Episode with Brian Murray (Co-Founder of Cabal)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Build in Public podcast. I'm your host, KP, and I'm pumped for yet another episode. So today I'm joined by a special guest, Brian Murray, who is a co-founder at a startup called Cabal. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, KP. Great to be here. Big fan.

Thank you so much. And so we were just jamming, you know, before we started on this about involving community from the get-go, how founders today should think differently about co-creating with an audience and, you know, building in public. We're going to get into all of those topics, but I just wanted to first introduce Cabal to the audience. So, Brian, why don't you give us a quick 60-second intro about you and what does Cabal do?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I've been in the startup tech game for a while now. Started my journey at Yammer, which was the predecessor to Slack, and spent most of my time on the product team there and jumped around to a few other startups. Also is in the— I've been doing venture investing the last 5 years or so. And what I saw both as an operator on the founding side and then also as an investor was that these are very high potential relationships. Parties are generally unsatisfied. So the investors want to be more helpful, but they don't know how. The founders are saying things like, there's that meme, let me know how I can be helpful, and being disgruntled. And I've developed an empathy for both sides, and I had an idea for how to fix it. So I teamed up with a former colleague of mine from Yammer, and we started building Cabal. Our tagline is, get more out of your investors and advisors. And I'm super passionate about this concept. I think it could be a really big tailwind for founders who embrace this strategy.

My favorite way to describe Cabal was like, I told one of my friends, founder friends, who I believe is one of your longstanding customers, or at least, you know, has used it. And I asked him like, hey, how would you define Cabal? Because I'm like getting— trying to get my head wrapped around it. And he said, it is the answer to the meme. Let me know how I can help you, right? Which is, 'cause that's been like around for, I don't know, 3, 4 years now on Twitter. Like, you have a Patagonia vest and ABC trying to tell you how they could, trying to show off that they want to help you. But really there's never been like a way, sustainable way to one, be accountable, to trackable, measurable, and also to really do it, to really follow through with the actions. And I think he described it as Kebab is the answer. So I thought it was funny.

Yeah, actually, just on that point, KP, I think memes that gain a foothold and traction, especially enduring memes, are really interesting to deconstruct. So is that— why is let me know how I can be helpful so resonant? And my answer to that is that it's, it's from the founder. It's like annoying to hear this thing, which, because the question is my responsibility as the founder to tell you how you can help me. Right. So you're sort of like feigning like you want to help. But actually, just to give the investor's perspective on this, I actually do believe most investors actually want to help, but they're just not involved in the day-to-day. So it really is hard for them to know exactly how to help. And so, yes, we are trying to answer that question. Absolutely.

And it's a two-pronged situation where both parties have good intentions, but it's like they're— that leads me to actually exploring the problem a bit more. So tell me, when you first started Capelle or when you started doing the discovery work, what did you see that was broken in the world? There's

basically the 2 themes of Cabal. One is how to get more out of your investors and advisors, but the other is this idea that we call the Modern Advisor Program, which is sharing equity in a more expansive way and stratifying how much equity you're giving different people. So I wrote a blog post about the Modern Advisor Program, but that was actually the real inspiration for Cabal was seeing this founder doing this thing that was unusual, but I found to be extremely powerful. But the next obvious question, once you have this army of people who kind of have skin in the game, what's most important is how do you get them to help your business? And we've kind of— we've thought very deeply about that problem, and I've got a lot of thoughts on that. But yeah, those are kind of like the two companies, and they, they converge in some really great ways.

So let's, let's unpack that a bit more. So how is incentivizing community different from ESOPs that you would give typically to your employees?

They're not. That's the beauty is that— so what you do is, you know, founders have their option pool, and depending upon the stage, it ranges in sizes. But let's just say it's a 10% option pool. My argument is that you carve out anywhere from 50 basis points, which is 0.5%, to 2% for this advisor program. And maybe you expand your option pool to 11 or 12% to accommodate this, and then you use that for this program. So So just like you would give different amounts of equity to an entry-level sales rep versus like a chief technology officer,

right?

You should do the same thing for people in your community. So you're drawing out of the same pool of equity as you would for your option pool.

And so as opposed to just having, I don't know, I guess you're going to have a startup of 100 to 200 people. You would have this program extended to a community of maybe 1,000 people, the top 1,000 most contributing Members.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah. But I, oh, go ahead.

So the obvious question that comes to mind is logistics and how do you like, even just how do you not mess up the cap table? Right. And how do you address investor questions around this?

Yeah. A lot of people, there's this meme of like, you know, having a messy cap table or like screwing up my cap table or something like that. The only strictures are you can't exceed 2,000 shareholders. Otherwise, you have— there's some security— securities laws that are triggered and you have to do some things. So you don't want to do that, but that gives you a lot of wiggle room. And to execute this, our recommended— and I'm talking about Delaware C-corps, but of course this is possible for any organization. You just have to figure out the legal structuring. But for Delaware C-corps, which most startups are, you give NSOs to advisors and, um, and you put them on a vesting schedule if you want. And the key is just Thinking of an appropriate budget. And then, you know, the other, the other thing I think a lot of people are thinking when they hear about this strategy is like, wow, 1,000 people, that's a lot.

Like,

how would I do that? My advice is don't do it all at once. You kind of do it incrementally, just like you would build relationships. You're not going to build 1,000 relationships all at once, but over the course of the years that you're building your business, you're going to meet a lot of people. And if you get in the habit of, as you meet people who are interested, excited, and willing to help your business, If you have this powerful tool that can be a quid pro quo, it's like a token of appreciation that will enrich that relationship in an extremely meaningful way. That is a lot, and this is important, it's a lot different than them investing in your business. And I'm a total advocate of doing the Republic or the big AngelList RUV party around the big rounds and getting a lot of investors. But you also should think about a vehicle by which you can include people purely for their contributions and not for their capital.

I like that. I like decoupling contributions from capital because oftentimes you may have a high contributor and maybe they're not financially ready to write 5, 6 checks in 5, 6 startups, but maybe they can help 10 startups a year, right?

Totally.

That is fantastic. So you threw some shade on the advisor program, it seems like. So tell me what's broken about that. And it is also a popular meme too, by the way. Like, I have had several friends who were on both sides and everybody thinks it's a joke. Like, I just rather, I'd rather just put my money in and be an investor, or I'd rather like, just don't, just don't thank me that way. Just don't call me an advisor, right? Just like, I'll help, I'll help you. I'll put you on a podcast or whatever, you know, whatever. And so it's become a meme unless there's a very serious, intentional, thoughtful structuring of that program and execution of the program. It's very rare. So I have a little bit of context, but if you want to, Like, what is this popular meme of advisors that's been hanging— it's been around for like, what, 15 years? You know, that is out of date.

Well, I mean, there's so much to unpack there. Let's start with just the first principles view on this. Like what's really happening? It's compensation. Ultimately, it's like you're doing something, you're contributing in some way, and I'm giving you some reward for those contributions.

Right.

But it's not in the form of dollars. It's in the form of equity, which is like a superpower currency. If you believe in my company. So, so I believe that that should— it's, it's a quid pro quo. It's, it's rewarding people for their contributions. And I think it's a lot more meaningful than doing cash. Now, if people want to support you pro bono, just out of the goodness of their heart, or because they're, they're excited about you, awesome. Like, that's great. But I just believe it's almost like a law of nature that if someone's going to be working for me, like, I want them to benefit from that.

Right.

Where this goes really off the rails is when there is imperfect information, and that can be on either side of the equation. So either the founder is like, yeah, I'll make you an advisor. And they make it sound like the grant is something like really substantial when really it's not. And then the advisor doesn't ask the questions like, how many fully diluted shares do you have? Or what was your last 409A valuation? Or the opposite, where the advisor is maybe some grizzled startup vet and they're like, yeah, I'll help you, but I need 1% of your business.

Right.

That's, you know, in both of those cases, I find it deplorable. But I do love the idea of compensating people for their contributions and using equity to do that because There's this beautiful dynamic with startups where like you can grow and something very modest at one point can become something very meaningful at another point. There's all these great stories about early advisors to Facebook, for instance, who ended up being like multimillionaires.

Right.

There's a lot more we can talk— say about the incumbent advisor approach. But in general, my, like, my foundational belief is that it is a good thing to reward people for their contributions and just doing it in a thoughtful way is what matters.

Now, is there a version of solving this or kind of at least Facilitating this in, in a much more modern way that Cabral currently does, or you have in your roadmap?

Yeah. So, um, there's a bunch of stuff we do. We, I'll just go through a list of things. So number one, we help you create a budget for this. So in our product, you can set up—

Why do we need a budget as a founder?

Because, well, number one, you should be treating like your option pool as a budget, just like you treat your cash balance. Like you should think of almost your option pool as having its own runway. So as I hire people or as I dispense equity, I'm draining that option pool and I need it to last me through the next round. So that's number one. And then what we're doing here is we're taking a portion of that ESOP and we're dedicating it to this advisor program. And if you don't have a budget, you know, you could find yourself in a position where you've overspent or underspent, but knowing where you're at based on your recruiting of advisors is important. Okay. So that's the budgeting. And then we also allow you to create tiers. So you can have like a diamond tier, a gold tier, a silver tier based on the amount of equity you get. And the idea there is that some people are going to contribute more meaningfully than others, and so you should stratify the amount that you, that you offer people. Then we have an out-of-the-box advisor agreement that's pre-mapped in Cabal, so people can just sign up and within a few minutes you could be sending out advisor agreements that are custom to your company, but they're boilerplate based on best practices around advisor programs. And we facilitate the entire process. That was actually, that was the very first product of Cabal is we wanted to help this founder who was recruiting a bunch of advisors do a few things. Number one, we didn't want him to have to involve his attorney every single time.

Yeah.

Number two, he didn't want to have to like bounce between like a Google Sheet, Salesforce CRM, DocuSign. Uh, we just brought that all together into our product. So those are some of the ways. And then we, we give you these nice like landing pages. So when you invite someone, they, it feels very professional and kind of like, uh, you're entering a club sort of. Sort of vibe, and we sort of professionalized the whole thing.

I love that. I mean, right off the bat, I think that whole advisor agreement thing, facilitating that is a winner to me, you know, because I've been at the receiving end and it was not— there was like a lot of back and forth. So we talked about the budget, we talked about tiers, and then we talked about the agreement. Now, the tiers— is the intention behind the tiers to be just within the company, within the startup exposure? of them? Or like, would the public know, would the community know about your tiers so that they can earn their way to the top?

Fantastic question. Right now it's just internal and there will be an arc for Cabal, our mission, if we're successful. And it starts with just making this process easier, but also I want to bring more transparency to this whole industry. And one, you can never know what you're getting with an advisor grant if you don't know a few key pieces of information. Number one is how many options are you getting? Number 2 is, what's the fully diluted share count? That's the denominator. So you divide the options you're getting by the denominator, and now you know your percentage. What percentage of the pie are you being offered here? And then you need to know the last round valuation, or you need to get some sense for how valuable you think this equity is, and the strike price. That's another thing. But over time, yes, I would love to basically publish benchmarks, almost like there's salary benchmarks for different levels of people, so that people feel like this is more fair and neither party is getting the short end of the stick, but that's going to come with time.

Yeah. Awesome. So, okay. So, I mean, a bunch of founders that I know live in this non-cabal world where they just simply bring in their investors and their early community into a Slack or a Telegram group. And that's what is used for comms, you know, about updates and comms and, you know, just keeping up with everything. Why do you think that doesn't work? Do you see yourself as an alternative to that You know, hack shift of a way of doing it, or you think that you can coexist with, with, with this method?

Yeah, I think that works sometimes, but there's a few fundamental problems with it. Number one is those tools were designed for high-frequency communications. And where do you do high-frequency communication? Well, one example is amongst a group of friends or within a company. So like Slack, for instance, is designed for internal collaboration. An investor and a founder, the communication is low,

right?

But the impact should be high,

right?

So when you— if you put all your investors in a Slack channel, the simple fact is when one person writes one message, everybody is interrupted,

right?

So it compounds. It's like a compounding noisy problem, right? My view— and also I think, like, who knows if they're using Slack? Who knows if it's like in their part of their workflow? You're in a different, like, I forget what they call like network or whatever, but what everybody, almost everybody is on is email.

Right.

And so the way we designed our system very intentionally was Cabal works like mail merge, meaning that when you send a message via Cabal, it is delivered from your email address as if it's a normal email that you would write. And no matter how many people you put in the to field, it delivers individual messages. So you can personalize a message at scale. And this becomes Very important delivering asks because like in the worst case, you're doing a BCC email and everybody knows they're on BCC and everybody's like, it's sort of like they hide behind the crowd and they're like, yeah, whatever, tragedy of the commons. But then if you do like a Slack or a Telegram or something like that, it's easy to lose it from your workflow. Whereas most people use email as like their to-do list.

Right.

And so you're inserting a one-to-one message to someone to do something. And the chances that they actually follow through with it are much greater if you do it that way.

Right. Gotcha. And it's, it's, it's also just cleaner. And I wonder if you can track your past messages, you know, and then just kind of see like, you know, can you track replies to the messages? Okay, cool. So then you really have a source of record for communication with, with your investors and advisors.

Yeah. And then, um, you know, if you just take a few steps down the logical path of where we're going, and we just launched this feature, an analytics tab. So now you can see of all of your members, your investors and advisors, who has been kind of going above and beyond. You can have like a— we create like a leaderboard of in a given month, which investor has done the most for you.

Yeah.

And then we're going to do something where you can give out boosts. We're calling them boosts, but basically like if someone is going above and beyond, you can just give them a little bit more equity. Like, I think it's a reward.

Right. Like a bonus. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is, Where this gets really cool is it gives opportunities for those up-and-comers. Like maybe the, you know, the very, you know, rich retired person, they might do a few super high-value things and that's great. But maybe it's like the SDR who's just such a fan of what you're doing and is like making tons of sales intros and you can, you can reward them for that. Now they're building up their own kind of track record of being a contributor.

Yeah.

That other founders are going to want to recruit for their, to be an advisor to their company. So I'm really excited about, you know, where this could go.

It is so, so powerful when you think about that, like just that example of, you know, a hungry, you know, high caliber SDR, you know, perhaps stuck at a role that they're not enjoying in their company. Or maybe they have this situation where they have their, they're like, what's the word? Oprah, the cup runneth over. They're like so good, too good to be at that company, but they could help 5 other startups with their intros, sales hustle, outbound intros and whatnot. Now, currently they're doing it to gain social capital, maybe, you know, and some kind of a social standing and good reputation points, but that could be quantified and that could be incentivized, right? So you really, if you're like a, if you're one of the world's best salesperson, you can get paid like the world's best salesperson. That's mind-blowing. And it doesn't have to come from one payroll, right? It can come from all these equity options. Now, how does the, from a contributor side, how does that work? Like what would my login, what would my profile, what would my, like if I'm helping 3 other startups, Like, how would that look like? And at the, like, is there a way for me to know at the end of the year, how much taxes do I own? Like all that stuff.

Yeah. So if you, let's say you're an advisor or an investor to 5 companies, when you logged into Cabal, you would see kind of like Discord style or Slack style. You'd see the tiles of all 5 companies on a left rail in Cabal, and you could toggle between them. And then when you go to any one company's page, there's a bunch of information you could see. You could see your history of interactions with that company. You can see the status of your advisor grant. So how much you've invested over the term. You could see your contributions over time. You can see the shoutouts that that founder has given across all of their members. So you can sort of some social proofing. You can see, we call them pinned asks, but basically like these evergreen ways of contributing to a company. Like, I don't know, retweet or retweet or add advisor to your profile. That's a common one that people want to get their advisors to add it to their LinkedIn or something. Right. And then in terms of where we're going with this is, uh, imagine a mobile app where you're scanning your portfolio and you're able to make meaningful contributions with swiping and tapping. That's where we want to get to. And meaningful contributions, we should talk about this, but I generally find that I bucket them in 3, 4 categories. One is sales. So that's intros to prospects and converting the funnel.

Right.

2 is marketing. That'd be like retweeting or blogging or whatever.

Amplifying. Right.

Yep. 3 is recruiting. It's like introductions to candidates.

I think the most important thing, hiring and recruiting. Yep.

Yep. And then 4th, which is funny because 4th, which might be the least important, maybe would be advice. So that's like feed product feedback or like, you know, thinking through a problem or whatever. Like it's good, it's useful, but the other 3 are so much more tactical and measurable. And that's what our, that's where we're really focusing our product is, um, how to facilitate those contributions in sales, marketing, and recruiting. And I have so much to say about those topics. That's really like the core of what we're doing at Cabal. But, um, but yeah, we want to make that easy for the founders to share those ways they can help and easy for the investor or advisor to actually fulfill those requests.

You, you mentioned this, this phrase around meaningful contributions, and then I, I have another question for you around equity for contributions. So I'd love for you to take it either way. Like, how do you define a meaningful contribution? Is this something like an internal phrase you use, or are you saying that there are things that people do that are really helpful, and then there are things that are just like, you know, lowballing, uh, low stakes?

Yeah, I definitely believe there's a spectrum of helpfulness, but you can't just say like a sales intro is always the most helpful. Like, it depends on the company, it depends on where they're at, the founder, the, the actual intro. But what I think helps me simplify this world is coming up with those buckets. So sales, marketing, recruiting, and advice. And, um, for speaking about Cabal, this is how we're organizing our product. So one of the capabilities I'm most proud of is, so in Cabal, what you can do is you can upload your list of investors and advisors. Then you can connect your CRM, whether that's HubSpot or Salesforce. And then we will tell you, we will show you which of your investors can help you with introductions.

Wow.

To your prospects.

Wow.

So that could be like a door opener, you know, it's like we just want to talk to this company, or it could be we're already talking to this company, you're connected with the CEO of this company, can you put in a good word? And a few points here. So number one is, generally speaking, of course this is not always true, but a lot of times investors or advisors have more senior contacts, number one. Number two, they are a third party, so their advocacy for your product is much different than your own sales rep advocating for your product. Right. And the biggest tragedy is most of the time this isn't happening just because the founder isn't aware. They haven't connected the dots. And I used to be on the other side of this, like getting all the— like people would create a Google spreadsheet of all their prospects and then ask me like, do you know people at these companies? And it was like, ugh, now I gotta go like do all this work to figure it out. So, and then we've taken it one step further. I mean, me droning on about this conveys my excitement about this particular feature, but the other thing we're sensitive to is that the founders don't have that much time They're super busy.

Right.

So do they really have the time to be going through this list every day and writing emails to everybody? Um, no, they don't. So the way we've designed Cabal is that a sales team can log into Cabal. They can see for their opportunities or accounts where their company has investors who are connected to those prospects. But you don't want your sales reps to be emailing your investors. That's a little bit like of a— you want the relationship to be maintained through the founder, generally speaking. Right. So what we've designed is a collaborative email workflow. where the sales rep, along with their manager, whoever else, can draft an email based on the connection they've identified and tee that up for the founder CEO. So then the founder CEO is just logging in and they see a list of requests, which are just drafts of emails, and they can quickly go through and say yes, no, yes, no, or add a comment saying like, we need more context on this before I'm gonna send the request.

Right.

And, and then we've also layered in seeing how the frequency upon which you're requesting these intros from that particular investor, so you don't overwhelm one investor with too many intros,

right?

But that's— we've got a few design partner teams that are using this, and, uh, it's awesome. I'm really excited about it. But that's just an example of get these people to help you sell. They're there, they want to help you sell, just make it easy for them.

Yeah, help them help you. So how big do you think Cabal could be? It seems like you're infusing CRM into it. A little bit of Slack looks like has been unbundled for comms. Where do you see this in 10 years? Like, how big could this be?

Yeah, I, you know, it's— I think a lot about like categories, and I don't really think Cabal fits into any category. Some people are like, wait, are you like a cap table tool? I'm like, definitely not. No, we want to sit on top of cap tables. Are you a CRM? Definitely not. We're, we're kind of— we have some elements of a CRM. Are you like a task management tool? Like, kind of. I would just argue that we are the— we are trying to design the perfect product so you can get as much value as possible out of this particular group of people who can add a lot of value. We're ants, like your friend said, we're answering Let me know, I can be helpful. That's our product.

I love that. And let me— that as a category. But if you have to, like, maybe— are you thinking about maybe coming up with a category or aligning yourselves to a category? Like, I don't know, I'm not saying, uh, I'm not saying a product category, like the tool or productivity or whatever, but I'm saying from a market share or just like an innovation, you know, because if you think of AngelList or, or, um, Carta, you know, they've been like on the, uh, investment innovation, if you will, right, as a category. Would, would you think that you are on the same direction at least?

Yeah, I would definitely put us in the category of like, uh, ownership innovation.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because we are not unlike AngelList or a lot of other things. We're not involved in like the actual financial arrangements of, um, you know, the movement of money and whatever, but we are in the business of helping Create more owners through the Modern Advisor Program, and then activating these people, turning these people into an extension of your team. I don't believe that the existing tools like a Slack or like an Asana or ClickUp, those don't really work for this group because those are really designed for the internal use case, which is very different than the external.

That might be my favorite part about this is that it feels like you've unbundled Slack. And then I haven't seen, uh, I haven't like seen anything else that Kind of comes into that territory. And maybe there are, you know, maybe Slack's not, because right now Slack's like used for everything, right? It's like, it's like the answer for everything. And oftentimes it definitely doesn't deliver. So my last 2 questions, one being, uh, your explanation, your, your, the way you're talking about equity contributions and community lends itself to asking me to this obvious question, crypto, Web 3.0. Right. What are your thoughts on it? You know, cause it feels like it could be a Kibale token. They could be, I mean, like companies can, can do NFTs, you know, and then maybe that could be an incentive for contributions. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? I'm sure you thought about it.

Yeah, no, like I said, I'm a huge, um, Bitcoiner. I believe it almost like religiously. I just think it's like a very, it's the innovation of our times, the proof of work. And then there's been just like an amazing explosion of innovation on top of this introduction by Satoshi. So a lot of— I think subconsciously a lot of the ideas for Cabal come from my experience in the Bitcoin community, which is like, why are people such raving fanatics about these tokens? Well, it's because they're owners, because if it goes up, they benefit from it. And companies can do the exact same thing, and we're just trying to make it easier for them to do it. But what's been in the way historically are like lawyers or people saying, I don't want a messy cap table, or all these memes that are like in the way from a founder getting this advantage, like giving themselves this advantage, which I experienced firsthand how powerful it can be. Now, my view on this is that we can make this possible with the incumbent corporate structure. We can use NSOs to get this effect. We don't have to do some crazy, like, let's create a DAO or let's create a token or whatever. Right. Your equity is your token. You just need to figure out how to distribute it more effectively. And therefore, I think we can help more companies because Because my view is that maybe the new startups are willing to, like, you know, consider becoming a DAO rather than a Delaware C corp. But for the most part, most companies are going to be, you know, stick with the tried and true because it's a very risky endeavor not to do that, but they want to have this benefit and we're just going to deliver that to them.

So you kind of went deep into crypto with Bitcoin and you kind of brought the essence of it into the old guard, in the shares and the Delaware C corp. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I love you, man. I'm a big fan. I mean, I'm a big— I don't think I'm as crazy as probably Pomp or you, but I'm a big— I have a, unfortunately, to my wife's dismay, I have a lot of money hanging up there in the ether. But no, I love it. I love that ethos there. I love what you did there. Address some criticisms. And I haven't seen this on Twitter or anywhere, but if you have to be honest and say, what are one or two parts of criticisms that came your way about Cabal? What do you think could be either mental blockers or things that are probably not working right now for founders using Cabal?

Yeah. When I was, um, when in the initial, like, iteration of the product where we were really focused on the modern advisor program, a lot of the old guard founders had that reaction. Like you said, they were like, advisors are useless. I gave someone like 25 basis points. I've never heard from them in a year. You know, like, why would you want to do this? And so we've— it's our job to educate people on, you know, don't think of it that way, think of it this other way. So that's one thing. But even if nobody does that, we still have this like massive opportunity of squeezing more juice out of your investors. Like they're so— they could be so powerful to your business and you're not doing enough to like get their— get them to help you. So anyway, the advisor bit would be one. I think like founder time, you know, founder time is a precious resource and to expect them to be our, you know, our primary user, that's our DAU in Cabal, is unrealistic. So that's why, you know, I was telling you about how a sales rep can log into Cabal and tee up a message for the founder,

right?

That's where we need to solve around, is like, we're not going to get the founders logging in every day. So let's try and like, let's get them to use our product in bursty ways where it's like very high value, right? We can lean on other people in the org to facilitate some of the workflows.

Right. I also like that you're thinking about these 4-pronged, like the 4 you know, individual tracks, you know, that, that Cabell, you know, can help you with, one being marketing and sales and advice and, and, and, um, hiring, because I can totally imagine like head of people at a 200-people startup, right? Logging into this every day because their job is to go get enough leads for their job board, right? So even if the founder may not use it every day, I think I like, I like the fact that other people, other owners in the company can, can use it. So that's, that's pretty cool.

Um, just to KP, just to riff on that for a second. So Patreon. Has been an inspiration for us. So what they've done is they have delegated their advisor pool to the functional leaders. So it's not just the CEO that has the authority to grant some advisor equity. Imagine all the functional leaders having their own little advisor group. Wow. So like the CTO has his engineering advisors, the CMO has their demand gen advisors or whatever. That's another example of spreading it out, spreading out the like This thing to more people, making it scale. And Peloton— or excuse me, Patreon is doing that without a product. So it's a little clunky. We absolutely want to bake that into what we're building.

I love that. I love that. And I definitely never heard about this, but I guess some of this is actually also an evangelism problem in the sense that like, like to this example, and like there are so many founders who do very smart, like the Sendoza founder. And it's, I think I interact with at least 200, 300 founders a week. You know, both on Deck and on Twitter and on podcasts and whatnot. And I feel like, I wonder how many people even know, like, you could, you could allocate a little bit of your option pool to an advisor program and run it as effectively as the Sendoza person. Right. And I'd love to be, now that I know the secret, I'd love to be an evangelist. I'd love to, you know, share this widely. Uh, 'cause I think it's for the benefit of the founders and also for the contributors. So yeah, definitely excited. So last one, what's next for Cabal? If you're hiring, feel free to give a plug. Or if you want to point people to a certain place, feel free to do so.

Yeah. What's next? We're just kind of— we've got a very clear roadmap. We're marching ahead. We're— some people are a little like— people have been very patient on our waitlist. We're very intentional about bringing people on methodically because we want, we want our product to continuously get better. And if we just open the floodgates, then, you know, we might not make the most out of, out of the experience. So we've got an awesome team. It's sort of like Navy SEALs. We're a small group, but we're, we're really, um, We've all worked together before. We love working together, and I'm sure we'll be growing again soon. We're kind of in like a focus time right now. What's next is just, yeah, more— I love talking to founders who are excited and interested in this concept or activating their community, because if Cabal, at the limit, if Cabal is very successful, just imagine LinkedIn, but where the connections are more meaningful. The connections bear equity. It's, it's a, you know, it's like there's skin in the game. And what that means is that there'll be more, you know, it's like I have this vision of, you know, when someone IPOs and they ring the bell and there's like a handful of execs. Yeah. Imagine like thousands of people ringing a bell because there's so many people who have benefited or have been part of that journey and contributed in some small way. Like the more companies that do that, the more excited I am. So if any founder has that mindset, I would love to talk to you. I'm brian@getkabal.com.

Awesome. We'll, we'll include that in our show notes as well. And, uh, I just want to say thank you so much, Brian. This was fun.

Awesome, KP. Thanks for having me. I love talking about this stuff, so talking about it with you on your show has been a real pleasure. So thank you, and I'm sure we'll be

chatting again soon. Awesome, sounds good.