So today, we have a very special guest, Brett Martin, a professor over at Columbia Business School and the co founder of QumuSpace, an interactive video chat platform. He's also the co founder of Charge Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in startups. So first off, thank you, Professor Martin, for taking the time to join the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks for having me, Miss Shamus. Pretty excited to be here. It's great to have you on the show.
So first off, when you went to Dartmouth and you're the vice president, raised a couple $1000 from local businesses. But then in 2010, you cofounded sonar media and then later in 2 2013, you cofounded a different company called switch. So how did you first get interested in business and startups? And what was that journey like? For sure. You know, I think it started a young age with me. My I was sort of I I always remember one particular moment when I had saved up a $100.
This is around 19 87, 88, 7, 88, and I really wanted to buy Nintendo. And my parents didn't wanna buy me a Nintendo. So I spent you know, most of the years saving up a $100. And I remember I went to the store, and I picked up the Nintendo, and I got the cash register And I was looking at my mom all smugly about how I was gonna buy Nintendo. And then they told me it was going to be $105 and that $5 of sales tax that I had not accounted for.
And I remember at that point feeling very helpless because I did not have you know, complete control of my financial destiny. And, you know, luckily, my mom did spot me that $5 to to bridge the the gap, but I remember that. And I said, okay. You know, I'm always have enough money to get to get what I want. And so always was doing, you know, odd jobs, entrepreneurial stuff, selling seashells in front of my house, Henderson City, Maryland, Madan, yeah, you mentioned I went to Dartmouth.
I went to Dartmouth as an undergrad and, you know, there, we kinda won the tuck business playing competition and, you know, always the plan was to do entrepreneurship. So right after college, you know, I really just did a a brief tour of investment banking. Did the 2 years analyst program. Got financial independence. And then ever since then, have either been building or investing in in tech companies. Absolutely.
And let's start off with your more recent co found that did company, which is Kumospace. What is Kumospace? And then what problem does it solve? Yeah. So KumaSpace is sort of your virtual HQ for remote and distributed teams. So KumaSpace is a it's a virtual office. Where remote teams show up to work every day. And so it's something that combines video chat and video games to come to create a a place. So you enter como space, and you can instantly see your whole team is there.
In the morning, you'll see your team filter in And, you know, we have engineers, so sometimes they're getting in a little later, you know, 10, 11. And you can see where everyone's meeting. See if they're meeting, you can see what they're presenting. You can see people coming into the meeting and then leaving a meeting and having little side conversations. And It's just like a physical office. And, you know, why do you go to a physical office? You go there to collaborate.
You go there to get some of your own work Madan. You go, you know, you'll eat lunch in the office to connect with your colleagues. You'll have parties or, you know, presentations or intent programming in your office. Sometimes you'll just be playing pingpong late at night in your physical office. And so now that more and more teams are working remotely, you know, working from home or working from anywhere. You know, KumaSpace provides the same thing to those remote teams.
It's a place for them to show up. It's a place for them to can't work done. It's a place for them to collaborate. It's a place for them to coop off and connect and and build bonds with their coworkers. So Christmas space sort of provides all of those. All the benefits of in person office, but to remote and fully digital teams. Absolutely. And you touched on a good point, which is increasing transparency between teams, which is can be super helpful, especially in a more re remote landscape.
But I think one topic that does come up or a competitor is zoom was able to gain market share back in the day when Eric Wants started. Because it worked better than any of the other competitors out there. Now over at Kumbospace, you have been partnered with some pretty big companies in including Nike and Amazon, but how do you plan to gain market share in an extremely competitive industry?
Now arguably, it is B2B, so so it's a little different, but how do you plan to gain that market share with Qumos based? Totally. It's a good question. So The way we think about it is and this is, you know, Clayton Christiansen was a famous professor. You probably heard about him. Right? He is a Yep. Intermeters dilemma, working with the Harvard Business School.
And one of his later sort of theories is that, you know, industries at different times in their development there's different sort of principles that to win them. And so when we look at video chat, sort of the first wave of, you know, video or rather, you know, video chat, video conferencing, video networking, really all that mattered was did it work? Right. And so Zoom won because it was the most reliable and the most stable.
And they did a really amazing job there that, you know, they built out their own infrastructure, their They're ex Cisco guys, they think. Right? So they're really good at the networking stuff. And so Zoom 1, because unlike all the other things, it just it just worked. And so they had a very monolithic design.
And, you know, it's, like, kind of if you build everything monolithic, altogether, it's easier to have complete control over each if you look at the next 10 to 20 years of video conferencing, I really hope that this is not the Zoom is end of history because I, you know, I think there's a pretty clear consensus that people and while it works, the people use it, they don't love it. So much so that there's a a word for it. And, you know, what do you that word is zoom fatigue. Right?
We hear about this. We're just like, we're sick and tired of it. We're bored. We're exhausted. It. It it's taxing. It's dehumanizing. It commodifies us. Right? And so when we look at the next 10 years of video chat, we think that it's gonna become increasingly specialized and personal personalized Madan, you know, the one thing we've learned about building a remote work company is that, you know, the office is kind of like it's like a one size fits all. Right?
Like, you have one office It it's it's made of atoms. It's not configurable. It's hard to personalize. It kind of it's the same shape and size for every person in there. No matter what their function is, whether they're engineer or marketing or sales or what their personal style is. You know, are they introverted? Are they extroverted? What their life situation is?
Are they just beginning their career and really wanna build a social network, or are they you know, mid career and and they really, you know, wanna be able to get in and out at easily to help with their, you know, go home and see their kids. You know, or their their late career and they have other goals. Right? So the office is one size fits all.
And but what we've learned is, you know, with remote work, it's anything, but and so all those different people that I just told you about, all these different functions, what we've learned about remote work is that they actually all have they have different needs. And so if you're a just out of college and you're, you know, really your work might be part of your social network. You know, you're building your professional social network work very important for that.
You want you really need mentorship works really important for that. If you're mid career and you have a family, you know, maybe you really wanna minimize, you know, you wanna be efficient. You wanna be in and out. You know, you don't wanna be spending hours commuting. And so You know, when we look at Zoom, Zoom is like this monolithic tool. It's really hard to make it personalized and customize each person that's using it, it's kinda one size fits all.
And so we we think that the next 10 years of video chat will be incredibly personalized based on who's using it, why they're you why they're using it. And you already kinda see this kind of fragmentation. You see a bunch of sales specific zoom tools. Right? You may have a Shamus or a Gong. You see product, you know, product specific video chat tools. There's people that are, you know, doing it for product feedback. You see all these people basically building these verticalized video solutions.
And we think that Qumu space by kind of using this conceit of a virtual world, it actually is a really expansive design space, right, in that virtual world, you can add anything. Right? So in Kuma's space, you know, we have whiteboards, and we have, you know, Tetris. And we have, you know, you can do an integration with your Figma, and you can also you know, virtual drinks or, you know, virtual games or virtual ping pong.
Actually, at our hackathon last week, someone turned their human space office into a, you know, a 5 minute soccer game. And so we think that, you know, Zoom is pretty limiting. Like, good luck trying to use any more than one app at a time. I mean, Zoom is trying to become right now, they're trying to figure out, okay, are we a product? Are we a are we a platform? Right? And so they're trying to build this app store, but, like, you know, I don't know how many Zoom apps you use, but not that many.
It's pretty hard. And so we think there's a really, you know, the next phase of video chat will be won by whoever can build this, like, most personalized platform that caters to each group. And in part that the reason why that's possible now is because There's all these companies out there, like, that do video as the service. So there's Agora. There's daily. There's Twilio. These are all video as a service infrastructure providers.
And so we, you know, Zoom has spent so much of its energy and its time in money building out, you know, the the core reliability video chat. And so we're lucky as a insurgent in the video chat market. We actually don't have to worry about that because we actually sit on top of all those other providers, which essentially give us the video for free. I mean, we have to pay them. But, you know, we pay them pennies, fractions of the penny for video chat.
And instead, we get to focus on building the best possible applications. For all the different users, whereas Zoom is kind of encumbered by the legacy infrastructure that has to support for its video chat. And so That's why we think it's a really great time to be innovating, you know, in video chat, the cost of entry is much lower. And we think the next phase will be won by you know, this, like, rich personalization layer, not by whoever builds the best infrastructure. But that's our bet.
We'll see how it goes. Definitely. And I think one problem that does come up when we talk about Zoom is that even on this call right now, one of the things that I've already had an issue with is that if I got a lot of things running in the background, I'll swipe over to something else. It could get a lit little laggy. Even though my computer's a very expensive computer, it can still flag some stuff up in the background. Now with Qumos space, it's I believe it's running 20 fourseven.
And if it's running 20 fourseven on a basic machine, How can it not draw a bunch of computing power from the computer while still allowing enough of the CPU and GPU to be used for other tasks? I think it's a great it's a great question. And when we have multiple engineers working on all the time, so even though we're even though we're not building you know, new video infrastructure, we're definitely focused on performance and and and reliability.
Like, you know, to to your point earlier, Zoom has made those table stakes I think that you don't always use video. So while kudospace, you know, we talked about a video chat and video game, The the our true vision for it is more of just like, what is the best possible communications tool platform for remote work? And so the way we think about it is remote. You know, there's different you always want the right message, the right medium for the whatever message you're trying to go.
So sometimes it's text and it's asynchronous and you wanna use, you know, chat. Right? And today, people use Slack for that. Sometimes you just wanna do audio and, you know, have a quick call. Right? So people tend to use a phone call. Maybe some people use huddles, but I don't think a lot of people will really use that. Right? Sometimes you wanna show something, or you wanna build rapport. Right? So you use video.
And so a lot of people are using zoom or Meets or, you know, older folks are using, you know, Webex or something like that. Right? So the way we think about it is, you know, what's our wedge sort of the entry point for Kumos space is we wanna build the best in person experience. So all the reasons that people go to the office, right, we talked about that to get work done to collaborate to build connections, to build culture. Right? We wanna give you the best way of doing that, but online.
And so we think that, you know, Kuma's space can be 10x better, you know, than whatever alternatives there are to have for on off for in person culture online. And then we will basically, you know, eventually bringing in all those other, you know, chat, video, audio, and use whatever's best. And so to get back to your question about computer, you know, power performance. Right? Like, you don't need to be on video all day to be in Kumu's faith.
In fact, we envision a world where, you know, if you're a outbound, you know, a more customer facing position, you know, maybe your Cuemath space experience is primarily audio first. And it's kind of like a walkie talkie esque experience to quickly communicate with your team. Imagine you're, you know, out in the field or you're going from meeting to meeting like I am often.
And I'm just wearing one of my AirPods, and I'm just getting kind of a nice little audio news feed of what's happening in Kuma space. And if one of my teammates wants something from me, I just being passionate. Hey, Drew wants to talk. And I just say, you know, yes, sir, what do you need? Right? So so we're not dogmatic about the medium We just wanna be the best possible platform communications platform for remote work. No. I agree. I think it's a great point.
I know even with Slack, the one of the most helpful features that I've had with it is that you can check whether someone's in a meeting if they connect their Google calendar. And that's pretty much the only indicator they give whether that person's busy or not. And I think being able to expand on that with Kuma space can be super helpful.
But in terms of remote work Well, that way, I'll just touch on that real quick because what you just said is something we think about a lot about, which is presence. Right? What is, you know, we, you know, we think of what it is sort of the presence, whether you're in this space or not. How can you have a better understanding? You know, one of the big benefits of a physical office is that you can see if someone's at their desk. Right?
And that's not just if you're a boss trying to make sure they're working because, you know, who knows they might be screwing around on TikTok. But, you know, you can see if they're available. Right? Are they really working? Are they chilling, and you can walk up to them, tap them on the shoulder, and quickly iterate on on ideas. And so presence is one of the core things we want to bring with Shamus space. People are spending anywhere from, you know, 6 to 8 hours.
Our virtual office users are spending 6 to 8 hours a day in Qumu space. And we want them to be present, you know, whether they're sitting at their desktop or if they're on their mobile phone, but we want them to be readily accessible. Definitely. And speaking of that's a quite a long time to be spending on a platform, probably longer than most platforms out there. And speaking of that, what do you think are some of your plans to monetization if you have some right now?
You know, look, we there's so many ways of making money if people are spending 6 hours a day on your platform, particularly if they're busy, B2B users, So, you know, frankly, our focus has not been monetization. We've, I mean, people actually come and already pay for a virtual office. They already pay for to throw virtual events in como space. You know, a lot of those logos we've, you know, people Google through a 10,000 person conference bigger in space last year.
So, you know, I guess we're not that focused really for us is we just wanna build the most engaging place on the internet for people to work for teams to show up. And so I guess the analogy is, you know, if you think about Google, Google, Google got very famous. They actually Madan movies about it. I can't remember that Owen Wilson movie about, you know, the the the lengths to which Google would go to make its office an appealing place to work. Right?
They had they had cafes and they had free lunches and they had massages and they have nap pods and they have programming and events, right, all to make work a more comfortable place for their employees. And if you think about today's landscape of virtual you know, remote work tooling, right, which is essentially Google, slack, Zoom. Right? They're not really fun places to work. It's true. Yeah. They just get the job done. Yeah. And we've learned, you know, yeah, there's a lot.
You can be very productive with Slack and Zoom. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Right? You look at all the stats for, you know, what happened during the pandemic, and people worked more than ever got tons done. And I think people were frankly astonished by how productive you could be with those tools.
But what you're starting to see now with the great resignation the lower, you know, lowest in years sort of employee morale and, you know, employee affiliation to companies is you're starting to see the toll. Right? And there's a human toll when you start to commodify workers and just reduce them to a little green status dot. Right? You you know, you start to lose the humanity of it and people feel no attachment to their job and they feel no because they feel no connection to their coworkers.
Right, or the mission. And so you're starting to see the the cost of the commodification of remote workers. And so I think We're a bit contrarian here and that we wanna create a fertile space for people to, you know, bring their personality into remote work. You know, be a human show off, you know, your your own personal style and what makes you unique both at a at a employee level and at a company level. And so maybe that's contrarian.
Maybe the future is just endless productivity and everyone being, you know, further commoditized and becoming a little, you know, a again, a remote work wheel, but that's not the future we're excited about and not what we're betting on either. For sure. And I think what I'm speaking of working in offices and working from home. According to CNBC, companies want workers back in the office at least 5 days a week think 50% of companies want workers back in the office 5 days a week.
And what are your plans to navigate an environment if that does start to become a reality in the long term. So, yeah, it's funny you should say that. We think that, ironically, anyone that's trying to get, you know, their workers back into a physical office, It is a potentially a good co consumer because, you know, we are actually selling the same benefits as a physical office. Right? Visibility, accountability, you know, basically, like, equity. Right?
So for employees, you know, people of color or women or parents or any sort of any, you know, protected class, right, like, you know, remote work gives them an opportunity to to give visibility. Right? If it's done correctly, you know, the ability in speed of iteration, a place to have unique company culture and to share it. Right? Those are all the benefits coming up space. We didn't make we didn't make those up.
We we actually took them from the physical office, and we're just trying to provide them digitally at, you know, a 30th the cost of a of a physical office. Right? So instead of paying, you know, $600 per, you know, user per month. Right? You know, you're paying 20 or 10 in in, you know, in Qumu space. And so I don't know. I'm not afraid of that at all. I think people will realize that, like, haphazard hybrid where you have a empty office for, you know, most of the most of the week.
I mean, I've been going to a bunch of New York Real Estate, a bunch of New York offices just to see the Shamus, and I'm telling you, you know, what I see? I see gigantic empty spaces where there's people just doing Zoom calls with their coworkers. And so you know, we're making a strong stance that that is not the future. And that, you know, we think that anything that, you know, another Clayton Christiansen concept that, you know, the next big thing starts off looking like a toy. Right?
It doesn't have the same attributes of the thing that it's replacing. And so we think a lot about the virtual offices. Yeah. Sure. You know what? It's not perfect today. It's obviously, there's still some great things about being in person. Right? But as the technology gets better, and it gets more fun and it gets more human and it gets richer.
These, you know, these virtual offices that KumaSpace is creating just gets richer and more engaging in and more fun and as people get better at using them, you start to see, wow. This is a 30th the cost. Wow. This is infinitely scalable. I can add another floor with snapping my fingers. Oh, wow. I can get, you know, really, you know, interesting analytics and say, hey. You know, the sales team who in the sales team is really, you know, connected in the in the engineering team.
Like, who are the main, you know, connections of info where information is traveling you know, the or or who feels pretty isolated from their team? You know, we need to, like, reach out and, like, kinda support this person. These are all things that you know, WeWork talked about but never really executed on. And I think you're gonna be able to execute on it in the virtual in the virtual world. So, yeah, I don't know.
I think that I I welcome the challenge and I look forward to building a, you know, a visual workplace that's way better than the physical For sure. And we mentioned a little bit earlier how you co founded a couple of startups. What would you say are the top lessons you learned from those startups and building those startups. And then what are you doing differently to position Qumu space for long term success? Yeah. Totally fair. You know, it's funny.
I I feel like I've been working on this same idea, my entire career. I just keep, you know, just different more refined versions of the same idea, which is how do you use technology to connect people in new and more authentic ways. And so how do you use digital technology to to create new forms of human interaction? That are more have our higher fidelity and more human than the ones that came before them. And so, you know, if you looked at sonar. Right? Sonar was my first company.
We basically, you know, the last big thing was Facebook. The next big tech catalyst was the mobile phone. And, you know, we we thought, you know, the next big thing was gonna be mobile social networks. And so we use all the data on the internet we have about ourselves, you know, all our profiles across link in and Facebook and Twitter. And, you know, we use that to connect you to people nearby in the physical world. So how to use online information to connect people offline.
And, you know, the idea was how do we just feel at home wherever we go and feel more connected to the person standing next to us? And, you know, in all fairness, this idea was Probably 20 years too too early. Now we have a technological perspective. We did it. And when people always ask me, you know, Oh, who's gonna do something in that, you know, proximity based social networking space? The answer I always tell them, I tell them it's Tinder. You know, someone already did. It's Tinder.
Proximity is really a good signal for dating, not a great signal for work or for making friends. The interests are probably a better vector to connect people based on our friendships. Proximity is very good for, you know, romantic relationships. Right? But if you look at our next company, you know, yang and I built an wanna be clear. You know, yang is the CEO of Qumu Space and my cofounder, and, you know, we've actually worked together on all these startups.
So, you know, he built the Android app at sonar, and then he was CTO at Switch, and now he's CEO at a como space. You know, we've been building this. So we've been working on the same idea together next app we built was called switch. It was basically Tinder for Jobs. How do you connect, you know, people looking for jobs directly with hiring managers? Know, make the recruiting process a little more human.
And then now, Shamus space, ironically, we are actually doing prac proximity based social networking again, but we're actually doing all online. So, you know, the proximity is based on your position well, you know, in the kumu space, you know, in kumu space, you can only hear the people that are, you know, proximate to you in kumu space And it's actually a way of having multiple conversations in the same virtual space at the same time.
And so we're using this concept of proximity, but now we're you know, a little smarter, little wiser, you know, kumu space is infinitely scalable. We were leveraging all the benefits of the internet. It's it's, you know, we can have a kumu space where you have people all over the world and, you know, even if you only had a ten people in the same kumu space, but in there all over the world. It actually feels very engaging and feels very active.
Whereas, you know, Sonar was, you know, it was it was always hard to get density. So, you know, I really think we're just taking the same idea of how do we create more rich, you know, digital interactions and and iterating it on and again and and hopefully, you know, making remote work just a more human place to be. For sure. And to wrap it up here, what would you say are some of your top takeaways for the audience and then where can people find more about, your startup Kumo space?
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you can find it. It's just a comospac.com. You can grab a free space. You can trick it out, build an office, have a virtual event and key takeaways just per, you know, persisting and iterating on, you know, your vision for, you know, your idea It comes in many forms. So you have to have the persistence to keep going, but you have to have the, you know, strong opinions loosely held. You have to not be dogmatic.
You have to just keep iterating on on your idea and figure out where it connects with the market. And so for me, sometimes I I look back at Sonora, I said, ah, we thought about it. Hey. This should have been in a dating app at the time. We probably should have pivoted and listened to the data. And I think this is the same concept. I wanna connect people in new digital means. And so now with consumer space, we finally got traction.
Got users, got growth, have customers, and, you know, just keep looking for that signal and taking the kernel of your idea and figuring out where it connects with the market. That would be my main advice to all the young entrepreneurs listening. I agree. Well, alright, everyone. That wraps it up for today's episode. If you enjoyed the podcast, make sure to leave a 5 star review down below. And thank you, Professor Barton, for taking the time to join the podcast today. It was a pleasure.
Hey, Shamus. Pleasure is all mine. Thanks for having Madan, and excited for what you're gonna do next. Appreciate it.