A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:06:34 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:06:34] S2: Now that we know that moment, when things were starting to work and you were starting to get referrals. Let's go back to the beginning. When did you start Manifest OS and what were you doing? Not necessarily your whole background, but the few years before you started and before you had the idea of what was going on? [00:06:47] S0: So I was building a company in real estate tech, which was my company number three at that point. [00:06:53] S2: What year is this? [00:06:54] S0: Well, I started the company in 2017. Late 2017, early 2018, it was two years ago. I was building that company. The company was growing fairly well. We were over $50 million in ARR, two hundred employees, a fairly large business. Profitable, we raised $60 million of venture capital from pretty good names, like SoftBank was an investor and I found myself in this weird situation. Where I'm not seeing purpose in all of this. I'm building a business. On paper, it's growing well. I still have some invested stock. But there is a lack of sense of purpose. Because that business for me was just, you know, we were helping real estate owners increase their earnings from their buildings and as much as I could relate to that pain point. I didn't want to spend my thirties, my most active years, on solving that pain point. So I started thinking about transitioning myself out of the business. [00:07:49] S2: And now you're what, '21, 2020? When you start having these thoughts?
00:07:49 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:07:49] S2: And now you're what, '21, 2020? When you start having these thoughts? [00:07:53] S0: I can't remember the exact year, but like, and it was also. There was no one aha eureka moment. It was slowly building up. [00:00:00] S2: But more or less just to give a sense of kind of timeline. [00:08:02] S0: I transitioned into Manifest OS in 2024. [00:08:03] S2: OK, so somewhere a couple of years before that. [00:08:07] S0: And I started working with my team, and basically building the leadership team to sort of plan for the transition. And ultimately, my chief of staff, who was then COO, became the CEO. I trained him, we communicated with investors proactively for many, many months. We gave everyone a heads up. We managed this transition, which was actually an interesting experience. I've never done that before, and the new CEO took over in August 2023. And I started basically thinking more deeply about this idea of building Manifest OS. [00:08:36] S2: Did you have this idea as you were transitioning or you just knew you wanted out of what you were doing and would figure out what the new thing would be? [00:08:44] S0: I knew that I wanted to build something in legal. I wasn't spending much time thinking about what that would be. I knew that legal is this interesting industry, where it's an industry that matters for the world because legal services are fundamental to our society. It's not, you know, delivering burritos five minutes faster. It's actually make or break situations in human lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's actually true.
00:08:44 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:08:44] S0: I knew that I wanted to build something in legal. I wasn't spending much time thinking about what that would be. I knew that legal is this interesting industry, where it's an industry that matters for the world because legal services are fundamental to our society. It's not, you know, delivering burritos five minutes faster. It's actually make or break situations in human lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's actually true. [00:09:08] S2: Or at least it can be. I mean, some stuff is little, you know, whatever contracts. But they can get serious. [00:09:13] S0: It can get serious. Ask a healthy person what they want in life, they tell you a thousand things. Ask a sick person what they want in life, and they say one thing, right? Same applies to legal situations. If somebody's getting sued, if somebody is in litigation, that's top of mind for them. If somebody is going through divorce, that's top of mind for them. If somebody is getting their visa or green card, that's top of mind for them. So for me, it was meaningful work. I knew that I wanted to build in this space because I felt like it's meaningful work and the reality is, if you're building a company. Which is freaking hard, you know, you might as well work on something that actually matters. I knew I didn't want to build enterprise SaaS. I knew I didn't want to go and build a GPT wrapper that does something fun. I wanted to solve a meaty, difficult problem in a regulated industry, and legal just perfectly fit those criteria.
00:09:57 · Pablo Srugo
[00:09:57] S2: That, by the way, is not to be taken lightly. It's actually pretty crazy. If you just think about when you're starting off, you're starting to be a founder and you just dream, and hope that this business is going to work. And then you get it to a point, like you said, $50 million ARR. This is a solid working business, and then for you to, and obviously some people do, you know, transition. But you transition out because you have another idea that you just can't stop thinking about. It's like, OK, I can, I understand that, I get it. But for you to just say, ah, it's just not enough for me, I'll start from scratch. I don't know what this next thing is, maybe it'll completely blow up and it'll be a tenth as big as this thing. Because I don't even know what it's going to be, but you know, screw it. I just can't see myself. It's just not worth my time to be here. I want to do something more impactful. It's not small, it's not a small decision.
00:10:43 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:43] S0: But if you look at, like, look. I don't mean to get all philosophical here, but actually I think we as founders sometimes don't think about the timeless truth enough, and why are we building what we're building? And you can get motivation in so many different ways. You can get motivated by money, and there's nothing wrong with that. People are embarrassed to talk about it, but why? I have no issue to admit that, my first company, which I started at eleven. I started because I was broke and poor, and financially hungry. And that was the real reason, or you can be motivated by your team. And there is nothing wrong with that. People can be building in the most, I don't want to call them boring categories, but like. [00:11:15] S2: You could say, yeah. There are some boring categories.
00:11:22 · Dan Mishin
[00:11:22] S0: There are boring categories and then, people get motivation from working with other smart people and being in the trenches together, and the feeling of camaraderie. And it's a real source of motivation. Amazing, that works but the deepest source of motivation that I've ever found in my career happened in this company and the deepest source of motivation is the service to the community. The service of others, ad if you look at the greatest timeless books, people find motivation in service to others. Every religious book speaks about getting pleasure and happiness from servicing others. Now you can still win. You can still build a valuable company. You can still be a decacorn, whatever the new term is for a hundred billion dollar company business. You can still make a lot of money and achieve a lot of success. But, if you're motivated by the desire to serve others. There is a very deep, meaningful unlock there that lets you persevere through some of the most difficult situations. Now, I don't make the decisions one hundred percent of the time from this place. Sometimes I make decisions because I'm competitive and I want to kick ass of the next guy. Or I want to achieve the next milestone to unlock the next round. That still all happens, but when you start making decisions from the place of this very clear, clean, pure motivation. The quality of decisions is so much better. So what I knew is, I knew that there was a pain point and the pain point for me was I'm not doing meaningful work. And life is too freaking short to work on problems that are not meaningful. And I knew that I need to solve it because it was ManifestOSing itself every morning. I would wake up later. I wouldn't have the motivation to go to the gym. I would be sleepy and foggy, and my brain would shut off. And when that happens for an extended period of time, you're like, hmm, there is a signal in there and the signal is, you know, maybe you need to make a change. So yeah, I didn't know the exact business that I'm going to launch, but I knew that I'm going to be building something meaningful.