Malte Bucken - Previous Cofounder of Tripcombi

Well, folks, we are at the end of season two, Founder Journeys. In today's final episode, we're going to really have an interesting conversation about building a company with a distributed workforce. The challenges that were present before the pandemic and what's happening now, but also the additional challenges that you're faced with when your founders are in different countries as well.

3, 2, 1.

Yo, what's up, everyone? Back at it again with another Founder Journey series. Today we've got my German friend Malte Malta is an awesome entrepreneur. We've had lots of great conversations as I've watched him build his company. He's originally from Germany, obviously, and moved to Canada with this company and now he's in New York. We're going to talk about this journey that he's had, this epic journey. The company was Tripp Delta, and then it changed its name to Trip Combi and then it got acquired. Malta, thanks for joining us today. Give us a quick background who you are. Tell us about Trip Delta, Trip Combi and the company that is today and a little bit about that industry.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Good to be on here. So, yeah, I'm Malte, born and raised in Germany. In 2014, moved to Vancouver. That's how I met Ray. And I was actually building a travel company called, well, Trip Down Trip Delta at the time. About a year and a half or so in, we got sued Bell Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines didn't like us using their name. So that's founder lesson number one.

Kind of a David versus Goliath story, right?

Like, yeah, so when we, when we started Trip Delta, one of the first things when we, when we founded it was we, we talked to a lawyer about it and it's like, hey, are we going to run into any issues using the term Delta? He's like, no, no, no, no, no. You'll win any lawsuit. But that's the thing you're going to. You have to win that lawsuit. And that means there's going to be years and years with litigation. So.

And that lawyer's probably sitting there thinking, yeah, money, money, money, because you're gonna have to pay for it.

So we got a cease and desist and then first thing we did was change the name. So that was that. So we build a travel startup and what we did was we built travel routing mechanisms the way that a human would. So we realized, I think this was in 2013, that when we were booking flights, we were starting 10, 20, 30, 40 searches and we would combine airlines and different airports that the standard Search engines, cheapware, that's where I work now. And Fair Portal, the company acquired us, was not doing that. Expedia, Kayak, if you went there, you had things like hacker fares or something, something like that, but they weren't actually as powerful as you could be as a human being. And so we started with our background. So my co founder and I, we met in university doing our master's in mathematics. So we're doing a lot of machine learning courses then. And we decided, okay, there's got to be a way to do this better and to do this in an automated way for someone like my parents to be able to do this without my help or without me spending an hour, two hours finding these flights.

And so to break that down, if I was to book a flight from San Francisco to Columbia, actually Sam's probably a bad idea. That's Seattle from to Colombia, Medellin. And I was using Delta. If I book with Delta, it's going to give me all the Delta related flights as opposed to, if I look for myself, I could probably find a cheap flight from Seattle to Mexico City and then Mexico City to Medellin. Two different airlines, but probably at a fraction of the cost because the airlines take advantage of that, right?

Yeah. So one of my favorite routes was always we had a buddy at launch who's Australian and he would book one way tickets because he didn't know how long he wanted to stay in Australia. And the, the one way ticket might have been Delta, I forgot which one. Probably not Delta, but Air Canada was like 1200 bucks because they overcharge you when you book a one way. And so what we would tell you is book with WestJet from Vancouver to Hawaii, spend eight hours in Hawaii or a day or two and then book from there. And you could save $900 by just combining those two flights. But you'd need to know which airports to use, where to have to stop over, and that's kind of the magic. It worked incredibly well on one way flights on round trips because you often have discounts on round trips that didn't work as well. But if you wanted to fly it one way, we could easily find you 60, 70, 80% discounts.

Yeah, especially for young travelers like that extra 500,000 bucks. That's like all your spending money for the entire trip right there.

Yeah, I never cared about stopovers. For me it was always okay, I can actually spend an extra day. Like this was back in college days. I could spend an extra day in the city and I had all the time in the world. But I had no money. And I was like, this was actually a benefit for me. Now that I'm a bit more busy and I have limited vacation days, I don't know if I would book these flights again. But back then, that was. That was a big thing. And that kind of gets me to a second lesson. It's just really know your audience. Because when we started, we always thought everyone would want to. Would want to book this, right? Like, hey, who doesn't want to save 300, $400? And we didn't realize that we thought the. Or initially we thought the entire world would be, you know, our addressable market size customer. And then only through very painful conversations with you and other people that we realized that we really needed to hone in on who is our customer, what is our addressable market, and who's actually interested in this product. And so that's kind of what we did that first year at Launch Academy when we started working on our pitches, et cetera, just figuring out who's our target audience.

Yeah, and I totally remember when you came into Launch Academy. I don't think I was the one doing the screening to see if you're accepted in, but what I learned about your company, like, wow, that's actually an awesome product. It's not for me because I do a lot of business travel and I've got all these different requirements. I can't have these long stopovers. But it was 10 years ago or I was not working and I was traveling just on my own. That'd be an awesome tool. Like I said, like you said, the stopovers are actually a benefit, especially if you can coordinate it and you save that extra money. But it just came back to, okay, you're trying to go too broad and you need to really hone in on those younger demographics and cater towards them. And that obviously worked because Delta came knocking on your door to sue you for using their name because it was successful. If you weren't doing anything, they wouldn't care. But you were actually making a lot of noise and there was a lot of searches. And I remember your. Your company was doing really well, and then you got acquired and then you got shipped off to New York. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so we. We started off in. In 2014. So I moved to Canada in July 2014, and I actually moved for my now wife. She's. She's Canadian. We met backpacking. One of the reasons I started this startup was I needed to find something to do while I was in Vancouver. Waiting for my permanent residency. So we had lived together for a year and Canada allows to file for a permanent residency doing that, but while you're waiting for it, you're not allowed to work. And so I was in Canada on a tourist visa or working travel visa or something like that, but it was nothing that would give me, you know, like a proper job opportunity. I've just been backpacking for, for 18 months. I needed a proper job or something to do. And so we moved to Vancouver. In July, we started Launch Academy and we also started applying for accelerators. We got the first product out, I think, or we launched with the first one around the same time. So July or August, our POC came out. We got accepted into the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator. That was not an awesome opportunity for us. We got our first funding through the German government, actually for people who were out of university for less than two years. You had to write a business plan and then they would give you equity free money with which you could, I think it was about 150,000 Canadian for three people to fund your salaries for a year. So it was a modest salary plus some money that you could spend on server costs, etc. And then through the Microsoft Ventures accelerator, we got $500,000 in Azure credits. So more than most startups can ever spend in their lifetime. So we knew we got funding for the first year or two and we stayed lean. It was two co founders and I. They were working remotely out of Berlin. I was working from Vancouver. We always called it 247 coverage. We did the whole startup grind. Always first at the office, last one out, you know, working gruesome hours. And they did the same in Berlin. So that was the first year kind of. And then once that money started running out and we had released not just the poc, but you know, we're actually live and the MVP was up and running. We applied for Y Combinator, we got accepted to the interview stage, which was super exciting. And then we went to, we flew to San Francisco, went through the entire interview process, prepared like crazy, thought the interview went incredibly well, thought we were in for sure. And then we got denied. That was probably one of the roughest nights we've ever had. But we sent them an email afterwards and they were actually really nice about it. They gave us make a super long response and just talking us through a couple of points. And this was before HitMonk was acquired, so we thought they were big into the travel space, but they were kind of actually actively trying to get out of it. And so like One of the.

We'll jump into, like, financing and investors and all this other stuff in a few minutes. But that's one of the problems is that you, as an entrepreneur, you're doing your homework, trying to find a good fit. Y Combinator, Hipmunk, they're in my space. This would be a great fit. I can learn so much from them. And then you apply. But there's decisions for that, no behind the scenes that you don't know about. And I know this firsthand. A lot of the time, it's not a knock on you and your company. It's just. It's not a fit because we're trying to move away or we've got a lot of interest in health tech right now, and there's so many companies that we can only accept, and we'd rather focus on health tech companies and not another travel company. Not a knock on you because your company's decent, but it's just not a fit for us right now. And so how, again, you followed up with them. They're very kind. But how did you guys, as a.

Team.

Deal with that rejection?

It was hard. It was really hard. With startups, you have so many highs, and I loved my time being a founder, and right now I'm an employee. But I dream up the day when I can be a founder again. And my wife dreads it because all I remember is the high. The lows are super low. That one was a rough one. Fortunately, I was really good friends with both of my co founders. One week. We've been friends for a few years. We've been studying together for years. The other one, we kind of met through the startup process and it ended up being a match made in heaven. So the three of us, we. We just, we talked it through, analyzed. We're the three of us, super, super analytical. So analyzed the heck out of it. And, yeah, got through it. But it was a rough week or two where you're constantly, Are we thinking, are we doing the right thing? Okay, so Y Combinator doesn't think that we're the right fit, but at the end of the day where it kind of made us more determined to succeed, it's like we want to, we want to show those, those folks that, that they made a mistake. And they, they openly say so too. Like, they love to see that they made a mistake and they do want to see founders succeed.

So I want to kind of segue here. You talked about how your relationship with your co founders was solid. It was kind of match made in heaven. But we all know building a company is not easy. And in the best of times, you were split between Germany and Vancouver. And I know a little bit behind the scenes, but there's some issues and challenges that you have to go through when you're building a distributed team like that. Walk us through that. Like, how did you guys make decisions? How did you guys resolve conflicts?

Yeah. So the. I think the most important one is just be a good communicator. Communicate openly if something bothers you. We have the policy of don't hold back. Just we let the other person know when something wasn't going the way that we expected it to. We were on calls constantly. Slack was probably the best tool that could have come out. I think it came out that year. 2014 was around. There couldn't have been any better for us. That was the two. Like, I was on Slack constantly when I wasn't. I was on the software engineering side when I wasn't programming on Slack constantly and then Skype calls all the time. But we did yell at each other probably once, twice, three times a day just because there was so much tension going on. You're constantly at that frustration level when things aren't going well. I was talking about the highs and the lows a little bit. And so you're constantly on edge. And so it was really important to me to have founders and co founders that came to visit and I visited them and we could just hang out and drink beers and have good conversations and we, we could yell at each other and then two minutes later we'd be best friends again and just talk about other stuff. We were really able to compartmentalize. This is work and it has nothing to do with you as a person. You're awesome and you're one of my best friends and you're the person that I spent most of my day with. And so you really need to be comfortable around that person and just really get along great. You fight. And then two minutes later it's like, okay, let's go for lunch.

Yeah. It's not easy to just say open communication and talk, but it takes effort. And all parties need to be able to be willing to buy into it and be that open with their feelings. And there's issues and the grievances and whatnot. What would you say was kind of a defining moment for you to recognize? Okay, this is something that can definitely be a co founder or something I can build a company with. We're kind of going way back here too, when you guys were just starting to connect. But like, what is it that rung in with you that, okay, hey, this is somebody that I'd want to build a business with.

So Max, that's the co founder that I studied with. I think right before we started the company, we went on a backpacking trip through South Africa and we rented a car and we went from Johannesburg to Kruger national park, which is, I don't know, a four or five hour, six hour drive, something like that. And we started talking about a controversial topic right at the start. And we pretty much kept yelling at each other because we thought the other person was an idiot right then. And then up until the point where we arrived and then we just took our bags and just like, okay, what do we do now? And we both forgot about it. It was. No one got personal. Everything was about the topics and what we wanted to do. And so at that moment I really knew, like, okay, this is the guy where, you know, an argument is an argument and you can just go there. And shortly thereafter, we decided to start looking into startups and to do that. And then with the other founder, he kind of stumbled into the situation and talking about perfect matches, we actually had two more co founders along the way. We started the company with someone who was a friend of a friend who ended up not doing any work. He was working remotely from us and we were constantly trying to reach him. He wouldn't answer our messages. And then at some point he got pretty ugly and was a pretty, pretty ugly conversation where I made mistakes and he made mistakes and we ended up splitting and he decided to work on something else. And then we got a second person on board. So this was part of that funding round that the German government gave us. You didn't get the money? The person got the money. So we had to switch out that person with the German government with the funding. We got a second person in who we found through again, friends of friends who then backed out after two weeks because they'd gotten into a PhD program. And so, you know, months into this process, we have already lost two co founders. And then we found Nicholas. And after four months of them working together, we had a clause in our founders agreement that by December 31st we would say, okay, this works or it doesn't because we've been burned so many times and we had no idea what we were doing. No idea what we were doing, right? So we had all these weird clauses in our contracts in there. It's like where you're not like. Because we were traveling so much and both Max and I were such crazy Travelers. It's like, okay. He wanted the ability to work anywhere in the world. And this was at a time where no one was really working remotely. So he was like, I want to go to Nepal and work from Nepal. And I was like, okay, you need to work in a location where you have at least this much WI fi or your connection has to be this fast. And we had all these insane conditions that we put into, like a contract and then actually signed.

So even to that fine detail, like, hey, you gotta make sure you have WI fi connectivity. X number of days a week.

Yeah, yeah. We were like, we were so green, we had no idea what we were doing.

So that's actually an interesting segue. So you. So you guys were avid travelers. And you obviously from Germany, now you went to Canada and then now you're in New York. Tell us about. Well, you kind of touched on traveling for your personal life. What does traveling from business look like? And building a company in three different countries. Walk us through that journey.

Yeah. So first advice I want to give, don't get into travel.

It is the worst industry, especially right now. I don't think they're doing too well, especially right now.

Margins are slim. It's hyper competitive. Everyone thinks, hey, I can reinvent travel. Everything has been tried, pretty much everything. We got incredibly lucky that we were as successful as we were. We got a niche that just ended up working. I don't know if we could have done it ourselves if we hadn't been acquired. Just looking at the numbers now and knowing what I know now, and I've been in this industry for a long time now, so don't get into travel. That's my first advice. And then how do you build a business? It's just be really passionate about something, find something that you really want to work on and then execute the heck out of it. We made plenty of mistakes, but we pivoted quickly and early, and we realized this was. We were not going in the right direction. And we asked everyone, you know, under the sun if they could help us and here and this and there. And you were so great at that too. Like, you had your mentoring hours and I sat down with you and then a few other folks at launch where any opportunity that I could get, I would just talk to people and try to. To reiterate through the product and through the thought process. I had never worked in a larger company, so I actually had no idea how any of these processes worked anywhere. And I was just trying to get constant feedback both from mentors as well as from the community. Just. Yeah, just experimenting and trying to get things done there.

And do you find any, like, can you pinpoint any? Obviously the advantage I want to get into the three different countries like Germany, Canada, US G7 countries. Both have very strong tech ecosystems and economies. But what are some of the differences, good and bad, between the three? You're now in New York and there's lots of opportunities there, but it's not easy no matter where you go. Germany, you had the leg up with the financing and that whole structure there. But yeah, just walk us through your opinion of three different countries and what was good and what was bad.

Yeah, so let's start with Germany. Funding was great, that was easy to get, and then it stops. The bureaucracy is a nightmare. You have to go to a specific type of lawyer. It's a notary. But in Germany, only very few lawyers are actually allowed to be a notary. And then you have to pay thousands of dollars to incorporate even the smallest of companies. It gets incredibly complicated. For everything that you want to do, you have to go to that person. You have to sign a bunch of paperwork. There is, or at the time, there was no online taxation, helping help, tools, anything. You always had to do so much paperwork. It was a pain in the, in the butt to.

You probably had to do it in person. So you couldn't just.

Exactly. And it wasn't me, it was my. So we were incorporated in Germany. So one of my co founders, he had a background in finance. He was responsible. Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with that stuff. He had to do all of that. But it was an absolute nightmare. The bureaucracy just kills you. And I think they're changing some laws now and they have changed a few things, but things such as ESOPs don't exist in Germany. Giving your employees shares is not something that the German tax law is actually meant to, you know, to do. And so it's just really, really hard to build a good startup culture the way that Canada or the US have. And so I was always really, really jealous of the situation as it was in Canada where it was so easy. You just, you know, to register a company to work with the, with the government, with IRAP and all of the other options. The Canadian government is really trying to help Canadian entrepreneurs to succeed. And that was really awesome to see, just to be able to do that. But at the same time, at least in 2014-2018, the financing situation wasn't as great. In Vancouver, it was hard to get money in Vancouver. It felt like you have all this oil money. And you have all these oil people who want to invest in startups or in industries that they understand. And unless you already had a big funding round, they weren't interested in you. And so you had a lot of those people. And so whenever you wanted to raise money in Vancouver, you kind of went to the Valley. It felt like if you want to raise actual money, you either have to go to Toronto or you have to go to San Francisco, to the Valley to get money. But the big advantage is that you have super highly talented people with great immigrant and great immigration laws in Canada. So it's actually really easy to build an amazing team for a lot less money than you would. That segues to the US and to New York and San Francisco. It was looking at the salaries, it was insane. I mean, right now everything is a bit up in the air, but if you're an intern at Google, you make 100,000 US and how was I supposed to compete with that kind of salary with the money that we were raising? And even if I could, why would I go to the U.S. why would I do that? Why wouldn't I build a startup in Vancouver where I can get top notch talent, amazing people, world class, you know, city and outdoors and everything that I, that a person can, can ask for and I can, I can build it there for, you know, 60 cents on the dollars, 40 cents on the dollars. Depending on what your, your tax strategy was and how much funding you, you were able to get through Shred or was it Iraq?

Yeah, I think, yeah, Iraq. So that's, that's for, for the audience, Shred irap. That's a lot of non dilutive financing, meaning that it's dollars that come into your company that doesn't take up equity and so it's government tax credits, grants that help you build innovation in Canada. But as much as I love waving the Canadian flag and putting Vancouver on the map internationally as a destination for tech, you still can't replace the impact San Francisco and New York have as major cities in the world and a draw of talent and whatnot because the history and legacy. So you are now in New York. What are, even though you got acquired, you're still operating there and functioning there. Like what are still some of the highlights that you love about New York and the tech industry that's there?

So.

The, you're speechless in New York.

Yeah, the hustle in New York is just amazing. I just love it here and I'm a, I would say a very high energy person and I just love how intense people are in this city. And everyone is trying to succeed, everyone is hustling. And you can tell it from pitch events that you go to, tech events that you go to the entire industry and the opportunities that you have to meet people. CEOs of big companies or just the tech scene in general. If you need to get to know someone, chances are that person is either in New York or in San Francisco. And when we went to Y Combinator and we were just there and we got introduced to so many people in just a few days, where it just said, okay, this is incredible. It's just that access to not just capital, but talent and knowledge and people who have gone through this. Right. People who have built companies from two people to 20,000 people. And you can meet these people and they're willing to talk to you and they're ready to help you out and they're willing to make introduction. That sort of thing makes me very, very bullish. Both on San Francisco and New York as tech hubs for the future too, where it's, yeah, you can work remotely, but if you want to learn from the people who have done it before, you probably have to be in these people in the cities and to be able to run into them and to meet up with them.

Yeah, the concentration of successful people, but also knowledgeable people, it's irreplaceable. Like I call it the big fish, small pond. Like you can be a big fish in Vancouver, but once you go into New York or San Francisco, you are a smaller fish. And that's where you're going to get the most learning and growth. And the beauty of the tech industry is that people are willing to extend a hand and help by getting coffee or getting some feedback and advice. People are a lot more willing to give you some time and feedback than a lot of other industries. Can we kind of touch on that? I want to focus on New York because you're there right now. What does that look like for you? What type of opportunities do you get there that you don't think you can get in other markets?

Well, it's. Besides access to capital.

Yeah, that's a big one. Right. Like experience around funding and financing and.

Doing the right thing. Know experienced people who have gone through 20, 30, 40, 50 funding rounds and just know how not to screw the founder and to put terms in that are actually founder friendly and who are willing to go to bat for you and to, yeah, just really help you out. So that's one. And then just the sheer number of tech events that you can go to the big companies putting up events, the AWS offices or Microsoft or Twitter, Google etc, where you either have a tech event or just something else that is happening and you can just go and experience it and have tech talks by the best of the best. And then you mingle and you talk to people and you realize, oh wow, this person. Is that or not? You know, it's just I know this person from Twitter. Like this person. Yeah. And you just get that access and you talk to these people and you see not just from the distance, but you're kind of right there and you.

Can actually, you're in the room with them. So that's actually a great topic to kind of jump in on. Like right now we're in the middle of pandemic and everybody's working from home. As you're working from home. I've got my green screen on, I'm actually at home. But that is my office, real office behind me. You can't replicate those type of experiences. You talked about going to pitch events and watching people pitch and seeing investors in the room and other tech leaders in the room. Where do you see that going? Is that going away? Is it going to be back in force once we kind of run our course through the pandemic? Or is there a hybrid? What do you envision.

For a founding team? I would say there's nothing. A team of 3, 5, 10 people in the same room or in a small office, in my opinion will always out execute people who are remotely because of the short communication that you can have, because you have the ability to whiteboard, because of the camaraderie that comes with it with being in person. Yeah, this zoom call is great, but I'll be 10 times more tired after these 30 minutes than I would ever be if we sat in front of each other at an office. And it's. There's so many things going on with remote work. And don't get me wrong, I love remote work. It's amazing. But I only want to do it, you know, one or two, two days a week. But I think that a big advantage that if we move to a more remote work, you know, like most companies going to the same most companies would go to, you're going to be at home four days a week and you come in one day a week. Startups who are co located are going to have a huge advantage over those who are not. And yeah, you always have startups or companies like WordPress or GitLab that are fully remote and that are doing amazing. But If I, if I look at the 80, 20 rule, 80% of the startups that are co located are going to do a lot better than, than remote startups. And then you have to. Yeah, and then you have the 20% of the remotes that you're doing better. So.

Yeah. And when you do look at GitHub like that, that's been ingrained into their culture right from day one. And so companies now that are trying to make this transition, it's not realistic because there's a lot of stopgap solutions that you can put in place. But it becomes so difficult to get the same type of productivity and the same type of culture and commercial camaraderie. And what you're talking about earlier, when people are remote and there's so many other distractions, especially if kids at home or your TV is 10ft away from you, or your peloton bike is just sitting there calling your name. But what, what? Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, so one of the things that I've noticed in my company, for example, is that decisions that used to be made between meetings, it's just like, hey, do you have two, five seconds? These conversations are not happening anymore. And so oftentimes I would be able to get things done in just a really quick conversation with the cio, the cto. I just walk into their office like, hey, is this okay? And then it's good. Now it has to be an email, has to be a slack message, it has to be an actual meeting and it just prolongs everything that we do because you have to jump through more hoops and yeah, I mean, yeah, one.

Of the things I've seen firsthand is you've got, especially with younger employees, people that are new to the workforce or kind of working their way up right now, they can learn through osmosis by just being in the room when conversations are happening, decisions are being made. Just seeing somebody, how they're actually solving a problem, the workflow that they go through to come to that conclusion. But when you're in a remote work situation that happens outside of your field of view, it's happening while that person's in their own home. They're not on zoom. It's happening totally without you having any visibility or knowledge of how to, how to solve that problem. And so that then has this trickle down effect where that person being promoted becomes that much harder because they don't know how to solve those problems or they don't have the logic or that information. And so training people, promoting people from within all just becomes that much harder because these decisions all get done in isolation. I don't see that going away from the work, from home. The hybrid rule, two days in the, in the office or three days in the office, the rest of the time at home. I think that's probably more in kin to what we're going to see moving forward. But that time in the office is going to be far more structured or collaborative as opposed to, yeah, I'm just going to the office, go work in my cubicle.

Yeah, I mean, you touch a really good point there too. With promotions, you want to be close to power if you want to climb up the career ladder. Now, that doesn't really matter in a, in a company that's small, that's a 10, 20, 50, 100 people. But once you become, you know, a bigger corporation, these things matter. And you need facetime with people who can push for you to get that promotion. And it's not just your direct manager who you might have a daily call with. It has to be, you know, the vp, the senior director, the SAP, the CTO who needs to see, you know, you and put a face to the name and be like, okay, yeah, yeah, you know, Mike really needs that promotion or Sarah really should get that promotion. And I'm not sure we're in the beginning of, let's call it an experiment of this global experiment. And I'm not sure that we've solved these issues yet.

Yeah. And that's one side of it within an organization. But then you also get into the whole other dynamics of when you have two companies trying to work together, partnerships, relationship, like the old school mentality of decisions are made or partnerships are made on the golf course, partnerships and deals are made, having drinks or beers after work. Right. That whole dynamic starts to disappear because how many decisions are made via Zoom as opposed to it is a new reality and so you have to kind of default to it. A lot of people I've heard say, oh, I've got so much more time my day. But at the end of the day, we are humans and you have to have that human interactions especially it's a big deal. Like you want to have trust and you want to be able to look somebody in the eye. Especially I was talking to another founder that's going through an acquisition right now, and their partners want to fly in to meet them and they're actually willing to put up with the quarantine restrictions and mandates to go through because it's a big deal for them.

Yeah, yeah. You really need to know who you're you're working with there, like especially in such a high stakes situation. But overall like first four weeks of lockdown, like here in New York lockdown was pretty, pretty rough.

Yeah.

I don't know how many happy hours we had, but since I don't think we had a single Zoom happy hour since mid April, you know, people get tired of it and so that was.

A very short lived experiment. I don't think anybody liked those Zoom happy hours.

But they're so important. I want to get today. I used to go to happy hour with my coworker, now I don't. And so you're missing out on a lot of the relationship building that you can have by being co located and I'm sure that some people have solved this. But overall I just see, you know, huge advantages of being in an office when you're in a smaller group especially you're trying to solve one specific problem and do it better than anyone else.

Well, the other side of it, we'll kind of wrap up here soon. But it's a serendipitous moment when how many startups were started because two employees of a larger company were shooting the shit over foosball or always having lunch together and talking about big problems in the world. And this epiphany moment where it's hey, we can actually create a solution for this. Or even talking about a challenge that they're having at work and there's no solution within work and a startup idea pops out. How does that happen when those two employees are only connecting on Zoom and not having those foosball moments or those coffee shop moments.

Yeah, or slightly adjacent. But all the founders at launch you used to go to lunch together. Not always the same groups, but that's how you would talk about. Or that was the time when you would talk about how did you get funding, how did you do this? You'd answer so many questions, how are you doing? How's the hiring going there? And you would use these opportunities to figure out a lot of the stuff that you were going through and you found people who were going through the exact same thing and you weren't as alone. If I was talking, just talking to my friends, hardly any of them were founders had gone through the experience and so they had no idea what I was going through. And so you, you kind of need to build that support network too. Especially when you're a founder early, early on at some point when you have a bigger team, your team can be that, that support mechanism too. Or your co founders are but for me, who was technically not a solo founder, but in Vancouver, I was. It was a really good support system too. Yeah.

Malta, this has been an awesome conversation. I want to kind of wrap it up with two questions. The first one is what tool or app have you found instrumental to your founder journey, whether it's on your personal side or on a business side, something that you think our audience would be interested in checking out on for themselves?

Well, the number one tool that I gave a shout out to earlier was Slack. That had been, must have been the number one productivity tool where we could just do everything and then I'm a huge fan of notes app. Roam is the one that I'm currently using. So if you want to check that one out, that really helps me.

Yeah, so that's one that we've heard a couple times now. And so just to be clear, it's a desktop app, it's not a mobile app. What's the URL? Roam.

Coi.

Rome Co. Yeah, you can Google it. I forgot it's not the food delivery. It's not the food delivery company. It's Rome note taking app. Definitely Google it. You can even Bing it. You can use Bing Search engine. Still alive. It's like an inside joke that I keep going back to. But yeah, you can definitely check that one. That somebody, that a few people have talked about that one. Everybody's talked about Slack. I use Slack. Our team uses Slack. We love Slack. It's a Vancouver company. I should get them to sponsor this. But Roam is something that we should definitely check out. I've heard a few people talk about that one. All right, and last, last question for you is what advice would you give to an entrepreneur, new, old, seasoned entrepreneur, first time entrepreneur, about building a company in today's world? Now you've obviously started your company a few years ago, but you're still tied into the startup world. You still see things happening. Like what, what, what would you have loved to have known that can help you today? Or what are you seeing in the environment that you think our audience should know about as they're going on their journey?

Yes. So I think the biggest learning around marketing that we had was really know how to get to your audience and you probably have to be really creative in how you do it. We always thought that by having the cheapest prices, people would come to us. That doesn't happen. So you need to figure out a way how to talk to your consumers. We were a B2C company, so we needed to talk to consumers. And once we had Figured out, okay, we actually do need to get that connection with the user. Actually, one of our mentors was a huge PR company. He was the owner of a huge PR company in Germany and we went to him for advice. And after about a month or two of trying what he, he was recommending, we realized he was working at a different scale. What he was recommending did not work for us. It just didn't. They don't write any, you know, folders of press releases or any of that. You kind of have to hustle and figure out a way to, to get your product out there to, to get people like, either, like some sort of virality level or get journalists to be interested, help them out, help other people, help you. And I think that was the biggest learning that we had just from the, oh, everyone's just going to come to us to, oh, we need everyone to learn about us, to, okay, how do we actually talk to users? And for us, it was a lot about proactive outreach from our side, talking to hundreds and thousands of users to figure out what they wanted and just really trying to get that go to market strategy right.

Yeah. Know your audience. It's as critical as any other part of your business. You really need to know who your audiences are and what the value propositions that you have that are going to resonate with them. And that's what you market. Not a press release talking about the cheapest prices, unless that is the key value that people are looking for. And if that is the case, it's a shitty business to be in. You're basically on a fight towards the bottom, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, we got one last thing, and this is an opportunity for you to be the entrepreneur that you are. What can our audience do for you? You've been really generous with your time and advice and insight. Here's a chance for you to have your call to action. What can our audience do for you?

Yeah, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Connect with me. I'd love to give back to the community, help other entrepreneurs out. If you have a great idea and you just, just want to talk about it, or if you have any tech questions, I'm in the, in the data realm and the software engineering realm. If you just, if you're unsure about something or immigration in the US or in Canada, I've learned a bunch. Just reach out, talk to me and. Yeah, reach out.

Yeah, definitely one of the smartest and one of the nicest guys that we ever had at Launch Academy, and happy to call you my friend. Hope to get back to New York soon and we can hit up another comedy club and late night debauchery like we did last time. But Malta, awesome talking to you. Thanks for taking the time, sharing your insight. Great conversation and. Yeah, take care. Be safe.

You too. Thanks for having me.

All right, awesome. We'll cut it there, add in whatever special graphics and stuff we need at the end. That was good. I really like that. Hopefully you did, too.

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I did. I did. Sorry. I think I went on a few tangents there where you kind of.

No, that's exactly what we. That's exactly what I want. Like, it's a flowing conversation.

Right.

Last thing I want is. Here's a question. Okay, you answer. Here's another question. Okay, Answer that. That gets boring. Yeah.

I love how you honed in my. My pitch, how you helped me with my pitch, because I. I didn't do the elevator pitch. I went all out and just. Yeah, yeah, no, that's good.

Old days. Yeah, you don't have to do that anymore.

Yeah, I forgot that. Or I didn't. I didn't bring up the time that you told me that I had the worst pitch in the world, the worst pitch you had ever seen. I should have brought that one up.

I don't remember that.

That was you. And I think. Charlene, I think you did a pitch.

Yeah.

Pitch event, like early on pitch training. And then it was me Shu. And I think jar pitching. And you just ripped me a second one. I did win pitch day. Hopefully that was a good one, so. Yeah, it was good. It was good. It was a good lesson that you need to go through something like that in a safe environment. I think. So that one was good. You don't want to do that on stage in front of 200 people, but in a room with 10 people, I think that's a good experience.

Well, we're still recording, so we might edit this back in. Sure. No, that was actually. Yeah, I remember those pitch days, and they were. It's one of those things. It's. It's. Unless you've gone up on stage, you don't know how difficult it is, and then you think it's easy, but then as soon as you do, you realize, oh, shit, this is hard, and you have to refine. And that goes back to the whole question about knowing your audience and knowing what the value propositions. You need to get that across in a really quick format so that you can get that second meeting.

And.

Yeah, so it sounds like it worked out because you guys are doing well. What's Jer up to these days? Is he still in Ireland?

He's in Ireland. He switched companies. He's. So he gave up on the startup world. I think he was already working for that health doc, like the tele doc company for a while.

Telemedicine.

Telemedicine. He switched jobs a few months ago, I think. We do text every once in a while, but it's definitely not as much as we used to. So it's mainly Alex and Dan that I talk to most these days, but still wants people.

Dan gave a shout out to one of his friends up in Ireland, another one out in New York, and you guys don't see each other often, but you guys still stay very well connected. Awesome. All right, thanks for your time, man. And if there's anything that we can do for you, just. Just shout out, give us a shout. And yeah, hopefully we do get to hang out and have some beer soon.

Yeah, we'd love to.

All right, awesome. Thanks, man. Launch Ventures is for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode of Founder Journeys, please like share, follow and check out our link in bio for all the other good stuff.