhere. So we should build against integrations way more than we should build against an inbox.

Thanks.

No problem. All right. I think we are all set. So thank you everybody for coming out.