00:37:07 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:37:07] S1: Yeah. Well... And you're not taking up rounds. You're not doing up rounds at that point if it's not going well. [00:37:11] S0: Exactly. So you kind of are. Yeah. So so even in that case, you you you you you you you shouldn't. I'm sure the motivation will be a little bit harder, but but I really believe in our team. I think they will be able to go through the hard and... You know, the hard times are never as as... So the bad times are probably never as bad as they are or as they seem at the moment, and the good times aren't as good as they seem. So you kind of are a bit closer to the median or to the average of the times. And and I think it's true here as well. [00:37:43] S1: The... So I... So on the bad times, they're never as bad as they seem. I agree. However, I know that. I've internalized that. I deeply believe that Everything that I've ever been anxious about basically in my entire life either hasn't come true or was not a big deal. And knowing everything that I know, still, I run into... Let's just say with the company that we're ringing on now, I run into something, and I'm like, oh my god. Like, I do not... Like, it just feels terrible. Like, I can't, in that moment, face a bad time and be like, this isn't gonna feel bad. Like, I know in
00:37:43 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:37:43] S1: The... So I... So on the bad times, they're never as bad as they seem. I agree. However, I know that. I've internalized that. I deeply believe that Everything that I've ever been anxious about basically in my entire life either hasn't come true or was not a big deal. And knowing everything that I know, still, I run into... Let's just say with the company that we're ringing on now, I run into something, and I'm like, oh my god. Like, I do not... Like, it just feels terrible. Like, I can't, in that moment, face a bad time and be like, this isn't gonna feel bad. Like, I know in [00:38:15] S0: a But I think it's good. I think it's good. It's like you you you care. That's why I think it's like the same way for me too. It's like... And I... And for many people around, it's like you still care, so every single kind of direction takes additional emotional impact. I think, you know, you can still stay level headed and make the decisions. I think that's the important important part, but
00:38:15 · Mati Staniszewski, Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:38:15] S0: a But I think it's good. I think it's good. It's like you you you care. That's why I think it's like the same way for me too. It's like... And I... And for many people around, it's like you still care, so every single kind of direction takes additional emotional impact. I think, you know, you can still stay level headed and make the decisions. I think that's the important important part, but [00:38:41] S1: but it seems you know that... Yeah. Yeah. My my my observation is that there are so many decisions to be made. Right. So many decisions to be made that, like, each one of them on their own, you don't even notice that you're making these decisions. But over time, they just kind of like... It's just like a like... It's like a quarter percentage of energy on every single decision. You know? And then over time, you just, like, sum all of those up. And you're, like, draining or depleting some reservoir of decision making energy Right. That you have Right. In order to, like, kind of like, when the one comes, that's like, oh, you know? You're like, well, I just made, like, 50 decisions yesterday. You know?
00:39:23 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:39:23] S0: It's like Yeah. It's it's... We... I've I've went through a few of these conversations recently with a few people that were ICs for a long time and now are leading parts of the work, and they just feel that from being able to what felt like meaningful work, they're replying to constant pings or tiny things across. And and I... So first of all, for sure, I see, like, you know, the kind of the more you get, the more you will get asked for decisions across. But but then I think the two things are are are important to to help out. One is you you have the, of course, the different segments of the company that applies in different ways. I think in our case, we have an amazing set of leads across that will effectively take a lot of those micro decisions and that kind of trust them completely. They will do extremely well. That in turn means that the the bad things get filtered out always back to to you. Mhmm. And then the second thing is that you you... It's like, I I think there's this kind of balance of, like, which decisions you should really take versus the individual should take, and it was, like, plus minus 10%. They should just run of it. In our case, what we are trying to, like, instill for everybody that we are small teams. This will only work if people take ownership and try to make a lot of those decisions themselves. We are assuming, and we are trying to put them in a position where we fully trust them, and then they they they they can flourish. They won't be punished by doing that and running ahead, but but they feel empowered to to, like, run towards the fire, take take decisions, fix it, not try to ask their their, like, you know, fuel these up on, like, is it is it right and and kind of go through that iteration cycle relatively quickly. Mhmm. Very... Of course, very... Now as a company, we run the company on micro teams. So we have 330 people. On the product side, it's, like, 20 teams of five to 10 people working on different segments of the product work. And and they are executing, and and and and then they kind of need to live with the part that you need to take more of decisions, but then in turn, it it it works well.
00:41:39 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:41:39] S1: Are you holding your breath every big model release? Like, what I find fascinating about what you're doing right now is that your growth is fueled by the fact that you are in the eye of the hurricane. Right? Like, you are in a middle of a market that really matters. And it turns out, when you're in the middle of a market that really matters to people and consumers, especially consumers, that also really matters to OpenAI and Anthropic, right, and and Google. And, you know, like, we saw this in our world. Like, for example, like, coding really mattered to Anthropic and OpenAI. Now, you know, Cursor has so far made it out the other end of that kind of... And and maybe you're the cursor of this world, and maybe Cursor will continue to be ahead of them. But these are not the incumbents of old. Right. Right. Like, these are like... It's just... These are big giants Right. That are very talented, that if you're in one of the key areas, it is... It just... I'm not even saying, oh, they're gonna do it or not. It's just gotta be a crazy time [00:42:57] S0: Right. [00:42:57] S1: And somewhat nerve racking and, like, knowing that you're right in the sweet spot of something that they really care about. [00:43:05] S0: Right. [00:43:06] S1: Because consumers really care about it. Of course. You know? I don't know. Just like like, you probably get the annoying VC question of, like, why won't OpenAI do it? That's not really my question. It's more like when you're in this eye of the hurricane, it's gotta be insane.
00:43:18 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:43:18] S0: Look. It's... We we will fight, and I think we can win. At the... It is it is eye of a of a hurricane, and so far, we've been able to to win time and time again, but it's... I think we are in a unique position where we do both. We do foundational research model and the application around it. So in turn, this means two things. One, to your kind of main point, on the on the research side, we need to stay competitive. So it's like this one is, you know, like, we need to create models that are better than OpenAI, Gemini models, and and I think we can. We did it on text to speech. Right. Then we repeated this on speech to text. Then we did on music, orchestration, bring that all together. And and we will we will continue battling battling them out and and hopefully hopefully winning. It's a tricky one. But that's that's that's one. So definitely, you know, checking the mark and holding the the breath when when things happen. But at the end of the day, model is only one piece of it. The second piece is as important, which is that application side. How do you create the best platform for creating an agent? Beyond having the best voice or the best LLM, you need how does it integrate with your CRM system with Salesforce or ServiceNow or Goldrive. How do you build functions in it? How do you decide when to refund or take an appointment scheduling? How do you then deploy that in production? How do you test, evaluate version control? Then And kind of we spoke about this is the platform functionality, but what most customers really care about is the outcomes themselves, how this will solve my... How will that impact my CSAT score and customer support if I do deploy that agent? Help me understand that. What's the cost benefit ratio of of of doing that work? And none of those other companies usually do that on the on the agent side, and that's where we where we focus and spend a lot of the energy. So now we are in this interesting spot where benefits of a lot of the foundational work ultimately end up benefiting the agents. Mhmm. And we hope to do both. We hope the product is going to be best, and the in in incoming audio foundational layer that we do will be best too. Same applies very much on the creative side.