#347: Andrew Berman of Vowel, on Growing Organically via Twitter, Building Remote-First Company Culture, and Taking on Legacy Brands

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital. On today's episode, we have Andy Berman, co-founder and CEO of Vowel, a company that's building a world where meetings are searchable, shareable centers of knowledge for your business. By redefining what data capture is capable of, he's found we can optimize the potential of every team by empowering each member to bring their best and leave the rest. Armed with lessons from his time as a VC, angel investor, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Nanit, $13.5 million in funding, and the power of interactive video, he's aiming to make the future of work as bright as possible. Let's dive in. Andy, welcome to the show.

Justin, so happy to be here.

I am excited to chat about all things Vowel. For people who don't know what Vowel is, what is Vowel, Andy?

So Vowel's a modern video conferencing tool. Uh, we make meetings searchable, shareable. We like to say it's instant searchable, shareable knowledge. And we want to give you a 10x better meeting experience. And I think it's really interesting that we're doing this interview today. As we're recording, Zoom is down globally. And so we're, we're rolling out a free plan for everyone globally, but also just for your listeners exclusively, we're giving 3 months free of our Pro plan with the coupon code JUSTGOGRIND. And so look, What are we trying to do? We're building the modern video platform for 2022. The last generation of technology was built in 2010. And that was built when it was a communication platform. I see you, you see me. But the future of work is different. It's changed. It's hybrid. It's remote. It's in-person. It's anything in between. And for that to work, we've given you a collaboration platform. And that's really what we're building at Valo, a collaboration platform. And our customers love it. And what do we do? I mean, we think about the world from before the meeting, everyone gets to contribute to a shared agenda. During the meeting, everyone stays engaged with a suite of collaboration features. And after the meeting, you get this real magic. Instead of repository of meetings and recordings, you get instant searchable, shareable content. And this is content that you can clip and share with anyone who needs to know or look back on. And so what our customers tell us about Val, it's time travel. And I've been in the video space a while. This is a culmination of a career in a video space. So I'm excited to talk about whatever you want to talk about today. Perfect.

I love that intro because that's something we see a lot now. It's like these companies were built a decade plus ago, these legacy companies and they're trying to update and stay with the times. Then you have new companies come in who are looking at it through a whole new paradigm, this whole new vision on what this should even be in the first place. But I'm curious always with Vowel, what even started this in the first place? What was your vision back then? I'm curious about the beginning always. Let's go back to the beginning of Vowel. Why did you start this company in the first place, Andy?

So I started my career as a VC. I am one of those atypical people who started in venture who became an operator. And I worked at Norwest Venture Partners. While I was there, we did a lot of investing in video conferencing, a company called Lifesize, a company called BlueJeans, maybe a few of some of these. And then I started my first company. My first company is a business called Nanit. And today, Nanit's the leading baby monitor on the market. We track breathing, we track sleep, we track movement. We do it from a video feed. And I hope the listeners out— and maybe the listeners out there are familiar with my brand. And we ran distributed. We had a bunch of— we had an R&D center in Israel. We had a bunch of people globally. We had manufacturing all over the world and a headquarters in a WeWork in New York. And we were consistently running to a conference room, to a phone booth, anything under the sun so that we could get we could get on calls, we could collaborate. And at that time, this was 2018, we tried Zoom, we tried— we were using Skype a lot.

Ah, Skype.

Occasionally we tried Google Meet. And we just got to this place where the audio got good and the video got good. And what I saw around me was all these companies were developing in WeWorks and people are always searching for the phone booths. And I was— in 2019, we started Val with this bet On what I thought would be the next iteration of video. And we set out on a multi-year journey to build the stack, so build our technology infrastructure from scratch, and then build the features that bring delight and joy to our user base. And so that's the founding story. It's all video all the time around here.

I love that. One thing I want to go back to with that is like, Thinking through this at that time, like 2019, you mentioned you started then and you're seeing this kind of in the market. You're seeing that there's an opportunity to do something better. You just mentioned build features that people love, but one of the problems is there's always so many things you could build. How did you decide what you wanted to launch with? What was going to be the first iteration of this product to get in people's hands that you needed? I'm curious about that to start with.

Well, I think it's got to be thousands. I think we've done thousands of user interviews. At this point. UX research is definitely where it starts, whether it's founder-driven, whether it's with a researcher in general. We want to understand your pain point. And we approached it from the pain point of distributed teams because that's what we were. And so we were living and breathing this world where half the meetings were happening 7 hours ahead of us on a day, on a day. And so the only way for us to all get on the same page was to do calls late at night for Israel or early in the morning for the US or for our Asia team. We'd be 6 AM and it just didn't work. And so it started with how can you record it? How can you make it searchable? How can you make it shareable? And other tools out there, they really do. There are recording. I mean, Zoom gives you an MP4 file. It's downloadable on Your desktop, but it's a gigabyte file, and then you have to use ten other tools to even get it to a place where it's searchable and shareable. We give you a link. It's what you've come to expect. It's what tools like Dropbox and Notion and Slack have made you made you appreciate, or even Figma. I mean, like we think of ourselves in a in the same vein as a tool like that. We want there to be hosts. And we want there to be individual people who are collaborating and consuming the information. And that's a very different way of thinking about company collaboration. I dare to say the word communication than ever before.

It's obvious to see why that would be useful. And anyone who's done the video calls and has transitioned into this world understands that pain point a bit as well. One of the things that people will say always, it's like, okay, at the time when you started this, like one being, why did anyone else not do this in the first place? You know, why did anyone else not see this? Obviously you were able to see this. And then from that, even thinking about that side of things, what you saw at that time, then knowing you want to build this, how did you get it in the hands of people? Like what was your idea, your strategy in terms of, all right, we need to approach these people? Because you mentioned some big companies that obviously went more like they like the The consumer, but also B2B. How'd you think about that side of things in the beginning around like, all right, who are we going to launch with? You did all these user interviews, but who are we going to launch this to get this out to? I'm curious about that side of things of distribution.

Sure. So it's been our— when we did user interviews, it was our network, it was our friends, it was people in the industry. When we started building the product problem, it has been— when we launched, it has been almost All Twitter and all organic today. We do almost nothing. I have, I have, I think this is the first week I'm starting to even tap really my founder network. And so what it has been is we talk about what we're building, we're building in public on Twitter, and people follow us. And they've learned about the product through that. And along the way, we've done a lot of user research, we've talked to a lot of our user base. And we're trying to just deliver a 10x improvement of the existing tools.

Why that decision? Why that strategy with Twitter, going organic with Twitter?

I honestly felt that's where makers are. I think our core, the people who adopt us are product engineering and design teams, although we see it all horizontally. And we believed that that's where we could reach them. And I think if you look at some of the other great collaboration companies, that's, it's a very similar strategy.

One of the things too, I'm curious about, because we've seen this in this industry now with the COVID thing and the whole switch to like remote work and everything, a number of different platforms popped up for different like use cases. What did you see as your use case at Vow? Who's gonna love using this the most in terms of like the type of people who are gonna be using this? 'Cause like, I think about obviously Zoom's like the legacy. Skype is legacy. You look at a platform like Hopin, for instance, is doing different things. You have some— I interviewed someone from Run the World doing a different thing. Like, what'd you think of it for that in terms of the use case and who this was going to be for?

So we're not for running large-scale webinars and events. That's what the Hopins of the world and Run the Worlds are trying to do. That's not our business. That's not what we're in today. Today, what we're focused on— we started with the thesis on internable company communication? How do we make it searchable and shareable? We very quickly learned from our user base that I don't just want to do internal communication, I want to do external communication.

Mm-hmm.

And I want to make— and I want to share this with my partners. And all of a sudden, our CSM has seen what is going on and is now super excited to onboard new customers using the Vow platform. And so it's been organic from there. And so it's very interesting when you put out a product, what the unintended use cases are. I think I heard of a friend, I was out to dinner with somebody who told me about their Nanit. They bought it for their kid and they were using it to watch their dog a few years later because their kid is older. That's an unintended use case. And that's something that we never built for and we're not going to, we didn't build features for it, but obviously that's something that a user is going to do.

Yeah.

And so when you're building product, you have a thesis, you have a hypothesis, you can validate it with research, but you got to put it out there. And that's really how your users are going to tell you what they like. And it's your job as a team to listen to them.

You mentioned the 10x product compared to other ones out there. And definitely you hear this in the industry of trying to not just incrementally better because it's not going to do enough for the market. It's not going to be compelling enough. For you thinking about Vowel, what does 10x mean compared to everyone else in terms of what gives the experience that's above and beyond? What other options are out there? Like, what are those core things for you that you think you do better that makes it a 10x type of product?

So I think first and foremost, every meeting's collaborative. So in the meeting, everyone has access to the notes. So when you are, when you're making something, when you're sitting there, there are very, there's a very interesting type of meeting. It's a meeting where you're pushing work forward. So there's an agenda, there are action items, you're discussing specific things, and everyone wants to collaborate together. And what is the behavior that we witnessed historically was people would have a video conferencing window open, and they'd have Google Docs next to them. And afterwards, then somebody would try to go summarize them and share them by email.

Yep.

What we do is we give you this instant artifact. And so it's video, it's audio, it's all the shared links, it's any bookmarks that you mentioned. And all that is neatly wrapped together in— with collaborative notes during the meeting. So, as we start talking about, Justin, you should do this, I can assign you that action item. And we're building that integration layer into your task manager and into every other tool that you would use for communication. So, things like Slack, which we have an integration with already. And, um, And things like your task managers and your, call it documentation. So the Codas, the Notions of the world. And that's our goal, to build this great collaboration tool that's deeply linked. And so that users get the information where they need it and have the context in the tool they're using.

Why do you think with this, other platforms, and obviously you don't have to speak to other platforms, but maybe you could speak to the challenges of pulling this off and maybe why other platforms haven't done this. The challenges of pulling off what you've already done, with having all these things that are so useful for people as they're using this product, which makes a lot of sense and is very intuitive to them. But what have been the challenges of building out this product in the first place of doing what you're doing?

Well, first we have to build our own video stack. So that is incredibly difficult just to start. Then we are focused on building the recording. Then we're focused on building the transcription, and then we're focused on building product knowledge management features. And I think most people in this space approach it from a very traditional communication background. Most people in this space have worked at a few, a few companies. So everyone kind of legacy came out of Webex. There is also the Skype mafia around, and so on and so forth. And when you start looking around, pretty much until the pandemic, there was never really a killer application for video. And then we just saw this massive platform shift, and now everything is on video. Whether you're in an office, whether you're hybrid, whether you're remote. And it's my belief we're going to see a massive company built in this space. And the company we're out there building is Val.

One thing with that too, with the complexities of pulling this off and building that, as you mentioned, which they're not, they're not limited. There's many. Take me through the team building side of things. One, like who you decided to start this company with, and 2, growing this team over time since 2019, because Everyone wants to hire the best team, obviously build the best team. Take me through that side of things, how that's gone, because I'm always thinking of other founders out there who starting companies, always wondering about these types of questions. I like to dig into the details. Take me through starting with the starting team, the founding team, and then how you've grown since then.

Yeah. So my co-founder, our CTO, was most recently at a genomics company that was acquired for around $100 million. He's very good with scalable, searchable data. And my head of engineering spent the last 15 years at RingCentral. For anyone who doesn't know, that's one of the leading voice and video companies out there. And so they've really gone through what it takes to build a scalable audio and video system. My head of product, who's absolutely incredible, spent a number of years at Asana building collaboration tools that people really want to use, and also time at Yammer and Coinbase. And so really understanding the mental models needed to make collaboration work. And we have some incredible designers from Meta and from GitHub, and just were thinking about this, how do I build an amazing consumer experience that's scalable and performant and just really delivers on the promise.

How did you, in the early days, convince them to join you on this lovely journey that is building a startup? Because it's obviously not for everyone, but I'm curious how that went in terms of that.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's definitely not for everyone. I think it's, as a founder, your job is to sell. And you're selling co-founders, you're selling customers, you're selling, you're really setting this vision, you're recruiting people, and you're making sure you don't run out of money. That's the job of a CEO. And I think from my perspective, it was, I think a lot of people believe there is going to be innovation in this space. And our mission to make, We believe that we should make meetings better and more inclusive. And that was a mission that really resonated with people. And by inclusive, I mean, we have people all around the globe working at Vowel. And so, how do you instantly share that information with them when you want to? How do you include them in the conversation? And this becomes such an issue with remote-first and distributed. And look, everyone— there's been all this debate on remote-first, in-person, in-office, whatever you want.

Yeah.

The cat's sort of out of the bag and nobody's in— relatively nobody, and I exclude the healthcare and manufacturing and a few sectors, are in the office 5 days a week. People are in 2 days a week, 3 days a week, 4 days a week. And then the customer may not be in their office and you're no longer visiting the customer. So it's just such a platform shift.

It is. It is. And I'm wondering with that too, how do you look at building your culture, your processes, the way you operate as a company In this remote world? And do you think it's going to be hybrid, fully remote? Because we invest in the future of work at Vitalyst. So we're always kind of thinking about this and talking to our advisors and the companies we look at. But for your company at Vowel, Andy, I'm curious on how you look at that in terms of building out your team, remote versus hybrid culture, all of that.

So today we're remote first. I'm a believer of— I'm a believer that we have to live it. We have to, we have to understand our users' problems. And we are building for what remote-first, I believe, looks like. Um, in the future, will we have pods in certain cities? Maybe if people want them.

Fair. It depends what your employees want.

Yeah. I, I think if, if in the future, if you have a, uh, you have a certain number of people in a city and they want to spend a couple days a week together, great. Am I going to be mandating back to work and everyone moving across the globe? No. And I find it's very interesting that companies are doing that.

Oh, it's fascinating, isn't it? To see that.

It's a quick way to do that 10% layoff. You just don't get to choose who you're laying off.

Exactly. If you want it that bad, yeah, people are gonna definitely leave you at that point, which I always find fascinating in watching these where you're like, really? You're trying to go 100% in person after this shift and you're gonna force it on people. It's like you're asking people to leave. Which maybe they want, maybe they want that. Maybe they're okay with it. If they feel that's a decision for them, but it's definitely something to think about.

And so it's a quick way to cut costs.

Yeah. Fair. And one thing I want to go back to, cause we haven't talked about yet, uh, I know in September of 2021, you raised a $13+ million round, uh, for your Series A, I believe. Uh, take me through the fundraising side of things. You went from the VC side of the table to startup founder. You have that both sides. So you have this expertise. me through the first round of funding. Was it angels? Was it a VC fund that pre-seeded? And I wanna go from one round to the next. I'm kind of curious about your journey on that front because again, at the time, 2019, this is pre-COVID, but there are other video platforms out there at that time. We won't say their names, but I'm curious as to the fundraising side of things, how it's gone.

Sure. It's gone very well. It's gone very well. We raised a seed from Amity Ventures and a number of amazing angels, Kevin Lin, who was one one of the founders, the COO and co-founders of Twitch, among other people. And then we raised a Series A from David Hornick at Alabi Capital, which was formerly August Capital. And David's just this incredible individual. He's been through, I think he's been in venture for 25 years and he's been on the board of GitLab, Build.com, Fastly, and Splunk. And so he really believes in these large software-driven outcomes. And he was totally bought up in the vision. And in addition to David leading the round and it being very competitive, we added some incredible angels. We added Ethan Eismann, the SVP of Design at Slack. We added Freddie, the co-founder of Okta and COO of Okta, so that we could make this searchable, that we could make this platform secure. Des Traynor out of Intercom. And just a whole host of other amazing angels, Tope out of Calendly, and so on and so forth. People who've really built collaboration and the future of work. And that was really important for us.

Yeah, I'm actually curious about that. So how did you look at that in terms of filling out your round, who you wanted on board, the mix of angels versus investors? Because Again, founders, especially when you have options, you're looking at this, one of the most important things, like who are you going to bring on your cap table for the rest of this company here? And in those rounds, how are you looking at that? And did you have people you were very much so targeting on specific things? Did you know you wanted to bring in a bunch of angels? I just want to hear more about how you thought through the process.

Sure. I always believe in having a bunch of angels. I think it's incredibly important. You get to leverage a lot of different people's networks. I have never done the party round. Per se, that a lot of our people have done. My my seed was very concentrated with one fund and then a bunch of other great people. In addition to Amity, we have Box Group, who's just been incredible, and a few other folks. And then in the Series A was heavily David Hornick, and I really had some people I wanted to bring in, and some had been introduced to me. So I met Freddie at Octa through. Through, I think it was Operator Collective. I believe it's what it's called. I met Dez through some ex-Intercom employees. Tope actually came to our website, signed up, and had seen the Product Hunt launch, I think. And I pinged him and I said, we should chat. We love Calendly and we're a big customer. And Kevin Lin, I was introduced to from one of our angel investors, actually.

That's amazing. Uh, it's always fascinating how you find these people and then fill out this round. Obviously they're going to be with you for a while, so you want to make sure the right people, um, in that too, how are you vetting these, these investors? Because you have the investor experience. And so you have that like kind of mindset, you know, some of the questions they're gonna ask, but how are you vetting them to make sure the right people to bring on in terms of your investors?

Sure. So my first company, Nanit, has amazing investors. Google Ventures led the Series C. Um, There's also RRE, Upfront Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, and a number of amazing angels. And they come in in different stages and forms. And so, I was introduced to my seed from somebody I— from my seed investors, from somebody else I know who had worked with them. Founder references are incredibly important. You want to find the good, the bad, and the ugly. And then for the series, when we were deciding on term sheets for the Series A, I asked David Hornick for, I don't know, 7 to 10 references and then reached— spoke to almost all of them myself. And what I loved about him was he gave me 1 or 2 where the deals didn't work.

Hmm.

And 1 or 2 he didn't give, I reached out myself and they were super positive on him and there were just no skeletons there. And so that's why we decided to work with him. It's really important to hear whatever founders say. It was something that I probably didn't do my first time around, but as a second-time founder, it's who do you want to let into your house and you want to get married to? Most of these are marriages. It's like a shotgun marriage. That's really what it is.

Yeah. Just having a few conversations at minimum with all these investors is very important for what you're doing moving forward. One of the things is with raising that funding and what you've done already in the last number of years, you've made a lot of traction. Obviously, uh, things have— good things have happened, but then moving forward is always different than what got you here in theory. So it's like, I'm curious about even with your growth strategy, you mentioned like Twitter has been great with organic. Do you look at, how do you look at like B2B versus consumer, what you're going to go after there? Like just take me through how you're thinking about that, even just from like a high-level perspective as you have this great product that can be used by both. So I'm just curious on how you even approach that.

So I think about it as companies, as our companies' teams, as our core ICP. Today it's companies that are remote first, 5 people to 80 people. Obviously more or less works too. Yeah, we're a free— we're a freemium model with a reverse free trial. So everyone gets 30 days of our business plan and gets to understand the value prop of of searchable, shareable knowledge. And we really, we know over time we will be going upmarket. I think there's this fallacy out there with PLG companies that none of them ever had salespeople. And then you look and you realize Slack had 400 salespeople. And so, we know over time we're definitely going to invest in sales more and more. And we know over time we're going to get out of SME and go and our ICP will become larger companies. And that's what we saw actually with Zoom, with Slack, with Figma, with, I even believe Notions now in enterprise and Coda and so on and so forth. And so it starts out with SME and you move upmarket and upmarket requires sales. And so that's, we have a lot of channels that we're planning on using and we are, we are, we have a really solid go-to-market plan that I'm very excited for.

I love that. What's, What's going to determine that even in making that switch, as you mentioned, upmarket? Do you think it's just revenue numbers? Is it team number? Just what is even going to help determine that side of things?

I think in collaboration in general, it's feature parity. And we've actually gotten to a place where I think we are getting towards feature parity. And it's just amazing. We provide an amazing experience for a distributed team today.

You talked about the business model a little bit just for a second, the freemium side. Has it always been that's the case? Like when you launched it, what was it? And has it evolved since then? And it was the business model pricing side of things?

It's always been— so we launched it free first in April on Product Hunt. And so it was a— we launched it free knowing that we were going to have a freemium offering. We introduced paid plans at the end of July. And we're now focused on monetizing. We provide a very generous free plan for anyone to power their workspace. And we're very big believers that users should be able to use our tools. And then we focus on selling companies or teams our pro plan or our business plan. And that's why we're giving away for your listeners our pro plan for 3 months free with the code, just go grind. But it's a feature-gated type model. The one thing I never want to do is gate the number of users. So we don't have a plan out there that says only 10 people can use Val on a team. Our free plan is up to 12 people. It's unlimited meetings for up to 50 minutes. And then our paid plans are 25 people to 50 people in a meeting. And the unlimited meeting length.

With what you've done in the last few years, you're taking on these incumbents that are large, they've been around for a while, people like know them, but people are willing to change over for things that are better. What have been any lessons, takeaways from that competition of you're trying to steal market share from others who have just been these kind of sleeping giants of sorts? Just any lessons or takeaways from that experience? What's helped you? compete in this market?

Well, I think there's something that's very interesting from a brand and consumer psychology perspective. When you think of the pandemic, what do you think of? I mean, Justin, I'm going to ask you this.

Yeah. What do I think of, like, the failed Zoom calls? I mean, everyone switching over to Zoom and being like, oh, wow, this kind of sucks. Like, that's part of my first reaction, I would say.

So you're competing with that. You're competing with Zoom sucks, Zoom fatigue. I have great respect for that company, but that is the consumer psychology. When I ask you, what do you think about Google Meet? What do you think about there?

It depends. I think it's convenient in some ways to have a better integration with my calendar, but it's lacking certain features, it's lacking different things as well. So it's okay. That's how I view it.

Yeah. And I think people have a long memory of the different strategies Google has tried. So people remember, a lot of people, depending on how old you are, may remember the original versions of Google Talk and Hangouts and Meet, et cetera. And you remember it when it didn't really work very well. And fast forward a few years, it actually, WebRTC, which is the technology that powers Meet has gotten much better. Your bandwidth has generally gotten much better, and we're able to have this kind of call that we're having right now. And so there's a lot of legacy brand frustration, and I think for us we have to think about the product category differently, and that drives it back to searchable, shareable knowledge. And that's a different experience. It's how do I make you as a podcast and not as a podcast host? But as a, as somebody else, a superhuman. Yeah.

With that too. So with what you're competing with in terms of these big companies, was it an easy sell? I mean, you mentioned that your funding went pretty well in terms of raising from investors, but did they get it right away in terms of that? Like looking at like the incumbents in the industry, did they understand right away where it's like, oh yeah, Zoom, other ones are not great. Did they know that? And they're like, we get this pitch. Did they, had they been like, oh, well, other people have tried this and failed. Uh, why yours? Like, I'm just curious on that when you're pitching this even?

Well, I think other people have tried this and failed is very interesting because the legacy category, when you start going back, it looked more like video conferencing with a SIP address. And so Zoom and Meet are real. And I guess to some degree, Webex are really the first iteration of the platform where you go to a URL.

Yeah.

It used to be video conferencing back when I, when I worked at Norwest was an IT person would come in and put in an IP address. And that's how the call would start. And you needed a lot of very expensive hardware. And so I think there is a class of people that say the existing product category is good. And there's a class of people say that the existing product category is horrible. And it just really comes down to where do you fall in? And I think thinking about the existing category is communication and thinking about us as collaboration is a very different way to think about it than— because for most meetings, does it need to be on video? Could it have just easily been a phone call? Why are we doing it like this? Then there's the meetings, though, that I want to push work forward and I want to document the action items and I want to share it with you and I want it to be easily searchable. And I want my team in New Zealand to get the chance to hear it. And I just want to grab a clip. So one of the big features that our users really wanted were clips. So I want to have a conversation with you about something that's sensitive. And then we're going to talk about something, maybe it's the product strategy or the engineering strategy. And we want the whole, we want a few people to hear it. And so the ability to just instantly trim it, just like you probably trim this podcast. Yep. And, and share that. And that looks like Zoom and Loom kind of had a baby.

Which I also love Loom, uh, for many reasons.

So at the end of this, we got to get you as a customer.

Well, hey, we have a team at Vitalize. Obviously, uh, we do a lot of different meetings. Uh, not a lot. I would say we do a lot with founders, and then we have our Monday meetings. So that's something we would definitely look at. file for this. One thing that with what I'm curious about too, and thinking about your journey, so had started a different company before, been at VC before, now you're at this company. Is there any way you're approaching this differently? Like all those lessons from before that you now can apply to this new company? Because there's a big difference between first-time founders and multi-time founders. I'm curious if there's anything for you that stands out.

I'll joke and I say, don't build hardware. So I'm very used to 16 to 24 month development cycles. It's kind of amazing that we can change things, that we can have an idea and push it live in a couple days. So I find that absolutely incredible. I think it's, we're very deliberate in how we hire. Not to say we weren't very deliberate in how we hire at Nanit. I mean, we have an absolutely incredible team there. But I want this company to be fun. And one of our values is work joyfully. And I'm a very big believer that people should work hard when they're here and do the best work they've ever done. Because if you have these amazing colleagues with you doing the best work you've ever done, you're going to enjoy it. And you know what I'm also a believer of? You having rest. Because this is a marathon, not a sprint. So when the day's over, go spend time with your family. Go spend time doing your hobby, your passion, because we're on a long journey to build a very large business. And along the way, there's going to be ups and downs. There's going to be glass we're going to have to walk on some days, and there's going to be amazing days. And you just have to sit there and, and think about the middle. And focus and execute. And that's what we do at Vowel. And that's one of the big things I learned from my co-founders at Nanit. They were experienced individuals. They had built hardware before and they had built it at Applied Materials. They had built these million-dollar machines in semiconductors.

Ooh.

And these are computer vision-based electronic microscopes. That's what they built. And from then they just had the war stories and the battle stories and nothing seemed to faze them. And as a second-time founder, I just know we have to keep going and we will be successful.

With hearing that, I'm curious, what fuels you to start companies and run companies? Because again, we talked about early on, it's not for everyone to start companies. And everyone has different reasons for starting companies. For you, Andy, like what's the fuel with this? You starting another company that also has been successful as well so far, but what's fueled you to even do this?

I think there is this— I haven't worked at a large company since 2009. I've only worked at small companies. I worked at a venture firm that was, I don't know, at the time probably 30 people and has grown significantly. Yeah, I worked at Nanit, and then I've worked at Vowel, and I'm not— and I'm very used to moving things forward very quickly. I'm also very used to nothing is impossible. I used to believe when I was a VC that it had to look a certain way, it had to act a certain way, it had to sit fit a certain mold. And what I've just learned over the past few years is. Sometimes the impossible is possible, and sometimes that will happen. I guess I'd say I'm an optimist, and so is my co-founder at Vowl. We believe that we can do this, and we're willing to go the extra mile. Why am I willing to challenge the status quo? Because I think we can.

One last thing I'm curious about, with you being in a company building the future of work in many ways. Anything else you are excited about, your trends you're seeing into this kind of future of work, things that you think the world is going towards? I just would love your perspective as someone who is in the thick of it, building it. Just anything else that you are thinking about, have seen or anything else?

I think one of the things that people need to realize, and I think a lot of people have realized over the last couple years, is the processes you have to build with a remote team. You have to build a little bit more of them. You have to document more. You have to get very good at your written and verbal communication skills. You have to get used to what async means. And async can be verbal, it can be written, it can be listening to a vowel meeting, it can be writing a very good Slack message. So documentation's very important. Processes become a little bit more important because you can't just tap somebody on the shoulder. So you have to go to the Notion page or Confluence or something along those lines. And I think choosing the right tools becomes very important. So our stack is, I have Figma open in the background right now. We use Slack, we use Notion, we use G Suite, and we kind of use most of the mainstream tools. And then we run the whole company on Val, which I find is amazing. And so I live every pain point of the customer on a daily basis.

Helpful, very helpful. And I know that's the last one, but you got, you got vowel.com, man. Like, was that early on you had this? Like, was that super pricey? You know, you're gonna pay for it right away. Like, just take me through that real quick.

Okay, so that was like a year-long negotiation. Text messages back and forth, kind of spitballing. We didn't use a broker, we did it ourselves. I think on tax day a couple years ago, the individual had originally wanted a massive number, and literally, I think he may have had his income taxes due, and he texted us a very rational number, shockingly rational, and we said deal. I just oh but it went for a year of like back and forth text messaging, being like we're not going to pay this. Like, good luck, find somebody else to pay it. And like, you would, you would be shocked if I told you what we paid for this. Shocked as in low, not high.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, because I've heard of some pretty big numbers of people paying for the .com one-word domain names, which are highly coveted. So people obviously know that vowel.com is where you can find you. Where can they connect with you, Andy, if they'd like to as well?

@Berman66 on Twitter. Find me on LinkedIn. Yeah. And for all the customers, have my cell phone number in as you sign up. And I respond to every text message. I typically respond to every email. I respond to 90% of the DMs. The 10% is like crypto scams.

And it's always those, Andy. There's always those out there.

And yeah, it's good. I'm curious, what are the crazy numbers you've heard for 5-letter .coms?

I mean, we're talking multi-7 figures, right? I mean, we've heard some crazy— I think I'll say multi-7 figures. I don't know if I've heard 8-figure plus, but multi-7 figures for sure, which you're like, it's just a domain name. It's just a .com, but you're like, but someone wants it bad enough, it's worth it when they have this big company behind it, raise a bunch of money. Like they'll do it, right? So it is interesting.

But I always think we paid—

if you're saying that it was reasonable, I'm thinking you got it either 6 figures, probably 6 figures, but maybe 5 figures because you're smiling. I don't know, maybe less. Maybe I'll nail it, uh, this last minute.

Throw out a number.

Uh, 200,000.

Well, maybe you're gonna have to have me on the show next time for me to give the answer.

Tune in next week for the second part of Andy's interview. Andy, thank you so much for your time today though. I really appreciate it.

It was a pleasure. Thanks again.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Just Go Grind. If you want to follow along on the socials for all things Just Go Grind and with me as well, You can find Just Go Grind on Instagram and Twitter @JustGoGrind. You can find me on Twitter @JustinGordon212. Find me on Instagram @JustinGordon8. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye.