The Exchanges

Q And love to know, have you started thinking yet about how you intend to monetize and if that's secret sauce right now?

A Pretty open book. Yeah. I'm talking a big game, giving away e-signature for free. I'm giving away invoicing for free. How the heck do you make money? It is on those larger teams. So we have two ways that we monetize. One is collaboration features, specifically between sales, finance, and legal, right? So any, so sales kicks off a contract. Anytime anything's edited or reviewed, or there's a change made, legal wants eyeballs on that. And then anytime it's fully executed and there's an invoice or purchase order created against it, obviously finance needs to be aware of that. So we bring all those together in our own kind of collaborative environment. So we're not competing against Slack, but we have our own collaboration features. And then we charge for that. B to B monthly SAS. And then our ICP, the folks that we're targeting, who we really built the product for is any organization that moves the majority of revenue through a contract. And these are groups to start mid-market, lower mid-market, where they're doing between one and fifty million in annual revenue. That at scale, if you move that much money, you're talking about billions of dollars through the platform, through these contracts, you start to look, act, and walk, and talk a little bit like a bank, but you can monetize in traditional fintech pathways, whether it be The float, uh, whether we think about things like inv…

AI assessment note: “So we have two ways that we monetize. One is collaboration features”

Q A hundred percent. So what was, what was the inspiration that led to founder a new building?

A There were a number of things. One, we run a small venture capital firm prior to this. So we're founders. We went VC. Now we're back founders again, but working and writing just a bunch of safe documents, wiring a bunch of money was inefficient. It took forever. It seemed like it was grueling on both sides, having to move money with your bank. Nobody liked it. And then there's security vulnerabilities. Everyone's sending Count routing numbers, plain text over email. You're right for man in the middle of tax. All of that led up to this moment where I'm driving down the one-on-one in San Francisco, and I see this billboard for Adobe sign, and it says, sign, send, done. And I was thinking for a second, just to our previous conversation, it's not done, but it's interesting. That's their value problem. They think that level of simplicity is what's going to make them win in the market. And I was just thinking, oh, Like, I could compete against that, and then there's some why now moments, technically speaking. Traditionally, to have done what we do, you would have needed something like OCR technology to render and extract all the contents of a contract. That was, that technology was never a hundred percent accurate and reliable, but once we got introduced to generative AI, the whole world's gen AI plus what, we are all gen AI on top of OCR unlocks what, and it just, it made it so that…

AI assessment note: “There were a number of things. One, we run a small venture capital firm”

Q I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Um, everyone's heard this. And, but I also know that, um, you have to listen to the market. And so where are your co-founder in your head in terms of, Hey, I have this great vision, but I also know that I have to manage expectations with my clients. How do you walk the line?

A Yeah, and I think this is one where if you ask folks, the example I use is the Nest thermostat. Before that thing hits the market, We all walked into any one of our houses or apartments, and like your background, it's absolutely beautiful view, beautiful architecture, beautiful furniture, but pre-Nest, you'd have this god-awful ugly thermostat on the wall, and none of us ever thought to question it. You spent so much time on those windows, and that wood, and that flooring, but then you have this ugly beige thing that sits there, and we all just assumed that's just the way it is, until one day someone says, hey, Maybe it could be beautiful. Now we'd never go back. You'd never put something like that in a beautiful house, like that's in your background right now. And e-signatures a lot like that. DocuSign is just the way it is. Invoicing and payments is a lot like that. So the way we look at it, I'm not going to overnight change everyone's consumer behavior. I'm going to go to where I know the pains are the strongest. And then as I alluded to earlier, I'm going to, I'm going to grow from there and start to educate folks that, Hey, there's a new way. Cause I can't go into an organization and say, You need to recognize revenue faster. You need to use us to speed everything up. So who are these guys? They don't know anything about revenue. But if I come in and say, Hey, do you want …

AI assessment note: “I'm going to go to where I know the pains are the strongest.”

Q I'm open to being a unicorn one day, but how did that factor in your conversations?

A Yeah, the big thing that I found is they want conviction. And if you're talking about early stage, pre-seed, those kind of funds, um, they don't want two X, four X returns. That's not going to help them. They need a hundred X, right? So you have to go into it already with the conviction that you're going to be a billion dollar company. Then you have to articulate how you're going to get there. And then why of all the ideas, why you're me and my co-founder, why are you the two yahoos that are going to pull this off? Why can't somebody else do it? So one, I think we're looking, they're looking for reasons to say no, first and foremost. I think most founders don't realize that. The other one is you have a finite amount of time with a venture capitalist. There's the elevator pitch, which is really fascinating. It could be anywhere between 10 minutes and 30 minutes, but it's the founder's job, I think, to control that time. What I do, what I need to do as a founder is make sure that we spend that entire time talking about only the things I want to talk about. I need you not to go off into a place, like I always talk about if we're in a house, And I've got a bunch of dead bodies in the basement. Every time I see you walking towards the basement door, I need to make sure you don't open that door. I need that because even with agree, um, sometimes I would use the example because I want…

AI assessment note: “you have to go into it already with the conviction that you're going to be a billion dollar company”