Ep. #1024 - Time Travel: Startup Superpowers Uncovered

00:00.53
Matt Watson
And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is Matt Watson, your host today. Excited to be joined by Andrew Berman from Vowel, he’s the co-founder and CEO. We’re going to talk about his entrepreneur journey and their company. They are creating some very cool cutting-edge video conferencing software. And we’re going to talk all about that. It does much more of video conferencing, I think, that’s why it’s so cool.

But before we get into that do want to remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by fullscale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult, Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And it has a platform to help you manage that team visit fullscale.io to learn more. Andrew, welcome to the show man.

00:40.86
Andrew Berman
Hey! Thanks for having me, really appreciate it.

00:46.12
Matt Watson
So before we started today, you mentioned that you’ve done some other things in the past. And to get started, won’t you tell us a little about your entrepreneurial journey?

00:54.73
Andrew Berman
Sure. I have a very atypical entrepreneurial journey. I started my career in venture capital, actually, I worked at Norris Venture partners. It’s one of the oldest and largest Vc firms out there. And very quickly after starting working there, I knew I wanted to start my own company. And when I was at Norris, I worked with some folks who did a lot of investing in video, in the infrastructure, in the earlier days of it.

And I went and got a master’s degree. After getting my master’s degree, about a year later, I started my first company and that company is a business called Nanit. Nanit’s the leading baby monitor in the market. We track breathing, sleep, and movement. One of the really cool things that people love about noted is we give you an ESPN like highlight reel so 12 hours of your kids sleeping compressed to 30 seconds, available every night after you wake up.

And after about 4 years of Nanit, I saw the pitfalls of running a distributed team. We had a bunch of people from all over the world. We do manufacturing outside the US and our hardware product. We do have a team outside of the US also. And it was hard to get everyone to collaborate. We tried tools like Zoom Webex meet and at that those days it was called Skype for business and realized what those products were missing or a better way to collaborate and so what we do at Wowel is we’re focused on turning.

02:22.61
Andrew Berman
Meetings into searchable, shareable information. Imagine never having to take notes again because AI is doing it for you. You have collaborative notes in the meeting and after the meeting have a full digital artifact that’s ready to go. So what we hope to do is make it so there’s no more Zoom fatigue. And what we do already make it so that our knowledge workers who are using our tool get access to their meeting data in their in the tools that they’re using. So things like Asana, Jira, Notion, that’s where Vowel’s data is data. Data’s live and I say data is because there’s many data from a meeting.

03:03.71
Matt Watson
Yeah, so the the last company you had ah Nanit. So are you not involved anymore? Was out of business? You guys exited or still going?

03:12.38
Andrew Berman
Business is still going. I’m not. I’m an advisor at this point. We have an amazing CEO there and it’s rapidly scaling. And I assume some of your listeners probably have our product. Google ventures led the series C the most recent financing round. And that business just keeps growing.

03:34.70
Matt Watson
So was that? um so you you mentioned that starting Val for you was almost trying to solve your own problems right? It’s like you’re trying to solve your own problems from running that business and I feel like that’s always. You know where the best ideas come from as an entrepreneur right is like as a byproduct of something else. You do you? You see some other problem that needs to be solved and that’s something we we hear over and over actually on the podcast.

03:57.14
Andrew Berman
Yeah I mean I just came to this place that the existing video tools just hadn’t changed in 15 years they allowed the only difference was our audio had finally gotten good and our video connection had finally gotten great and so we got to this place where you can conduct. You can conduct business and you can work with your colleagues across the world. But it’s very hard to collaborate and push work forward and that’s what we enable so we enable our typical our typical folks work in the product engineering design but a lot of other functions and. A lot of them are entrepreneurs who are looking for a better way to stay in contact with their team and look one of the things we do is we make it so you can record and search and it’s a very interesting journey. We’ve been on.

04:50.70
Matt Watson
So as part of of part of the the product and the platform that you’ve built does your guys’ product integrate with a lot of other platforms.. For example, you know if I use Salesforce or Hubspot I need to schedule a meeting with a client. It helps. Ah. Integrates with that to schedule it and then bring those notes back like into the Crm system or something like you do a lot of integrations for things like that.

05:11.24
Andrew Berman
So we’re rolling out a very detailed integration strategy in q one and so right now we’re built on top of g suite and so we integrate pretty neatly with google calendar and Google g suite which I think probably most entrepreneurs today are using and then. Um, we’re rolling out a zapier integration and that allows you to feed information and then we’re rolling out a whole host of other native integrations over the next six months and those will be everything from your crm to your task managers to your documentation tools.

05:31.14
Matt Watson
Okay.

05:49.26
Andrew Berman
And I think the the goal is for the information to live wherever it needs to live and you think about it so many meetings happen with ah teams across time zones. So folks in New York are trying to collaborate with folks in Los Angeles and in reality those folks will be better better served with some of the people not attending the meeting and then being able to listen and catch up on two x speed and so that’s what we’re trying to do and that’s what we enable our customers to do we have teams like Airhouse Flox ah homeroom and other great companies who are running their entire organization on us and we we’re just very excited and one of the things I think we’re going to do for your listeners is. We’re giving everyone three months free of val pro and so the coupon code for that is startup hustle. Um, and I hope everyone gets to check out and see what type of productivity and what type of cost savings by eliminating the need for so many endless meetings that we can bring to their company.

06:57.73
Matt Watson
So you mentioned being able to replay meetings I actually think it’s a great idea people probably don’t really think about I don’t know about you but when I watch Youtube videos a lot of times I actually watch them at like one and a half or maybe in 2 2 times speed and you get through things so much faster and actually I think that’s a. Ah, really good suggestion. A lot of people probably don’t think about because a lot of other tools probably don’t do that. Do they.

07:20.73
Andrew Berman
No I mean I had a customer tell me the other day. How amazing. It was to be able to the meeting was going on. They were on a plane and they were watching it 30 minutes later on two x speed with access to all the notes. And everything that happens so people always feel in the know people are always included when you want them to be included and your message is disseminated throughout the organization your organization I think you know is for being a founder yourself. It’s very hard to keep everyone on the same page. Always constantly knowing what your priorities are and that’s why we think this is such an interesting opportunity out there.

08:01.94
Matt Watson
So one of the features you mentioned of the product was transcription have you does do you guys do anything with like auto summarizing the meetings like you know it kind of goes through the whole transcript and can use some Ai and figure out like the the summary of the meeting or anything like that.

08:19.75
Andrew Berman
It’s coming it’s coming next year that’s what what? That’s what exactly what we’re go, where’re the direction. We’re starting to go and I think you can just imagine what’s possible with advances in stuff like generative ai. My previous company. We use extractive summarization and we are summarizing hours and hour hours and hour hours of video and my goal at vowel is to turn my customers into superhumans and to create so much measurable productivity gains imagine leaving a meeting. Getting the tldr in the slack channel or in your tat or in your notion and automatically knowing what happens so you have to pick up your kid from school or you can’t make that conversation. You are fully in the know and that’s the world that I’m trying to bring to.

09:12.31
Matt Watson
Well I love I Love the idea of having like kind of automated notes right? It’s like nobody has to. It’s not about the transcription and the like detailed notes but it’s like a summary of the notes right? like what the hell did we actually talk about in this meeting that is useful to remember for later right? like the.

09:13.80
Andrew Berman
To market.

09:30.49
Matt Watson
You hope you hope to get some action items. But if you could automate you know so somehow like those action items or key points would be really good.

09:36.75
Andrew Berman
Totally I mean you want to know what were the kind of I don’t know what were the 2 to 10 things we talked about maybe let’s call it 5 and we’ll average it out. You want to know what the action items are and I and the third thing you really want to know is what were the decisions. So.

09:53.87
Matt Watson
Right? so.

09:53.88
Andrew Berman
What did we decide to do not just the next steps because so much of work is collaborating so much of work is collaborating with folks to move work forward. You get into a meeting. You spend a few minutes trying to figure out why you’re there. Um, and then afterwards you discuss a problem. You have your action items and you’ve decided to do something so what we try to do is the full gamut so before the meeting we allow you to share an agenda. It’s collaborative you can share it with a slack link anybody was access to the calendar invite gets it during the meeting you have this notepad. So no longer needing to have a video window plus a Google doc or word doc opens the side and then after the meeting get that summary action items put it in the tooling you’re using I don’t know what you use at your company but we use notion and Asana. At mine and jira also on our engineering side of things and we’re starting to adopt things like linear. Also.

10:54.94
Matt Watson
Very good. So what do you? How do you see the the future of this playing out for your guys as company is it just all the integrations and and that’s the like the real key key for you guys kind of going forward.

11:07.53
Andrew Berman
100 it’s giving users access to the data where they want it and there are so many different tools you want to integrate with and you want to get access so three weeks later when you hover over a task in your task manager you actually know why you are doing this.

11:13.17
Matt Watson
Yes.

11:26.40
Andrew Berman
And remember the full context.

11:27.16
Matt Watson
Yeah I mean so I’m I’m a software developer by trade right? And yeah I could see like having you know various calls and then like you get the transcript the summary the the notes and stuff but then like tagging the Jira work items that we talked about right and being able to somehow reference back to those conversations. And getting that information could be could be very useful. So.

11:47.42
Andrew Berman
Totally I mean imagine you write things you write at shorthand you write in Jira or you write in as saana check out this bug. There may be a lot of context that’s missing from that conversation and we’re trying to give and we’re going to give you all that.

12:00.54
Matt Watson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s great.

12:06.22
Andrew Berman
And I just want to make your team much more productive and I want to reduce one of the things that we’ve seen that’s happened during the pandemic is people spend so much more time in meetings now. Ah ah be it’s It’s an endless stream of video.

12:16.75
Matt Watson
Oh yeah.

12:22.22
Andrew Berman
And whether you’re in person whetherever you’re remote whether you’re hybrid. Whatever you’re spending your entire day on video and then when you leave you go on Youtube or you go on Tiktok or you go on Instagram and the stat I’ve seen now is that people are spending 9 hours a day on average in the us on video. And that includes all those things. So let’s say say for the average person. It’s like four or five hours in video meetings. Maybe an hour on Youtube and then 30 minutes on Tiktok and 30 minutes on Instagram maybe that maybe that’s not the average person but give or take and our goal is to make you more productive again. And building one tool.

12:58.88
Matt Watson
What? Well so what? what tips you have out there for people that feel like they have that fatigue of being on video because I know I feel that way like if I’m on video for three or four hours you know at the end of the day like then the day I’m just spent do you have any tips on suggestions for people.

13:14.90
Andrew Berman
Have an agenda for the meeting so in advance. Why are we having this conversation in the meeting be brutal about it. Why are we here? What are we? What is our goal and what are we trying to accomplish and when when if you can finish that in 20 minutes end the call. And give everyone time ten more minutes back of that 30 minute calendar but a great meeting. It has ah it you there are certain people who can just run amazing meetings and you see I’m sure you’ve seen it in my your company and I see it all over and they just are so prepared. So. They gather everyone for a specific reason they document the next steps and the action items and then they make it so that and they make it so that they actually follow up on it and I think that’s part of how you reduce the fatigue I think also we try to make it so that it’s actually a collaborative living artifact so we have the notes. Everyone gets to ask the notes. There’s a place to raise your hand and question marks and I think those are also ways to reduce the fatigue of just video in general.

14:19.54
Matt Watson
I think I mean I’ve also heard in the past that actually just like turning off the video part of it is something that can help help with that fatigue have you have you heard that before.

14:28.58
Andrew Berman
Um, it’s a great Point. We. Do it all the time at Vowel. Ah we have meetings where people are video off. Um I find personally I have to be in front of a computer to be productive. Um I’m not very good at walking meetings I can’t really multitask but I love doing vit meetings with the video off. And just having audio only and then using our tool and then still staying on my agenda with my action items and next steps I Do it all the time.

14:52.10
Matt Watson
Yeah, something about the something about the added video just requires more attention or something that maybe wears this out I don’t know.

15:02.60
Andrew Berman
And I I it’s there’s There’s a lot of very interesting research that I’ve seen about this and so I think it’s a very interesting topic that needs to be explored forever.

15:14.36
Matt Watson
So as you were considering creating this company. How did what were your thoughts around knowing who your competition was like was that something that that obviously didn’t scare you away I’m just curious What what were your thoughts on. On that of it on that kind of going into this.

15:32.59
Andrew Berman
Sure I believe I knew very well who our competition was and I think you know who our competition is. It’s these some of the larger players out there. But I believe what you’ve seen time and time again. There is a way to historically we saw in software an unbundling of software.

15:41.66
Matt Watson
Yeah.

15:51.86
Andrew Berman
Everyone would build something for specific very narrow use cases. What’s happened over the last few years a rebundling over software. Maybe you’ve heard of figma the design tool that Adobe bought for about $20000000000 they didn’t say let’s build a plugin to make design collaborative. They rebuilt the stack.

16:00.18
Matt Watson
Oh.

16:11.20
Andrew Berman
Maybe you’ve used notion which I think is the the best way to describe. It is an all in 1 tool but really was started to focus on the wikispace so going after the confluence product on Jira and they also started with. A let’s build it ourselves and focus on all encompassing with templates and everything from like project management charts and now going in a lot of different and directions and acquiring a calendar company called cron and then I think you have companies like clickup. And I think they’re their their marketing slogan at least we see it in where I am one tool to rule it all and what all these people are saying is I’m going to build a collection of tools and we’re going to rebundle it and so we’re not going to find and there is tooling fatigue. In a sense and I think there’s another company out there called rippling that’s doing this also in the ah hr tech space and so entrepreneurs are sitting there and saying I want to build the platform company and that was what we said from the beginning we’re going to build our own video stack.

17:04.80
Matt Watson
Excuse me.

17:16.91
Andrew Berman
We’re going to replace hodgepodge tools and plugins and we’re going to do this with an end-to-end experience so that our user base gets a better product experience significantly cheaper and I think if you wanted to do what vowel does with plugins. It would probably cost you sixty. Dollars per user per year and instead we sell it to you for 1650? So my goal is to really empower empower people with with features and functionalities. They never even thought existed in in video and in collaboration in general.

17:51.67
Matt Watson
Yeah, that my my only concern being and you going into it would have just been no one like who who you’re competing with you know it’s like we’re going. We’re going up the ah you know so after some billion dollar you know, competitors right? And ah, um, that’s always just a scary scary endeavor. You know as part of. Part of my question and um, so obviously obviously to do this. You guys had to go out and raise quite a bit of capital do this too right.

18:13.54
Andrew Berman
Yes, I mean I’ll I’ll take that for the beginning part and then I’ll tell you about raising capital. So I mean the first part about this was yet. It’s super scary. My first company we did the we went. We’re in the baby monitor market. Most people don’t know a brand name besides us in the baby monitor market.

18:24.42
Matt Watson
Yeah.

18:31.74
Andrew Berman
And so it’s a very different type of product and you’re not going up against the googles of the world or although maybe you are with the nest cam um in this category It is one of the biggest categories out there. It’s. And it’s probably the product that you spend the most amount of time on in a given day and that’s why I believe there’s such a large opportunity here to take off a share and focus on a specific person and focus on specific. Companies and Personas and then move up market over time.

19:06.62
Matt Watson
So I have a couple more questions for you. Well actually tell me tell me more about the the fundraising part of it first.

19:14.40
Andrew Berman
I have incredible investors. Um I have everyone from tope the calendar of the founder of calendarly to an individual named David Hornick who I believe led investments in so splunkbuild.com fastly and git labs to. The cofounder of intercom de trainer. Um, the cofounder of Twitch the streaming video giant ah and the cofounder of ah okta for anybody who knows the enterprise space. 1 of the leading security companies. So I set out from the beginning to.

19:43.53
Matt Watson
Yeah.

19:51.64
Andrew Berman
Find an an amazing group of investors that wanted to believe in this long term vision of how we can reshape an industry who really signed up for this daunting mission and that’s what I’m doing and that’s what I’m going to execute on.

20:04.82
Matt Watson
That is a really impressive list of of investors. Obviously so I guess you know for others that are listening out there like holy shit how do you get all these investors like what is that mostly come from your experience from the nannet you know company before and and those relationships from your success there or. Was it. You know working with you know so a Vc or whatever they help make a lot of those introductions or how did how did how were you able to kind of crack that.

20:31.43
Andrew Berman
It’s a hodgepodge and a mix of both I have a I’ve um I was in Vc when I started my career so I have some some relationships from that some of my investors introduced me to some of these people.

20:36.83
Matt Watson
True. Yes, yes.

20:46.19
Andrew Berman
And the Ceo of calendarly actually came to my website and came in the intercom chat window and said I’m the Ceo of calendarly and and I would love to chat.

20:57.59
Matt Watson
Nice. Ah.

21:00.75
Matt Watson
Nice, Well, that’s the thing if you if you create a really good product right? people you get. People’s attention and then to some degree they will. They will come after you.

21:02.12
Andrew Berman
And and.

21:10.83
Andrew Berman
100 % um and I think we’ve been lucky I mean we do this to empower our customers and we have we have a company flux. It’s a distributed It’s a distributed team focused on making cad software. So I think. Ah, for listeners out there. This is um eecad so going after how do you build circuits. They were on their entire company on vowel every meeting every interaction it runs on our platform and we try to empower customers like that. To be significantly more productive.

21:45.33
Matt Watson
Absolutely well finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit fullscale io where you can build a software team quickly and affordably use the full Skillle platform to define your technical needs and then see what developers are available to join your team visit fullscale io to learn more. So. You know in some degree. There’s always winners and losers like when crazy things happen like covid and even the recession we’re going into now and it seems like you guys are no doubt one of the big winners from covid and the move to remote right? like um, you started this in 182 kind of before. You know that became even more in vogue than it is today. But um, you, you guys definitely feel like you got to help ride that wave right? like that’s you you guys in some degree were in the right place in the right time.

22:35.95
Andrew Berman
Yeah I think it’s is so ah, everything and we’re definitely in the right place in the right time and I think one of the things that people don’t realize is how much of a platform shift. We’ve seen wherever you’re remote wherever you’re distributed wherever you’re in person wherever you’re at. 1 of the large banks where there’s bringing people back five days a week you’re still spending your entire day on video because unless you work in a room where nobody else works on a different literally. Everyone works in the same room as you then you’re collaborating and so you’re trying to.

22:56.30
Matt Watson
Yeah.

23:10.98
Andrew Berman
If you work at a large bank. You’re talking to their office in London now it’s so normal to just get on video and so we benefited from a platform shift and I think we really see. What is possible by just being what the legacy tools have made possible and what we want to do in the future I believe I’m creating a new category in itself. It’s the knowledge of what’s going on.

23:36.91
Matt Watson
Yeah, and some degree it’s it’s um, not only is it related to the video part of it but it’s all it’s also related to like the notes part of it right? It’s it’s not just the the video. It’s thinking about integrating with the Crm and knowing like these are conversations he had these are things we talked about like being able to. Get access to information. That’s just not accessible today. Yeah.

23:55.97
Andrew Berman
Well and then being able to search it so you have search on. You have search on the web you have spotlight search maybe on your mac but you don’t have anything to search through all the the 6 hours a day you spent back to back on video and that’s what I’m building for you.

24:07.56
Matt Watson
Yes, yes.

24:13.95
Andrew Berman
Because I don’t know if you’re like me but I can’t remember my first meeting this morning and yet I’m sure I have action items and to do and follow up from there and I can’t remember where I said somebody genius and I can’t remember where I said somebody has to follow up on something and for the record I very rarely say things that are genius.

24:27.57
Matt Watson
Right? So so what do you? What do you do when somebody sends you an invite these days and it’s for Zoom or something. Do you just reply back and you’re like no here’s the link to val. Ah.

24:41.14
Andrew Berman
Let’s use a vowel.

24:42.58
Matt Watson
Ah, how how many times how many times a day does that happen.

24:47.35
Andrew Berman
Very rare at this point with me but I’m sure it happens to ever. It doesn’t happen. Our entire company runs on Val um, but I’m sure it does happen and ah, it’s typically let’s here’s my link and one of the things that we’ve done is we’re browser based we’ll have a client come out this year

24:51.71
Matt Watson
Yeah, yeah.

25:01.22
Matt Watson
Right.

25:05.16
Andrew Berman
And so it’s very easy for anyone to get started you you send a calendar invite. It’s just like how we’re recording this podcast. There’s no software to download. It’s super easy.

25:16.33
Matt Watson
I’m a huge fan of that I um I feel like Zoom and some of the other ones that run like to me Microsoft Teams is the worst like I feel like it always I don’t know why it like destroys my computer I don’t know what it is something about Microsoft teams like my computer doesn’t like. So I appreciate the fact that it’s browser based so tell me, there’s what are the challenges like for dealing with all this video and the notes and the data that you guys deal with you guys I mean do do you guys end up like saving recordings of every one of these videos or is it.

25:32.35
Andrew Berman
Very cool.

25:50.25
Matt Watson
Just like a temporary like we save them for a while we train we do the transcriptions we delete them at the end of the day kind of thing or like you guys must have like a major cloud footprint for all this. It’s kind of the point.

26:00.22
Andrew Berman
We have a major cloud footprint we are multi-cloud um, we we run our own stack to a large degree on on the video side of things. And we have a major cloud footprint and use a lot of great api providers. We use everything from Aws Gcp or sock 2 type 2 certified from the get go for anybody who’s sitting there worried about security. Um, and we have to have a major cloud footprint. Ah this is.

26:24.24
Matt Watson
If if.

26:31.31
Andrew Berman
Real-time audio and video communication in the Cloud. Do we store all the information depends on what pricing plan you’re on. Ah, if you’re on our business plan we store we do store it forever if you’re on our pro or our free Plan. We have. Gates on what how long we store the information for um, most of our customer base is signing. We’ve seen sign up for our business plan and then we give you the ability on to download it. Um and the ability to take your information wherever you want to go with it.

27:04.77
Matt Watson
So the potentially will they can save off like every video and and go back and rewatch any of them at any time.

27:12.79
Andrew Berman
Totally if on our paid plans you can save every video you can download any video you can download a clip of a video. Um, and if you wanted to then take it and embed it on your website. You can do that too.

27:17.10
Matt Watson
Yeah.

27:25.19
Matt Watson
That’s yeah, it’s just got to be an insane amount of insane amount of data and I think you know you guys are an example of something where creating a business like this twenty years ago would be way more difficult to do just the cloud helps so much with the scale of this trying to do these things.

27:39.32
Andrew Berman
Well, it’s kind of the only business I’ve ever created if you go back to my first business and in business nownet we record and say we’re we’re a video based baby monitorer. So we stream something like 12 to 17 hours of video a day.

27:48.13
Matt Watson
Yeah. Right.

27:54.61
Andrew Berman
We were stored in the Cloud then we do processing on it and then we then we convert it into bite size summaries and actionable moments. So it’s sort of the only thing I know how I know how to do at this point is build video companies. Um and we’ll see where all the world goes.

28:05.80
Matt Watson
Yeah, yeah.

28:11.21
Matt Watson
So for what you guys were doing with Nanet and and stuff you’re doing today. How much you guys? Do you guys use Ai for that is that Ai that you had to create yourselves or are you guys able to use some Ai stuff that’s kind of off the shelf for.

28:24.76
Andrew Berman
Now it is completely Ai but we don’t market it it as ai my my partner my partner that I started the company with had a ph d in computer vision and machine learning and all we track breathing sleep movement and give you a night summary all using a camera.

28:35.76
Matt Watson
No.

28:44.28
Andrew Berman
No sensors. Um, we built all that technology ourselves from inception at Vowel We’ve taken a similar approach. We use some off the she. We definitely use some off-the-shelf models but we build and train our own models.

29:00.16
Matt Watson
Sheriff.

29:02.65
Andrew Berman
We don’t build our own transcription engine we use Whoever the best is at the moment and we have a longer term deal with one provider. Um, and we try to then focus on building the technology that we think matters.

29:18.34
Matt Watson
So as as I were recording this like middle of December you know the the hottest subject over the last couple weeks has got to be like the open a I chat gp stuff and um, um, I’m gonna guess you got a few people on your team who have who have looked at that over the last week figuring out hm how do we do? we. Is this something we integrate with to help summarize transcripts or like how do how do you guys? think about the the craziness of of all of that. It’s ah it’s incredible.

29:39.92
Andrew Berman
Stay tuned is all I have to stay Well there are some limitations of using some of openai’s plat products that I E the token limit. How many words you can actually summarize with.

29:54.42
Matt Watson
Right.

29:57.45
Andrew Berman
Um, and with their most modern models and I believe using davinci it’s about 3000 words give or take um exactly. But when you have your own platform. You can do some other interesting things.

30:02.73
Matt Watson
Which is nothing for a long meeting.

30:13.73
Andrew Berman
And you have other queues and I’m happy to show you what we’re doing in the future.

30:17.28
Matt Watson
Yeah I think I think that’ll be really cool the the more you can do with the auto summarization stuff and we’ve played a we’ve we’ve had that Holy Grail a little bit for a long time with the podcast. It’s like how do you take a 40 minute podcast take the transcription and then like auto summarize a podcast like that’s it’s been part of our own. Our own problem to solve. You know.

30:37.46
Andrew Berman
Would you use stuff like descript to remove filler words I think you said you didn’t edit but have you played around with that at all.

30:45.61
Matt Watson
I Don’t know what tools our our team uses but we use something to transcribe it and um and then I think our team manually summarizes it but it would be great to have something to auto summarize it.

30:56.74
Andrew Berman
I’m sure those folks are working on it as I’m sure as I’m excited to share what we’re working on in the future but it’s I think there are a lot of opportunities and it’s something we’ve been preparing for since we started this company based on. My previous background and my cofounders previous backgrounds.

31:12.10
Matt Watson
Yeah, absolutely so what do you as we start to wrap up the show today. You know what do you? What? what? kind of suggestions. Do you have for other entrepreneurs that are that are listening. You know what kind of words of wisdom. Can you can you drop for all of us.

31:25.73
Andrew Berman
I think you’ve been an entrepreneur and I’ve been an entrepreneur and I think there are ups and downs on every given day. You never judge it by the highs. You never judge it by the lows on certain days. It feels like the world’s ending and for certain days. It feels like everything’s amazing I think staying cool and calm and just. Plowing ahead really can help I think secondarily it’s I win because of my grid personally. But also I think we always end up delivering an incredible product experience to the end user but I am gritty. Um. And I think as you know, ah, you’re a successful founder yourself. You have to be really gritty to survive. Um, third suggestion I mean obviously I think all founders should be using vowel and so check it out at val.com and we have that coupon codes startup hustle. And that gives everyone three months free a vowel so you can turn your meetings into you can so you don’t ever forget what happens in your meetings and you don’t have to have all those sticky notes at your desk and you can turn everything into searchable shareable instantly available knowledge for your team. So. So a great customer says something share it with them when one of your great product or designers has an idea share it with the engineering team so we can start building. It.

32:43.72
Matt Watson
I Love it. I’m I’m a huge fan of video like I you mentioned loom earlier and I think I’ve used that before I don’t remember exactly what it was but I’ve definitely used video a lot on the engineering side of like recording screen captures like hey here’s the problem. Let me show you walk through it, you know and putting it in a. Comment in Najira take it or something like that and like video is such a very powerful thing. Um, but there’s there’s problems with it and you guys are trying to solve some of those problems. So I Really like it.

33:11.98
Andrew Berman
I Think what? what we’re trying to do is There’s so much interesting stuff that happens in synchronous communication I E the meeting. How do I then take that information and make it Async and digestible and consumable. So you only have to.

33:20.26
Matt Watson
Right.

33:30.19
Andrew Berman
Watch the important parts because that makes you look like a superhuman and everyone in any kind of every company wants to look like that.

33:36.90
Matt Watson
Absolutely I love it. Well if you need to hire software engineers, testers, or leaders, Full Scale can help. We have the people and the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts. When you visit fullscale.io, all you need to do is answer a few questions and our platform will match you up to our fully vetted highly experienced team of software engineers. At Full Scale, we specialize in building long-term teams that work only for you. Learn more when you visit fullscale.io.

Well Andrew, I really appreciate having you on the show today. And really love what you guys are doing. I definitely want to check it out. I honestly had never heard of your guys’ product until today. So glad I learned about it. It sounds like a very useful tool and as you mentioned, everyone, just go to vowel.com. And when they go to sign up for an account, there’s a place to put a promo code somewhere and they just put in Startup Hustle is what you said.

34:28.71
Andrew Berman
Yep, so when you go to upgrade, you sign up for an account. Everyone gets thirty days free of our business plan and if you upgrade and put in Startup Hustle as the coupon code. You’ll get 3 months free of our pro plan.

34:39.34
Matt Watson
Okay got it. All right? Well, any final words as we end the show today?

34:47.23
Andrew Berman
Thank you for having me on here. It was a pleasure. And I hope to see Full Scale as a customer on Vowel.

35:00.44
Matt Watson
Ah, yeah, you never know? Yeah, yeah, absolutely all right? Well, thank you so much.

35:03.44
Andrew Berman
Yes, awesome. Thank you.