Behind a $300M exit: Interview w/ Palash Soni from Goldcast

Okay, I think we are live.

Welcome, Palash. Hi, Rob. Great to be here and great to see you.

Yeah, you too. You too. It's awesome. Awesome to hang out. This is the first and perhaps last interview we're going to do on Physics of Startups. So, and if it is the last, it will be nothing to do with you because, because I'm super excited. As context, I'll give like a little bit of background and then love to get a little more from you. But Palash here, one of the founders of Goldcast, which was recently acquired for a number that he cannot say, but you can Google online and it's widely evident. Really awesome acquisition, very cool company. HBS grad. When'd you graduate?

We didn't really graduate, Rob, but we were in the '19 to '21 batch.

Okay. You were in '19 to '20. And yeah. And so the context of this interview is we're going to have the interview that I want to have. And so I'm very excited for that. There's so many things we can dig into, but why don't we like maybe give a little bit of your background so people know a little bit more of who you are and then we'll just jump straight in.

Yeah, definitely, Rob. So I, I'm an engineer by training. I grew up in a very small town in India and that's what most people do there, become engineers. So I went to an engineering school in India and then worked for 7 years before HBS, 3 years in manufacturing and then about 4 years in in an ad tech company. And in manufacturing, I realized that, hey, manufacturing is not adding much value to the company. It's all marketing. So, so I wanted to be in marketing. And so I joined an ad tech company, did a bunch of roles there. And my last role was as a product manager. They're building a DSP, an ad buying platform that was backed by machine learning. So in that experience, I realized that to build a cutting-edge tech company, you have to be in the US. And that motivated me to come to come to HBS. And the CEO of that last company was an HBS alum, so he wrote a recommendation, and I'm very grateful for that. So there we go. Uh, that's how I came.

Love it, love it. And so, so you kind of— you, you, uh, took a detour during HBS. How was HBS for you? Uh, I, I loved it, and RC also here loved it too. But like, what did you think?

I loved it, Rob. It was, it was life-changing for me because for, because for me, this was my first foray in the US, right? Not just business school. And, um, and so everything I, I learned about the US, the network, everything, the seed of that was in HBS. Um, so yeah, very life-changing for me, even though I only spent a year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you got the good year. RC year is the best year. So, uh, okay, so like, what I want to do now is I want to zoom out and look at two points in the, in the evolution of Goldcast, and then we'll go around these points. But I want, I want you to tell me about Goldcast what Goldcast is at time of acquisition. And then I wanna go back and say, what was Goldcast at time of RC Year brainstorming? And like explain those two different points.

Yes, so Goldcast today is a video content platform that's used by B2B marketing teams to create, amplify, and distribute content, video content. So we have tools that can help them run webinars, run online events, record podcasts like Riverside, and then take all of that video, use agents and AI to edit it, to create short-form content, to create written content from it, and then distribute it and measure all of it throughout the value chain. So that's what we are today. And we started as a pure-play virtual events platform, kind of unfocused when we started. So B2B and all of this is a later evolution.

Cool. A virtual, okay. I wanna jump back into that. Where did that come from? Give me like the origin on the virtual events platform that was kind of everything at that point.

Yes. I wish it was a cooler story, Rob, but it's not. So for context, like I came into HBS wanting to start up and I met my co-founder Kishore and then later Ashish. In that context, we were all looking to start up. And so Kishore and I were exploring ideas and we went through a bunch of ideas. HBS. And in the end, this was just 2 months before the summer internships. We had no summer internship because we didn't look for it. So we were kind of panicking that we need to do something in the summers. And we didn't want to get a job, so we were still looking for ideas. And my big learning was, hey, we need a market which is big enough and which has a lot of tailwinds where we can do something. And so COVID was getting real at the time, and it was clear that there will be a need for virtual events. So So that's what started the exploration.

Cool. Okay, so COVID hits, you're like, huh? Yes. Virtual events are gonna go straight vertical. Let's build a virtual events platform. Yes. You were not the only one to build a virtual events platform at the time. We were talking about this a little bit before. Yeah. Let me explain, like, I would love to hear about the evolution, right? There's a bunch of money pouring into virtual events.

Yes.

Kingmakers happening in VC. Who, by the way, none seem to still be alive anyway other than you. And you kind of evolve from virtual events platform to B2B video marketing thing. Like, explain that journey.

Yes, I'll try to keep it short, but when we started thinking about virtual events, it was still early. Like the lockdowns had not happened. I remember like I went to i-Lab in HBS and shook a bunch of hands when we were thinking of this idea. This was like that time. But people were still cautious, wearing masks and stuff. And from that time to the time we started raising our pre-seed round in May of the summers, I think 4 startups had come in. They had all raised $10 million by then, and $10 million plus. And so we started raising the pre-seed round and we got that same pushback, right? Hey, there's so much competition, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. One thing that we underestimated is that there will be a lot more competition because a lot of in-person event companies also didn't have any business, but they had all the people, the connections, and everything else. So they also jumped in, and there were, I would say, 5 other startups that raised more money by the time we had money in the bank. So it became real chaotic, and that chaos plus our own learnings from the past pushed us to focus. So we did a lot of talking around to different personas who can use events because events is so broad, right? And again, by a stroke of luck, one of our professors at HBS, he used to be on the board of an events company in the past, an event tech company, which was also acquired by Cvent actually. So there we go, back in the day. Yeah, so his learning was that they didn't focus enough. And then B2B is probably one durable place which will always need events, and it it looks like a software business. So we focused on B2B marketers actually. We just wrote to like 50, 60 of them, just cold emailed and got a bunch of responses, which in itself is a positive sign. And we talked to them and we realized, yeah, this is probably something that will have durability even after COVID because B2B marketers are always looking for ways to reach out to their audience in the least cost manner, create engagement and all of that. So That is how we started.

So at that point, so you're sending out a bunch of cold emails to B2B. You're, you have the conversation with the professor who's like, listen, if there's one thing I've learned here, it is you have to focus narrowly. And you're like, okay, B2B feels, B2B marketing feels like a place where there will be a, this like spike, but it will continue there. And we don't know about the rest of the world. So what we're going to do, we, we, we've built a product. We haven't built a product.

We've at this stage, we have not built. We had not built anything, but the hypothesis was that we'll build a virtual events platform that is very good at integration and analytics with the martech and, and CRMs.

Got it. Okay. So at that point, that kind of sounds like virtual events, B2B marketers, that feels like the core pieces are in, in place before you've written a line of code.

Before we have written the line of code. Yeah, we had, we had a prototype on Bubble, which was —back in the day. So we showed it to a bunch of people and we explored a bunch of personas, but this one was the one that felt like, hey, this has the most durability and has some kind of proof that we can put behind events, like some kind of ROI.

Oh, so you tried other personas before then?

Oh yeah, because we spoke with not just B2B marketers, but we spoke with like trade show organizers. We explored like executive briefing rooms, which is also kind of an event. We did a bunch of things, but, uh, but realized that this is probably the most durable. In the, so, okay.

So you would basically reach out to a bunch of different people. Yes. Have, have calls with them, show them the bubble prototype and kind of like see what happened. Yes. I assume. Well, can you talk me through the, the feeling when you talk to the exec roundtable people, when you talk to the trade show people versus like, 'cause, 'cause I think what a lot of people don't know is like, What is it? What should it feel like when there's something there?

Yes, definitely. So, Rob, I think the— it's been so long, but what was apparent is that when we spoke with, for example, we spoke with two CEOs of trade show companies and they were talking about, okay, how things would evolve, et cetera, but they didn't really want it want to do virtual events. It was clear that, hey, they were, they're kind of asking for things that were, that were very, you know, old. They didn't want to change. And it was also stupid for us to assume at the time, even though a lot of investors putting in money in other companies were assuming that COVID will last forever. It will not, right? It was clear. So we, we understood that, hey, we can build for them, we can get big contracts from them, but it's not going to be durable. With B2B marketers, it was clear that they they were really excited for this and they were asking for, you know, a lot of things around it, which kind of seemed like, okay, this is something they'll do a lot of if it works and they want to prove it to their CMO, they want to show it to their CEO, all of that, which just the way they interacted with that prototype and they asked for features and everything else, there was a clear night and day difference for us that they needed more. Also, the other thing that we realized over time, not upfront, is that they have been doing something like that before, which is called webinars, right? And, but webinars at the time was an extremely sleepy category. It had very old school players. And so for them, this was also a way to reinvent webinars because webinars kind of worked, but people had this feeling that they can work much better.

Interesting. So they're already doing something here. They're already doing something. They want to be doing more of it. They want to be doing better, but they don't have a good way to do it. And they see, they talk to you and they're like, oh cool, if this could help me do XYZ, I'm in. Did you have people like buy based on the prototype? Like how did that, how did you get your first 10 customers and when was the product built?

Yes. So we built the first version of product within like 2, 3 months. It was very quick, which is, which is very quick back in the day. And it was very unstable, but we got 2 customers. One of them was was this company called Axonius. They are Boston-based, were much smaller at that time. Now it's a unicorn. And we wrote to, I think, like 20 CMOs in Massachusetts, and the CMO of Axonius replied in a cold email. He eventually ended up being an angel investor, but he had this thesis that, hey, events need to be like virtual events, need to have XYZ. And I think the broad sort of summary of that is that they need to be very engaging and they need to represent the company's brand, which is something that wasn't the thing with the incumbents like Zoom, right? Zoom looks like Zoom for everyone, and we hadn't thought about that. So we did the virtual summit for Axonius in September, and it was free. We did it for them for free, but then we realized we need to redo the product to make it skinnable for every company. So if, say, for— if you do it, then it has the blue and white brand of yours. So we rewrote the product in 2 months or less than 2 months, I would say 6 weeks, and deleted the entire frontend and came up with the second product. This was all like, I shortened it up, but the other push for rewriting the product was that we were not getting enough traction because we had focused too much on the integration and analytics part. But what what marketers were telling us is that they want the product to look great first because that's the first impression. Without that, there is no engagement. And they wanted branding, right? They wanted the product to look cool. And we always thought that that's superficial and why would anyone care about that? But marketers do care a lot about that. And so that was a learning for me in that time. So I put a pause on the integration stuff. Put all the effort in redoing the front end. So then we reskinned the product, came out with something around Christmas of that year. And then we started going back to some of those original people, like 25, 30 who had responded, and we started getting some traction. So I'll just give two stories which helped us kind of take off at the time. One was that we obviously were reaching out to everyone. So the HBS network helped, one of the CEOs from the HBS network, he connected us to to his marketing leader and they are still our customers. It's this company called Bloomreach, which is also big now. So they were like, hey, this is something I've been looking for because I really want, we just rebranded, we want our brand to be out there and there's no option for me to do that in other players. The second one was that Underscore, which you know as well. I'm familiar, yeah. Yeah, they did an event and David Cancel, who's the CEO of Drift, he was speaking on that event and he really liked the interface and everything else. And he just mentioned in passing to the partner at Underscore that, hey, this product is great. So we got to know, and then we really like harassed him over emails to respond to us. So he finally responded after maybe 7th email and then connected us to the marketing head of Drift. They ended up becoming a customer. And at that time we had maybe 4 customers, but when Drift Did their event, things took off because Drift, basically every marketer saw it at once. So interesting.

By the way, I was at that event. I was at that event with David Kansler. He is one of my heroes. I am at anything he shows up to. So that's super interesting though. So, so let me play that back and see if I understand it, but it sounds like basically you were having conversations with B2B marketers. Yes. And it was kind of like, they're kind of like sales calls, kind of like feedback calls. It's kind of like a feedback call, but if you want to buy it, I'll sell it to you kind of call at that time. And what you're hearing them giving a lot of feedback about the UX, the design, the front end of it. And in your mind, you're like, well, listen, you can't, you're wrong. Like that can't, that can't be the thing. And it turns out that is the thing, which you experienced after doing that that like first summit. Is that, is that right?

Am I understanding that right? That is correct, Rob. And the other thing also is, which kind of is similar to what is happening right now, things were changing so fast, right? There wasn't much of a concept of virtual events. Not a lot of people were doing webinars. They had only seen Cisco Webex in the past. So people didn't know what to ask for, right? Things are shifting so fast. So when we didn't have a product, we just had a prototype, people were still talking about integrations and things like that. And when we built the product, then a lot of people started giving feedback like, hey, I want this to look like my product and mine and my brand. And so it took me a bunch of time to really understand that that is very important.

Interesting. And then the other thing I love is basically the Drift case study and Drift using it just— Yes. Every marketer in the world would just go and see Drift stuff. And so they would all see Goldcast. Through just all the awesome stuff Drift was doing.

Correct, yes. And that became the dominant strategy for us at the time that hey, if one Drift can make this much of a difference, then we should really go after martech companies. So eventually we ended up winning all major martech companies like Gong, Sixth Sense, and Salesloft and all of that, which became a good sort of engine for us.

That's super, and so you're basically, You're working with the coolest martech companies that all the other companies with marketers are seeing, which is advertising for you, which is just causing— and I assume that would drive a lot of inbound.

A lot of inbound. True. Yeah. Interesting. It was. And, and this was something that we were uniquely sort of doing and focusing on, niching on. So we were able to get inbound despite so much competition. Like even at this point, we were maybe the 10th largest funded company in this space. So there were 9 more companies that had significantly more money.

Yeah. And when you say significantly, like how much more money?

So dude, one of the competitors, this company called Hopin, they had by this time raised about $700 million and they ended up raising $1 billion eventually total. And then there were 3 more companies that had raised north of $100 million. Okay.

So at this point, I want to kind of like clicking at this point because you basically have figured out B2B marketing. Yes. You've figured out this angle for B2B marketing and you're getting inbound. Things are working, right? But you're looking left and right and seeing companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in theory in your space. Yes. What are you like, how did you experience that? How did you think through that? Did you question? What you were doing, if you were going big enough? Like, how'd you think through that moment?

Yeah, great question, Rob. All the time we were questioning ourselves all the time. But I think because things were working, we were getting referenceable customers and above all, we were winning a decent number of deals against these better-funded competitors in our space because that flywheel had started working like more referenceability, more deeper feature set. With things moving that fast versus all the other companies. Their big customers were like Mobile World Congress, for example, right? You can imagine how much resources something like that will suck out from you. You won't be able to focus on a Drift, right, which is going to pay you maybe $10,000, $50,000, maybe not more than that. So, um, all of those things really helped us, but it— but where it created a lot of problem was our fundraising, right? We had had an insanely hard time raising money ever. Like, Goldcast was never an easy fundraise, and it was just very hard to convince investors that there's this niche which can create a good company because the fault lines of the market were not clear. Similar to what's happening in lots of AI markets, right? The fault lines are not clear in most categories.

And somehow pitching, hey, we have 3 HBS founders, is not— is not what investors wanted to hear. Yeah, I know it is.

It is a hard sell.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. Uh, that's interesting. Okay. That's fascinating. And so things are working for you. You have people raising all around. You had also said you have a theory or you have a, you have a, uh, a way of thinking about the VC market kingmaking and how to operate when, when VCs are kingmaking people who are not you. Uh, I'd love to hear that.

Yeah, Rob, that's, uh, obviously there's no like recipe right around it, but, um, I think in markets like ours, uh, and it was kind of a unique market in, in, in COVID times because it got created during COVID times, which is true for many markets right now. Lots of things are new. Um, I do feel like that capital indigestion can create lots of problems for companies that have lots of capital, but also, um, it can create opportunities for more agile, smaller players, right? If you believe that this market will twist and turn, because bigger companies, even small startups that have raised a lot of money, it's non-trivial for them to change courses because changing courses means that you'll have to slow down and your investors will scoff on that, right? If you are— if you have raised $100 million and if you're not doubling every year, then then what are you doing? So that pressure is insane. And you— and then also you have to only attack the very obvious and bigger markets. If you have raised a lot of money, you cannot really easily make non-obvious choices. So in our case, that's what happened, right? Like lots of players had raised money on this thesis that there's a broader virtual events recurring revenue category which didn't exist actually. And that's something that we had become convinced of once we had spent maybe a year in the business that the broader category is, is going to be very hard, but maybe the niche where we are on is going to sustain. Now that conviction is very hard to survive on because you need money to survive on. So we only— in every round we just got one investor. Actually, we pitched to maybe 70, 80 investors every time. I have an awesome CRM of sorts in Notion which I built to do that, which I send to every founder. So we just got one yeses, but that was enough for us to keep going, and eventually we were proven right.

Yeah. So, so if I'm, if I'm to like generalize here, when you see a company that is raising a ton of money in a space, or, you know, like in a new market, when, when VCs are just pouring a bunch of money into a couple clear winners, there is often, or there may be, if, if you, if you are not that company, just assume that the physics of that, those big companies is they have to go for the biggest chunk of the market in the biggest way possible and must go foot to the gas pedal, like pedal to the floor on that. Yeah. Which usually leaves some interesting piece of the market that actually could be the right direction for the entire market open. They're gonna go based on the obvious big part of the market. But that might not be the obvious big part of the market in, in the future.

Yes. And the market could also change. You always have to be ready for that. And companies that have raised a lot of money are generally less ready for that than smaller companies. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I'm not going to play the, I wanted to play the like, oh, but if you could have raised $100 million, like what would you have done with that? But I don't think that's like an even interesting part of the conversation. I think the interesting part is like, okay, I know we connected along this journey multiple times and it always felt like there was this kind of like ambiguous direction decision where you had like multiple. Can you maybe talk me through, let's go maybe a year, 2 years after this, after, you know, after the first couple customers, what were the big question marks that you had to answer and like, why was it difficult?

Yes. Uh, great question, Rob. So this, so at this point, where we are in the journey. We, we knew that B2B marketers is the right persona to go after. We have a bunch of customers, we are growing fast. And then around, I would say '22, right? 2022, start of '22. We remember the markets had started kind of crashing a lot. Yeah. And that created a negative sort of pull for, for many SaaS companies, but definitely for this category because COVID had also subsided. And so that impacted our competitors a lot more, a lot more than it did for us. And so it was very hard to raise capital. And at that time, our thesis was that, hey, we'll build a platform to do virtual events and webinars both and give people the tools to run their lead gen and pipeline around events. So that's what we were discussing, if you remember at the time, that, hey, we'll build integrations and Slack alerts and tools for sales teams to interact with people in webinars and all of that.. And so that is the thesis we worked on with for the entire 2022. And we did some good stuff. We built a lot of things which helped differentiate the platform, but it wasn't 10x differentiation. It was, yeah, we are maybe 2x better than Zoom. So that was the— that kept us going in 2022. And in that time, as markets were not coming back, we knew that the dip is not temporary, right? The SaaS market has some kind of permanent headwinds. Definitely marketing teams are under a lot of pressure, so it's not trivial for them to invest. And then AI came in at the time, so that just appended the conversation in the market. And whoever remained in our category at the time, most players were doing two things. One, they were going into in-person events because they were like, hey, we know the persona and in-person events are coming back, why not just build in-person events? And then they were putting in AI around this whole thing. Like, hey, if you were clicking around and building events, now you can chat and maybe build events. That was the, if you remember, the early version of many AI products, right? And what we did at the time, we took a slightly counterintuitive bet because we knew that in-person events is not going to be an easy play because there are lots of incumbents and Cvent is because, you know, it's the biggest one and it won't be possible for us to go after them. And also there's the same problem of recurrence in in-person events also, which is not easy to solve, right? It's not really a SaaS business in many verticals. So what we did instead is we started talking to our customers and we realized the most successful customers of ours were the ones who kind of treated these events as a media channel. So all of these companies like Axonius, Zuora, etc. They were really sort of building what at that time was called like an internal media company, right? And so they definitely wanted leads and everything else, but for them this was a source of content. So we said, okay, instead of going vertically doing virtual events and in-person events, why not we go horizontal and do something in videos? Because ultimately the enduring value of a virtual event and/or a webinar is the content that it creates, which is very valuable. So we quickly in 2 months built our first prototype of a product that would take the webinar and within the product itself will spit out clips for you, which now is very table stakes. But in early '23, you can imagine was kind of revolutionary, right? That people could take, just be in the product where the webinar happened and get clips within 30 minutes that they can post on social media. So that customers started really liking and wanting, and we were the only players doing it at that time. Now, the con of this approach is that we are now getting into the video territory, right? You're not really an events company, and video market has its own warts, right? There are lots of bodies buried in that market. Wasn't clear like how the tech will evolve to really make this more than just a clipping tool. And the pricing was unclear. This clipping product also had individual competition of its own, right? There were companies that were independent doing just this thing and selling for $20 a month, and we were an enterprise product that was selling in 5, 6 figures. So all of these questions were very tricky, but we still pressed ahead, went along with this thesis, and and then decided that, hey, this is going to be the future. Because if we have to build a venture-scale company, it does look like that we have to again find another tailwind. And there's tailwind in video because of AI, because there's so much manual effort scale involved in video that AI will help bring it down and sort of democratize it for the marketer eventually. So we took sort of, I would not say it was a hard turn, but it was definitely a 45-degree turn from being very integration pipeline data-centric to becoming more content-centric and, and positioning Goldcast as a video content platform instead of a webinar platform. That's super, that's super—

okay, I wanna dig into two pieces here. The first is the insight, where the insight came from. I hear this a lot and I don't think it's talked about enough, which is just, yeah, look at how your best customers, the customers who are saying hell yes, they're using it a ton. Look at how they are using it. Right. And like the answers are often just there in some level of fidelity. Yes. That's fascinating. Did you, so did you then kind of like go and look at them and then go look at other customers and try to like say, hey, why aren't you doing this? Like to, to the ones who weren't doing that.

Yeah, so Rob, the actual sort of piece of insight was that a lot of these customers of ours who I just named, they were asking us to build an— actually build an on-demand product. So hey, if I did a webinar, instead of me needing to download it and then upload it on Webflow or Vimeo or something, why can't I just one-click host it on my website and keep collecting leads and views and everything else? And that seemed boring to us because that the whole category of Vimeo, et cetera, is not really exciting. So, but we realized that, hey, they want it because they really think that content is very valuable. It does get views from, and ultimately they want consumption from that content. They want that content to last longer. And at that, this was early ChatGPT. So for a customer, for a marketer to think that, hey, I can use what, you know, the LLM can do to actually cut up a video. It's, it wasn't, it's not obvious, right? So we had to step in and say, hey, this is what is possible now. You can actually create a clip from a full hour of video and post it on social media, which would take you like multiple weeks. So we tried this. We also tried a bunch of other AI products, but all in the content domain, um, and then this stuck. Yeah. And so, okay.

So you're, so you're, the interesting thing there is you're getting feature requests from people and you're like, I don't, they clearly like, this doesn't seem right. But then, but then you go back and figure out what are they actually trying to do? What are they actually trying to accomplish using our software? It's like, oh, okay. There's something there. Let's ship some AI stuff around this theme and see what sticks. That's super interesting. Well, I guess then tell me then the before and after this realization, before you are a, you were describing yourself as a B2B marketing events, like virtual events platform and webinars, right?

Right. After you were describing it as what? As a video content platform. And that was a big change because what we also realized is that, hey, we are, we will and always keep on doing virtual events and webinars, but That is not the only value, right? And we cannot call ourselves one because then people will not know what all we do. So we thought a lot about, okay, what can we call ourselves? Because we are now doing this, all of this other thing. And we came up with video content platform. That the reason that we chose this is because we just showed what we do to, I think, 10 marketers at a conference. This was in 2024, mid of '24. And they were like, yeah, this is what my video content supply chain kind of looks like. So that's— everyone was using that word, video content. And so we did that. Obviously there was always this risk of alienating our older webinar base, but by that time we had become slightly well known in the webinar virtual event space. And also honestly, Rob, we we thought we didn't have a choice. If— because as a venture-backed company, you have to keep growing, right? Even if you're not growing like 100%, you have to at least like hit 70-75%. And we didn't see a path for that to happen in a durable manner without us innovating on this axis. So—

And just like hypothetical, but I'm just curious your riff, and then I want to jump to the acquisition and the physics of that. But yeah. If you had started as a video content platform, do you think anybody would've like, do you think that would've worked from day zero? Or do you think you had to start with events and webinars?

'Cause that's kind of— Great question. Great question. So Rob, actually, you know what happens is that, and why a lot of the video original video hosting companies sort of missed the bus here is because they were getting all types of content, right? And they kind of became like a repository of content and, and as a software provider, it's very hard for you to know like what's valuable there, what's not valuable. You're getting L&D videos and all of that too, right, in your Drive versus in our case, we were close to the persona which was responsible for a lot of budget and responsible for driving leads, pipeline engagement, etc. So we were just talking to the right people, I think, and got the right slice of the market being here. Um, but we eventually ended up building that stuff. So we have a full like Wistia, Vimeo competitor in our product too now. Um, because we wanted to complete the full cycle to say, hey, you don't need to take video out of Goldcast. You can create the video in Goldcast in whatever manner you want, edit it, and then distribute it.

And still, just so I'm sure, still for B2B marketing at this stage too?

Yes, very much still B2B marketing. Got it.

Cool. Okay, sweet. All right, let's, let's jump forward. Acquisition. In the, you know, sub-billion, above $100 million stage. What do people not know about the $100 million to billion acquisition world?

Yeah, Rob, I would, I would, I'd say a bunch of things here which, um, hopefully can create some kind of theme. But, um, as I said, right there in the US tech ecosystem, and this is like our bankers told this, so it's believable data point, there are only like 150 to about 250 9-figure acquisitions that happen in a year. So it's not that often, and you only hear about the IPOs and the Figmas and billion dollars. In our case, what happened is that when we did all of this, we were growing fast or a lot faster versus say our peers in the industry. So to give you an idea, when we made all of these changes, we only grew 50% in 2024 because we knew that we had to make all of these changes. But then last last year our projection was that we'll grow 85%, so kind of like from '11 to '21, and we ended up doing that. We ended up meeting the plan, but it was higher, faster growth. And so because of our innovative product portfolio, the bets we took, we kind of started being seen or perceived as the leading player, even though we were not the biggest player. And the competition has subsided a lot at this point. So So that's why we got an inbound from, from Cvent in June and July, just making it clear that they wanted to play in this space and they have multiple priorities, obviously, so they would rather make an acquisition than build stuff themselves. So that's how the conversation started. And I think what we realized is in this whole process is that every— two things. One is that every market has a different acquisition dynamic depending on the companies that are there, the leadership teams there, and the state of the market. So for instance, in martech, what we realized is that most companies that can make martech acquisitions, barring Salesforce, are not interested in anything below a billion. So like most— like Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, like these three are the big, say, say, martech sales tech players. Things would not move inside unless, you know, there's a huge thing at play, like a CXO is betting for you and a CXO at those companies will not get excited for anything below a billion in enterprise value. So then the other players in our space are all venture-funded players who are also seeing headwinds, right? Like the Gongs and Saleslofts and everyone else. So we were lucky that we were in the intersection of events and, and martech, and, and Seaburn was a player here. But otherwise it would have been like hard to find an opportunity like this if we had become much bigger, right? And then we had to go for like a billion plus to really be attractive to someone. So that was one insight. The other is it also depends a lot on the on the leadership team and what type of company is it. So for example, in cybersecurity, right, you see that every company is in acquisition arms race, which is why there are a ton of acquisitions between $100 to $1 billion, right, that happen in that space. But in our space, if you look at players like Adobe makes billion plus acquisitions. HubSpot, which is probably the biggest competitor of Adobe, never makes any acquisitions or any meaningful acquisitions. They're still growing, they're still doing as well, but just how the companies operate and their leadership thinks will make a lot of difference in how, you know, what your exit outcomes could be in that like sub-billion, sub-IPO window. So all I would say is that this is something that is always worth an inspection and things always change, right, with the market, but always worth an inspection on, okay, what will an exit potentially look like, right, in this market and if, you know, if IPO is not an option. Yeah.

And if you're, let me ask this. If you, let's say a couple of years from now, who knows, but you go to start another company. Yeah. Is this a factor that you're actually going to consider at the idea stage, or is this not a factor that you're actually going to consider?

Honestly, I would, Rob. I would consider this and definitely consider this because once you are in the market and doing stuff, it's It's not that trivial to change courses, right? So yeah, this is something I would definitely, definitely consider. Cool.

Cool. Okay. Super interesting. Anything else on acquisitions that people don't know that you think, uh, you know, we don't talk about enough?

Oh yeah. Um, the other part of the whole thing, probably in acquisitions, is that Ultimately, see, companies are always bought, right? They're— it's very hard to sell a company in this time. And also, I think once you are on the venture treadmill, there's a certain point which creates a point of no return. So Goldcast has only raised $40 million by this time, and by both us wanting to not raise more and the market giving us that signal that probably you don't need more money, we didn't and couldn't raise more. But let's say if we had raised $150 million, we would have become an unattractive acquisition target even at this price. Because then there's all these considerations like, oh, okay, what, you know, your investors need to be convinced and there's a lot of things that need to be uncovered. So I think being truthful about like what the category can really consume and do is important because just additional capital can truly kill the company if you if you don't really need it or your category cannot support it. Yeah. Interesting.

Okay. I wanna, I wanna zoom out and give you, get a last, get a last take from you on this of, so there's, we've talked about a couple of like very, like if someone looks at the early and the late version of, of Goldcast, it kind of looks the same, right? Like it kind, there's like, you can definitely see the similarities. The path isn't obvious. And, and so, but you've talked about a lot of like very difficult things that deciding the direction of the company and especially when, when the market's facing headwinds, looking to the side and seeing a bunch of people raising a ton of money when you're not. Yes. And then just kind of generally fundraising. What, as you look back, what was the hardest part that you don't feel like you were properly, like mentally prepared for?

Uh, Rob, so two things I would say, two junctures in the company that were really hard. The one of the hardest one was our Series A, right? The last venture round that we raised because, oh man, that was such a bad time to raise money in general. Markets were crashing and I sort of pushed for an early fundraiser. Our board was asking us to wait and get more metrics actually, and I'm glad I pushed for it because because we were probably the last, I would say, big round in martech in general. Like when the window closed shut, and again, I had to pitch like 70, 80 investors, but not for a pre-seed round, like a Series A. So I had to talk numbers and spend so much time and get a no eventually. So that was super hard. And honestly, there was no great insight. We just pushed, pushed and pushed and pushed and had one believer eventually come in. The second, I would say, really hard part was just making this pivot, because if you look at the team internally, at that time we were still growing. Almost 100% when we made this change, right? And the team was like, why are we doing this? We now need a whole set of expertise. We need to figure out PLG, we need repositioning, and why are we going in this video space? And at that time I didn't have all the answers, but my instinct and everything else said that we need to do it. So we had to just make a unilateral decision or get into founder mode, as is said today, and just push for it. And that made a lot of people unhappy internally. We also had to do a layoff at the time, which was very, very jarring mentally, to just give us more runway to see this through. But most of the people stuck even though they were unhappy in different ways, and I'm glad they did. But if I had not— if I and my founders had not made this like extreme push and unilateral decision, we would not have made this change, or maybe we would have half-assed it, which would have not created the kind of success.

Yeah. And just, just on that piece, was it harder to get to the conviction or was it harder to execute once you had conviction?

It was harder. It was harder to convince a team of 100 people that this is the right thing based on my own gut instinct conviction, because I didn't have a lot of data and like a clearly articulated thesis at the time. But that was just honestly—

You'd built up such an intuit— you felt you could kind of feel it in customer conversation. You could feel it in all these different places. Yeah, that's— that is hard. That's hard. Jubilal, this has been awesome. Anything else you want to share? Anything else that we missed covering?

No, no, I think the only other thing, Rob, is I think a lot of people are starting companies right now, right? This is an exciting time, but also an extremely scary time. One thing which I always— I say a lot nowadays is that the market you go into, this just kind of dictates the outcome from day one. And I was a believer early on when I was starting up that, hey, just start up, things will take care of themselves. I don't think that is true anymore. Like the more time you invest upfront, just thinking about like the market and thinking through all of the things that I talked about does pay off in today's world where competition is extremely high and the windows are so much shorter, right, to get into places. I almost think like the team is almost secondary. The market is what determines the outcome, even if you don't have an amazing team. So just thinking through what market you get in and making sure that it's a good market and you know its history and what you can foresee, the better outcome people will have.

Yeah, I love that. You're getting back to Marc Andreessen's 2007 Only Thing That Matters blog post, which is—

Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, in great markets, the quote goes, uh, market—

markets pull product out of the startup, and team is secondary. Good, good teams matter, but market matters. Market decides.

Market decides, and, and, and a great team gets built around great markets. Um, people are always attracted to those, um, those kind of areas. Awesome.

All right, well, thank you for the time. Thanks for, for jumping on. It was, it was great to catch up, and congratulations to you, and thanks for sharing all your, uh, all your insights from, uh, path to an awesome acquisition.

Thanks. Thanks, Robert. It was a pleasure.