00:05:17 · Tae Hea Nahm, S0
[00:05:17] S6: Hi. I'm Tae Hea Nahm. I'm co founder of Storm Ventures. We're a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley focused on b to b software companies. I have invested in over 200, of which 12 have become unicorns. I've also... Was a founding CEO of Airespace that we sold to Cisco for about 500,000,000. So when Airespace first got started, I was just an investor, but I was the only investor, and the company was incubated at Storm office. So the original idea for aerospace came from someone that was working at Storm, Tim Danforth. He was a technologist out of Cisco and has a lot of experience. He came up with the idea of having one infrastructure to support both cellular and Wi Fi access. I like the idea of Wi Fi and cellular because then you can support all wireless in one box. I thought that people will want to have, simple and easy wireless access. And so I figured Wi Fi would be the way because Wi Fi leverages open spectrum, so it's free. It's not like cellular where you have to pay a cellular. Ad[00:06:27] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus.
00:06:27 · S0, S1, S2, S7, S8
Ad[00:06:27] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:06:52] S1: Kate holds the key to every brand asset your business has ever made. She's the only person who knows the difference between teal, turquoise, and the correct company blue, but she's going on vacation. Luckily, before the company falls into design disarray, you realize you can put Kate into Canva. Save every color font and logo to a brand kit everyone can access, and Kate can vacation happily in the knowledge that no one will ever use Comic Sans. What will you Canva today? Ad[00:07:22] S2: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:07:52] S7: The secret society of semi homemade? Ad[00:07:54] S8: Listen up. Sam's Club has premade dishes
00:07:54 · S8, S9, S2
Ad[00:07:54] S8: Listen up. Sam's Club has premade dishes Ad[00:07:57] S9: for a Thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours, all while tasting suspiciously homemade. Ad[00:08:03] S2: Come join us. Sam's Club. Individual oven times may vary.
00:08:07 · Tae Hea Nahm
[00:08:07] S6: Our provider. So that was my belief and why we started Airespace. And to be honest, the beginning of Airespace was really hard. I actually hired four people to do cellular, four people to do Wi Fi. But then as we talked to customers, we realized that customers just wanted WiFi only. That's why we pivoted to WiFi only, I had to actually lay off half the team at that point. I remember one of the people I laid off moved him from outside The United States to Silicon Valley to do this company, and then I had to lay him off. It was tough to lay off 50%. Well, alternative is we shut the whole company down, and I lay off a 100%. And this also was in 2002 when Silicon Valley was going through a very difficult time. At that moment, given the difficulty of Silicon Valley, the problems that Airespace had in the beginning because we were pursuing the wrong product strategy, the natural temptation will be to shut it down. And the only way I could persuade my partners that we should continue funding is for me to become the CEO of the company. But that also increased my accountability, and that meant if the company failed, I'd be fired. And one thing that boosted my confidence that we should continue is, I was talking to Samsung executives, and they were saying how they want to have WiFi enable all their, like, laptops and consumer devices. And that gave me confidence that maybe this is the beginning of a wave. And then once I believed in the WiFi only, then we needed to hire out the rest of the engineering team, the go to market people, and ultimately my replacement, who was employee number 24. And as I was talking to one of the investors now about the go to market, I mentioned we want to pursue one based on partnerships. And that's when, my co investors introduced Bob and saying, will be very good at partnerships.
00:10:05 · Bob Tinker
[00:10:05] S5: The idea behind Airespace was to enable people to use WiFi at work. We probably all laugh about now. Oh my God. There was a time when we did not use WiFi at work, but this was 2002. Intel had just put WiFi built into their very first laptop. And people were like, how do I use this? What can I attach it to? And all of a sudden now people are bringing to work saying, how do I attach this to a network? And they were putting Linksys access points under their desks and creating holes into the network and creating huge security issues. Airespace's mission was to bring WiFi to the enterprise. That worked out pretty well. We timed that right. There was a wave of change with laptops now enabled with WiFi. There was a big pain because enterprises were like, uh-oh, now what do we do? And we built a solution for that. At Airespace, we tackled a problem that had both pain and urgency. We went from zero to $80,000,000 over the course of about three years. How do you get your first 10 customers? Every startup really wrestles with that because it's hard. If you think about it from the point of view of your customers, imagine you're a person going into a hospital and you need surgery and the doctor says, You're gonna be my very first patient. You'd be like, I don't want you to operate on me. I don't want you as my doctor. Your challenge as an early startup is you have to convince customers to buy your product when nobody else has. Like, how do you do that? Sometimes it comes from previous relationships where you've been able to work at other companies and had customer relationships where they trust you. That can help. But the real thing you need to do is make sure you're solving a pain that has urgency. Because when people have a pain that's urgent, they're willing to take risks on buying from a smaller company. The second thing that's important in terms of finding and winning your early customers is listen to them. One of the things we did that worked really well is we had this concept called a teaching customer. When you're out talking to early prospects, some say yes, some say no, some say maybe, and you get a lot of feedback. It's hard to figure out, like, who do you listen to? Figuring out which
00:12:08 · S0, S1, S2
Ad[00:12:08] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini in Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:12:33] S1: You've been asked to run the company's social channels, but company content plays by its own set of rules. It needs a logo in the first three seconds, but it can't feel like an ad. It needs subtitles, except when it doesn't. It needs to run at two times speed and deliver a complex message simply, of course, within nine by 16. Thankfully, your company has Canva, so you can easily edit your video and every version of it. What will you Canva today? Ad[00:13:03] S2: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. I hope I don't have to cancel again tonight.