How to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding | Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder

How do you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic?

Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was acquired by Cvent in a nearly $300 million deal earlier this year.
Palash Soni (Co-Founder and CEO, Goldcast) joins the Neon Show.

Goldcast entered one of the most overfunded categories in SaaS. Hopin alone had raised more than $1 billion. This is the story of the decisions that helped Goldcast survive the category and ultimately become one of the biggest MarTech acquisition stories of the last few years.

Enterprise customers are won long before they ever sign a contract. We trace that idea through Goldcast's journey, from landing Drift as its first marquee customer and reaching its first $1 million in ARR, to the relationships that quietly compounded over the years and eventually led to an inbound from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

We discuss how retention has always been MarTech's biggest challenge and why AI doesn't fundamentally change that. And why acquisition, not an IPO, is the most realistic outcome for most companies in the category.

This episode is about winning in a market everyone had written off, and the decisions that turned Goldcast into one of the few companies left standing.

00:00 - Trailer
00:36 - How Palash caught the startup bug
05:51 - Meeting the co-founders
08:50 - Fundraising has never been easy for Goldcast
10:36 - How we got a term sheet in 2 days
12:43 - We quit HBS and they became our first customer
18:47 - Customers told us our product looked ugly
19:50 - How Drift founder changed the course of Goldcast
21:44 - When competitors raised $250 million
23:31 - How Goldcast got high-profile angel investors
30:33 - The elevator pitch of Goldcast
31:06 - When companies in your space are crashing
32:36 - Was virtual events even a valid space after COVID?
43:15 - How Goldcast won OpenAI
44:38 - What led to the acquisition
53:33 - One thing Palash would change about the last 5 years
56:58 - Founders should define company values
58:48 - Why we had an unusually large post-sales team
01:01:09 - Retention in MarTech has always been subpar
01:04:36 - Is acquisition the only path for a MarTech company?
01:09:16 - How Goldcast got great logos
01:11:01 - How the three co-founders split roles
01:12:05 - If not acquisition, then what?
01:14:20 - How founders move to higher ACVs
01:16:21 - The ethos of the founding team
01:17:25 - The book that changed me
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This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Coldcart got acquired for $300 million first event. Is acquisition the only part for a market company? That was also something that we looked at. We didn't even target OpenI. The marketing ops leader of Box evaluated us for the deal didn't go anywhere, but we kept in touch with him. He ended up being the head of marketing ops at OpenI. We brought in a bunch of angels in that round. Todbelski, Lenny Rachitki, Chan Puri.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

How do you bring us such high-profile angels? Everybody's asking founders if a tropic comes in your domain, what will happen to you? Yes. Back then, Hoppin was a giant. So every VC would be asking you, how would you compete with Hoppin? Honestly, I think the answer was kind of. Hi, this is Sidhat Alu Alia, your host at Neon Show and managing partner of Neon Fund, a fund that has invested at pre-seed stages in some of the best enterprise AI companies that started out of India and building for the globe, like Atomic Work, Spot Draft, CloudSec. Today I have with me Palast Sony. Palash, welcome to the Neon Show. So excited to be here. You built Goldcast, right? And Goldcast started as an events platform. And then you built full stack everything video side. Congratulations on the exit, right? Goldcast got acquired for $300 million by C vent. You come from a tier two city in India, Bhopal, right? You went to IIT Kanpur, then worked in ITC, worked in Nmobi, came to HBS, didn't complete your HBS. And when you came out, you raised your work first round in 21 or 22? 2020. 2020. COVID had just hit. And the category was super crowded. Hoppen was there, which had raised like potentially like hundreds of millions or a billion dollars.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Yeah. Ended up raising a billion in total.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Yeah. So super crowded cat category, right? And I think you are the only one in that category that pivoted to a very successful and gave a very successful outcome to all the stakeholders. So maybe you can tell us about the journey. Where did this entrepreneurial gene come from?

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Okay. Yes. So I I was born and brought up in not even in Bhopal, actually. There's a small town called Sagar in MP. I cannot even ascribe a tier to it. It's a tier three or tier three? So I was there till 16 and then came to Bhopal by happenstance, and that's when I got to know about IIT and everything else. So got into IIT K. But I think the entrepreneurial bug sort of comes from my mom because my mom, while she was in Saga, she tried a bunch of things. We used to have a cow at our home. Um, she tried selling milk, she tried doing like a snacks business, a lot of things to sort of um supplement the income of the family. And now in hindsight, I can say those were not good markets. And so nothing succeeded. Saga itself was like a very um poor city in some ways. But seeing her in action kind of inspired me and sort of put that bug in me. So yeah, when I was in IITK, I I was interested in startup from that time itself. When startups was not a thing, I think the only startup people knew of at that time was Flipkart in India. Um so I was always interested in startups. I was I kept in pace with you know what was happening in the world. Um and after that I joined ITC. I spent three years there. And the main reason for joining ITC versus some other options that I had was um it's a hands-on job. So it's technical, it's managerial, but also you're doing things and seeing the results of it. It had people management as well. So I spent three years there, and then I I actually attempted a startup after that for um about nine months. So this was full, so I was full-time for four months, then I was at Inmobi for five months overlapped. And in those nine months, it became clear to me that I don't know anything about starting up. So I um I had put down my papers actually at Inmovie at that time and I took them back, and they were gracious enough to let me continue again. Um, but that experience taught me that uh maybe uh I'm not ready and I need to learn a lot of stuff. So uh fortunately, in movie was a great place to learn that because for the first two years I was in um I was what you would call like a customer success kind of role. So I ended up managing a large team of customer success managers and was very involved in the P2P sales marketing side. Um so I knew of the event space, the the whole marketing automation space from that time. Um and then the next two years I was a PM. Um and in in this whole time, the startup bug kind of was continuing to bite me. And so I I came close to pulling the trigger a bunch of times, but could never. Um and so this plus the whole PM experience sort of taught me that hey, maybe uh maybe to build an actual like software startup, you need to be in the US. Because as we were just chatting about, right? There was there was there were no examples to follow at the time, right? SaaS, I think only Freshworks was probably the one. That also happened very late. Very late, right? Freshworks was still a small company at the time. So this was like about 2018-ish. So I wanted to come here and do a startup, but then when you were like six years out of school, you the MS ship has sailed.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Um nobody will take give you an MShip.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

And uh there's no there's no natural way for someone to come here, right? If you don't have family here. So B school was the only admission uh possible. And so I applied to some B schools, and fortunately, Naveen, who's the CEO of Nmovie, um, he's also you know a great person, early inspiration for me. He was he's an HPS LM, so he wrote my recommendation for HPS, which helped me get in. Um, so yeah, I came here and uh I wrote in my essay that I'll want to start up. And some people said, hey, why are you writing that in the essay? Because that's kind of counterproductive for MBA. Um, but I don't believe so. Like MBA is a great place to start up and we can chat more about that. So I came in with the intent of starting up. So I gravitated towards people like that, which is where I met Kishore, who's who's my co-founder, and and he came from the Indian cohort of HBS, and then Ashish, who was my CTO, he's an Indian American, but he was in my section. That's how we met. Um yeah, so the three of us met. And your Ashish was also a part of HBS? Yes. So he was part of HPS, but he was an engineer before. So he was doing this MS plus MBA degree at HBS, and he was the he was an early engineer at Jet.com. So he used the Jet.com exit money for MBA, which which even he thinks it was not a great idea, but he did that. Um, and so we uh the three of us bonded together on this common desire. We explored a host of ideas in in HPS, and uh finally when COVID was coming around, uh, full lockdowns had not happened at the time, but it was clear that there's an impediment to travel, you cannot really shake people's hands. Um, and I knew of the events based because I had done a lot of conferences at InMovie. So we decided to look at this space of virtual events, and at the time, I think a lot of founders doing it now will resonate. At the time when we thought of the idea, there were maybe just three startups at the time. AMET was one of them, Run the World was a was a startup that started here at NGSP, and um uh Hoppin was there, and they had some kind of like a beta product at the time. So very early, so we thought, okay, uh, we can get in into this space. From the time we said we'll get in to the time our first year ended and we could actually go and jump in. Uh, this space had become extremely crowded. Things moved so fast because COVID lockdown happened, everyone wanted to do it.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Which month and year did your first year in?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Uh, this was 2019 to 2020. Um, so I'm with the time frame I'm talking about right now is April 2020. Yeah. Um so by mid-April, like sorry, early May 2020, things were super crowded. And there were like five startups each had raised 10, 15, 25 million. Um so that forced us to um to do some, make some decisions, which I'm glad we made. Um, and again, there's an aspect, always an aspect of serendipity, right? In in this. So Serentipit Oshley, one of our professors uh at HPS, he was um on the board of another event tech company in the past. And he had written a case on why that company failed. So we reached out to him, and uh that company uh that he wrote the case about that got acquired by C Vent eventually. Uh but it wasn't a good acquisition. But the insight he gave us is that hey, events is not a horizontal business, right? Every type of event is different. Uh, so you guys should focus on one vertical, and um and so we decided to focus on B2B uh at the time. We thought it's not possible to now fight as a late entrant a horizontal game. Um, and B2B is something we knew. So yeah, we started with this positioning of B2B virtual events platform and uh and then went in the market to raise raise money. Tell us about how tough or easy it was to raise the function. And that fundraiser has never been easy for LowerCast. Um, but when we when we had this thesis, our our goal was that um we'll we'll work on this predominantly, but because there was no natural way to work full-time in the US, we'll uh we'll raise a small round and then go and build it in the second year. Then we graduate, we'll we'll do it full-time. Uh, but things were moving so fast. When we went to investors, there were lots of questions, right? The space is so crowded, and then what will you do differently? And is there really a need for a verticalized focus solution, all of that? Uh, which I'm sure will resonate with lots of founders starting right now. But the main beef that investors had is that hey, you if you want to compete with these people, you need to raise at least a million plus, right? And if you raise a million plus, you cannot be a student, right? Because then what if you take a job and then what will happen to your money? Um, but we had no way to go full-time because we were on F and Visa. So in this whole desperation, I um I called up one of my friends here who was a founder, IITK uh batchmint. Um, and I asked him, like, hey, this is the problem I am in. Uh, and he said, Oh, have you heard of O1 visa? I was like, No. So he connected me to a law firm who told me that you have essentially you can get an Owen Visa, but you have to raise money and get all of this before 15th of August when the fee was due for HBS second year. So that created an extreme clock for us. And then we started going and talking to investors again. But then no one was willing to again take a bet because they were like, hey, we don't know what Owen Visa is. What if you don't get it? I'll give you still have to give you money. Um so um I remember, I distinctly remember a time when Kishol and I were walking around Charles River. It's a beautiful area, if you have seen that. Uh, and we were so sad because no one was willing to give us money. We were in this like chicken and egg problem. And we explicitly decided that let's try for one more week. Otherwise, we'll have to give up this company. It's not possible to build it. So another serendipity happened at that time. I had met another founder uh of this company called Rapid SOS. It's a Unicorn. Rapid SOS. Okay. So Unicorn right now, and the final founder, Michael Martin, is also an HBSLM. So we had come for recruiting once, and I just crashed that recruiting event to get to know him. Um, so I messaged him on LinkedIn saying, hey, I'm really desperate. Let's chat. So he was gracious enough to give me a call. We chatted for five minutes and he made four connections. Um and one of those connections actually knew Gorov from Afor. So he was like, Hey, this is not the route night, uh, the right round for me, but Gorov might be interested. And so he made an intro to Gorov. And and Afor guys is similar to you guys, right? They move super fast. We spoke with them on Tuesday, got the term sheet on Thursday. Wow, within two days? Within two days.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

So did you ask Gorov what he saw to move so far?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Uh he said the team, but at that time I didn't see it. Uh yeah, uh, they are extremely fast. That's their MO, and I think that's their advantage as well in the market. So within two days, they gave us a term sheet, and then wired the money by next week, actually. It was so fast. Um, so things.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

So that was from the second second fund of 75 million or something like that, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Yes, correct. Right, right, right, right, right. So that happened, and then we we ran to get our own visa, finally got the own visa, and then quit HBS.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Wow, that's an amazing story.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Yeah, very complicated, but uh and how much did you raise in the first round? So we ended up we ended up bringing another institutional investor and then a bunch of angels to end up raising about one point slightly south of 1.5 million at a 5 million valuation.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Okay, as a first-time founder, I always advise first-time founders, uh, right? Obviously, second time, you will you build multiple companies in your lifetime, but make sure first time you survive. Yes. Right? If you don't survive, then you cannot optimize dilution. Zero into zero is zero.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Yeah, that's a that's a very fair point.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Right. So you raised 1.5 at five. Then what happened after that?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

So we raised 1.5 on five and uh immediately hired four engineers basically. In Boston? In Bangalore, okay, actually. Uh not even Bangalore, it was remote at the time because this was peak COVID. Um, most of them were IIT Kanpur grads, um, either reason grads or or fast grads. So we rushed to build the product and we actually built a first version within two months, which was insane in those times. And and virtual events is is sort of complicated, right? Because it's very high stakes online, things cannot go wrong. Uh, so we did our first event as a pilot in HBS.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

And uh HBS became the first client. Yeah, even though they were not our IC. Two stories to share to you? Yeah, probably. So recently we bagged an entrepreneur called Prashan Jalan. Uh yeah, I know him very well. Gikliya, right? IIT Kanpur 2015 back. Right. And uh one year ago we bagged Anuti Kumar from HBS 22 Vatch. I know both of them very well.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Yeah, amazing. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Yeah, those are fantastic entrepreneurs, both of them. And for us, it's mostly uh though the founder has to be top one person, yeah. They'll figure out what to build. Anyway, the world is changing so far.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Even the bigger companies don't know what to do. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I was exactly having that conversation with Prashant yesterday. So uh great pick. Um, you guys definitely know what how to pick your founders. But HPS became our first customer. Um, and uh that event was I think it was attended by like a thousand um current students and uh incoming in students, and the platform like crashed and burnt in that event so hard that uh like two of our engineers had joined just two weeks back, and they were like, damn, where did I end up? I I am I at the right place. Yeah, this company doesn't work, should I quit? So I had to do a lot of damage control along with my co-founders at the time. And you were still in Boston? I was still in Boston. In fact, all of us were in Boston. And all three of you got over, or only you? So the two of us, one of them was an American, so he he should he was fine.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Um, so yeah, we have our O one, we have our first failure, and uh and that's what I also tell founders that don't don't look for success in your first few customers. Yeah, try to it's all hillside, right? Hillside 2020. Right. Try to fail as hard as possible. Yes, because the the first few scars together as a team will will join you very hard.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yes, right, right. I I and I think that that commitment I had underestimated because three of those people ended up staying till the acquisition and still there, actually. Uh, and turned out to be like amazing, brilliant engineers. So they stayed and uh we kept on trying to sell. Um and so we were because we were here new, right? We didn't know anyone, we didn't have a good network. Uh so we were mostly doing code outreaches. And who was your first paid customer? Yeah, so first paid customer was this company called Exonious. After how many months of raising this round? This was four months after.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Wow, and at that point of time the pace was moving so fast, you might be wondering what the wrong I'm doing. Yes. Because I remember we invested in Airmeet in the same time, February 20. Right. And by I think December or something, they were at 10 million HR.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

And we used to hear all of this, right? So if you imagine, like we have made this insane decision, right? And and to add complexity to this, I had a at the time I quit HPS, I had a five-month-old kid.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Yeah, so you're married, you had a five-month-old kid. Yes, my wife is not working. So people would be asking you uh is something wrong with you.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

My parents were, they didn't question it as much, but they thought that I was and you had some backing, financial backing to sustain in Boston? No, the round was your financial backing. Yeah, and the round.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

But you were paying me paying yourself what, five or ten K max? Yeah, at that time there was honestly the first six months we didn't take any round. I had some money left over from my scholarship from first year. That's what I was using to survive for the first five, six months. So it was it was pretty intense, pretty insane. And uh, and we were hearing all of these things, right? Like AMED is scaling this much, Hubilo had raised 100 million by then.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Yeah, Hubilo had cost 30, 40 back then. Yeah, yeah. People were just pouring money, right? They're pouring in models back in Hubilo. Exactly. Other stories tell founders, don't worry about your competition raise. Yeah. If VCs ask you, anthropic will kill you, don't talk to those VCs. Because ultimately your customers will decide your future. Right, exactly. Right, and if you're not delivering to your customers, yeah, no matter how much you you raise 50 or 60 million, yeah, 100 million, it's not going to help you, right? Yeah, hopping is a classic year, raise one billion, burn through that.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Yeah, seriously. And they had raised about 125 by then. So it was already very um, it was de-stressing, right? Because we had zero revenue, zero customers, and then everyone is doing um, doing tens of millions of revenue. And uh so Exonius, the CMO, he was Boston-based, very great guy. Uh, he took a bet on us saying, hey, okay, we have an annual event, I'll I'll pay you for that. Let's test it. And so we did that event that went successfully. Um, but we were not getting as much traction as we wanted. How much did your first customer pay? So Exonius paid us just $5,000 for that event. That's it. Um, and it wasn't an a recurring contract, it was just that event.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Uh today I I see all the logos on your website Uber, Airbnb, Pub, yeah, uh, OpenAI.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

OpenAI, Anthropic. Anthropic. Yeah. Yeah. That was a long journey from there. So yeah, going back, you know, to Exonia's experience taught us something that uh I think B2B customers generally had a different need. Um, and some of them we had anticipated, right? So I was very focused on integrations and analytics because they want all of that. So Marketo, HubSpot, things like that. And uh and then the other thing that we learned at this process is that uh B2B marketers were already doing webinars, and the webinar space was completely stale, there was nothing there. Um, so we wanted to build a product that could do big annual conferences online, but also webinars. Uh, so that helped drive the product direction at the time. But one thing we missed is the look and feel of the product because um after Exonius, we were not getting as much traction as we expected. And uh, when I passed through all of the customer conversations, I realized everyone is saying, Hey, your product looks ugly. So people were telling it to us on our face, and I think I was probably a bit stubborn at the time to believe it, but then we said, okay, maybe it's time to change. So we had a contractor as a designer at that time. We asked her to work over time. She turned around a new design in two weeks, and we turned around the platform in two weeks, which was insane in those times, you can imagine, right? So we worked day and night, and by end of December, we had a new look and feel, new UI. And in that process, we built a bunch of very cool things.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Um, and the moment we showed it to customers, we could see that their eyes lit up, right? They want to use it, really use it. So um then within quick succession, we got like two or three more customers. One of them was Turing, uh, the other one was Bloom Reach. So these are all people from some kind of IIT HPS network. Uh so uh we got those. And then an amazing thing happened at that time that that changed the trajectory of the company. Um, our pre-seed investor, underscore, which was the the other fund, they were hosting their events on Goldcast. And the founder of Drift, David Cancel, he was a speaker on one of those events. So he was like, wow, this this looks very cool. And he mentioned it in passing to underscore that this platform is great. And so we got to know of it. So Kishore, who was running sales, my co-founder, he hounded David Cancel. I think sent maybe 10 emails. Finally, he delanted, he said, okay, I'll introduce you to my team. And Drift became our first, I would say, big customer. And how big is Drift? Drift at the time, as a company, I think, was a unicorn or close to being a unicorn. Yeah, David Cancel is a legend, but if you can tell us about our audience, yes, uh, so Drift was the first, I would say, website chatbot. They kind of invented that concept of the website chatbot, uh, and very focused on the B2B marketer persona. So there were support things in that area, intercom, etc. But they were marketing focused. And uh David Canzel was the second time founder had already exited to HubSpot before. Um, legendary guy. So he um um he built Drift at the time, I think there were about like 400, 500 employees, almost a billion in valuation. And uh and so Drift became our customer. And and what happened is that because Drift sold to marketers, uh about 1200 marketers ended up attending that event, and it went very well, went flawless. Um, and that sort of skyrocketed our pipeline. So from that, like sub hundred million, sub hundred K in revenue. But what was your sub 100k? Sub 100k, yeah. Because Drift was 50 and then everything was just like 5, 10, 15 here and there. Uh, we went from there to a million AR within four or five months uh because we just got a flurry of inbound. And and then uh did you raise your next round then? Yeah, so the moment this started happening, we could see that trajectory. So we said, okay, it's a good time to raise. We went to raise another round. And the short story there also is that we were actually thinking, but while we were thinking, we were approached by two very blue. Funds and I can't name them because of confidentiality. But they sort of pushed us into fundraise. And this is something that I tell founders that you should never get pushed into fundraise because if you're not prepared and those things don't convert, then you are kind of caught unawares. And that's exactly what happened. Those two funds were we went to the partner meeting. Um, so we were like, okay, we are all set, we are going to get money from this fund and it will look great on TechCrunch and everything. And then suddenly news came out that Hoppin had raised a 250 million round, which in those times was insane.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Like almost like anthropic raising, right now, 10, 10 billion dollars.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's kind of like that moment in those days of SaaS. So those two funds pulled back. They were like, I don't think they gave term sheet? They didn't give a term sheet, but we were almost discussing terms at the time. Okay, there was almost a verbal. Yes, there was a verbal, almost a verbal commitment, and and we were doing partner meetings. And they were blue chip in the US. Super blue chip funds. Um, so and I think both of them have invested in anthropic as well. So talked about it. So they pulled back, and then we were like, okay, damn, everyone knows in the market that they are looking at us and they have pulled back, and we are not prepared, we don't have a proper presentation. So uh we then sort of were in this in this myth of a bad situation. So we went and then talked to a lot of funds. People were obviously scared of competition. Yeah, uh, but then again, um, we got a break, and unusual ventures came in and wrong at the time. So the partner at Unusual Ventures, Sandya Haigre, she was uh an exec at Amplitude before, very super legit person. She was she's based here in SF? She's based here in in uh in the area, and she also ran marketing for Amplitude in their you know pre-IPO days. So she knew this space and she was like, Yeah, you guys are doing something right. I'll write your check.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

So I that's that's quite a lot of conviction when the marketers going from the other direction. Yeah, betting your yeah, yeah. And how big was the fund?

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Uh unusual, I think, was about a $400 million fund. And what how much did they put? They put 10? They put they put seven and a half in that round. At what post money? Uh at uh 38 million post money. And you raised a total of 10. In that round, we raised about 10. So they put in seven and a half, then uh our pro radar investors put in some money. We brought in a bunch of angels in that round, and those were like very high-profile angels, like Scott Belski, Lenny Rachitki, um Sean Puri, all of those people. And uh and then HubSpot also came. How do you bring in such high profile angels? So these were uh um all intros for some from some of our existing angels. Uh, but by this time we had enough trajectory. You were at one million error, which is not even one, honestly. When we raced around, we were at 300k. Okay. But it went from like zero to three hundred, four hundredk in a couple of months, which in those days was incredible.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

I think now it's what what you have to you your story or advice be to the founders because what happened to you back then is exactly happened to founders right now, but at much larger scale. Yes. Everybody's asking founders okay, if entropic comes in your domain, what will happen to you? It's already in your domain. Yes. Back then, Hoppin was a giant uh in your domain with so many others from a smaller giant. Right. So every VC would be asking you, every engineer would be asking you, how would you compete with Hoppin?

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Yeah, that's a very great question. And honestly, I think the answer was kind of simple that B2B marketers have a specific set of needs. We will build um a specific set of things for them that Hoppin will not focus on because their major customers are big conferences, right? So they'll always get pulled into that. And then we'll build enough social proof to be able to get that flywheel on. And we had already won a bunch of deals against Hoppin. So I think it is always important to show some wins against the big competitor. But the challenge that everyone is having right now, and people had at the time, was that fault lines were not clear. Like, why should there be a B2B virtual events platform wasn't clear to people, which is why we had to talk to like 50, 60 funds at the time. And then finally, I think. How much time did it take to talk about? Um so at the because we were hot by then, we got a lot of inbound. So all of this happened, I think, in two months. So how do you become hot? We became hot because of drift, honestly. I think drift and then so many customers coming in. Uh gives you. Customer signal has to be had and learning for founders that to become hot in the VC market. Yeah, yeah. Customer signaling is super important. So the space was hot, right? It was uh clear that there's a lot happening in the space, and people were looking for horses to back, right? And we had some good logos, some good wins against Hopay and everyone else.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Wow. And and then after raising the round, what was the trajectory of the company then?

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Yeah, so but then we raised um we raised this 10 million round. So then we went on a hiring speed, we hired a VP of marketing, uh, VP of uh sales and everything else. And then we ended that year at about 2.2 million to which year? 2021.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

2021. So 0 to 2.3 million in the first year.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

How how many months were there between raising the 1.5 and the 10 million?

SPEAKER_00 27:02

Uh about about a year.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Okay. Yeah. But 20, 20.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Uh actually less than a year, I would say three and a half quarters.

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Okay. And so yeah, so right now you have raised 10 million by 2021. And then you are two and a half a million year.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

What happened after? Two and a half million by the end of first year, and then this was end of 21, which you can imagine was a time of change, right? COVID was receding, markets were crashing, and so markets had started crashing, but it wasn't like a full-fledged crash. And at that time, um, we were discussing that hey, should we go and raise another round? Because we have had a good year. We got GitHub as a customer, which was about 150 KD. GitHub is still a customer. GitHub is still a customer, one of our biggest customers. Um, so things were going well, and uh I think the advice we got from everyone was that hey, you should you should maybe raise after three or four months because you can show more retention and things like that. But something in my gut told me that maybe that's not the right answer. And in this time, I was also stuck in India. So I hadn't gone went back to India since I came to the US. And I had a small kid, I wanted my parents to meet him. So we went to India and got stuck because we didn't have a stamp on our O1. So then I had to desperately fight, get that stamp somehow. And then I came um alone to Boston because my family couldn't just come trivially. Um, and I stayed in a hotel for two months in a very sad hotel, raising this round, second round. And uh this was a very challenging time because markets had like full started full-fledged crashing. So you would remember that, right? All the spacks were gone. Yeah, um, and uh people just didn't want to invest. That was the worst time. That was the worst time. So I had a lot of inbound before that. So many VCs were reaching out to us all the time, and then they all vanished. Then I wanted to talk to them. Um, so this round was also brutal. We I think ended up speaking with again 60, 70 funds, but without inbound. So I had to like corral a lot of intros from investors, like early stage investors. And um finally, again, one of our earliest customers, uh Turing, the founder of Turing. Jonathan. Jonathan Siddharth, yeah. He's a great guy. We'd built a good rap. We are recording podcasts with him in the next couple of days.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

We recorded with Vijay day before your show.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

Okay, amazing. Yeah, those are great guys, great founders, very helpful. So, again, in desperation, reach out to other founders. I reached out to Jonathan, he connected us to Westbridge, and uh Westbridge then ended up leading.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

How much did Westwidge put in at what value?

SPEAKER_00 29:26

So Westbridge uh that was a 28 million round in which Westbidge invested 23 at 118, 118. 118, and then five was unusual scroll data.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Okay, yeah, amazing.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

So we raised 28, and I think that was the that was the last big round in all of B2B Martech in that year, honestly. There was no other I think after this is what early 2022? This was yeah, like first second quarter of 2022 that time. Yeah, I think the biggest that that it was so bad for Martech for the next two years that I think the biggest round after that, or noteworthy round after that, was Clay, honestly. I think Clay when it started raising is when Martech sort of thawed a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

So what was your biggest advice on the fundraiser? So yeah, but let's say as a founder, where are your strengths? Are your strengths storytelling, is your strength data, is your strength execution? Like what yeah, what do you lead with in a fundraiser?

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Great question, uh Siddharth. I I wish I have a great answer to that, but I realize I'm not I'm I'm a good storyteller, but I'm not like Adam Newman. Good. I cannot sell it.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Nobody nobody should be Adam Newman, and then you will be sending hard as a time is yeah, exactly. For example, if you if you remember from your earliest pitches, let's imagine that I'm a VC and this is for learning for the founders everywhere. But how how would you in 30 seconds or one minute uh pitch gold cast to me back then if you're pitching?

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Back then, yeah. At the time we were saying we were calling ourselves a B2B digital events platform that marketers can use to engage their audience through virtual events and webinars and use the engagement data to drive sales activity. So that was how we positioned it. And it was a very simple pitch, um, but no one was talking about it at the time. And the the implicit challenge that we were having is that all these companies that were touted as competition before they were crashing and like publicly crashing, layoffs and companies getting shut and everything else. So people were questioning now, okay, should this space even exist? And our uh answer to that was that hey, if there's one corner of the world where this space could exist, that's B2B, because B2B companies have big marketing budgets, they they have so many things that are happening always. They need to talk to their audience, and what better way to engage them with in a cost-effective manner than virtual events and webinars? Um, and people like, yeah, I don't know. So it was it was a decent point, and I think it it kind we kind of proved it, but um, at the time no one wanted to really believe it.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

And and what what was the part of this is a simple pitch, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Like what was the part of your story that stuck with investors the most or they remembered the most that it was that we were B2B focused uh because events industry, uh in the events industry, like B2B hosted events, like events hosted by companies that were. Yeah, for companies for companies, that's a very small percentage of it. The big industry, big part of this in this industry is trade shows, um trade shows actually, yeah, industry trade shows. Um so people were finding it hard to believe that this could be like a big, big market. Um but anyway, we found a backer who was willing to believe in that story, and uh we we raised a 20, 28 million round, and then we did what everyone does after raising such a round. We started burning money, scaling the team, and and then our sales was working, so we went from 2.3 to about 4.3 million by the end of that year, too. By the end of that year, so 2.2 to 4.4, so roughly about 100% growth, and um, and then we were collecting good logos, and I think in this whole time we were proving that yes, we can consistently win good logos, and and uh our churn was not as high as all the other competitors. Like uh in this market, people were churning about like 10 uh 5% a month at the time. Our retention was still bad, I would say, but it was still in the 70s, uh, gross retention. So because the industry was churning, it was no fault for the product. Yes, exactly. Industry was uh churning, marketing teams were getting cut, budgets were getting cut. Um so uh when we got to five, if you look from outside, right? In those times, if you say, hey, I went from like two punt X to four point X, we'll look great, but we could see that there's something not working here, right? And and I think our conclusion was that the market size is not big enough, which wasn't a novel conclusion, everyone had concluded that. But what everyone did in response was that, hey, let's we were doing virtual events, that market is shrinking, let's do in-person events, which I think was the fatal mistake that a lot of companies made in this market. Um, because in-person events requires it's a different animal. It requires a lot of product to be built. And the the services business, not a product business. It's actually a very intense product business, honestly. There's a lot of services as well there, but in-person events requires um a lot of like complicated registration, ticketing, integration of the hotels. There's in in infrastructure in person, right? The iPads and everything else. So it's a complicated business, and then again, more high stake than virtual events, right? So people are not willing to change as easily. And Cvent was the leader, big uh big person in that in that game, right? So we realize we can't fight Cvent. Um so um, and if you just wind back to that time, right? 2022 and Chat GPT had come in. So the narrative immediately shifted to AI. Everyone was talking about AI, and it wasn't clear like what can this space do with AI, right? We can make even you we can use AI to make virtual events creation easy, but because the question is whether virtual events themselves are valuable.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

They are needed or not, because people wanted to meet in person as much as possible. Correct, exactly. So nobody wanted to meet each other virtually because it was two years of all virtual.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

Two years of all um all insight. So two changes started happening in this time. We started focusing on webinars a lot more, and that was a very good discussion. What's the difference between the online B2B event and a webinar? Um, honestly, there is now that you look at it, there isn't a big difference. Uh, but that time, if you look at B2B digital conferences, right? Those were lots of bells and whistles. So it will take a bunch of time to set them up, branding, the complex registration, and then you'll have sponsor area, all of that. Versus webinar is let's quickly create, I'm doing something every week. I have a speaker, I'm just talking to them. Very quick registration, integration into market or hop spot. It's like a set workflow. So it's a lot easier, like a whittled-down version. And uh people were because they had not thought of this before, a lot of competitors were building a different product for webinar because we needed a simpler product. Fortunately, we had made that call from the get-go, so we were able to focus on that very easily without changing the product. And then the second thing that we did at the time was we went and spoke with a bunch of our existing customers, right, who were very successful, who were renewing with us. And one of them happened to be Zoara. Um, and so Zoara was the crown jewel in the Google Cast um logo Pantheon, which wasn't much at the time. Uh, and the insight we got from them and a bunch of other customers was that they were successful because they didn't treat digital events and webinars as events, they were treating it as a content strategy. So the webinar itself is only part of the value, but everything that happens after that, you take that content, use it to fuel LinkedIn and blog and everything else, that's generating a lot of value. And that's how they see it. Um, so that sort of was a light bulb moment for us. Um, and uh this product build was being led by Ashish, my co-founder. He so he was not focusing on the core business. Um, he was focusing on creating AI solutions. And what he built as a prototype was taking a video, a giant like one hour video of a webinar, and then generating derivative assets from it using AI. So, like video clips was one. Uh PDF or sorry, a blog was another. So we had some of this, we showed it to customers, and uh the the GTM of this was being led by Kishore, my co-founder. So they were both involved in this, and I was focusing on the main business, and they came to the conclusion that yes, this is the right thing to do, we should invest more resources on this. So um I further then again repurposed my VP of product, Lauren, who's now CPO, into a PM on this product. So these three like very important executives were focusing on this product. How big was the team of back then? At that time, we were I would say about 100 people. Yeah. And in this time, from the time we made this decision to uh the end of the year, uh, we were about 140, 150 people. So we were scaling rapidly, right? We had not really decided to cut the burn. And at that, in this in that year, also we grew from 4.4 to about 8 million, which wasn't a lot of growth. Uh in the same time. By end of 2023. By end of 23, right. Uh, but we could see the cracks, right? The churn was improving, but it wasn't coming down. Because of the new AI features. No, but those of the AI features were still in infancy, right at the time. They had only it was just a pure event business. It was a pure event business with an AI add-on, which is like half baked right now. Uh and then churn continued to happen. It improved because we made we were just improving the business, but it didn't improve because of the product characteristics. And so we could see the writing on the wall, right? That this cannot continue forever. We'll hit a wall, we'll die. Um, so that was the time when we decided that hey, we have to take this AI thing seriously, right? Because um we'll not survive. And so it's a do or die. We cannot half asset. And what that really meant is that we had to commit to that product. So, what that means is that A, that product has to be a standalone product. It couldn't just be. Can I repeat what was this product? Yes. So the second product was uh was essentially a video clipping product. You have a big video uh that was coming out of Goldcast. Um, you could feed it into that product and it will find the key moments that you can post on social media, on LinkedIn, and you can't.

SPEAKER_01 39:00

But how many people were doing it? Does it large prosumer business?

SPEAKER_00 39:04

Yes. So it at that time there were not many people because it was still very early, right? Chat, this was like within the first year of Chat GPT launch. So um there were a bunch of prosumer people who were doing it. The products were kind of half-paked at the time, no one was there in enterprise or in bigger companies. And uh and so we committed to that product and building that product as a standalone PLG sell product, which we had never done in life. And the reason was that that we wanted to lead with that product, show it, have people use it, and then arrive at the aha moment that this is the only company which is doing the creation of the product video as well. Like the webinar and virtual events, the they account for about 60-70% of the content that's created in B2B. Um, so it has to, it has to like flow from there into this product. And we were already doing it. Otherwise, you have to download a five gigabyte video, it's painful. So we committed to that. And uh the natural conclusion after that was we had to cut the burn because this not only was a product change, but also a repositioning of the company. Because we could no longer say we are just a webinar platform or a digital events platform. So we did that soul searching of positioning, rebranding, etc. And we we had to a layoff to increase our um runway. So how from 100 people, how how big the team became? So by that time when we decided to commit to this fully, we were about 150 people.

SPEAKER_02 40:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Um, and so around 2024, like end of first quarter, we made a decision to um lay off about 20, 25 people. Um, that will give us additional runway and uh give us time to like reposition the business, build all of this stuff. Because at that time we were also clear that it's not just webinar and clipping product, but it's webinar. We have to build something like uh a Zancaster or River site so that we can also capture that content. And then we have to build a distribution site also, which was something like a Vistia or a Vimeo to host the video. So we'll complete the full cycle, and hence we started calling ourselves a an AI first video content platform. It was a nice story that we helped marketers run video, which is very engaging format end-to-end. We are the only platform to do that. So we had to prove this thesis, right? And we had like we had half-baked stuff at the time. Um so we decided to to let go of some people so that we can have some runway. Uh, and that was a painful exercise, which was made like extremely painful because at the same time my dad got diagnosed with cancer in that same week uh when I was doing my layoffs. So it was a very hard week. I did that, I did what I had to do. Um, and uh and I think that kind of drove one emotional change in me. And I and I love my co-founders for like supporting me on that. Uh and the change was that we said, hey, we we don't want to stay small here, right? If I'm not investing time in family, then I want to create something like really meaningful and big from this. So we were like, let's commit to this, let's give it this year, let's grow slow, make sure this is done well. But next year we are going all in, right? We are we are either going big or going home. So in that year, we did all of these changes and we grew only from 8 million to about 11.5 million. By end of 2024. End of 2024. But we could see changes inside our company itself. Like our win rates were improving, uh, CAC had gone down, a lot of metrics were improving in ways which was clear that it was because of the product and the positioning. Um so start of 25, we had about 15 million left. One five. So how much we were burning per month? We were burning uh at this time, we were burning about um 500k a month.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

So we still had like 30 months of runway.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Yeah, we had a lot of runway, but we wanted to go big. So we said, hey, let's let's increase our burn this year. Let's make sure we have just like five quarters of runway so that we can show great momentum for this year and then raise money within a year. 40-50 million kind of for hours. Right, right. Um so our goal was to go from 11 million that year to 21 million by the end of this year, uh, which we thought was great growth, which I'll talk about how that turned out. But um we then started accelerating and and investing back in go to market. So we went back to 150 people and um and in that time we won uh a set of great logos, right? OpenAI came on. How many won OpenAI? Oh, yeah, this is I think a good GTM then said for customers. So um because we knew that our uh our big game is always going to be enterprises, uh, even though we had didn't have much penetration at that time, we started doing these field dinners in in and around SF, New York, etc. And then we did a dinner in SF in which the marketing ops leader of Box came in and and so he evaluated us for box. The deal didn't go anywhere, but we kept in touch with him, we kept sending him emails and all the good vibes. He ended up being the head of marketing ops at OpenAI. So we didn't even target OpenAI, we got an inbound from him saying, Hey, we are looking for a solution, and and that's how OpenAI happened.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Uh lesson for founders that hey, don't treat it as leads, treat it as relationships.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you have ACBs of 20,000 or more, relationships is all that matters, actually. That's how Anthropic also came in because Anthropic was uh an ex customer, I think maybe from Zora or one of those companies. Um and she went to Anthropic, became their leader of their digital events, and then brought us in.

SPEAKER_01 44:25

Yeah, so not only your product has to be A plus, yeah, but your relationship also has to be A plus with the team. Right, right, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 44:33

Exactly. And that's a big lesson that I always take on. We had we had and still have very good relationships with our customers. Is it still a journey beyond that now? Yes. So 24, we are sorry, 25 starting. We have started pushing the pedal, we are growing fast, and we went from 11-ish million to 16.5 million within six months. So we're like, okay, we are on track, we'll get to 21. We have a great story, AI, video content platform. It was truly differentiated even today. I don't think there's any product which does the whole thing, uh, even today. Uh so we said, okay, let's go and raise money in July. Um and while we were preparing for fundraise, we got an inbound from C Band at the time. So it was a complete inbound. The complete inbound out of the blue. So actually, Nathan was the leader of Cop Dev, he replied on an email we had exchanged back in like 2020 when we were just starting. Um and so I saw it, I said, okay, that's great. We were we had no idea at that time, we were not looking to sell. So I went on a call with them. And uh I think the key of that conversation was that I explained to them that hey, we are not a webinar platform, we are a full video content platform. If you're looking to make a bet in this space, um I would love to chat, but we you should know what you're getting into and you should value it appropriately. And I think they had they are a very, very sophisticated acquirer, so they knew everything. And they had spoken with our customers, uh, they had done the classic like GLG research and everything, and they knew the landscape of the market. And they told us that they had also yeah, uh another interesting story.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

The ex MD for APAC for GLG. Yeah, Ramadeklan, he's an LP in Neon.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Oh, okay. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

So we are able to open a lot of doors for our for our portfolio.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

Yeah, yeah. The GLG Mafia is really strong. They they they have one more fund called Teamwork uh Ventures, which Team Worthy, sorry, Team Worthy, which was also one of the potential investors for our past time, but in here. Anyway, so so easy hasn't done their research, they had identified two players in that space. So now was the second one?

unknown 46:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

It was it's part of the story, uh, I'll come to that. But um, I think the story uh or the only learning I can take from this is that we we did two things right to get us to this moment. Um, one was that we made this AI change, right? And it was very counterintuitive for everyone at that time because video AI is a whole different animal, right? It's a whole different animal, and uh, and especially when there's so much complication involved with the PLG motion and everything else, and going multi-product with such a small scale, which now I think is cool. But at that time it was like very everyone's telling us that hey, going multi-product at eight, nine million AR is insane. Uh, but we made that call because we were trying to follow the market, right? Tailwinds are the most important factor in winning. And second is we survived. We survived when everyone in this space was kind of dead or almost dead. Um which is why C Vent probably looked at everyone and they're like, okay, these are the only people surviving. They're doing something cool, a good brand. And so we started engaging in the conversation with Cvent. Um, and in parallel, we were also, we also kicked off a fundraise. Um, so we were chatting with C Vent, and in that state of conversations in the next two months, it became clear that this could be an amazing fit for all the reasons. But but big reason is that Cvent already is an undisputed leader in the in-person events. And so their goal was to create a holistic like uh total events platform, and we were an amazing fit for them. They had incredible penetration in enterprises, which is where our growth would have come from. So, all in all, a great story. And um while we were going through this process, we had another company which got interested in us to to uh to look at the acquisition. So that um that created a what I could call like a small bidding war um between the two companies. And in this time, we had the the the classic choice, right? That all the founders faced that should we continue raising money, uh, which in all honesty was not easy. So as I said, Goldcast never had an easy fundraise. This fundraise was also equally hard. Uh we were, I think in this fundraise I talked to the most funds, about 80, 85 funds. And again, we got interest because we had all these logos. Um 16 million is no no no mean feat. Right, right, right. But but then people were looking at a growth rate, and then just the growth rate expectation had flipped, right? So people want to um wanted to back companies only that were going from 11 to 30 or 40, um, which is easier second end. Impossible, right? It's very hard. Yeah, very hard. Very, very hard, right? Yeah, yeah. And I I realized that see, if that is the expectation, if it's that ubiquitous, um this market would not support it. I knew that. And um and we would have been able to raise if we continued, we would have found a backer, but we thought that maybe okay, this is the this is the time to make the decision. And and then through this process, we also got a value which uh which made a lot of sense, right? We knew that everyone will make make money and be very happy from this outcome. Um, but most importantly, it was a great outcome for our employees as well.

SPEAKER_01 49:38

And how much uh at that point in time the percentage of company was with a founder and team, and how much was with investors?

SPEAKER_00 49:45

Oh, yeah, so as founders, we own 30% total. Um, 60% was investors and 10% was employees. Understood. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:54

We're very fair for the team, right? Even after someone television, you had 10%.

SPEAKER_00 49:58

Yeah, yeah. We had 10%, and I think a lot of that was also unvested options. So as I said, C Wend is a very sophisticated and great acquire. So a lot of those unvested options were also in some ways honored, not directly honored because there's some complications. So they were honored, which gave a great incentive for the team to stay and and continue contributing.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

Understood. Great. And I I assume with the other player coming in, it's okay if you don't want to name it or oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:26

So that player is actually on 24. So C Vent on 24 is a public company in this space, actually, for 150 million.

SPEAKER_01 50:32

Uh so they offered you acquisition on oh no, no, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 50:35

That oh no, that other company I cannot. Sure, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:39

Yeah, yeah. So so another company offered came in, then that that was also an inbound?

SPEAKER_00 50:44

That was not a pure inbound, that was an intro from Westbridge.

SPEAKER_01 50:48

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:50

Uh yeah, having good investors and the captain. Yeah, good investors who are who back you and believe in you.

SPEAKER_01 50:55

So I assume uh because the space was slow, frequent initial, and because they're a P-backed company, right? Yeah, they don't pay high multiples. Yes. So initial multiple that they would have agreed to would have been like 10x of revenue or 12x of revenue.

SPEAKER_00 51:11

You know, it was it was surprisingly good. Um because I think people realize that this is an interesting moment, and and for companies to make a bet in AI like quick enough with you know everything else today. Yeah, honestly, honestly, I don't know because uh SaaS multiples are completely crashing right now. But but your AI revenue also matters, right? Yes, AI revenue matters a lot. Uh the other complication we had was that because we were selling the full platform, we were never able to say this is AI, this is non-AI. Um, but I think like everyone knew we had lots of usage on that product. You could actually go and scroll on GitHub's page or Atlassian's page and see that there's goldcast generated content there. So um there was lots of proof points. Um but I think the whole AI thing was the differentiator. Like we were truly a differentiated product by then, uh, which we were never actually before uh as differentiated.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

So so with the other other player coming in in the mix, how much did it influence the price going up, let's say, was it influenced by 20%, 50%?

SPEAKER_00 52:17

I think the price in that that probably put it up by another 25%. Wow. Uh, which at that scale matters a lot. Yeah, that scale matters a lot. Matters a lot. But I think what it did more than that was it A made the terms much more better. Very friendly. Because the other play was offering friendly terms. Exactly. So it made the terms very friendly. Uh and uh it also made sure that the deal got done because deals fall through all.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Well, if they know that they are the only one, then they can drag it. And probably some sometimes it's also like uh raider like kill the company by making it dry.

SPEAKER_00 52:54

That could always happen, right? And and C Ven has an amazing track record, and they're great people and everything else, but who knows? Who knows? And and also I think that that was a blessing in disguise because we our deal closed on 8th of December, and about 15th of Jan you would know SASTROC's like nosed, right? When Opus 4.6 came out. So it was it was great timing, and that that whole thing pushed the urgency to create close that and what was the revenue on 8th of December?

SPEAKER_01 53:21

About 19 million. Yeah, so you have scaled pretty pretty quickly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:27

This year we last year we scaled pretty well.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

Yeah, what a ride. I would say congrats again. Thank you. Thanks, man. If you had to change uh one thing during that journey, one decision, a few decisions, what would you change during the last five-year journey?

SPEAKER_00 53:44

Yeah, great question. So I think if I were to change one thing, I would have done that layoff a lot sooner and uh gone harder on AI a lot sooner. Uh we built a good product, but I think we could have moved a lot faster.

SPEAKER_01 53:59

Yeah. And and some of the things, like a couple of things or three, four things that you think you did right that that generated such a large outcome for everyone.

SPEAKER_00 54:11

Yeah. I think one thing that we did right was uh just focusing on on one particular vertical. Um which which which was a natural a natural decision at the time. Being only B2B. B2B, right. Um I think there's a natural advantage to doing that because you build enough, you build concentrated social proof. So similar customers, when they look at your logos, they get they get comfort. Um and you're able to build those last mile things that that really matter to the customer to make their life rate, which was a great decision and something that we sort of underestimated in the early days. I think it it worked in a favor. Um, the second uh good decision for us was raising that series A. Because honestly, when we were raising that series A, the 28 million round actually, um that A, I I I sort of unilaterally pushed the timing back, which which really helped us close. Otherwise, we would not have been able to close that round. Also, the the foundation was kind of shaky at the time, right? You're raising for a virtual events company when COVID is going down. So I'm glad that we found backers, but if we had not, then we would not have been able to maneuver anything in this um in this whole journey. The third thing that that we got right was just the bet on AI in the right direction because everyone was and it has to bet on AI. It's not new, but this in the betting in that direction uh of building the video platform instead of building an events platform was was the right light decision, very counterintuitive at that time. Um, but uh ultimately we we were we were listening to our customers in in doing that and it just paid off well. Um I think the fourth decision that that in hindsight, I I think we got right, or I would say set of decisions or policies as they that we were very team-friendly in many ways. So, for instance, like a lot of early employees, about 110, 120, we we gave them a 10-year vesting or 10-year exercise period. So a lot of folks who had either been let go during the layoffs or had left the company before, they also ended up making a good amount of money in this because they they didn't have to buy their options and all of that. Um, we were generally like very good with severances and everything else, even when we were suffering financially. Um, and and so all of this sort of created a great sort of team spirit in the team. And we were able to fight through many hard times uh successfully and come out stronger. So we had many quarters where you know the retention was going up and up, and then it knows died, which is very demodelizing for the company. But then like the team got together, figured it out, and did it well. Um, the fifth thing, uh, and I'll stop after this, that we did well, but again, one of those things that I could have done earlier is just like defining and operationalizing company values. So we had done some company values work very early on, um, and that was done by the whole executive team together, uh, alongside the founders. And that that just became a document which had 10 things listed, no one talked about it. It was kind of like not useful. And around this time of layoffs, I had to realize that the culture of the company is breaking despite our best efforts because it's becoming bigger, right? 100 people, 100 plus is a lot. You stopped knowing people the first thing. Yeah, exactly. I had stopped knowing everyone well and all that. Uh, and so we defined company values this time, and I said, hey, it's just the founders who are going to define it, it's not going to be a discussion because uh a company is kind of built in the image of the founders. So we defined the company values of uh with what we want to see. So we had we had five things. One was called go mainstage, which was like very high ownership and showing that urgency uh that you know have when you are mainstage. Second was called go backstage, which is like we want everyone to get the hand get their hands dirty. So we don't want pure managers or like the leader should not be like, hey, this is beyond me. Everyone has to do stuff. Um and the third is which I think, and I'll stop after this on the values. Third is what we called ace communication, empathetic, uh, sorry, approachable, uh, clear, and empathetic. So we wanted everyone to be to be direct with each other because we were remote, right? It's very hard to read everyone's facial feature. Um, so we wanted everyone to be very clear, um, but also be empathetic and approachable in that time. So you're not prickly and bad news is traveling fast and everything else. Um, so that's called ace. And that ace became these three values going backstage, mainstage, and ace, they became like sort of watchwords in the company, buzzwords, uh, because we operationalized them well. We had low emojis for Leaven Slack, we gave awards and everything else. That worked really well.

SPEAKER_01 58:47

And what if you have to summarize, what was the thing that worked really well in your go-to market?

SPEAKER_00 58:52

In a GTM? Um, see, I think one thing that worked amazingly well in a GTM is is that we it's something we did actually after the customers were closing. So we had a an unusually large post-sales team. So we had a very healthy ratio of CSMs to customers. We had a support team, we had an implementation team, professional services, and all of that. And we could have always argued to have to having a smaller team, but what that did was that customers were felt supported a lot at every point of time. We also measured NPS like a religion, uh, really. So we had an incredible word of mouth, honestly. Uh, at every point when we did our analysis of where we are getting pipeline from, about 50% or more of that pipeline came from word of mouth. And those were not referrals where a customer is making an introduction, but we used to ask people, like, hey, how did you know about Goldcast? And they would say, Hey, so and so your customer told me about you when I was on you know on the treadmill with them or something. So that I think we got really well, and something I take with me like keeping your customers happy is the best go-to-market strategy.

SPEAKER_01 59:53

Yeah, so just doubling down on the process, what was the the process of post sales and what are the team post sales that made you successful?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:02

Yeah, so uh the team post sales it it evolved a lot, and a lot of that was again feedback from NPS, right? We used to measure and look at every. I still till my last day last week, I used to look at every NPS response and what it said qualitatively. Um, but our process was that after a customer is closed, we'll have a kickoff call with them, then we'll implement them for two to six weeks, depending on the complexity of the customer. Then after implementation, they would go to a CSM. And the CSM's job was to be like a subject matter expert. So they'll tell you, hey, you should do things this way, that way, or you should do a poll uh to create engagement, those kinds of things. Like being the qualitative expert, and then we had a support team, about like 15 people in India. They were doing support. And then we had a services team. So in cases where there are big events or teams are running out of bandwidth to do things, our services team would come in, like do things for them. Those were the five things. Then we even had added an AM layer in the end to do renewals and expansions. Uh, so it was kind of complicated, like the lot of stakeholders at the time, but we streamlined it to a way where customers always felt supported at every point and they were they were not never left hanging.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09

You know, you you evaluated the entire worked in the entire mark tech space. Yeah. Would Mark Tech be the right category? Yes. Marketing tech, right? So how has this marketing space evolved now? Like today, if you have to define it, how would you define it?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

The the Martech space, yeah. Martech space is challenging for a variety of reasons. Uh but I think the biggest reason is that it's there are only few things in Martech that are like truly must-haves. Um, and then the marketing teams themselves are uh huge ups and downs, right? Like the company has raised money, you need to accelerate big marketing expenditure. Then when things cool down, marketing is the first to go. So the retention in Martech is always subpar. That is a well-known fact, which creates challenges in fundraise and everything else. I think what happened in Martech is because during COVID, when everyone had a lot of money to invest, right? And cags were through the roof and no one cared, there was so much noise and so many point solutions in marketing across everything, um, which ended up sort of maybe hurting the customers because customers were confused, they didn't know like how to make X from buy. Everyone looked the same, said the same, everyone is going to increase your pipeline. Um, so it wasn't really good for customers. And this was also one of the things that we always felt, which is why we wanted to build this one product, right? Even if it meant committing to like a massively multi-product strategy very early on, because we thought that's the right thing to do for customers. Otherwise, they're so confused and so drawn down by so many tools. So, right now I think it's moving towards consolidation, definitely. And with with Cloud and everything else, it is going to get consolidated more and more.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:43

Which which would be the top 10 players in Martech if you had to name today?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:47

Top 10 players. Oh, I think the undisputed king of Martech is are always HubSpot and Adobe, right? They are the big ones. Uh, then I would say Salesforce is there. Then right now, I think the big sort of startups that are to watch for Clay is definitely one, right? Absolutely crushing it. Um, there is uh uh Unify GTM, which is a you know BDR outreach platform. There's Hockey Stack, which is again a customer of GoCas, we are their customers too, and uh it's in in the attribution space, but they are expanding. So I think those three startups are are something to watch for for sure. Um and then there are some existing SaaS incumbents like Six Sense. Uh you know, it's a it's it's kind of become a must-have in that stack. Um Gong is another one, right? Which is which straddles the boundary of both sales and Martech. So I think those are the the key players.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

And any upcoming startups that you really see in this domain?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43

In Martech? Yeah. How great question. Um I have honestly, like, because I have spent so much time in Martech, I am deciding to consciously not start in Martech again. Um but I think there are a bunch of like video editing companies that are doing very well. So Mosaic ML is Mosaic is one of them, is out of India doing video editing. That's interesting. I think Unify GTM is a very interesting company for sure. Um, what else? There's a company called Default, which is uh which is sort of building the end-to-end stack for inbound marketing. I think that is very uh very cool. Then there is a whole host of like AI first CRMs. I think that can be game changing. So something like Rocks is there, um, and they are taking different light field um and uh there's Monaco. I think those can be very, very interesting because they can help crunch the stack.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:38

Yeah. And is acquisition the only path for a Martech company? Because we have seen what happened to HubSpot share price.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:44

Right. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great point, and that was something that we also knew that we knew that IPO is not possible in this market, right? Um, so acquisition is unfortunately the only like credible big exit path in Martech. And there are there can be different types of acquirers, right? There can be strategics, they can be PE and everything else, but it it has to be an acquisition.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:05

So how many $1 billion revenue companies, certain uh agents in C or are in Martech that can really acquire a company, a startup for 300 to 500?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

So that's a great question, and that was also something that we looked at at the time uh to evaluate our options fully, right? So honestly, like 1 billion plus revenue companies in in the whole Martech space, there are just a handful. There's C Bent, right, at the lowest end of that, and then and then there's the public companies, like HubSpot, Salesforce, um, and maybe some bit of like Microsoft Oracle as well. They play in that space too. But and Adobe. I think those are the big players. Uh, but the challenge is, and this is where like founders can probably like draw parallels to their markets also. Every market's acquisition characteristics are determined by the players in that market, and who are the players in those, right? So, for instance, for what we understood is that in in uh The likes of Adobe, Microsoft, those companies, right? Those two. They don't move as much until it's like a billion in enterprise value, right? Because it's just too small for them. So players like us are not attractive to them in general. And then there's some private players, right? Cvent here, there's Gong and Sixth Sense, et cetera. But Cvent is more of an exception here, honestly. Most companies would not have as much liquidity and as much scale and profitability as Cvent has. And then there are some peripheral players in this market, like Zoom, Salesforce, et cetera, that could be acquirers, but there are not many. Honestly. Beyond, I think, 300, 400 million, you sort of start running into this problem that, hey, maybe there is nothing from here till a billion or two billion in enterprises.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:48

So if you have to start again, and you would agree, you're like a second-time founder now, that markets dominate the kind of exits that you're having, right? So which are the markets that you think about that you might start in?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

Oh, oh yeah. Great question. So I have been looking at a bunch of markets right now, but I think some things that interest me are healthcare services in the US. It's a it's a big giant market. Trillion dollar market. Yeah, trillion dollar market and very broken. And I think my sense there is that I'm looking at like AI rollups in those spaces because it is also hard to sell into healthcare. So you'd rather own the asset and capture that. Um, so healthcare is one. The second is real estate. Real estate is a massive services market, so a lot of scope to bring efficiency using AI. So those are two where I'm spending the most time. Um, other things that are interesting to me are uh things that involve design because nanobanana is so powerful, you can have a sort of JSON that describes this interior design of a house or anything else, and then render it in nanobanana perfectly. It is it is an amazing tool. So uh I think it kind of opens up the scope for custom manufacturing or or customization in products and things like that. So that's something also I'm interested in. Um yeah, that's what I'm looking at right now. Martec, video, all of these things, I'm I'm kind of non-compete in in most of those, so I'm not looking at that. And you would not want to double down and double down again in the domain that you're already played in. I already played. Yeah, exactly. And and honestly, Martech has has that perennial problem of um of flow retention, right? That AI doesn't change that really.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:29

Yeah. And and with uh a lot of tools now now coming in, let's say, because of AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:34

Uh the plethora of tools can be created overnight to reach out to customer in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:40

Right, right, right. Right, right, right. That is true. That is true. And which which is also, I think, something that founders have to think, right? If um in in, for instance, like one thing I tell all the time is I'm very bullish on C Vant because they are they have their mooring in the physical world, right? If you go to conferences, there's a lot of hardware in the conference that's used, they are into hotels and everything else. So it's not you cannot cloud code your way into replacing C Vant. It's a must-have. Um, but if it's like a pure play product, like just reaching out to customers, etc., there's there's always the argument to be made. Then maybe you can do it with Cloud or or like it can be recreated easily, um, which is definitely a challenge.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:18

So you have like great logos uh on your website. Yeah. Uh uh like did you very specifically went after certain logos?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:27

Like yeah. Yeah. Um, so we we had a very strong go-to-market team, I would say, uh, both marketing and sales. And and obviously Kishore is an incredible um go-to-market leader as my co-founder. Um we we what we did well, uh, and one of the operational things we did well is that we realized that retention for us is is it like falls off the cliff uh at 500 employee mark. So we knew we dissected the business in three verticals. There's a SMB, which is less than 500 employees, and we shifted the entire go-to-market operations of that from to India. So we had AEs closing those deals in India actually. How big was those deals? Uh those so ACV in that segment was about 17, 18k.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:13

And we actually said we don't want to increase ACV in this segment. We just want to focus on retention and CAC, make the CAC lower. Um, then the second segment was mid-market, which was 500, 2000 employees. And employees was a proxy for the size of the marketing team, also. So there the ACV was 35,000, and then enterprise is 2000 plus, which is where we knew we had a lot of runway. And enterprise was about 65,000, $70,000. Um, and what happened is when we made this AI change, right? We saw the fin rates kind of increasing in that order. Enterprise was the highest because they were the ones who felt the pain of disconnected tools the most, then went market, then SMB. So very um uh and then in and then in every market, we in every segment we we had a named account list of about 300, 400 accounts that we would go after.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:59

So between the three founders, like how were you splitting responsibilities?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:03

Yeah, uh, so I I was the CEO. I was spending most of my time with with product and customer success. Um, then Ashish was the CTO, so he looked after tech. And Kishore was the CRO or CEO, and he used to handle sales and at some point marketing as well. And you also lead led the fundraise. Yeah, CEO always has to the fundraise. I think that that's what has to fall with the CEO.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:27

So you would say like having a holistic founding team was very critical to for such a large outcome, right? If if one piece was missing in the founding team, it would not have been there.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:39

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think uh at least for if you if you look at me and Kishore, we look similar from outside, right? Both HPS, business guys, but we had very complementary skill sets, interest, and and temperament. So um Kishore is like very fast moving um and and very sales oriented, right? So he's a great storyteller, he's great with customers, love him, everything else. And I was more patient and and more long-term thinking. So we complemented each other very well in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:09

And and let's say if if acquisition you would not have taken acquisition route, what route would you have taken then?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:16

Yeah, great question. So I think I made a a bunch of like flow charts at that time because I knew that this is not that moment we can just pass by. So if an acquisition did not happen, if let's say both of those acquirers fell off, then we honestly thought that we'll spin off the digital events webinar product and business and we'll sell it off, and then spin off the video AI product into a separate, much smaller company. Because I think that product standalone, if we had if we had the opportunity, could have been built a lot faster and then sold in more markets, not just B2B. Uh and the technology was moving fast enough to be able to do that. So that was option C for us. I think lately I've been thinking, okay, option D kind of presented itself after the acquisition, which was Cloud, right? So if with Cloud Code and what it can do, we could have built a bunch of things. So for example, it would have been possible to compete in in the in-person event space now, because the process of building the product is not a bottleneck anymore, which used to be in the past. So I think we could have probably stayed stayed as a standalone company and then inflected our growth rate by building more products. Which was your highest ACV customer? Our highest ACV customer uh is I think Capital Group. So Capital Group is is is a is a big asset manager, it's one of the top five asset managers in the world. They they own lots of funds and they invest in credit and everything else. It's kind of like Bellington Management or or the deep like Canada pension fund.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:52

And did that customer reach like seven-digit ACV or was it?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:55

No, so our our highest ACV before the acquisition was uh about 320-ish K. Then I just after the acquisition, we closed another customer uh in the payroll space, uh paychecks. Paychecks was about, I would say it's a this was a three-year deal totaling about 1.2 million in TCV, so 400k. We are just about to close a million dollar ARR customer. But I it was it will happen in a month.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:20

Understood.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:22

So so uh why I'm asking this is yeah, how how do founders move from six digits? Because you initially the six digit is also.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:30

Yeah, uh initially I given 50k deals were like the godsend for us.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:34

So, how how did you as a company navigate from when 50k was impossible to going 100k, then 300k, 500k, and all million?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:42

I think it's all a question of like sequential social groups. So, first you have to you have to do some black magic to get your first set of customers, right? That's there's no set playbook for it, it's just hassle and grind. And then just have the logos and just make sure that the first set of logos are supremely happy with you so that they give you a case study. They're willing to get on camera with you, they're willing to give you a testimonial and reference and everything else. Then you can use that to get more and more customers. And then at every jump in scale, you have to you have to do that black magic of sorts, which in our case Kishore was doing. He's the incredible salesperson. Um, so like our first true mid-market logo was MailChimp, actually. Before that, we had all the companies which were like 500 or less.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:25

Well, they were paying 510k, 510k. Yeah, it's very difficult.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:28

Yeah, 20k ACV, very, very difficult life. So MailChimp came in at like $80,000, and that sort of opened our eyes that oh wow, this is this is amazing. Then we got ThoughtSpot and a bunch of similar companies as customers. Um, and what was the GTM to get MailChimp and ThoughtSpot? So MailChimp was uh honestly like a complete outbound package over. It's complete outbound, but because we had already had a bunch of high-flying startups, even though smaller, it gave us a little bit more warmth uh to reach out to them. Once you have one or two logos in that space, then you can get more logos. Um, and I think our first big enterprise customer, honestly, GitHub, which came in, fell into a lap by chance early on. Um, but then we use that GitHub thing to get GitLab and a bunch of other customers. So every segment requires its own social proof creation. But the main thing to concentrate on is just like a set of two or three customers, you can just somehow win in that segment, get make them super happy, use them to get more customers.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:28

Like your website is amazing because it looks like a hundred million hour company.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:32

It does, it does. We do a very good job of marketing because we have to market to marketers, right? So we always have to be an extremely tier.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:39

How will you build that culture and that kind of talent in the team that you look like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:44

Uh I think it's partly because of like our our ethos as a founding team. We really believe in the value of brand, especially in competitive spaces, right? Software. If you look at software, right, alternatives are not a problem in software. So then what will people anchor on? They'll anchor on brand, right? Because product is is commoditized. So we we knew that, and then we had an amazing team. Like our CMO Kelly is incredible, all of our second-in-command marketing leaders are incredible. We put in a lot of effort to like recruit the right team and invest in brands. So we just re-in that whole process of repositioning, rebranding, we I think we did about like 20-30 interviews with leading CMOs to understand like how will they describe us and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:28

Well, thank you so much, uh, you know, Palash. This has been an amazing journey. Uh, probably you will want to do another version because time is limited.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:36

There's one more question that I I thought of an answer of about the book. Yes. Like what book? Um, because uh I there was there was one book that I read in about like midpoint of this journey that that sort of changed my perspective. It's called The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lancioni. And it sounds like a very gimmicky title, yeah, but it's an incredible book. Anyone who has crossed the 10 employee threshold, right? How did it change you? It changed me because it made it clear, like, hey, what is the exact role of the CEO? So, for example, just to give you an example, one of the temptations is to get in between executive misalignment and try to solve it or try to manage it. So, if two executives, let's say the product leader and engineering leader are are arguing over something, then you sort of get into it and sort of micromanage that and try to not have that conflict happen. And I used to do that all the time. I don't like conflict. If two people are fighting, I would try to stop them. But what used to happen is I would just because of me, they'll stop, but the emotions are suppressed, the the arguments have not come out, and it will lead to dysfunction in a bigger way. So I stopped doing that. Like we used to have executive meetings where people are fighting for 30 minutes, but then at some point I was like, Yeah, this is right, they they should just get it out and then be done with it. So that's one big change that I got from this. Any other change? Uh I would say this is like one big one. The other change that was there is just holding people accountable. So I think one thing that I always realize is uh, or I always thought is that hey, if if someone is not hitting their goals, right, then I would always try to find reason for like, okay, maybe the market wasn't good, maybe they didn't have things in control. And sometimes it was true, but accountability means accountability, right? If you have, if you're a sales leader, if you have a number on your head, uh you have to hit it, right? You have to get close. Otherwise, you have to be held accountable. So I think I became very good at holding people accountable, uh, despite the fact that it was probably sometimes not clear whether you know what factors influenced it. And in the long run, I I figured that is the right strategy. Like accountability as a top-level construct is super important.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:41

Any other book that you would recommend besides this?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:44

Oh, I think one book, which is not like a specific founder type book, but in general, good book for every business leader to read, is this book called The Moral Animal.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:53

Uh, it was written in the 90s, um, and it's about evolutionary psychology, like how why humans think the way they think. Um, but it helped me just become a more empathetic human. Now I can like look at some behaviors and say, yeah, this is because how we evolved over the last 300,000 years.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:10

No, thank you so much, Padas. This has been amazing hosting your learning of the journey. Thanks.