Straight Answers

“Like maybe walk me through just the setup. I mean, I, I know nothing about the parking lot kind of industry.”

answered: “We had a really unique go to market and product market fit.”

“Like, did you get one design partner and then start collaborating with them? How did you set it up?”

answered: “a lot of our focus was first making multi-agent, multi-step architecture work.”

“What attracts you to specifically that stage, that, that pre-seed stage?”

answered: “I spent some time at a financial services company as I chose that sector.”

“Was he supplying then one of the first Pieces of furniture that, that Wayfair would have sold?”

answered: “Wayfair got at this early, like early 2000. They started as CSN stores”

“We just have to cross the board, reduce spend, and that's typically, like, into that motion, it's really hard to, to sell. When, when this is happening, like, in twenty-twenty-two, how much runway do you have?”

answered: “we faced this situation where our burn was high, and revenue was plateauing”

“And so back then, you know, 2014, where does the idea for, for ritual, how does that come about? What's kind of the origin story there?”

answered: “Normally ideas like this, it doesn't happen in an instant.”

“Did you then go into fundraising mode and try and raise the seed round? And what was that process like with those pilots in hand?”

answered: “I think you've got to be able to tell a story to someone”

“Do you start building? Do you, do you fundraise?”

answered: “that's the part that was a little bit messy that I was referring about before”

“It's AI is gonna, you know, make services more effective, it's gonna make cybersecurity more effective. What does the product MVP V-One look like to you as you're thinking through it, and again, like, late, twenty-twenty-four-ish?”

answered: “we could build an AI native company and an AI native product”

“You're kind of like me, like you might have an idea. You can't do shit about it.”

answered: “It wasn't even necessarily that we thought there was... what we knew was that this video”

“It was all word of mouth. This time, did you get into, like, paid ads, or what, what, what, do you remember what was, like, your big acquisition channel?”

answered: “Some of the early hires we had to do at Hipmunk that we didn't”

“Was there any frustration at the speed of execution, even if it wasn't directed like at each other, like, Hey, you got to get this done by X time just as a whole. Was it a benefit to not have the pressure that early on, or was it a detriment?”

answered: “I think early on, we were still wondering like how big could it be?”

“Did you end up picking, you had, as you said, kind of Um, from startup founders all the way to enterprise, as you started off in, in this design phase, did you end up deciding to, at least from a go-to-market perspective, hone in on one of those, ah, kind of company size types, or did you scale to, from there to like a million plus growing across the board?”

answered: “The upside of, of seeing a landscape that you created become clouded and competitive”

“And I think, you know, happy year salespeople for always forget, how do I identify the person using experienced muscle memory? That's going to kibosh this thing.”

answered: “rarely is this idea of a challenge for mentioned”

“And, and a lot of it is like, Hey, you know, talk to customers, like understand what the pain actually is. And like, you know, I, they, they always try to discredit that time, but like, I, I put a lot of weight into it where it's like, well, what did, yeah, like, I'm curious, what did you, what did you see?”

answered: “Cause cause cause of the, the negative view, let's say it would be okay.”

“What are the sort of things you can actually get them to talk about? Or is it really mainly just like you raise a round or big, big product?”

answered: “But I just want to say like you nailed something kind of implicitly right there.”

“Do you recall like how many customers you signed in that first year or just how, how, how fast things took off?”

answered: “I think more than the how many customers. So we did few pivots”

“Uh, when you, when you think about your, your story with refined labs and again, starting as effectively a consultant and then really creating a, you know, big company out of it. When did you feel like you had true product market fit?”

answered: “I'll talk through my current situation, right? So I've run, I started Paceto”

“Was this a bit more, Methodical, like you saw the market and then you, like, how did you decide, again, you know, okay, you want to work on crypto, you want to work on DeFi, but how did you come up with the actual idea? Was that done a little bit more by design this time around?”

answered: “I'll give a little context about what we're actually doing and then”

“And it's just like, what's going on? Like, who is this guy?”

answered: “Well, like, okay, let's talk about Nike. Then let's, let's jump into Nike.”

“It's more like every one of my customers is slightly different. So how do I build product architecture and technical architecture to support those differences in a good way?”

answered: “it's interesting you, you say that, you know, there's that quote”

“That's right. Well, he's not the CEO anymore, right?”

answered: “Oh, I know, but you'd think that at least read it. But you know”

“So they can receive orders that are placed through the internet. How are we going to make this work?”

answered: “how did you even take those first few steps and have conversations”

“So there's a balance to find there, right? Which is how do you both invest in the things that you need to go prove as quickly as possible and get ahead of what's coming while also, you know, kind of staying as lean as you possibly can.”

answered: “I'm curious, like, what was top of mind for you during that first year”

“If you can go from zero to eight enterprise customers in six months, that's like a good start. So that's kind of like the first guardrail and did the business continue to grow?”

answered: “And I'm curious before you move forward”

“But rarely do you order like five or 10 of it on purpose. What was it about the design of these meals or the setup of them or whatever that, that some people were even doing that at that point?”

answered: “Because we wouldn't have guessed that. I had such a strong bias towards on-demand delivery”

“And then on the flip side, has there ever been a time in the last year where you thought things would just like completely break, or maybe just like not work out?”

answered: “anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you. This startup life is”

“Was this like generally accepted wisdom? Like, yeah, of course, no brainers, it's a matter of who's going to do it and how, or were you a little bit of like the, the crazy ones saying things that many people thought were just kind of unimportant or nonsense even.”

answered: “I actually think it's literally the single most topic or a single most important topic”

“And is that more from what makes most sense for you or just like in terms of what resonates with customers? Like do you find some customers prefer the robot as a service model, but others are more used to just buying equipment or how's the market respond to that?”

answered: “my point there is less about the market. It's just, I believe”

“I would have never have known that, but I know that if you go through this process of starting through your target audience and figuring out kind of like where they want to be reached and how they want to be reached, you don't have to guess. Is that, does that kind of connect?”

answered: “The question I have though, is when it comes to like traditional media”

“Do you start building with a design partner? Where do you go?”

answered: “instead of a product market fit, I always think about operator market fit”

“Did he think that way at all? Did he do that kind of math?”

answered: “arguably the most successful founder of all time is George Washington.”

“Okay, okay. Of high margin revenue to you, like, SaaS-like margin revenue to you?”

answered: “the margin profile is quite strong if you build it in a way that's kind of self-service”

“My understanding is you raised, you know, solid kind of, I think four million seed kind of right out of the gate. What was that, what was that process like?”

answered: “started this kind of on nights and weekends with my two co-founders”

“And, uh, I'm curious, especially in that first year, because I assume that was when any challenges, like, what were some of the main challenges? Do you have any, like, punch-to-the-face moments where things didn't look as clean, let's say, as you might have hoped?”

answered: “a big moment for us was, was kind of making this transition”

“In many cases in deep tech, because you get to go kind of so far out, you almost know, like, if you can deliver this sort of improvements on performance, reliability, or, or whatever it is, They will come, but the question is, you know, can you actually build it? So what, what happens during that, you know, 2013 to 20 16, 17 phase?”

answered: “Yeah, but by the way, in deep tech, there is a big risk”

“Like what in your experience works really well? Uh, and, and just like increases the odds that the people that, you know, journalists like that will cover you.”

answered: “Well, let's even break that down and extend it.”

“I remember, like, a month in, He sent me this, you know, a hundred page personality questionnaire and assessor compatibility. Like she's like, even my wife, I did, uh, have you something like that?”

answered: “How do you, you know, let me ask you this, man.”

“Like besides product hunt, first of all, what did you do to push it and what was the adoption like? Yeah.”

answered: “So product hunt is a funny one. We've now done a number of product hunt.”

“Like, what, what's the story around there? How did that happen?”

answered: “the Series A, like, name is, you know, it's kind of hand wavy”

“It just doesn't matter anymore. Clearly you're winning, but in that seed stage, you know.”

answered: “at the end of the day, a VC that invests in you and the seed round”