Loom’s Growth Journey From Nearly Broke to 14 Million Users & $1.5 Billion Valuation with Vinay Hiremath

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A lot of people just work and their mission is to get a job. Their mission is to save up enough money to buy a car. These are not things that fulfill you. Think about if you could choose who you would want to be in the future, what kind of a person would you want to be that would allow you to get up every day and say, okay, I'm willing to go through a bunch of shit to get there.

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AI.

I'm rarely super pumped and jazzed as much as I am today. To interview somebody with us we have he can fly like a bird, sting like a bee, faster than a speeding bullet. The man, the myth, the legend. Vinay Harmath, founder of Loom, who took the company from maxing his credit cards. Inches away from Shutting down to 14 million users and the biggest VCs on the planet funding them. 1.5 billion valuation. Forbes 30 under 30 man, it feels like you've done it all at such a young age. Super excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I'm glad that my profile screams needs therapy to the max.

So Happy video creation is nothing new, but like you've just exploded it with 14 million users. Give us the backstory. How did you and your co founders come together?

Why Loom?

What else did you consider for sure?

Yeah, I thought a cool stat that we surpassed recently that kind of put like the magnitude of where Loom is because like after a certain period you don't really understand. I would say after 100,000 users, you don't really understand, like, the magnitude. It's hard to even imagine 100,000 users, at least for me. We recently surpassed a billion minutes recorded on our platform, which to me, I was like, first of all, it pains me to think, okay, how many of those minutes are just people like redoing their recordings? Because I think our user experience could go a long way to helping our users record better content. But then also I was just like, wow, that's. That is a ton of video. And yeah, I certainly, just so you know, I'm offering that off to anchor and say that, like, early on, we certainly didn't have a video platform that had a billion minutes worth of recorded content on it in mind. Actually, me and my co founders, we got together and really the number one thing we wanted to do was A, just work with each other because we were good friends from before we started the company. And then B, we just wanted to build a culture that we thought supported makers and supported the people that quote, unquote, actually get work done, which is largely the IC that are like building your people operations or building the product, designing it, shipping it, marketing it. And so we saw the way that our previous bosses have built cultures and we were like, we want to do things a little differently. And then B, we just wanted to start a company and ideally do something that just had some moderate level of success. And so really we just started with a weekly meeting that ended up not being weekly and ended up ending within the first five minutes of us running the first one around, me and my co founders thinking about different markets we could disrupt. And since we just love working and we love hacking, basically the first idea we came up with, we just stopped the meeting and just started opening up our laptops and working on it. It ended up being user testing and iterated in that space for a while and eventually landed on Loom over like a six, seven month period.

How did you meet your co founders? Friends? College?

What was going there? Yeah, so Shahida ended up interning at the first company that I worked at. And. And actually me and Shahid really didn't get along at first because I used to be a pretty abrasive person and I had also dropped out of college, so I was bringing a lot of brat culture into the workplace, which you learn as like someone who is hanging around like fraternities, that this is not how the world works. And usually people don't like to be treated the way that most bros treat each other in fraternities. And Shahid actually really didn't like me at first and we butted heads a little bit, but then we ended up becoming really good friends because me and him ended up going to the gym together. And so from there we like, ended up starting a YouTube channel where we have, like now unlisted all that content because it was a prank video channel. And we just didn't want that to, like, surface again. And thank God, like in today's cancel culture, that we did that. And then we ended up being like, roommates and we ended up just becoming really good friends. And then I ended up meeting Joe because I was trying to scalp tickets. I was trying to get tickets to this electronic artist, his name's Feed Me, and my friend couldn't find any tickets. And so we ended up realizing that this artist was playing down in LA two days from then. And so we rented a couple motorcycles and just went down to LA and quickly realized that we didn't know anybody in la. And the only person that I actually knew was a friend from college. And that friend from college, I hit him up. I was just like, hey, man, can I crash on your couch? Turns out this guy was childhood best friends with Joe, who's my other co founder. And then I introduced Joe and Shahid together when Shahid ended up working down in LA because he had no one to get, no one to stay with, and she'd ended up crashing on Joe's couch. And then they became roommates and we just started hanging out a lot. And so.

So what would be one key takeaway from that for others? Trying to look for co founders. I think the key thing here is relationships. You guys worked on some smaller projects together, and relationships, of course, transcend companies. You guys got to love each other, hate each other. It's like a marriage. But any other learnings in terms of finding the ideal co found?

I feel like I've met so many people who have found co founders in so many different ways that I truly don't think there's a one size fits all answer. I've met people who have started companies with their best friends like me, Shahid and Joe did, but it ended up blowing up and really not going well because there were just like a misalignment of values. I think the most important thing for finding a co founder is honestly just finding someone you respect and you have a base level of trust with. And from there it's mostly about aligning on what you both want out of that experience. And from there, the most important thing to align on in My opinion is just how hard you're willing to work. So, like, the biggest problems I see from co founders that are just like starting their companies is not communicating enough feedback about what's working and what's not. And then the second thing is not being aligned on, hey, this one founder is working nights and weekends and this other founder is like just turning up like for the weekend. But during the week they're like, oh, work is like really important. I think those misalignments of commitment is where a lot of problems happen. So as long as there's alignment there, I think you can find a co founder out of many different people. If you can find it out of someone who's also a friend, like, amazing. But I think it doesn't always work that way. And I've seen enough successful companies start from people slowly looking for a co founder that they didn't know before. And so I wouldn't say that you have to do it with your friends, but I think it's more fun to do things with your friends in life in general. That's just like a philosophy I have.

Fantastic. But the key themes there are respect, trust and values. Alignment. Said it perfectly. Great companies are built on great alignment. So let's walk through the first several months, maybe first eight months a year of working on Loom, you had a big break that saved the company. Tell us more about that. How did you get your first customers that first early days? What did that look like?

Yeah, I think the backdrop that is really important to remember is that we had been pivoting for six months, which you can basically translate into failing and not having any success for six months. And so at the time that we had launched Loom, it was a mix of a pivot based off of information we had gathered being like just iterating through the user testing space and looking at video and how it was being utilized at work through like user research and user testing. And then it was also a bit of a Hail Mary. Right. So we ended up decoupling our recorder from our user testing platform. And so when I think about the first 30 days, there was like a huge spike when we launched on Product Hunt. So when we ended up launching on Product Hunt and decoupling the extension from it, there's this like huge spike in usage, which was amazing. We actually ended up having a couple of investors come down to our place and they were going to end up cutting us a check for 50k for our pre seed round, which seems minuscule now based on the rounds that are getting Raised, but they were going to cut us a bit of a pity check because they had seen us iterating so much and they just believed in us as founders. And we basically sat them down and were like, hey, we know we were going to hit you guys on user testing and this user testing platform and the progress we've made, but you guys should sit down because we have launched something and we don't exactly know like what's going on, but something's going on. And we ended up getting, I think like on that Saturday after launch, we ended up getting more signups than like all of our previous iterations in the user testing space combined and also like including the launch of Loom itself. And so first 30 days were honestly a little bit of amazement, a little bit of relief that we had hit something, a little bit of relief that we didn't have to go back to finding work and working for somebody else. But then also a bit of disbelief because we almost couldn't believe that there was so much word of mouth growth and natural growth and we were honestly wondering, is this going to stop? Is this going to stick? And we just didn't really know. And so there was also, I'd say even within the first, let's call it 180, let's call it within the first six months, there was always a question of like, okay, well how far can this thing go? Because we had just failed for so long having anything that was a success. It was like, how big is this going to be?

What was the key decision point that caused you guys to split out this video recording feature from the user testing? Was it customers telling you or was it a gut feel saying, let's put this out there?

It was a little bit of a gut feel. We had made the recorder upload while I was recording and that was for non technical reasons. Actually it wasn't because we wanted to make this awesome video recording product. It's because people didn't want to wait for their video to load when they were submitting user testing feedback. They wanted to just be able to get out of that flow and get paid. And so we kind of got feel. We're like, okay, there's these like Snapchat ask like video messages for maybe giving resume feedback or giving feedback on something else. That was really where our heads went. Maybe we can launch this, we can get some growth and then funnel that growth back into the user testing platform. And so it was a bit of intuition. I think that we also did have a bit of intuition that was backed by me and my co founders believe heavily in if you're going on a long journey, you should understand the landscape and how you plan to navigate it. And I think that one of the most important things about starting a company is like what are the market and user pain hypotheses you have and how do you like make sure you document those hypotheses and evolve them over time. So there was also. We had started developing hypotheses about video at work and like how it could be used. I just think the intuition was off from how big the opportunity actually ended up being.

Definitely. And then you launched on product hunt. You said you didn't expect this kind of growth.

What were some things that you maybe.

Accidentally or deliberately engineered in there that drove that sustainable growth and word of mouth from launch to month over month after.

The one positive benefit of failing a bunch is that you get really good at understanding how to launch because you just have to launch a lot. Right. And so there's a few different things. One is that we definitely did. We were a user testing platform. And so before we launched the recorder I would go, I had this ritual of going to Phil's Coffee Shop in San Mateo and literally just putting my computer in front of people and harassing them. Because the great thing about desperation and us running out of money is that you are willing to do anything to make sure that something works as reliably as possible. And so I would literally go to Phil's Coffee Shop and just put this recorder in front of people and be like, hey, click this thing to start and click this thing to stop. And I would give them no other instructions about what it was. So I started to refine the product and we ended up. I actually still think it's the ultimate user experience. Of what? Of loom, which was you just click the extension once camera automatically turned on. There was no 3, 2, 1 countdown. You were just recording and then you click the extension again to stop and you just got a video. We didn't even have video titles back then. It was amazing to go through and refine the product down to the least number of steps. So I definitely think that's one thing that helped. The other is that we got really good at faking Personas that we didn't have. Now anybody who started a company like understands this is that you have to instill the marketing message in other people and have a belief about how will it'll be used. And so we had some use cases on our website. We didn't really believe em. We were like, oh, you can use this for sales outreach and like marketing. But in our heads, we were like, this is just gonna be a video recorder that people use for like, resume feedback. And we also ended up building like a marketing page. Cause we just got really good at that from other product hunt launches. The other thing is obviously the performance of the recorder, which has gotten significantly better over time. But for me, I just feel like performance and speed is just. It's an ultimate feature that. Especially if the parallel for people is that things are really slow. And we knew that the parallel people had was like record something with QuickTime or whatever other like the Windows Media Recorder, upload it to YouTube and then share that video out. We knew that was the frame of mind that most people were coming from. And like, I. I do think that speed, even within the user testing tool like that, is an ultimate advantage of Loom. And right now it's speed plus performance. With the number of users that we.

Service, would you say that was a big aha moment for people trying it out? Because I do agree, right? You got to record, then you got to post it to YouTube and then share. So you talk to users, you watch them, but just doing this yourselves, you inherently know that there's multiple steps, you cut them out, and with speed and performance, delivered a delighted state. Would you say that's the aha moment that drove the word of mouth? Or what was it?

It's funny because that's what I would have said at that point. I thought the aha moment was when people, like, landed on their PA and they were like, whoa, like, this is like, super fast. That's what my engineering brain thought at the time, what we've now realized. And we actually have the aha moment and then the habit moment clearly defined for our product managers. Now, internally, the aha moment for Loom is actually when you get a view on that video. So actually, because Loom is a new user behavior and most people still don't record video at work, you end up getting a subset of users who are like, oh, this is really cool. And they have a certain psychometric profile. Maybe they're more comfortable on camera. Maybe they're more confident with sharing this kind of information and they just start using it because they're like, oh, maybe I can do it for this, maybe I can do it for that. But it's not immediately obvious even to them, like, what they'll use it for because it's a new behavior. And so we baked in that category for quite a bit. And I'd Say that we're still there. We're maybe at the later stage where it's still like early adopters, early majority, which is crazy to think that we're probably still in the early adopters phase, just given the scale that we're at. I still think we're in the early adopters and like late majority phase. I think that what then happens, the actual aha moment is when you get a view on that video. So when someone sends that video and then they get a view and then the other person is, thank you for sending me this video. Thank you for not like this just makes it so we don't have to hop on a call or it makes it really easy and we don't have to send a bunch of messages back and forth with screenshots. That started happening to our users a lot. And then there was almost an aha moment for me, Joe and Shahid. We almost went on like a spiritual journey of sorts because we started seeing people. Like the great thing about user generated content platforms is that you start seeing people use your tool in ways that you would have never imagined. If you were to tell me that Parker Conrad of Rippling was going to raise a $250 million round using loom, like using Loom, I wouldn't have believed it. Not even like a long time ago, even two years ago, I wouldn't have believed it. But that's like now happening. I guess that's one of the really cool things about platforms where users create content is that there's actually aha moments for the people who are building the product too, which is ne.

So you talk about that aha slash magic moment. They experience the wow. And maybe one of the wows is they see somebody getting a view and then they reach back out. But then how do you turn that into a habit? What are some key ingredients to creating a habit moment?

Man, that's such a good question that I think if our VP of product had a really good answer to that question, she'd be very happy, so she'd want to hear it. But I think that there are certainly a couple of things that you can do. One thing that you can do in order to create behavior, like the most common primitive to create behavior is like in product is notifications and sometimes for good or sometimes for bad. With Loom specifically, I think that there's a couple of things that are really important for the behavior. One is that video is really heavy. And so people that are baking onto Loom within an organization, it's our. We see it as our jobs. And so we ended up releasing Loom hq, which is our system of record. We see it as our jobs to surface the most relevant content to you when other people are recording. And that's a really strong way to create a behavior because it's linked to notifications about relevant content that your co workers are creating. There's obviously other ways of doing it where if somebody signs up and they're in engineering, we surface content to them from engineering leaders being like, hey, you should probably use this for code reviews, you should probably use this for architectural diagram overviews. You might want to use this to record like postmortem meetings, whatever it might be. And so I'd say that there's like a mix of use cases and a mix of notifications. I would also say that ending like for us specifically, something that's really important for the behavior is that people end up using Loom as a communication enhancer within channels that they're already talking in. Right? And so our integrations into those ecosystems like Slack and Zendesk and GitHub and Gmail is really, really important. It's really important that we meet our users where they're at. We make it as easy as possible to create and share content or find content that they already created and put it into the channel that they're communicating in. I think the third layer that we think about creating more behavior is how do we automatically refine and polish video content for our users over time. And so we've invested a lot of time in making editing over video as instant and easy as possible. And what we're going to start releasing, we've released trimming and stitching videos together and it's all instant. But eventually we'd like to automate the editing for people. Especially in the messaging use case. We've released a couple features. One is that you can remove filler words so you can remove ums and ahs out of the video. We're going to be releasing more features like that that just give an extra level of polish and shine to a video that give people a certain amount of confidence to use Loom over and over again. We also think about like the information architecture of our recorders since we are in the business of changing behavior. Basically the question you asked could be translated into what is our product roadmap at this point? Like everything that you see in the product, everything that we're releasing is in one way, shape or form to help our users be more productive and more efficient with video. And it's in order to create behavior change. Definitely. And there's a few things you talked.

About in terms of frameworks for people to think about. One is the triggers via notifications that you notify people, whether it's an external trigger or an internal trigger, but then they do something and they experience the wow. And then you're meeting them in the channels where they are so they're not going to a whole new channel. And so that forces them to keep coming back through triggers and getting these rewards. Near Royale has a great framework called Hooked, which really I was visualizing that is like trigger. They take an action, they get a reward, and then they make a long term investment to keep coming back. That is fantastic, man. I love it. At what point you thought that you had product market fit? Because product market fit has various definitions. If you talk to Rahul at Superhuman, he says your NPS should be over 50. But this is seems like more apparent here. People keep coming back. But was there a specific goal, no go timeframe for you to drop this and pivot to the next thing? What was it that said, I think this is it.

It's so funny. So Raul is a friend of mine also near y'. All Amazing book, Hooked. It's a little tragic that we're using that same reward pathway to basically reprogram society for lower level consciousness with Twitter and TikTok and other platforms. But I won't go on that rant. I think on the product market fit question. Look, the way I describe this to people is you can get really analytical about things, but there are just some things that have inherent limbic resonance. And I feel like product market fit is one of those things where it's, I don't need to go to a party and ask people if the party is cool. You just know if the party's cool or not. If someone's telling you that the party is cool, it probably isn't. And so like with product market fit, the most important thing in my opinion is the thing that has no quantifiable data to back it, which is, does everybody around the table that's building this thing feel like there's product market fit? And so for us, like technically we had product market fit and we launched on product on, right. But we didn't really know until we saw sustained growth. And I could give you a number of what the sustained growth should look like. I could give you our viral coefficient, I could tell you our nps. It's very good. I don't know why. I think that we have a lot to improve about our reporters, by the way, I think that we're investing in a lot of qualities. So I saw that there's some users of Loom on here. We are investing in the quality of the product. If you have any feedback, please DM me on Twitter. But also I could give you like all of this quantifiable data about what product market fit actually means. But the truth of the matter is that product market fit at the base layer is just going to feel like you have hit something that solves a significant user pain and has sustainable growth within some sort of channel. And there's a bunch of measurements you can put on like the channel market fit. There's a bunch of measurements you can put on how long people are spending on your platform, but that's going to shift over time anyway. And like what ended up being good enough early on for Loom is no longer good enough for our current, like current KPIs. And so really I think the most important thing with product market fit is does everybody around the table believe it? And I gave you like a few things that go into that, but honestly, I think this is one of the answers where quantifiable data to me is like not. And I know that Rahul would disagree with me on this, but it's not as important as does everybody around the table just say, yes, we have product market fit? It seems pretty obvious.

You talked about this perfectly, right? The magic moment, they experience this wow and they keep coming back because you're forming a habit that's a leading indicator of product market fit in many ways. Because those people, if they keep coming back, they're retained, they're sharing and whatnot, eventually that leads and converts into metrics. But would you say those two things that you define the magic moment and the habit moment were keys to getting to 14 million users or more?

I mean, there were certainly keys to getting to 14 million users or more. And there's a lot that goes into that. But also I think related to like product market fit specifically, it's like Vanta, perfect example of a software that helps us enable SOC2 compliance. I don't need to use Vanta very regularly. Like the product market fit is SoC2 compliance and US retaining as a customer. I think that the magic and habit, like the aha moment and the habit moment are very important to loom. I think the number of users and the growth we've had in some ways is more related to timing in market, in the market opportunity. And it's actually, even as an investor, I always Think about things through timing of market and total addressable market and what the market motion is and how many different lateral pivots you can do within a market. Before I invest, but I didn't have that mindset when I first started Loom. It's something I think about as it relates to like the total number of users or like the total number of revenue. It's like we're beholden to the market that we operate within.

Now, speaking of markets and investments, you invest as well, but you were weeks away from shutting down and then raised 200 million from top investors like Sequoia and recent Kleiner. What were your top learnings? Maybe you can share to make fundraising easier for founders, especially in this market.

Yeah, and this market. This is an interesting market. I think the first thing I'd say is that this was advice that I gave even early on. The thing about the current market is that valuations have gone way down. People are less inclined to invest capital, but that capital has already been printed. And so all of these funds that exist, the velocity of that capital being deployed is slower, but the capital is still there. And so the thing I would use to your advantage here is that you have a bunch of operators of these VC funds and they're willing to take meetings, right? Unfortunately, those meetings might not lead to much, but they're still willing to take meetings because their job is to collect information and understand what is happening in the market. And so what I would do is I would definitely meet with other investors. If you can't meet with other investors, that's like another topic of conversation. But meet with investors and don't try to raise capital right off the bat. If you're not in that situation, if you are in a situation where you have to raise capital, this answer is going to be irrelevant. And I can give a different answer based on that. But I would just, I would meet with a bunch of VCs, I would keep them on a newsletter and be like, hey, we're not like actually raising money right now, but we are pivoting a lot and we're building a lot and we send out like a newsletter that happens, let's say like once a month, once every two weeks, once a week, whatever you think is the appropriate timeline. But keep a bunch of investors on the back burner of, hey, like, this is how fast we ship and this is what we're learning. And if you can show that you're a formidable founding team and you're thinking about the market, that is going to set you apart. And when the time comes to raise, or when you need to raise, or when you absolutely have to raise, hopefully an investor is going to look at you hitting some sort of product market fit and they're going to take a bet on you even if they don't understand where the market's going to go. I have other answers to this, but basically I think outside of that, specific to the current market we're in, I think within seed it's important to understand what your unit economics are going to look like. And it's also important that in the current environment you have a high performance culture and a high performance team like growing at all costs is not going to work in the current market. The amount of forward looking revenue multiple that you can raise on within the current valuations has gone way down, which I personally think is a good thing overall. But you just have to understand that interest rates continue to rise and people will reduce the amount of velocity that they deploy their cash Capital and other LPs of funds will pull that capital out of these funds because they want to diversify their interests elsewhere. And so just show that you're a team that is able to iterate and learn really quickly, build an investor network that is watching your progress and then try to go in for the sell. If you have to go in for the sell and raise capital right away, I have a different answer for that. Let's dive into that.

Let's hear that. I think I completely agree. Right. Communication is everything, relationship is everything. Taking investor money is like a long road and you should be building relationships when you don't need the money, keep them updated and when the time is right, it'll fall into place. It's like content marketing, it's like inbound marketing. Right. But let's say you don't have that and you need to raise capital right now. What are you seeing out there from companies you invest in or the best founders you talk to?

I think the best founders that I talk to, if you need to raise capital now and your capital efficiency metrics aren't there, the best founders I talk to are masters of the market that they operate within. And so the reason why this is so important is because VCs want to know right now that this is going to be an investment that leads to some level of capital efficiency. If you are a startup that's trying to build a social app, this probably doesn't apply to you because the only thing that's going to help you is having traction. And so if you need to raise money as a social app right now, and you're in a position where you just absolutely can, and you're about to go under. That's a very tough position to be in in this current market. And I don't have good advice for you. I don't want to make it doom and gloom. Like, you should probably talk to other social app founders to get their perspective. I think that if you're building a SaaS app, though, like, the way I describe whether or not someone's like a good presenter is they don't like word vomit. Everything they possibly know about the subject on you, they're talking about a very specific part of the subject that they know. And, you know, they're a master of it because they actually know all of this. They're only talking to you about this small part of it. And then anytime you veer off of the talk track, you're able to expand. And so, like, even this conversation right now, like, you probably know that I invest because I was able to say, if you're not in this situation, like, I have a different answer. Right. It's like the way that you deliver a great presentation or you win people over is you know a lot about what they care about right now. What investors care about is what does your market capitalization look like in the long term? And how do you show me that you're de risked over time? And so that's going to include product roadmap of getting revenue and being efficient with getting revenue, as well as an understanding of the market and where you can pivot. And then also how the recession is impacting your market and why the investor should care or not. And the more you know about your market, the more you know about the different pivots you can make to get to capital efficiency. The more you're going to seem like you know what you're doing, and the more FOMO the investor is going to have about not giving you money. Because they're like, okay, maybe I don't know whether or not this idea is good, but I know that the founder knows what they're talking about and they're thinking about the things that are important in this current market. And do I really want to wait and not invest in this person? And then if they start something in the future, maybe later in the future, or they find another investor, I'm like, damn, this is like the one deal that I should have invested in this year that I didn't. That's where you want the investor to be. And in order to do that, you need to care about capital efficiency and you need to care about the market that you operate in. So before maybe like a year and a half ago, you could have been like, we just have a bunch of users. This looks cool. Give us money. Because a bunch of other people will. That's not going to happen anymore. So you need to really know what you're talking about. And there's no way to shortcut that. You have to just think really deeply and iterate and pivot and ship and execute. Definitely.

What's the best hack you found for getting in touch with investors? Are you dead if you're not in Silicon Valley or New York City, you don't have a network. Like, what is the best hack you found?

Yeah, you're definitely not dead if you're not in Silicon Valley or in New York. In fact, the number of college grad limates that there were a number of college grad limates who were thinking about where to spend their careers and I think only one of them chose Asaf. Most of them chose New York. But that's also selfish because I want a bunch of people to move out here to New York. I think there's multiple ways you can get in touch with investors. I think the first thing is what is the purpose of an investor? And I know this is like philosophical, but like the purpose of an investor or the purpose of a creative agency in Hollywood is that there's some scarce resource. In this case it's capital. And there are the gatekeepers of capital that allow people to exercise allocating that capital. And so ultimately you're getting capital to allocate it. And there are gatekeepers of the capital that exists. And you're not just going to get it. So one way is to go to a bank, another way is to talk to a VC. How do you actually get VCs to take you seriously? It's yes, raw execution and knowing what you're talking about. But it's also, are there other people that those VCs know that hold you in high regardless? And so if you have friends in your network who know VCs, you should get to know them and let them know that you're starting a company. Let them know that like you're not looking for like carte blanche investor intros. If they're not willing to make that yet, but ask them, be like, look like, can I just keep you posted about what we're doing? Because I actually really value your feedback. And also, if at some point we need capital, like, I would love to reach out and get you to intro me to somebody. So it's like a value first sort of relationship and then you show them that you're legit. If you don't have anybody like that, then you have to show the world that you're legit. And I would do this anyway is I would start a Twitter account and just start building in public and talking about your ideas and building that up so you have some street cred online. I would do both of those things, but I would definitely do the first one, especially if you people in your network that know VCs. If you don't, then you're going to have to reach out to VCs. There are a lot of VCs out there that are willing to take meetings. Again, like I go back to this point of like, he started a Twitter. If you started talking about things and you seem relatively smart, VCs will take meetings. There will be investors out there that take meetings because they're sitting on a lot of capital that they're not deploying right now. And so I, I think now is the best time to actually take meetings with VCs, and I think it's actually the most accessible and you just need a Twitter account. I would highly recommend you don't scroll on Twitter. It's terrible for your mental health. But it's a separate conversation.

There's something to be said about like building in public. I see Andrew Gazdecki and we had him on here, do that really well with Microacquire. He, in the last year and a half, he went from nobody knowing who he is to like raising lots of money from Bessemer, having a lot of customers, huge following. Effectively, if you talk about it and talk about the traction and the progress and the failures, you'll attract VCs because it's their job, like you said, right. Hollywood agents, their job. They have a scarce resource and they want to scout the best, best talent. Now let's dive into the people side of things, right? Great companies are built with great people. People build companies, not the other way around. You guys started with being kind of individual contributors, doing everything yourself, and now scale to a big team. When do you create and delegate roles? Let's walk through like different stages, right? Validation, product, market fit, growth and scale. How do you figure that out?

Yeah, I think early on it's, there's certainly early on with your co founders you probably want to figure out like who is going to be the CEO, who's going to be in charge of engineering. If you have multiple engineering Leads. Is there one person that care be down for managing more than the other person and just trying to figure out like the roles and responsibility. Because there's someone who would probably be in charge of investor relations. Is there somebody who does sales? Like, I think that when people come together, there's just like natural roles that you want to align on. And you, even if you can't align immediately at first, like, you should definitely have the conversations about the swim lanes and where everybody's at. And that is like an alignment point between you and your co founders that you want to have like as soon as possible, in my opinion, because you want to be focusing on building and scaling the thing. And at first there's like these role contributors, like domains that you own, but you don't really have a company. Usually people are not taking it super seriously. And you can just be like, I'm the guy who does design or I'm the gal who does sales or whatever. Right? And that's how it starts. I think as you scale up, you start to see some natural bifurcations of what people are naturally good at. And there's like this spectrum of what are people naturally good at and what do people want to do. The amount that people care about doing things they don't want to do has an inverse correlation with the size of the company. And so the bigger the company, the less people are willing to put up with things that they don't want to do. And that has to do with specialization. It has to do with the intrinsic motivation of building the brand and the brand becoming bigger and nebulous and not something you can like, super relate to. Like, I doubt that anybody, like, there's probably very few people at Microsoft who are like, I bleed Microsoft. And like, I want to get up every day to just do what's the best thing for Microsoft. And so early on, this is like, not a problem. And so you get these like ancillary roles. And early on what I would do is I would interface with their lawyers on like, immigration stuff. We didn't have like legal counsel. And so I would interface with their lawyers on immigration stuff. And the reason that came up is because a lot of engineers are not from the U.S. like, a lot of good engineers are from India or wherever else. And so I just naturally was like, I'll handle this, like H1B situation. But eventually you want to hire a legal counsel, right? And eventually you want to like, delegate out. And so it should become like a pretty natural thing. I think as you get to let's say that you start to scale to around 10 people. I would strongly suggest that most people bring on someone within people operations, someone who's thinking about like compensation, someone who's thinking about benefits, someone who's thinking about like some of the legal side of things, collecting feedback, stuff like that. I would strongly suggest it around like 10 to 15 people. Once you get past like an org or team size, like if any given team has like more than eight people, let's call it. I would definitely start thinking about bringing in a manager. People can only really effectively manage six to eight people. There are like rare instances where people can manage many more, but only for like short periods of time or by giving up other things. On the coaching front. There's other areas of scale though. I think that this is like also a question that's intimately tied to the product and like where the product goes and like how fast certain teams scale. Because the ratio of certain teams to other teams also indicates how fast you need to delegate out and how fast you need to hire. The only advice I'd give is that when you do hire someone, hire someone who's smart and give them autonomy, but give them the responsibility too. So like when you delegate out, learn how to actually delegate. And that's like the hardest thing for founders and it's the hardest thing for first time managers is like you start in this role where you felt in charge of this one thing that only you had. And you do have to like give your Legos away. And so a big part of this is like actually giving your Legos away. And then a big part of it is also admitting when you're really not good at something. Even if you want to be good at something, that's something that happens a lot is you want to be really good at project management. But maybe you're not. So maybe for your org specifically you need to hire like a technical project manager, even if that's not applicable to other teams. And so I don't have like good generic advice other than there are certain team size breakdowns. You want to divide and conquer the swim lanes. And actually if you're a new leader taking over a new team, like I ended up taking over the people Org late last year. The first thing that you want to do is you want to understand like what does everybody else do? What do they think your job is? And then what are the swim lanes? And if the swim lanes aren't clear between your team, that's your first system of delegation, is making sure the swim lanes are clear before you do any work, work. And that can be painful too. So swim lanes are really important. I think that once they're established, though, people generally, if you have a high ownership culture, people generally just pick stuff up and then you hire in specialists. As people tell you, hey, like, this is becoming like a lot of work. And I think it's really important we hire someone.

In terms of hiring and hiring the right talent and finding them, were there some key things you learned along the way? Now building it from zero to hundreds of people, hiring specialized talent, evangelizing people to join your vision, your mission.

So there are things that I think we've done right and wrong. So I'd say that one of the top things that you can do to hire good people is we live in an age, this is the way I see it anyway, is that we live in an age when where there is like a ton of information that people are consuming at all times. Having a voice and being right is one part of being a leader. I think now more than ever, the thing that people really crave is authenticity. Like you see it in the culture. You even see it in like the counterbalancing forces of the culture. Like cancel culture is like a big part of the cultural conversation that we're having online at work. Like anywhere you go, it's cancel culture is a big thing. And so I think like even the silencing of information is, is an indication that people just want authenticity. People want people who are willing to like, say what they truly believe, keep it real and just tell people straight how you actually feel. And so the first thing that I do for like actually hiring really great people is just don't be an npc. Like basically don't be a non playable character for anybody who doesn't play video games. Like, a non playable character is that person that you talk to who just has the scripted lines and they like walk into walls sometimes because of the bad programming. In the video game, you want to be a main character and you want other people to feel like this is a main character. I want to follow this person because this is a main character. And so first thing and most important thing really is the founders and the leaders just have to have main character energy that is like way more important than like most things that you'll do. The second thing is that you want to make sure that you're really clear about what values you care about and then what values you don't want in your culture. And that's a hard exercise. It's a hard exercise because especially as you scale, you almost can't say the values that you really don't want in your culture because everybody is strongly aligned with their values. And so you're going to bring a bunch of people into your system and in your culture that maybe don't align with those values. But I would pick one or two values that you really care about and I would make sure that, yes, you might have like other values that your company cares about. We have a set of cultural values, me and my co founder, we actually refresh our cultural values every 18 to 24 months. And we have like exclusively reserved the rights to own our cultural values as execs and then get feedback from leadership about what we might want to change, what seems representative or not for the culture. But I would pick only a couple of those values and make sure you are really testing for it and make sure that you are rejecting candidates that don't align with those cultural values, the ones that you deem the most important. Because if you end up bringing in people who believe in a value that is in opposition with how you think about product roadmap priorities or how you think about sales priorities, like as a startup, you are giving up your biggest advantage, which is instant alignment. So you can just get to executing. You should be spending as little time in planning and alignment as possible because that is your major advantage over massive companies. And so I'd say before, like from 0 to 140, pick one or two values that are incredibly important. Pick one or two values you do not want someone to embody and care a lot about and then test for those things. We ended up implementing something called a top grading interview that I think everybody should run at their company. It's basically going through someone's resume and asking them the same number of questions of what problems did you solve? Diving into those problems, how would your manager rate your performance on a scale from 1 to 5? Why? How would your coworkers rate your performance on a scale from 1 to 5? Why? And then there's a couple of other questions, but then basically, what made you go to your next job? What was your drive to going to the next job? And you asked that for every single step of that candidate's journey within their resume, which is exhausting, I know, but the benefit is that you get a real understanding of whether or not that person truly embodies the values you care about or whether or not they embody values that you don't want in your org. And then you also understand whether or not this is a person that has an intrinsic growth motivation. Because you ask a repetitive series of questions over the entire career. So they can't just pick and choose things that make them look good. If they do, it becomes very obvious over a long period of time. And actually, this is like how Elon Musk interviews people. He's just, what problems did you solve? Like, why did you pick your next job? What was your relationship like with your manager? And you could. You can go really far with that interview. So I would tactically give that up as advice. It's hard to.

There's a great. There's a book on that as well, top grading. You can search it on Amazon and you'll find it and read all about it. There's a bunch of YouTube videos on that as well. Now, one crucial but super hard skill is learning how to figure stuff out. Like doing hard things that haven't been done before and like dealing with ambiguity and figuring things out on the fly. How did you learn that skill or master that skill?

I think it's something. The thing about doing things on the fly is that you can only really master, master the skill by doing things on the fly. So I don't really have a good answer for you here other than, like, you do it. The only thing I would say is that your ability to do things on the fly is going to be impeded by your natural. Basically, there's like a growth curve of the company and then there's a growth curve of the individual. Right? And like when the growth curve of the individual for a sufficient amount of time does not match or exceed the growth curve of the company, you start to become ineffective in your role. And this is especially true for leaders and founders. And so the major. What are the major things that end up impeding your growth potential? That you have direct control over how much time you're investing in your work. That's like a major one. So it's. You're falling behind in work. You're really bad at project management, you're really bad at something else that you really need to learn on the fly. Can you invest more hours in it like that? That's going to be like a major contributing factor to you being able to grow. And it's the reason why when founders are figuring shit out, especially when they're not good at everything, they're pouring their entire lives into their work. And if they're not, like, bad things start happening for the org because the org still needs you to fulfill these roles and duties. And so that's the first thing. The other thing Is like, if it's important enough to the company and you don't think you'll be able to ramp on it fast enough and you still think you're the best person for the role, do you have enough capital to hire someone to do that? Or do you have somebody on your team that's naturally better at it than you, that you can delegate it to? That's another thing. But it's basically time and capital, like, those are gonna be your two biggest impediments to continuing to maintain your job and learn and do shit on the fly. And then the third thing that you can't change is like your natural aptitude. For me, if you were to put me in a design role, like, I'd probably be fired within, let's call it like a month. If, like the culture is generous. So they're just like also things that are just like naturally your aptitude towards certain things and you absolutely wouldn't be able to do it.

If you hate doing something, don't do it.

Yeah, you have to sometimes, like, you have to. But for sure, if you can protect your energy, then that energy for you as a leader is going to matriculate into the entire org and people are going to do a better job because they're like, oh, our leaders are super stoked about what we're doing. Like, we should be stoked about what we're doing. So protecting your energy is like really important too. If you're a CEO in a lot of ways, you're a chief energy officer as well.

It's the marathon of the mind. Speaking of that, if you look at it, the biggest outcomes in business are founder led, Shopify, Airbnb, Dropbox. So it's really important to be in top shape mentally. Mental health is a huge topic. People don't talk about it. Especially if you look at Silicon Valley, where I lived for a number of years, until recently moved to Dubai once. Crushing it until they're crushed. What are some things you've done to stay at the top of your game? I've watched you on Twitter, you're working out, you kickbox, but you're a high energy person, right? What do you do to stay in that mental frame?

Yeah, the thing I would caveat is that I've been a high energy person like for a lot of my life. So like a little bit of background. I grew up. I didn't grow up. I still have it, unfortunately. When I was 14, it started becoming apparent that I have depression. And actually a lot of people in my family do like, we have a history of depression, there's multiple suicides. There's a trend line in my family that mental health by default for the operating system we were given is not. We didn't max out on the mental health score like early on in character creation. Early on, I had to master my mental health for me personally, just because it was a necessity. It was like, I certainly wouldn't be able to have this conversation with you. I had to teach myself how to have real, full conversations with people. I would go to the mall and literally just talk to people and muster up courage to talk to people and learn how to, like, communicate. Because even communicating with people was so difficult. And so for me specifically, mental health was not really a choice. I reached a point where I basically had to decide, am I going to work on this or am I going to unfortunately allow the other side of what would happen, which is a significant degradation of mental health, potentially suicide. I definitely thought about it more than a few times in my life. And so for me, like, it's a necessity for me to think about my mental health because when things go off the rails for me personally, they go really bad. And so I. I was able to build like a few frameworks as I started to understand myself a little bit better. And I think they're generally applicable to other people. It's all the things you would expect. So I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't know. Get really good sleep. It's really important. Work out. I think everybody should lift heavy weights. I know that a lot of women are like, I don't want to get really ripped. That's not a problem. You have to lift heavy weights for a long time. Just do it anyway. I think it's really important. Yeah, like, exercising in general is so important, but I think there's an undercurrent. Like, the reason that people end up getting burnt out is that the reason people end up getting burnt out is not because they're working really hard. It's because they're working on shit they don't want to work on. Like, no one is really excited about what they're doing and thinking, oh, man, like, I have to put in more hours. No, if you feel inspired about the things that you're working on and the people that you're working on them with, you don't end up getting burnt out and you end up protecting your mental health. I think a big thing that leads to that is having an understanding of mission and goal. And so I think a lot of People, they just work and their mission is like, to get a job. Their mission is to, like, save up enough money to buy a car. These are not things that like, fulfill. You think about what kind of a life do you want to be and what kind of a person do you want to be? If you could choose who you would want to be in the future, what kind of a person would you want to be that would allow you to get up every day and say, okay, I'm willing to go through a bunch of shit to get there. And so I think a mission and a purpose and it'll evolve over time. I have a framework that I've used for myself, but it's gonna be very personal to each person, is figure out values that you personally care about. A mission that you wanna drive in the world and let it be like, small and able and tangible to start. And then just else, like, start like widening it over time as you prove to yourself your capability and what you're able to get in life. And a lot of that times that's out of your control. Cause terrible things happen to people. But I think that mission is like, really important. And then from there you'll want to work out, you'll want to do all these things. Like, the things will become easier. And even if you don't want to do it anyway and like that. I know that's like advice that people don't like, they're like, oh, great, like you're telling me to do it, so I get it. Like, I know it's hard, then do a little bit of it. If you don't like to. If you find it really hard to sleep, see if you can put yourself in bed by a certain time. And you might not get to sleep, but, like, at least you're in bed. If you don't like to work out, like, work out for five minutes and then do that for a week, and then work out for six minutes the next week. Say you can apply this. This is Atomic Habits. Like, great book 101. Like, you can apply this to anything in your life. But I think the central thing that people really want, that's like the much harder pill to swallow, is that if you don't like your work, if you don't like your life, you probably don't have much purpose. And you should just admit that to yourself and try to find it instead of blaming the system. Like, I. I feel like that's like a huge thing that's happening online. Oh, but it's the system I'm in. And Like, I hate capitalism, I hate, like, work. Like, I wish I never had to work. And it's news flash, those things aren't going to change unless you think you can change capitalism overnight. Like, you should probably prioritize wanting to care about your mental health and wanting to care about your health. And like, the central thing is that you don't have a purpose and so find one that works within the confines of the systems you can't change and then accumulate power and status and wealth and then change those systems. If you want to change those systems, accumulate the power first and then change them. But don't complain because if you complain, then like, you're not going to get anywhere. And people certainly won't allocate capital and opportunity to you within the systems if you want to like completely uproot them and you hate them. So it's a little bit of a rant. But I think that most people who don't have good mental health, they just don't have purpose. And I'd get off of social media, that's like another big thing. Like, social media is just such a terrible thing you can do for your mental health. If you wake up in the morning and you're instantly checking your phone and then you just roll out of bed into the job you don't like, no wonder you hate your life. No wonder you do, like, remove the things that are like draining your dopamine and your serotonin and these things that literally motivate you to get up and go do stuff and then reassess. You have to build that up over time. But I think purpose is a big part of it. I think unfortunately, like, everybody's gonna just have to go on that journey for themselves. And like, for some people, you just can't catalyze it. You have to let them hit whatever rock bottom is for them in order for them to be like, fuck this, like, I want to change.

I couldn't agree more. I went through a lot of mental health issues myself. I left the day to day of a company I co founded and I had to find my own purpose. I deleted every single app on my phone other than WhatsApp. And my only connectivity with the world is literally the traction. Webinars and email, but no LinkedIn app, no YouTube, no Insta, nothing. Moved to Dubai, uprooted myself from the FOMO of Silicon Valley. 12 hours time zone ahead and focus on a whole bunch of different things to find that purpose. So I couldn't agree more. As you look back at your journey, what was the toughest, lowest point. And how did you navigate it?

Toughest, lowest point. You know, there's honestly so many points, honestly I think that one of them, and it's one that's very relatable and I've been told by my marketing team to not bring this up, but I'm going to bring it up anyways. We ended up going through layoffs not too long ago and I think that you don't need to get all serious. We've been through it. I think there's a lot of founders that are going through this right now. And I think that when you go through it as a founder, you feel a certain level, you feel ultimate ownership because you know that your job is to be able to navigate the market and understand what's happening. And there's like a lot that's happening in the market that's completely out of founders control. To be clear, I'm not saying that this is completely on founders, but as a leader you have to believe that you need to take ultimate responsibility for everything in your life. And so you start to wonder like, where are the areas where I didn't take responsibility that led us to here? And I think that was a really dark moment for me and my co founder and we ended up, we've made it through it. It still doesn't make things right. There are a lot of people who ended up having to find new work, ended up having to leave loom like it really sucked. But that was certainly a low point in a different way than I wouldn't have expected. And it's no coincidence that I am prioritizing mental and physical health over everything else because I consider it a major contributing factor to where we had gotten. There are other situations. I think that when we had first scaled up in Covid, when we had first gone through our first level of COVID scale, all of our systems were breaking. Some of our like, one of the things about being a people leader is that the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more that people have to deal with in their personal lives. So as an ic, people aren't going to be like telling you, oh yeah, my wife got cancer or my kid passed away. And you just think that these are things that happen to like people out there, but they're happening to your coworkers all the time. And like during this period where Covid is just starting to ramp up, like all of our systems are failing and I'm trying to do my best with Jude, our VP engine to like wrangle this chaos, it's hard because everybody is just, like, pulling 16 hour shifts. They're trying to, like, keep things online. There are people who are like, reaching out to you, saying, hey, I know I need to work. But, like, they're breaking down and just saying, I don't know what to do about this Covid thing. Like, my grandma is in Italy, right? And she just sent me a photo of them carrying bodies outside of our village. What do you do in that situation? I think that period of time was another dark. Like, despite us growing, it didn't feel positive to me. Like, it felt extremely dark. And that was. I have so many stories like this, there's a bunch of dark moments. I think that the more you scale and the more you go on this journey, like, there are extreme highs with being a founder when things are going well, but they certainly come with extreme lows. And I wouldn't change anything. Like, I think I've learned so much as a leader because of them, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. But, yeah, they certainly suck. And you always tell yourself, oh, I'm like, better now. I'm not going to go through another dark period. And then something else happens. And I guess that's life. It's life in general. And people who think that they're not putting themselves in those situations, like, life will throw those situations at you, regardless, it's better to prepare for them. It's better to have good mental health. It's better to do the things that lead to better mental health. It's better to take care of your physical health. It's better to make sure that you have a support network and you prioritize having friends. It's also really hard to do those things depending on where you're at in life. And I don't know.

I couldn't agree more. Support network, working out, meditation, prioritizing your mental health. Pain ultimately is the precondition for growth. Right? In many ways, it's like bodybuilding or something. Every time you increase weight, it's progressive overload. You just get stronger for it. And when I look at your Twitter, I think it summarizes, get rich or get jacked in the. Or get jacked trying. Don't die trying. Get jacked. Right?

Yeah. To be fair, I think my Twitter, and then I have a bunch of videos that I'm editing. I'm going to start a YouTube channel, too. All of these things are like, for me at least, they're in service of increasing the values I care about in the world. And I have five personal Values, it's freedom, authenticity, courage, inspiration, and kindness, in that order. So everything that I'm doing from like a media standpoint is to increase those values. And then the second thing is I would love to live a life that I love. And so I would love to hopefully help people live a life that they love too. And I think that's going to be like a central theme for a lot of my presence online. And I don't know if I'd be like, posting like, the fact that I did a random marathon or that I wouldn't be posting about my fitness journey and all that stuff if I didn't know that that also garnered views and it helped promote certain values that I care about. Right. Like, to some degree you have to play the game. And at this point, I am doing these things, but I'm also just like, playing the game. I don't know how else to put it.

That is amazing, man. You're helping the world and the people around you with your learnings while going through it yourself. And there's no bigger gift. And there's something to said about the karma you get from it. Right. There's great joy in just paying it forward and giving back. It always comes. Vinay, where are you most active?

I know you're most.

You're very active on Twitter. Are you active on LinkedIn? Is there anything else that we should follow?

I am not very active on LinkedIn. Not a big fan of the platform. I won't go on that rant, but I'm not very big on LinkedIn. I'm pretty big on Twitter and I'm starting to post more to Instagram. And then my YouTube channel will be live in a few weeks here. I'll be active there, obviously, but Twitter's probably the best. Yeah.

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One last question to close this out.

What's one piece of unconventional advice?

We talked a lot here.

Lots of nuggets here, lots of gold. But what's one piece of unconventional advice? As you talk to founders they ignore, but they shouldn't.

Oh, man. Okay, so here's the thing. I can give you the answer, but what I'd say is that all of those things, basically all founders will have to make those mistakes anyway because they, like. It's one of those things where wouldn't it be nice if we just got advice? And every time we got the advice, we just followed it and we didn't have to make any mistakes. But then you don't like really know the lesson. And so like people just have to go on these journeys themselves. But I would say that you said unconventional, right? Yeah. One piece of unconventional advice I'd give founders is that there are times where you want to be open minded and you want to listen to your team and you certainly want to promote diversity. Like you want to promote diversity of ideas and within your org. Like I truly believe that leads to better outcomes, but make sure it's the right kind of diversity. And so what I mean by that is if you have a strong vision for like how products should be built, how things should happen, like making sure I go back to the story of like values. I think that you want a diversity of backgrounds of people who have like different perspectives. You don't really want like a massive diversity of values. It's better for you to be strong headed in your values. And anybody who tells you that you should be like really open minded to new value systems, don't listen to them because they've never led anything at significant scale. Competing value systems is a huge problem at scale. And so set the tone, right? Make sure you understand that everybody is aligned with the values that lead to success for what you think success will be. And you might be wrong. And if you're wrong, it's terrible because the company fails. But the thing is that you're taking the responsibility to be wrong. You're the one who's in the board meetings, you're the one who's raising the money. You're the one where things go wrong. You can't just leave like other people can just leave. You can't leave. If you do, you might end up like lobotomizing your relationships with the entire VC network. Make sure you are strong willed in the values you care about, the strategies you care about, and make that clear to your team. There's this amazing framework on Do Try Consider. I think that there's a blog post by Asana, Here are things that you, you should do, Here are things you should try, and here are things you should consider over time. If you want to hire really good people, they don't want to be told what to do. Like they don't want to be told what to do. So you want to move things into the consider category by default. But maybe there are a few things that you want to tell people to do. I would say that like your value system and what people should care about from a value standpoint, this is not like a checkbox of your culture. Even though it reads like it on every single HR blog post. This is like a fundamentally and philosophically really important thing for your organization. Have a strong opinion, like it will take you really far. And I think most of the conventional advice is to like, people don't really know how to apply the ideas of diversity to like winning. Like honestly I don't even know, like I'm still going on this journey as I scale up and I'm sure I'll be wrong in like many things I said on this call. I just think that being strong willed in what you value is like really important and other people are looking for that kind of leadership. So do it.

I want to take one last question. Sorry about that. It's been asked a few times. In a competitive space, given Loom also wasn't like the first to market with that product.

How should you think about it?

What did you do, if anything to ignore and flush out the competition around you?

Yeah, within a competitive space ultimately you have to understand. So within a competitive space you're offering a product and you want to understand what is your differentiation. And so the first point of differentiation is being first to market. So with Loom, we were lucky to be first to market within our category. There were a couple of competitors that had been like earlier to market, like I'll give a few like shout outs. Hi Fi was on there like screencastify, like first to market for the category you're really serving. For us it was like video messaging and video recording. Over time there are going to be other competitors that come in market and they're probably going to try to differentiate based off of something that they don't think you do very well. And so for Loom, we started to see competitors pop up that were hyper siloed. So the thing that we took really seriously at Loom was being horizontal. And we still take that really seriously. It's like this is a general workplace, video messenger and utility and recorder that you can use for marketing, you can use for sales, you can use for internal and external communication. We still believe that. We think that paid off big time. But there was certainly a moment where like competitors were popping up and there were investors who were like, hey, if you focused on sales and went really deep there, you could generate a lot of revenue. And we're like, that's not the right answer long term. And so you're going to figure out these differentiation points on brand and marketing and then also on what features you offer in sales. And the features you offer in sales feed into brand and marketing. And so I think that Those are really important points. The other thing that I would bring up is that people like to spread a brand that they feel a connection to. And I'll go back to this. This is, like, famously said there's an interview by Steve Jobs when he was at Next Computers at mit. Highly recommend anybody that's working in a competitive space. Watch this lecture. It is like, basically an hour of pure gold. Anything I say, he'll say like, a million times better. But the thing that, like, really resonated with me is if you don't tend to your brand and you don't understand why people, like, affiliate with your brand, you're gonna end up becoming undifferentiated. On a primal level. Like, the way that people choose to use products is primal. Like, you could look at an Android device. There's a ton of Android devices that are actually better than iPhones in specs. But, like, why do people choose Apple? And it's like, there's a lot of companies out there. There's a lot of people that have personal brands. There are a lot of things that there's a lot of information out there. In a world where there's a lot of information, you need to earn the right for people to give a shit about looking at what you're doing. And so whatever product decisions you make, whatever, like, operational decisions you make, that is going to feed into your brand, and you should, like, really take that seriously. So there's all the product and feature stuff that I could talk about. Okay, do you want to go verticalized? Do you want to go to horizontal? Do you want to, like, price at this price point or this price point? That's not necessarily interesting. There's like, a million people that have written blog posts about it. I think the thing people really pass up, especially in today's day and age, is just how important brand is. We, like, recently shipped a candle called the Smell of canceled Meetings. Like, where do you want your brand to be? Like, when people ask me, what's it like to be on the leadership team at Loom, I'm like, we're like a bunch of hippies that are also capitalists. Capitalists. And it's, what is your brand? What do you stand for? Stand for something. And this is why I go back to, like, main character energy. Like, I think it's so important to have main character energy. It's going to feed into everything else you do. Yes, Brooke, I agree. I thought it was genius. Honestly. It was, like, more successful than any other brand campaign we ran was a candle stand for something and do things that make your team, when they stand for those things, happy. And I think that a lot of good stuff comes from. And I hope we don't. I hope we don't lose sight of that either. At loom.

Fantastic. This was gold in every sentence. Do things differently, stand for something, be opinionated. Love it. Vinay, wishing you great success. A few more commas to that valuation. Love and peace, my friend. Thanks for joining.

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