So Rich, right now I'm looking at you and you are wearing a t-shirt. A nice watch, what watch is that? This is actually a bespoke watch made by an Italian pilot and it's inspired by the A13A altimeter in planes. Jesus Christ. And then you were very exhausting answer. I asked it's my fault. It's not a brand. No, no, absolutely. You were in gray shorts glasses and a crucifix.
Yes, I knew and I have decided to start a business together. We're in a small railroad apartment with two other people. It's getting crowded. It's warm. It's warm in here. Moist from the humanness. We've started to talk and there's a larger issue involved which is it may be time for us to go get an office again and this is we used to have an office in the city with the agency that we co-founded.
And we've been in startup mode hiding out in this little place in Brooklyn that is an apartment. This is it's got an oven. And it's essentially a one bedroom apartment. It's a one bedroom apartment. So now we're going to go look and we're trying to decide between Brooklyn and Manhattan and all these sort of archetypal things.
I want to talk about for like 20 minutes is the real function of the office because in the conversation about work from home and the conversation about what people, you know, why people should go back to work. It's very employee centric and that is fine. I get that people, people who some people just may not want to come to the office etc.
Like everybody's had that conversation. But for you and me in offices of tool and I don't think people talk about and think about the office as a tool very often. That's absolutely right. And I want to just talk about the ways that it's a tool because I just feel that like no one documents it while you're doing this. You're you're playing around with your necklace with the crucifix on it. And I'm slowly losing my mind watching you do this.
But came out I had to fix it. You got to fix that otherwise you can. Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things that come to mind when I think about an office and by the way, it feels wrong. We're start up. We don't have revenue yet. And we're looking to spend money. First of all, we don't have a revenue and we're many months away from having a product where I could say to somebody like, use this in your company.
I don't know months away. I don't know about many, but yeah, it's far away. So it's scary more than two right like it's scary. It's scary. You know, I have two voices in my head. That's I want to put the number much higher once says stop spending money. Yeah, I get. Tighten the ship and be frugal so you can longer runway longer runway and make a profit. Then there's this other voice that says you're thinking too small. Yeah.
And the second voice has done me much better than my first. Yeah, the second voice tends to be right. The second voice what the second voice does is put you in the situations where you have to react. The second voice creates chaos. I think that's right. And what do we mean by that in relation to all of this? Let me describe a situation.
Somebody came out to visit us who was interested in our product from a big company and then came into the space. It wasn't good. And you watched them. They didn't shut down or anything. It just was like suddenly they started to tell themselves a complicated story. That's right. And now we had to spend a lot of time countering the story without ever saying it explicitly because what they were looking for was something that look kind of start up.
They wanted to start up the experience and instead they were in a or something of a bigger scale. Yeah, it didn't help us. No, it didn't. It's a but like, okay, so now we let's say we get a place and we're trying to decide between Brooklyn, which would be like just more room to work. Where people can come by or Manhattan, which for me is like now somebody can come by check out this space and we'll talk to you for two hours.
I think that's right. And I think for me, the reason to do it is too full. One is that. And let's you know, people who are not from New York City won't process this. Any of the many people who like have offices in Brooklyn will be like, what are you talking about? Asking a person to leave the borough of Manhattan, the central burrow where I don't go most is.
Yep, is like asking them to go to Mars. Like they just even if they're in Queens, like they don't nobody wants to come to an office in Brooklyn. They want to go everybody like that is where things get done. And I think and I think there's two things happening here. One is. And this touches on the whole remote work debate and all that one is. We as frankly technology, fingers, leaders, strategists, whatever you want to call it love to talk to people.
We find when we talk to people things happen and and whether it be a partnership, whether it be an interview, whether it be a potential client or customer or whatever it may be. We like it. We like it because we find that things happen when we do it. We're doing the start up right. And we keep going out and having conversations with people about how most startups do it.
And what's unusual to me and confusing to me is that most of them do not base their growth trajectory on the idea that humans will be involved. Initially. Yes. And when we talk about the classic SaaS product, they always come to terms with the fact that getting the credit card out won't build you a mega company. But they start the right they start the way they're like you're going to get people will get their credit card out. And if a million people use this product, we're going to make so much.
You can make good businesses doing that because everything's automated. I mean, you just need stripe in a couple of forms and off you go and you can take people's money and make money. Like for anywhere. The but the ones that have really, really big ambition come to terms with the sales team. Like you're just going to need humans. And those humans are going to go out to big people with big budgets. And they're going to court those people for possibly months or they're going to respond to an RFP.
I mean, a major city agency will throw out an RFP for $15 million. Let me tell you, they are not getting a credit card out. That is not how they're going to buy 9,000 seats for that RFP. They want to meet you. They want you to pitch to them. They want you to jump through hoops. They want you to get to know them. There is the the the gating mechanism for a tremendous amount of growth in the software industry is a 40 person conference call.
Oh, you've been there. Let me let me not an appealing pitch. But let's pause for a minute because no, this is in our future. We need to look into each other's eyes and acknowledge that we're ready for this because it's this. From this right, but we're not we. Hey guys, I got Paul Ford and Richie Adi here. And then for 15 minutes. This is Mike. This is Susan. This is awesome. Mike. Thanks on giving flashbacks right now. This is Susan. I'm sorry. I got knocked off the call. Sorry. I'm in my car.
So it's worth noting a poll. If we do if we do start talking to people about, you know, bigger opportunities for our startup. We are not selling services are actually prohibited from selling services. But we can sell software licenses and we may sell them to bigger companies. We may sell them to little little mom and pop shops. We want to sell them to everybody. Everybody come, come on, come on.
No, no, this licenses like this is this is our future. That's right. And but it's still relationship building. This is the way I always frame it is East Coast West Coast. West Coast wants to automate. They tried to automate like money. I have a form. I have a formulation for this. The West Coast makes the boxes. The East Coast fills the men. Interesting. Right. That's Twitter. They made the box and then the media industry was like cool. Yeah.
It's it's launches. It's drinks. It's meetings. It's connecting. And that's what sales is. Right. For a lot of people. I would love for you to meet my boss because I think this tool would be so good for this, you know, the for Delta airlines. Yeah. Love to meet your boss. Let's talk to your boss. Absolutely. What's your boss like? He boss is not taking a credit card out. So I have a friend who is head of revenue for a software company. And he started the process to like sell to government in DC.
Oh, you know, I've been on these. I once was part of this process and people kept retiring before we could finish the paperwork. Oh, no, no, he said he's like, we're excited about it. There's a ton of money there. Obviously it's government contracts. He's like, when do you think you'll start to see something come together?
He's like, it will start to see like possible possible options in a year. Yeah. I couldn't believe what he was saying. Oh, yeah. And you know, that's the grind. That is the graph. But once you land it, you're kind of never leave. You know, it's the classic, you know, screwdrivers to the Pentagon world. I'll tell you that part is that's great. No, because I remember being told like, well, if you really want to it was it was so that we could do some open source work for the government.
And we were told that we needed to hire a $30,000 expediter in order to move that contract. And it was just like, we're not going to make it. I'm not going to lose money on this is bad. Okay, so recapping reason one we want to be out there is we like to connect with people we like to find partners. I want we're building a product. We're building a product that people can pick up and use.
Okay, that is what they can do. And I could sit here and assume that people will find it decide what it's good for and pick up and use it. But what will work much better is people coming to the office and saying, what is this thing? And me going, well, it works like this. Would you like to try it? And, you know, making friends. It's funny. It's anti scale. What you're saying, because you can't you, you, what Pete. No, but let's coast these hold on. Let me finish this thought.
West Coast says, give me a million prospects. I'll turn those into 20,000 paying customers and those 20,000 paying customers will pay me $10 or whatever a month. East Coast is like, give me a few hundred leads. I'm only going to land like a dozen of them, but they're big. Let me tell you my right.
Which is because you can't host to everyone in your office who's interested in your product. That's impossible. This is all these formulations to me just feel like they are very abstract and not connected to how humans communicate. I'm going to tell you how I see because I think the way I see it is actually quite different than most people. And part of this is because I'm, I'm good at communicating with large audiences. I do that. Right.
I just hear the flex. No, it's not a time. It's not a flex. This is a, no, it's true. So what is it when you, okay, first of all, somebody wants to come to the office and talk to me. People want to talk to me about this product. Okay, great. I want to talk to them. My ultimate job is to tell a story that people connect to so that they care about this product. And they wrote about this inner newsletter that's going out today at a board.
Right. Like the fact that when I was, I'm going to tell you a little story when I was at Harper's magazine, which is a very like non, it's an old magazine in America that is a good reputation. It's very lefty. It's at a center. I built the website and so on and so forth. And when I've launched the website, built an archive of the whole thing back to 1850 and thousands of people got in touch.
And I did you customer service and solve subscription problems. They would ask they would send letters to the editor. They would, and I was your title editor. I was an editor. I associate editor, but you were dealing with you weren't doing classic editor. I was a little aware everywhere. I ordered the computers, the little company.
You ordered the computer. It's a little work. So I ended up building hundreds and hundreds of relationships. Sometimes I meet people after and they would go, man, I yelled at you once in email because there was no room. I subtraction. It was weird. You responded. You know, it's crazy to meet you at this party. Did you respond to everybody? I tried to. Yeah, I get my best. I thousands. So over the years, I thousands of interactions. That's not an editor. That's customer support and IT.
Let's never worry about titles ever. Okay. Like never worry about titles. Okay. If I if I was doing an editor's job, I wouldn't have had those interactions. Those interactions taught me how people behave when they get a consumer product in their hands. And they taught me about what people want what people expect and how people see customer service and how they treat organizations. It can be very alienating and then the minute you talk to them as a person, they start to really interact.
People and then on the other direction when you have a direct personal interaction, that teaches you how to interact with thousands of people at once. It's this whole system. I need to have people come by and tell me what they like and don't like. I need to make eye contact.
And then when I go out and talk to thousands of people, I'm using that information. And then when the thousands of people talk back to me, I know what to say to the person tell, what is this? This is not to sell a software product. This is to understand where we live and to understand how to communicate so that people can get more frickin value out of it.
And what I feel is that everybody is looking for a funnel that goes exactly one way. People are going to come in and they're going to give it, they're going to like this thing, they're going to like the website, they're going to give us a credit card and then they'll go in the like the customer support thing and we'll log in.
Yeah, there's no, it doesn't work that way. It works. It works two ways. You're sitting there at the bottom, like going like, hey, what do you think? Should we do this? And I like your hat. Yeah. And the thing is that some of those relationships from back in that day are still extant. Like some of those people who used to write me still send me like birthday notes.
Interesting. Yeah, it's relationships. What you're saying is it's relationships. And that is it's connectivity. It's connectivity around humans and software is one of the things in the middle. And an office is a utility for making that move faster. It's a place to meet. Yeah, it's a place to meet. And, you know, are there a lot of places to meet in a lot of different parts of the country, even parts of the country that are.
I think what is so fascinating and unique about New York is yeah, could you do this in Austin, sort of, but you're kind of meeting your, you're the same kind. You're meeting your own kind. Well, what happens when you're seeing other technology, Austin's a big tech center now, San Francisco's a tech center. Think about New York City is you're going to see it all, like they all converge.
You're meeting the representations, the representatives of organizations at that are sort of apex works like big companies. They all have to be here. Yeah. And then they need to go buy some software. In different sectors. Yes. And so they're going to come and they're going to tell you what publishing need. And they're going to tell you what fashion needs. Right. Right. And that's very, very valuable information. And you use that to guide the product strategy.
So let me let me tack on. I mean, I agree with you. We happen to have this in common. Strangely, we like to be in the room. Yeah, with the other people. How else am I going to learn about how this all works? I mean, because you can't you can't literally, you know, what what happens? You're, you're smart guy and you're 20s and people are like, you should subscribe to the economist.
Right. Well, I'd rather actually go into the economy and look at it. Go into the, I like to see the economy. I'll say one other thing. And I've said this in the past around having a place to work. I am a, I work out my puzzles by talking to people.
I was expecting my upper body. Hi, there will be a bench. Yeah, people don't wait. Rich works out every morning before he comes to the office and there's usually like a two minute break down about how this freaking ripped is. I'm not very ripped. No, it's true. It's older and my muscles are not. It's an ironic. It's an ironic. But I believe in I believe in. It's not that I believe in it. It's just how I work. I'm very, I'm an oral communicator.
I do think something is so severely lost when you're trying to compartmentalize it into, you know, a one hour meeting once a day or twice a week or whatever you're doing. I'm a collaborative thinker. I'm a tough collaborative thinker. I'm a very like.
I, I, all I do is inject doubt into the conversation. Imagine 50 hawks swirling around your head at once. And that's what it's like. That sounds beautiful when you are in interrogation, but what's funny is it doesn't matter who I've worked with you 200 years. You love me as if I am like in your family. And it doesn't your brain switches and you're like, well, hold on a minute there. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I think it's massively valuable. And people talk about this. I think Apple sort of put their foot down and we're like, you know, we're we invent things like you got to be together.
We got to see each other and talk about stuff and walk up to a whiteboard and throw ideas around and talk. You need that, that sort of casual ability to talk. Let me tell you something as a boss. It's real dangerous because without the employees body language, you don't know how badly you're screwing up.
As a boss. I'm telling you, like, why do I need you to come back to the like you in the office if you're somebody not not that it's not really our current team. We don't have this challenge. But like, but if you're in the office and I can see you kind of looking at the floor when I walk by. I now know something about the organization. Yeah, I can't learn that. I can't. And it's and you're and people will be like, where you can everybody will have a litany of like, you shouldn't know that anyway.
And I don't need to come in the office to tell you you're an asshole. And it's like, you don't, but you won't. Yeah. See you better. Let me see it. Also, it's condensing the interactions into one moment. Yeah. That everyone's sort of prepping for is not natural. You know what I love? I love boss elevator ride. That's my favorite.
Hey, how you doing? It's just it's the worst minute of their lives. It's terrible. It's terrible. And it's kind of terrible for us as as former boss is honestly. It ain't good. It's all false and kind of bullshit. It's the worst of their lives. So that's I'm looking forward to that. Anyway, the New York office special. Yeah. So maybe you know, down not far from now, we'll be recording in a room in one of our new offices.
There's a lot of commercial real estate available. There's tons of it. There's like swats of it. It's us a time to get a bar and we watched this beautiful part. Get a bar. Get a bar. Get a bar for the. Oh, we're not going to get a bar as well. We're going to say you're pivoting to bar. I mean, we're saying this product. It's a board. Anyone can sign up. The locals coming soon. It is home to a lot. Actually lots of lots of users. Very exciting.
And we'd love you to use it and beat it up. You know, you can tell us straight up what you like. And this is the Audi Ford. We're at the Audi Ford X. And wherever else the Audi Ford is going to love us. We love you. We love you. And we will talk to you soon. Take care. Take care. Take care. Take care. Take care.