Latest / NC Tweener Talks / Eric Boduch: Revcast, 24 and Up, and Building the Next Generation of Triangle Startups (Part 2)

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Eric Boduch: Revcast, 24 and Up, and Building the Next Generation of Triangle Startups (Part 2) · NC Tweener Talks

• 00:00:03 - Eric Boduch We need to go out of our way as companies, as entrepreneurs, as startups themselves to buy from other entrepreneurs. So some of the responsibility for making this area successful falls to the startups themselves and building an environment that's more friendly for startups to get funded, for startups to hire people that have done it before, and part of that is buying from other startups. Welcome to Triangle Tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to the exit and all the lessons in between, with an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Now here's your host, serial Founder and General Partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo. 00:00:53 - Scot Wingo Welcome to Part two of a two part series where we interview Pindo Co founder Eric Boda. If you haven't listened to part one, you should go ahead and go back and check that out. These are going to be better if you listen to them in sequence. When we left off, Eric had left Pindo and decided to take his knowledge to a venture studio. But you may be wondering what is a venture studio? How does it work? How do you take these ideas and spin companies out? How's it different than an accelerator, an incubator, a venture capital fund firm? We'll go into all that. This episode is sponsored by Whitley Recruiting Partners. Whitley Recruiting Partners specializes in recruiting top tech talent for growth stage startups in the Triangle. They offer industry specific entrepreneurial employees who drive immediate results through fast, accurate and scalable recruiting process. If you have an opening, they have a offering for Triangle Tweener Times subscribers where they will do a survey available talent for that opening. Extensus HR they are a PEO which means they help you manage all of your HR needs. That enables tech founders and growing businesses to scale smarter. They take all the HR admin away off your plate. They manage the payroll, do the recruiting, employee benefits, retirement plans, compliance risk and more so entrepreneurs can focus on innovation. For over 25 years they've leveraged a people first approach, customer centric mindset and deep industry experience to ensure employees have the tools needed to stay competitive in today's market and employers. Robinson Bradshaw, a full service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangles startup ecosystem. Learn more about Robinson Bradshaw's startup and venture capital practice at robinsonbradshaw.com BofA bank of America's transformative technology group helps game changing tech businesses and their founders realize their boldest ambitions across a wide range of technology sectors. With hands on support, world class resources and an extensive network BofA provides the stability and scalability that tech companies need to rapidly grow today and into the future. Lithios Apps Lithios is a triangle based software design and development studio that builds custom mobile and web applications. Focused on quality and user experience, Lithios helps founders and teams bring products to life that drive growth, engage customers and stand out in competitive markets. They've worked side by side with clients who products have gone on to earn millions and follow on funding Aligned Technology Group ATG Are you navigating cloud cost as a startup? Who isn't? ATG helps you maximize AWS Activate credits where you can get up to $100,000 in free cloud credits. This is fax. We actually have some of these at one of my companies and 300,000 for AI driven startup businesses as an AWS Advanced Tier Partner. They streamline your cloud journey, optimize your security, help you with scalability, all cost efficiently. Startups move fast. Aligned Technology Group helps you build smarter Unlock your AWS credits today by calling Aligned Technology Group Eisner Amper, formerly hpg, one of the world's largest business consulting firms. They have a dedicated technology practice offering outsourcing, accounting, tax and advisory services. Their experienced professionals serve more than 2,000 technology companies from early stage startups to public enterprises. Discover how Eisner Amper's stage specific solutions and industry expertise can help you achieve your milestones, whether startup, international expansion, M and A or IPO. Eisneramper.com Tech and last but not least, thanks to our friends at Walk west who produced this podcast. We really appreciate it. We are back with Eric Bodick. If you haven't listened to Part one, you may want to go and do that now because these are very sequential conversations. And when we left off, Eric had left Pindo and decided to take his knowledge to Adventure Studio. But you may be wondering why, what is a venture studio? Well, let's jump into the conversation and find out. 00:04:46 - Eric Boduch So now I guess answering what is a venture studio? I think there's different kinds of venture studios. It's all about a different way to start companies or and to some extent a different way to fund companies in the early going different models for how you can do it, different derivations of it. We could spend a whole hour and a half. 00:05:05 - Scot Wingo Did you go study all this and kind of come up with what you I did. 00:05:08 - Eric Boduch I looked through a lot of it and came up with a model that I think worked and then started down that path and made some tweaks to the model as we did it as you learn things from talking to. In large part, the tweaks were on the make it better for investors or a certain class of investors. So the idea behind a venture studio is co creating companies with entrepreneurs. So how can you do parallel entrepreneurship or multiple companies at a time? And then I think the model comes down to how many companies do you do? How much ownership does the venture studio take? Do they charge anything for the services? Which. The answer should be no, in my humble opinion. 00:05:47 - Scot Wingo You know these models where you give a company money. 00:05:49 - Eric Boduch So there's a lot of things. Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of models that can work. But I think it fundamentally comes down to, like, how involved are you? How much effort do you put into starting in companies, both as an individual, as a leader of the venture studio, and also as a, a team member of the venture studio. And coupled with, you know, what does that mean as far as your equity? 00:06:13 - Scot Wingo Yeah. 00:06:13 - Eric Boduch You know, how many companies can you do at a time? There's, there's a bunch of variables in there you have to think through. 00:06:17 - Scot Wingo Yep. So back at 30,000ft, there's incubators. No one says anymore. Now I think everyone says accelerator. 00:06:24 - Eric Boduch Yeah, incubators, accelerators. 00:06:26 - Scot Wingo Yeah. There's traditional vc and then they're starting your own company. And you chose this fourth option, which is venture studio. 00:06:32 - Eric Boduch Yeah. 00:06:33 - Scot Wingo Was this because you really didn't want to just work with a cohort of people you wanted. You had a bunch of ideas you wanted to spawn forward? 00:06:42 - Eric Boduch Let's walk through that a little bit. Let's start with the easier ones to eliminate. It's probably easier for me to eliminate the incubator accelerator from the standpoint of you're doing so many companies, you run office hours, you help them out, you might do meetings and give them oversight, but you don't really know. It's hard to give really good advice specific to a company. You're giving general advice and you're just not. You can't be hands on just because of necessity. I mean, there's no way you can be hands on with 10, 20, albeit 100 or 200 companies that are running through a cohort. And you keep running those cohorts. Right. So that wasn't for me. I think those models are great. Right. I mean, obviously YC has proven that model to be amazing. It just wasn't something that at this point in my life, I wanted to do where I might be more apt to do that 20 years from now or 10 years from now or 15 where I want to be, maybe less hands on. So that one just wasn't a fit for me and not something I wanted to do personally at that point in my life. And still the VC was more of like, hey, you write a check, you're in, you know, you're investing in companies and you can give them oversight and sit on the board. Maybe some, maybe you're not on the board, maybe you write a check and that's it. And that also wasn't as interesting because I really still wanted to be involved in the build process. So then that left kind of two options. Start another company. I love the early stage stuff. Do it once. Start a company. I think Jason Caplan still would love me to do that so he can be at my door. And it's intriguing. And I was talking to another partner at a, at a big studio, and he's like, hey, I might even go back and do that someday if the right idea comes along. And I can see that. I could see that for myself too, at some point. So that was intriguing. But the venture studio thing, I felt like now I had the background and the credibility to do it. And so started thinking about, well, what if we do two companies a year where I'll work hands on with entrepreneur, we'll build a team. Right now we have a team of six. Right. That are working with those companies and then help them get started. You can think of us as the, you know, the unpaid co founder. Right. We're taking equity. We're not taking a salary like most of the other co founders are. You know, we're completely in it with, you know, only getting paid when there's. Or when there's an exit, a liquidity event. Right? 00:09:13 - Scot Wingo Yeah. So it seems like you, you didn't want to be hands off. You didn't want to be so hands on that you were the total founder. You want to do multiple companies, but you also didn't want to do this accelerator, which is kind of like, it's. 00:09:25 - Eric Boduch Closer to companies but not hands on. Yeah, okay. 00:09:27 - Scot Wingo So that's interesting. 00:09:28 - Eric Boduch So that was the studio model kind of fit where I could help entrepreneurs build companies. I could be their partner, I could build a team around me. And there's a lot of benefits to the model. Like the studies in the model say, you know, studio companies grow faster. They get to Series A faster, they get external funding in general faster. They're more likely not to die. They're more likely to have better exits. All of the data says this is a great way to do things. And we can as a studio, I think if it's done right and we're a build oriented studio, we help companies build that first product, we help them raise money. We're now kicking off a venture fund. We want to write that first check or at least half that first check into companies. So get that first million in when it's still at the post idea stage, but not yet product stage. Uh, so we'll be doing that as a new offering through the studio, a second offering out outside of the core studio. But I think the idea is, can we help people create companies in a better way than you might get through, you know, friends and family and angel networks and bridge that gap between idea and real institutional money? 00:10:35 - Scot Wingo Yeah. And then I remember, I think it's the first one was Bill Gross at Idea Lab. 00:10:41 - Eric Boduch Yeah, yeah. 00:10:42 - Scot Wingo And his company, one of his companies bought my second company. Yeah. So I actually got to go out there and it's pretty wild because it was like, it was an homage to his ego. Right. So he like sat, he sat in the middle on an elevated platform and hanging behind him in an open space was a giant portrait of himself. 00:10:59 - Eric Boduch That's pretty funny. 00:11:00 - Scot Wingo And then the, and he would actually explain it on the tour that ideas would radiate from him outwards. It sounds like you have a little bit more of an open kind of a system here, I hope. 00:11:08 - Eric Boduch I mean, I don't. I met Bill once somewhere and frankly, don't remember. This is a long time ago. Don't remember the conversation that. Well, I guess that's what. 00:11:19 - Scot Wingo But they spawn, you know, to his credit, he spawned goto.com which was like basically like you know, the invented paid search, Expedia City search. That's quite something. I'm forgetting. 00:11:30 - Eric Boduch They did a bunch of great stuff. 00:11:31 - Scot Wingo They did a lot of great. 00:11:32 - Eric Boduch Yeah, he had, you know, and they. 00:11:34 - Scot Wingo Earned his spot in the middle of that, that room. I mean he had some really darn good ideas. 00:11:38 - Eric Boduch Absolutely. I, you know, hopefully I feel a little more humble than that. 00:11:42 - Scot Wingo Point of my question, how many of these ideas come from Eric's brain and how many of them are founders coming to you in the studio and saying, hey, I really like this concept and I'm a first time founder and I think I've got a great idea. Let me. I want a partner. I want you to be my co founder basically to the studio. 00:12:00 - Eric Boduch Let's talk through that. It's an interesting exercise. Our first studio company was Revcast. In essence, the idea behind Revcast started as like, hey, we're going to help People manage quota capacity. At the time, we were still at the tail end of the go go days where everything was about if we manage how much quota we have on the street, that's what's going to drive sales. Because everyone was buying software. 00:12:26 - Scot Wingo It kind of felt like it came out of Pindo, your experience. 00:12:28 - Eric Boduch It did, it did. It came out of work I was doing at Adopt and when I was building out the first model and then realizing that all of the planning side of the business, how you run and manage your revenue organization, at least outside of forecasting in the quarter, outside of running deals, really running your revenue organization is all run through spreadsheets. And it felt like it should be more like manufacturing and SAP. I think in general, things are moving there. It's not quite there yet. You got great guys like Sam Jacobs over at Pavilion that are talking about that all the time. There's a bunch of people that are pushing salespeople to be. Not deal people, but process organization, almost math people, right? You build a model you execute against your playbook in your process, and then you should be able to adapt to changing market conditions. It should look a lot more like resource management. It's inevitable. Sales is going to be there. And revcast is early in that kind of space. 00:13:25 - Scot Wingo That was an ERIC idea. 00:13:26 - Eric Boduch So that was an idea that came out of Pendo and ERIC and idea. It was refined by talking with a bunch of revenue operations people. But then we ran into like a huge macroeconomic shift, right? Interest rates went up, Money wasn't free anymore. And so I would say that which started quota capacity now became a revenue optimization problem. Like, hey, if you have a dollar to spend on your revenue organization, or say you have $10 million to spend on a revenue organization, what should it look like, right? How many quota carriers you need? How many people do you need generating pipeline? How much pipeline is coming from marketing? What's that all costing you? You know, what's your expectations on things like attainment? How long is it gonna take to ramp new people? How are you allocating for people that go out on maternity and paternity? There's a whole optimization problem, just like you'd have in a manufacturing environment. And that's what revcast turned into, right? It's like much, much bigger products. So we all of a sudden went from hey, we're gonna sell this. This is our wedge to eventually getting there to like, holy shit. But it was a holy shit moment of all of a sudden. It was like, okay, we had this thing that the Revops people said they love. But now as we're actually bringing it out to market and it for us to build it, you know, now as we're pushing it out to market, all of our beta customers are like, oh, we don't have money, like, and we have even less money for sales stack, you know, because people think we've over invested in. My CFO is telling me to get rid of tools and like, you know, you're net new, right? You're not even replacing spend, right? So it was, it became like, okay, we need to expand, we need to change our offering. And then it became like instead of doing quota capacity, right, it became that plus all of this other stuff, which is where we've finally are pretty close to there today. So it's like, hey, we can actually help you run an efficient revenue organization. We can help you understand as a CFO where every dollar is being spent, why it's spent, where your risks are, what your assumptions are. So you can be a lot more confident going to the board and saying these are my numbers and this is why we're going to hit them. And here's the risks we see and here's how it compared to our metrics from last year. As long as we hit this number, this is what we'll do. If we can improve at 20%, this is what we can do. A much more intelligent conversation, I think. 00:15:34 - Scot Wingo With board currently growing at 20%. If you want me to go 40. 00:15:38 - Eric Boduch Yeah, this is what it's going to cost. This is what I need to do. These are the improvements I'm going to need to get like, you know, with my existing team last year we did 80% attainment. We'd have to hit 90 in order to grow 20. That kind of stuff, right? Being able to have those intelligent conversations between board, between CEO, between cfo, between VP of sales, you know, is it hard? That's where it started. 00:15:58 - Scot Wingo A lot of founders that try to get people out of spreadsheets, they find there's this recidivism back to the spreadsheet. Have you found it's been hard to break people of that kind of bowling, man? 00:16:09 - Eric Boduch Definitely. It's definitely a little bit of a struggle. And people are like, well, it kind of works. And then I'm like, okay, you're not going to miss? They're like, we're confident we're going to hit our number. And you talk to them three months later and they're like, yeah, we missed. Why'd you miss? We're not entirely sure. Or they'll say things like deals pushed. That's the worst excuse ever here. I mean, I'm a board member on a company too. Hate hearing the deals pushed. Well, why they push? And then you make assumptions. Some deals, pipeline quality problem. 00:16:31 - Scot Wingo We had to work with our reps to really clear up the pipeline. 00:16:34 - Eric Boduch Yeah, I'm like, all those things should be part of your model. Right. They need to be there, and then you need to adjust things. And we're like, okay, well, if our average deal size is really this or deal time is this, what does that mean? 00:16:46 - Scot Wingo For every fourth quarter, 25% of the deals pushed, that should be part of the model. 00:16:49 - Eric Boduch It should be a surprise if they can't come back and answer some of those questions. You question why, but I don't think boards hold them accountable to that in that same way. And it's hard too, in the board's defense. Right. You're a real. Your real action is just changing out the people that are in the spots. Right. But I think systems, especially around sales and revenue, need to change. And so that's the bet with Pendo is like, we can change the way people are doing in running their revenue organization. And I think we'll expand that into things like deal forecasting. There's lots of areas. I mean, you could see this as a basis of what could be the next salesforce. 00:17:26 - Scot Wingo For that matter, is Pindo a customer? Not yet. 00:17:29 - Eric Boduch Not yet. They're a little out of our ICP. For RevCast, we look at our ICP as like Series a. Up to 150, 200 million is probably our sweet spot. So Pendle's a little bit bigger than that out of our icp, though. I'd love to get Jennifer Kalin, who's the CFO over there, using it. It'd be great. But they're a little out of our icp eventually, someday. 00:17:54 - Scot Wingo So that's when you came up with the idea and ran it for a while. 00:17:56 - Eric Boduch Came up with the idea. A long winded way of saying it. Ye. The second company, 2 and 3 happen around the same time. So you could argue either is the second company, but we'll pick Wayfound as the second company. That was an idea that was a big play in AI. Right. So we're like looking at this and we're saying, hey, this OpenAI product's coming out. This GPT, as I like to call ChatGPT. GPT is too long to say. One of our engineers coined early GPT and it caught on for a little while. It seems to go up and down, but it's just a lot easier to say Gypity, who wants to say GPT all the time? It takes too long. You know, it's too long, too long. Shorten it. 00:18:40 - Scot Wingo It is long. 00:18:40 - Eric Boduch Maybe we can call it G, you know, but it has to be something different. Jeopardy is kind of funny. Anyways, so GYP was coming out and we're like, holy shit, there's going to be something amazing coming out of this. We should just start building. And we started building around that space we originally thought we were going to go after, you know, the AISDR space, Right. Because that's a natural. As a lot of people ended up thinking afterwards, that was a natural. And we had some really cool tech there. Arguably we still have some underlying tech there that's probably better than half the people in that space have. And we're going down that space and building. So that was another idea that kind of came internally more than anything else. Right. We were building for that space and we were building a lot of core infrastructure at that point. Because you need to build that core infrastructure to really do any kind of business function. Right. And part of that was, how are you analyzing how well the agents do? And we had gotten Tatiana Mahmoud, who had a brief stint at Pendo, and she was also the CPO of Nextdoor, and she worked at AWS as an executive and over Salesforce as an executive. So just amazing background. She was one of my advisors and I was talking to her about this and I was like, hey, we're looking for a CEO for this. I had had one false start with the guy that was going to run with the, that I want to run with the AI sdr, take it in that direction. He was interested in it, but ended up not wanting to jump on into the startup world. And so I was talking with Tatiana about it and she's like, what do you think about me running it? What do you think about me taking over and being the CEO? And I said, I think that would be amazing. I think you'd be amazing CEO. I mean, great product background, really good for finding the product market fit. Never been a CEO before. You know, sometimes she rubs people. She's, she's, she's, she's, she drives people, right? So better or worse, you know, you're going to get on board that boss, and as a CEO, you know, you have to do that, you know. So she came on board and we were trying to figure out how to take that to market. And she ended up really glooming in onto the performance management side of Things like, how do you manage agents? Make sure they're performing up to snuff make and doing it from a business perspective. A lot of people have tried to address that from like, hey, we'll do prompt engineering. We'll do this to work on the engineering side. But frankly, when you're deploying agents, whether it's test and production, you just have to manage them. You have to manage, make sure they go off, don't go off the rails. You have to make sure they're actually answering questions that the customers are coming up with. You have to do that at scale. You have to have agents. In essence, at that point, you're having agents manage agents with some additional human intervention. So there's a huge market that I think that the sales forces of the world and all the people building heavy into the agent world are starting to realize now that performance management. So that second company started internally. That's what they're doing. They're in San Francisco. Revcast raised 3 million. Wayfound also raised 3 million as their first round. All San Francisco money in the case of Wayfound, mostly San Francisco money in the case of Revcast. I'm dying to do a deal that's led by someone in Raleigh. 00:21:47 - Scot Wingo Tweener funds and Revcast. We're local money. 00:21:49 - Eric Boduch Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wish if I had known earlier, I would have got you in the wayfound deal too, you know, but they are, they're all of engineering and products here, but. Or I say all of engineering's here. 00:22:04 - Scot Wingo But you're a local anchor, so. 00:22:06 - Eric Boduch Yeah, yeah, you know, so that was Company two, also an internal idea, but they're also early. So you're kicking off your studio and people don't know to come to you yet. Right. The third idea actually came from one of our advisors in the product marketing space. And we looked at. At first it started as a platform for product managers, and then we quickly looked at specifically talking and tackling brand story first. So how you tell your story. And again, AI is kicking off. So we're like, hey, we can do things now with AI that we couldn't do before. Right. We can listen to all of your external conversations. Gong was already doing that for sales calls. But now we can listen to customer service calls, we can listen to marketing pitches, we can listen to everything you'll give us access to. You know, we can look at your email pitches, we can look at your landing pages, we can look at all of this stuff at scale. So how your company is represented externally, we can analyze and Then we can compare it with, you know, going back to things like rubrics, like, what is your sales rubric, what's your messaging, what came out of, you know, command of your sale or your sales consulting, right? All that strategic work. You've spent all this money on marketing and positioning messaging. Now we can take those documents and we can compare it to what people are actually doing and saying. And so we can identify salespeople that might need to be retrained, right? We can identify marketing materials that are out of date. We can identify customer success people that maybe aren't answering questions in the right way or representing the brand in the right way. All of that type of stuff can happen at scale that you just couldn't do before. I mean, period. Even the sales side, you could listen to some of the golden calls, but you only could listen to a snippet as a manager, a small portion of them as a manager. And now AI can do that at scale and say, like, and then tie that to business performance, which is great. And the big thing for them is, like, troop. The company that came out of this is, you know, their claim to fame is we can help you change your win rate, right? We can help you improve your customer satisfaction and your retention, you know, from the customer success and the marketing and the customer marketing side. But on the front end, we can help you improve your win rate because if you're doing the things you should be doing on all the sales calls, you're likely to convert more deals from the early stage to the later stage and are likely to close more deals. So I think there's a heavy tie in with Winter eight. 00:24:32 - Scot Wingo That's number three. Is there a number four? 00:24:34 - Eric Boduch That's number three. So that was like pseudo externally developed. 00:24:38 - Scot Wingo So two are internal, one external, and. 00:24:40 - Eric Boduch Then the fourth one is a company called Sesame, which came to us. We were looking at. We were intrigued by the identity space, digital identity. And in this case, James Monahan came to us with this idea. He's like, hey, we want to do something. I want to do something in the identity space. I've been working for it for 12 years. Here's an idea I have specifically around building a marketplace for identity verification providers. 00:25:03 - Scot Wingo So this is like a loss, like B2B identity. 00:25:05 - Eric Boduch No, we're looking at the consumer side. So if you sign up for a bank account, or you sign up for Masterworks, or you sign up for Otis, anything that you have to have your identity proven, those are done by idvs, some large companies that'll say you are who you say you are, they don't exchange information. So wouldn't it be great if there was a marketplace? Because there's a huge drop off, as you can imagine. You're like, oh, I'm signing up for a service now. They're like, go get your license and hold it up to your webcam. And how many times do you want to do that? The drop off is pretty high. Right. But if you could reuse those scans across competing organizations and verify the people through some cool tech, that makes a lot of sense. So we built that and are now trying to figure out the market for that, working with some of the IDV providers to run a pilot for that. And the second thing coming out of that is this whole idea of reputation or fraud detection. If you have access to more scans, you're going to be able to detect bad actors a lot easier and save people the cost of. So it was Company four that was external. It was an idea that we were intrigued by to begin with. And he came to us with something we're excited about. 00:26:14 - Scot Wingo Consumer's interesting too. 00:26:15 - Eric Boduch Yeah, yeah, sorry. 00:26:17 - Scot Wingo Going in the consumer direction, it's probably. 00:26:19 - Eric Boduch Going to be to be businesses, but consumers can understand it. Right. And then the fifth company, you know, some of the stuff like the companies that are incubated right now, two of the three that we're working on are brought to us. One's in the social selling space, another one's in the E comm space and a third one I'm spending a lot of time on myself and maybe run myself for a while. Is the plan is kind of like in the agent space? Yeah, well, I don't know as much. Well, maybe breaking. But you look at AI and you're like, hey, there's a great opportunity to make people's lives easy. Right. And it was a business idea I had way back in the day, before the days of AI. It was like, how do we have computers making our lives easy and agents can do that. And so I'm looking at that space pretty heavily now where we've been building code in that space. At some point I'll raise money for it. But yeah, we're building agent tech that'll help people make their lives a lot easier. 00:27:17 - Scot Wingo Cool. 00:27:18 - Eric Boduch Awesome. So those are the companies we're working with. I'd say it's a long winded way of saying we have ideas that come internally, ideas that come externally. We just want to be involved at the idea level. We're not a. The studio is not a vc and even the VC fund we're raising is not a VC that's doing external deals. It's there to take advantage of the fact that we have asymmetric information. We're working with the CEO, we're working with the idea for a couple months. So we have an extreme amount of due diligence. So barring us finding something that makes us not want to pursue it, if we're going to pursue it, why don't we also write that first check in and take advantage of early staged valuations and go to a CEO and be like, hey, you don't even have to shop this. We'll give you a deal. It's going to be slightly under market, but you don't have to shop this at all. And so we can write those early checks in companies that we have a ton of information, a lot of asymmetric information about, and can get them at lower price points than the general marketplace. That's why we're going to do that. 00:28:19 - Scot Wingo Get them to a bigger seed with more momentum, which is kind of like a theme. We'll talk about the Triangle ecosystem in a second. That's kind of a common. 00:28:26 - Eric Boduch Yeah. So raising money for. That's great. You know. 00:28:30 - Scot Wingo Cool. I found going as an operator where you're, like, going really deep on a problem and then doing the Tweener Fund, which is an extreme example of, you know, with 150 portfolio companies. 00:28:41 - Eric Boduch Yeah. 00:28:41 - Scot Wingo The variation, the variability, the, you know, you're. You have to go like, super wide and not as deep. How. If you've found that as well, how do you handle the complexity of basically keeping now seven companies in your head? You obviously do a good job at it. 00:28:58 - Eric Boduch Yeah. I mean, we only do two a year, you know, and Tatiana. And we found, like, I'm less involved in at this point. Right. So Revcast is a kind of a weird one. A, you know, because I want to get them farther along and B, because they're the first one. And I was the CEO for the first year of that, too. Right. As we were getting it kicked off. 00:29:16 - Scot Wingo So, like, they're the kid that went to college and kind of moved back. 00:29:19 - Eric Boduch Yeah. I mean, they're the kid that was homeschooled to some extent. Right. Because I was that CEO. I was involved in. They're kind of an exception. Troop is getting to that point. We have a CEO Austin, who's amazing, had been a CEO in the past for a company that raised 70 million. So I'm spending a good bit of time with them, but that'll transition to. It has been Austin's business to run for a while now. We raised friends and family half a million for that. We're going to go out and raise VC for that. So I'm super excited about that business. I mean, that's one that feels a lot like the Pendo business. There's so much upside and it's such an interesting space and it's a whole new opportunity in an area that product marketing has existed. But maybe like product management hasn't been understood as important as it is. When you think about companies like Salesforce, why were they successful? A lot of it had to do with the brand story. The story they told like that. No, software story. 00:30:27 - Scot Wingo Genius. 00:30:28 - Eric Boduch It was fucking genius. Right? That drove the business. Right. And everyone started thinking about that and you start thinking about their competitor at the time was Siebel. Right. And it was a huge difference. When you thought about the implementation time and the time to get up and running and the Benioff messaging there was great. There's lots of stories like that. And so brand story, consistency of brand story and how that relates to sales and marketing. Marketing are so important and product marketing has never had software for them. So like Troop delivers that, like real software for product marketers or, you know, that product marketing, sales enablement piece of the business, specifically product marketing. Right. Messaging, brand story, that whole side of the business. I think we can bring a lot of exposure to that piece. I don't even know how we got on the subject. I started getting passionate about like Troop and the opportunity there. I'm so pumped about that. But yeah, they're going to go out and raise vc. 00:31:24 - Scot Wingo We were talking about how hard it is for you to send them out of the nest a little bit. 00:31:27 - Eric Boduch Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you. Well, we weren't talking about that. We were talking about how hard it is to keep them front of mind. I feel like, you know, I'm working on, you know, if you think of the studio as like, hey, we're working on an average company for 24 months, hence the 24 and up. We really have four companies that are going on at a time. So it's not, it's not a lot of bifurcation of my time. And we have a team of six too. Right. So it's like you get one and a half people if you divide it by four. So you're getting one and a half co founders. Now you're not getting 100% of my time, but you're probably getting 25% of my time, which is worth 10 other people I don't know, it's worth 10 other people. I mean it's definitely worth whatever 25% of my time is worth. But you know, it's like that. And then you get another person and a half. Right. Or a person and a quarter. 00:32:16 - Scot Wingo What is the team of six? Are they largely engineers? 00:32:18 - Eric Boduch Largely engineers design. And then we have an opening now because my chief of staff is going back to the customer success space. So I have an opening. We're trying to figure out exactly what that role should be. It's a mix of helping out with operations, but it's probably also we're trying to be. You try to think about how a business is evolving and companies now. It used to be really easy to raise money. It's still relatively easy in AI if you're in San Francisco or New York, it's harder to raise money in Raleigh, it's harder to raise money in any of these secondary markets. It's harder to raise money as a first time entrepreneur as opposed to someone who's a founder before. It's just harder to raise money period these days. So if we can bring someone in that maybe has more of a background as a senior associate at a VC firm or something like that, that might be an interesting fit to look at. 00:33:15 - Scot Wingo So kind of an external relations kind of like warm up the VCs that. 00:33:18 - Eric Boduch Are following us runops for us, help our companies with operations and getting systems set up. But at the same time be able to help our companies raise money. Right like help like right now a lot of that falls to me, you know, can we offset that, you know, and provide an additional resource there that can help out there. And then we're going to raise a little bit more money. We raised three and a half. I left a million and a half for the studio for a couple of Pendo investors that were waiting on liquidity. They're still waiting on some liquidity, but I'd like to build the team a little bigger. Like you know, we were originally going to raise, raised five and we knew we'd probably need more like six to run through a full cycle in the studio. But we're going to take it up to probably a total of seven and raise another three million bucks for the studio. So I'm in the process of raising money at that, which is just like raising for a company. You know, we're raising it at 9.8 pre so the studio looks a lot like a company. It's kind of wild. And then our fund is a 2 in 20 fund. Right. So it looks like a VC. Yeah. So I mean, keeping four companies in your head is not nearly as hard. It's a lot less than VCs have to do. I was talking with one of the big VCs and they're on like 15 to 20 boards of 15 to 20 investments. That's a lot. 00:34:29 - Scot Wingo There's no way to keep that. 00:34:30 - Eric Boduch Yeah, we're doing four. I mean, how many tweeners now or how many people in the tweener fund? 00:34:35 - Scot Wingo 150. 00:34:36 - Eric Boduch 150. Yeah. I guess that's the number you said a little while back. Yeah. So more power to you if you can even remember all their names. It's hard, right? It is that. That's probably the biggest struggle on my side is like, how many companies do we really want to do? It's an interesting opportunity. And you think of VC funds, they always want to get bigger. Right. Because there's leverage. Right. If you're a good emerging manager and it's a first time fund and you're doing really well, you might have started with a 20 or a $40 million fund or even a $10 million fund, but pretty quickly you're thinking about, hey, how can I run a 50 or $100 million fund? Because frankly, they need it to survive. Right. There's not a lot of fees coming off a $10 million fund. I'm in a fortunate position where I don't need the money to survive. So I'm looking at this as all just equity upside. But you see VCs quickly getting up to the. If they're really good, it ends up being they're like 100 $200 million funds, right? 00:35:34 - Scot Wingo Yeah. 00:35:34 - Eric Boduch Then they have to be on 10 boards. Yeah. And then you have to do that. And then it's like. But where a studio model is inherently capable to keep small. In fact, it has to be small. Like an early advisor came to me and was like, hey, it's great. You have these first at the time, two companies and they're doing well and they've all raised external money. Let's leverage that so you can do 40 a year. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's what we don't want to do. Then I'm spread across. If I'm doing 40 a year and 80 in the studio at a time, what's the company getting? What does that work out to? 1 1/4% of my time. Then it's harder justifying the equity piece we want. And it's also just harder adding value in general. 00:36:09 - Scot Wingo Your accelerator at that point. 00:36:11 - Eric Boduch Yeah, absolutely. 00:36:13 - Scot Wingo You know, you spend a lot of time in the Pittsburgh ecosystem. I think you're still a little bit active there. Is that. 00:36:18 - Eric Boduch I think it, you know, I was very active there when I was still living in Pittsburgh. I moved down and then the pandemic hit, so I got a lot less active, some of it out of necessity. And I think I'm going to be spending more time in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's an interesting parallel to Raleigh. Right. Which we can definitely talk about. 00:36:36 - Scot Wingo Yeah. Kind of similar. You've got good university structure. It's got a little bit of a problem of, you know, it's kind of gone from. In this rust belt kind of thing where it's gone through a down period and then, you know, I think it's on a bit of a bounce back. Yeah. But a lot of young people leave there. We have the opposite where a lot of people, young people want to stay here. And then we also have this huge influx from, you know, used to be the Northeast and then it was the Midwest and now they're coming from the west coast, so. So that's kind of unique about bigger cities in the, in the Southeast. 00:37:07 - Eric Boduch Yeah. Pittsburgh has a little bit of that. Of boomerangs like people have left and then come back. I don't know that they. The entrepreneurship community takes advantage of it as much. But similar to here, you'll find people, they're like, oh, the guy running marketing for XYZ big company is actually living in Pittsburgh or in Cary. Right. It's kind of crazy. There's people you don't even know about here that I'm like, oh, oh, I didn't know he lived in Raleigh, as it turns out. 00:37:30 - Scot Wingo Yeah. 00:37:30 - Eric Boduch You might not even put Raleigh on his. 00:37:32 - Scot Wingo I get to meet many of them. So you're right. There is a big surface. There's an iceberg kind of situation here. 00:37:36 - Eric Boduch Yeah, there definitely is in both areas. And. And Raleigh has an interesting advantage in the climate. Right. You don't move to Pittsburgh for the weather, but you move to Raleigh for the weather. 00:37:45 - Scot Wingo Yeah, absolutely. So what do we need in the Triangle ecosystem? As best you can tell now, you've been here for quite a while. Yeah. 00:37:52 - Eric Boduch You asked this question in an email a long time back. And I was like. And then a reply because I was thinking about this because the same question gets asked of places like Charlotte or Pittsburgh and Philadelphia even to a lesser extent. And I think a strong technical talent system which you get from the universities and from the startup environments. And Raleigh definitely has that UNC Duke and oh yeah, NC State. Sorry, I just say that. Go Heels basketball. I was always a Tar Heels fan. Scott, I'm sure all your listeners probably know that you're a big fan of the Wolf Pack, right? 00:38:31 - Scot Wingo Yeah, I think. I'm not a sports person, so I. 00:38:35 - Eric Boduch Don'T really pull into this. 00:38:38 - Scot Wingo I think we're fortunate to have all three schools here. 00:38:40 - Eric Boduch It's like amazing. I mean, great schools too. Pittsburgh is Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh and some supporting schools. Right. Great Computer science, great in the medical health space because of the University of Pittsburgh, primarily computer science, I would say on the Carnegie Mellon side here we have Duke, UNC, NC State. So strong supporting cast. Great. A lot of early stage support for entrepreneurs. You see that in Pittsburgh, you see that in Raleigh. There's some great programs like an accelerator in Pittsburgh called Alpha Labs. There's not exactly the same thing in Raleigh. It's probably a little bit of a gap here on that side of things. 00:39:21 - Scot Wingo You should start an accelerator too. 00:39:22 - Eric Boduch Oh my gosh. 24 and up. I think that's accelerator. I think that's more for you. Gotcha. You, hey, in the future you have more. I don't have to do anything about it, but someone wants to run it under our brand. I'm all for it, you know, as long as it doesn't require any of my time, you know, but I'm all. 00:39:37 - Scot Wingo Seems like you guys have enough learnings. You could, there is something you could bake into an accelerator there. 00:39:41 - Eric Boduch You know, we'll, we'll, we'll see how the brand expands over time. But there's only. I, I'm very well aware of that. Eric Bodick only scales to 70 hours a week. Right. So, yeah, so there's, there's the technical talent, right. Which I think is really important. And University Systems is an important piece. 00:40:01 - Scot Wingo We need an accelerator. 00:40:02 - Eric Boduch Yeah, maybe. But I mean, I think, you know, it doesn't hurt. It helps. It helps in that environment. 00:40:08 - Scot Wingo And you're semi volunteering to do it. As long as it doesn't take any of your time. 00:40:11 - Eric Boduch Definitely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm volunteering to be a cheerleader for IT and help support in however I can. That takes very little to none of my time. The second thing is like companies that do really well. Right? Because going back to do I have the credibility or have I earned the right to start a venture studio? I would say pre. Pando. No. Right. But if you really want to be an area that has a lot of successful startups, you need other people that have Done it before, either as early executives or ideally co founders at startups. Right. That are now doing another one that have been through that growth. 00:40:54 - Scot Wingo We need a pindo mafia. You are part of the pindo mafia. 00:40:57 - Eric Boduch I am part of the pindo mafia. I'd love to see more. I mean, you're an investor in Hoy's company, right? Mike Hoy, one of the early salespeople at Pendo, became a sales leader. So people like that. Great. We need more of that. Pittsburgh's got Duolingo and a few others. Right. That are great for that. Having people that have seen that. Seen What? Going from 0 to 1 to 4 to 13 to 28 to 50 something to 100 or whatever it is. That kind of growth rate, that's different. It's just a different experience than growing at, say, 20 or 30 or 40 or 50% even a year. 00:41:32 - Scot Wingo This is where SaaS and some of our bigger companies never having an exit has been kind of bad for their. 00:41:37 - Eric Boduch Yeah, maybe I'm not. I mean, I've been here five years, so I have less experience about SaaS as part of the ecosystem. I think there's probably a lot more they could do for the ecosystem if they're interested. I'm not sure where they stand on all that. 00:41:52 - Scot Wingo I think Dr. Goodnight says he doesn't like startups because they take his employees. 00:41:55 - Eric Boduch Yeah. 00:41:57 - Scot Wingo Which is true. 00:41:58 - Eric Boduch I kind of understand that. Yeah. But it's for the greater good by them taking your employees. They're bringing in additional employees in. They're growing companies that you can then take their employees. Like growing the overall size of the market, I would argue is better for SaaS than worrying about losing an employee here or there. Because now Pindo employs what, how many hundreds in Raleigh, Bandwidth, Red Hat, all those companies. 00:42:23 - Scot Wingo We'll have you and Dr. Goodnight and you guys can hash it out. That'd be a fun podcast. 00:42:26 - Eric Boduch I've never met him. I'd love to meet him sometime. So if he listens to your podcast, my email is eric@24 and up.com. you can email me. I'd love to chat with him. 00:42:34 - Scot Wingo We'll see how you know. 00:42:36 - Eric Boduch I mean, they built an amazing company over there, right? Amazing company. It's amazing. Umstead's amazing. They've done some amazing things. I even got to see his rock exhibit. Like, he's got a mineral and cool, like, rare rock exhibit. I was over there one point and one of their execs took me through there. That was amazing. He's got some amazing stories that we'll have to talk to him sometime. So, I mean, I think there's that piece so we talked about, like, hey, we need technical talent. We have that here. We need more of the Pendos of the world in these areas that are spinning off people that have seen that growth rate, right. That have been through that. And it's important that as one of my San Francisco. I lived in San Francisco for six and a half years. So as one of the San Francisco VCs told us, they can't be cogs in the wheel, right? You don't want the people that are mid level managers at Meta or whatever, and they might be great, who knows? But they're cogs in the wheel. They're not the wheel. They're not the one who built the wheel, right? So you need people that have been through that kind of experience and then you need VCs that have funded those kind of things. Because funding those is different too, right? And I think that's an area where Raleigh and Pittsburgh both are pretty weak, like VCs that want to get in an idea level. And one of the Redpoint partners described themselves as a YOLO firm, but it's that kind of thing. Like, hey, are you going to invest in the next Pendo, the next Duolingo, the next Salesforce, the next Airbnb? I mean, how many people turn down Airbnb? A huge number of early VCs, right? Are you going to invest in those at the ideal level or are they going to be done by outside capital? And having capital that has an office here that's involved here is so important, right? Because when you have fundraising downturns, the first thing they do is start saying, I'm going to do all my early stage deals in my backyard. And even for Pendo, with four pretty experienced co founders, it was hard raising money in Raleigh, right? I mean, we were turned down by Raleigh firms in the get go. 00:44:31 - Scot Wingo Only Idea Lab too. There's some idea. 00:44:32 - Eric Boduch Yeah, Idea Fund as a smaller investor. And that point we were backed by Core and in Contour, right. New York and dc, even my first two studio companies. Both of them ended up being funded by San Francisco, primarily San Francisco. The third one remains to be seen. I've been trying to get that done with a local firm. So I'd love to build some of that. Who's going to bet on the next Pendo, who wants to build that kind of firm? And we'll see. There's opportunity. We'll see where Tim takes co founders. There's an opportunity for Them to do be really aggressive about that sort of stuff. 00:45:12 - Scot Wingo Part of the challenge is as those guys have been successful and gotten up to that 50, 80 round which is great, you know, in fun size. They're not writing the smaller checks so. 00:45:20 - Eric Boduch That they necessarily need to be smaller checks. Like our early investments. I mean CRV did RevCast 2/ million dollar check, right? 00:45:28 - Scot Wingo Yeah. For you guys. 00:45:29 - Eric Boduch Yeah. 00:45:30 - Scot Wingo But for people that aren't in a venture studio that are. 00:45:33 - Eric Boduch No, but early even for early stage. 00:45:35 - Scot Wingo The Michael Hoys of the world, they need that, that, that early stage check that has kind of left the area. 00:45:40 - Eric Boduch Yeah, yeah. I mean I would love to see that early stage check be bigger even in the holies of the world like that. Hey let's, let's write that 2 to 3 million dollars first check into a company and really let them build as opposed to like hey we'll give you a 250 or a half a million dollar check and you're going to be able to not do as much as someone else you're competing with in the Valley or Boston can do. Right. 00:46:02 - Scot Wingo And really that's not the mindset is like give pre revenue companies 2 or 3 million. 00:46:07 - Eric Boduch Going back to that story. Right. We have technical talent here that's solid. We're starting to have an environment in Raleigh where we have companies that have seen that fast growth and now we need that VC community that wants to be those YOLO funds that wants to like has aspirations to be the next, you know, Redpoint or Sequoia or Andreessen or you know, CRV or Bessemer or Battery, you know, you name it of those famous like how do you build a firm like that? You know and I think think there's an opportunity to have one in Raleigh. Whether it's a new firm or one of the existing firm takes a different approach. Maybe that Firm starts as $100 million firm but it's probably 100 plus million dollar firm. When you talk to people in successful areas that's one of the areas that they say the Raleighs, the Pittsburgh's, the Charlottes are missing is that firm that's going to bet on those generational sized companies. Right? 00:47:05 - Scot Wingo Yeah. Like the Austin ventures that no longer is but for a long time they were there. 00:47:09 - Eric Boduch Yeah. Plant Flex Pittsburgh has the same thing. Duolingo got funded outside it was a founder similar to Pendo Story that had some success before and you know first money I think was Union Square right out of New York. Right. Like outside you can't miss those deals in your hometown you know, and you might have to pay a little more for those deals. You might have to get involved earlier. But in the early stage deals, you're betting on the large part, on the jockey in the system. Right. You're betting on the founders. So we need that. I mean, I was talking with someone in Indianapolis claiming that Indianapolis is doing so well because it has that. Right. It has that component. I mean, High Alpha did a lot there. Scott Dorsey, the whole team there. Amazing people. 00:47:51 - Scot Wingo He's exact target gamut. 00:47:52 - Eric Boduch Yeah, exact target guy, really. You know, know, similar environment. Started with a venture studio and then grew it up into a whole, what I would describe as a financial conglomerate now, like a big, big area. 00:48:03 - Scot Wingo Is that something you want to try to do? 00:48:05 - Eric Boduch That's a. That's a loaded question, Scott. 00:48:07 - Scot Wingo Sounds like you're volunteering again. 00:48:09 - Eric Boduch Yeah, no, I mean, now you're going. 00:48:10 - Scot Wingo To do an accelerator and you're going. 00:48:11 - Eric Boduch To build a giant. There's one area where I agree with Jason Kaplan. You only can do so much. I mean, like, I would love to support someone and be involved in a great VC fund that wants to be the fund that's going to. To fund the next Pendos or the next Duolingos or the next Bandwidths or Red Hats or what have you. I don't have to be involved in that. I would love my studio even potentially to be a piece of that. Right. They get our funding through something like that. I don't know that I have the time to drive that I have the time to be involved. But it needs someone. This goes back to. I think it needs someone that has that strong operational background, that strong experience. Someone that's built companies before, you know, someone like you or bring someone into the area. Right. 00:48:54 - Scot Wingo Maybe Todd could do this after he's done. You got to start working on Todd. 00:48:57 - Eric Boduch I think Todd's going to go into politics. Todd's always had a political bent. Can you see Governor Todd Olson? Who knows? Or down the line. We're not outing Todd as a political career yet. 00:49:08 - Scot Wingo Pure speculation. 00:49:09 - Eric Boduch Governor Todd Olson would be kind of cool. Or Senator Todd Olson or Vice President Todd Olson under that. Scott's already getting me now to run for president. So it could be Vice President Todd Olson in the boat ticket. Last job. I would have all the jobs that'll be way, way down the list. More power to the politicians that are out there. But I think, yeah, I think Todd would be amazing, you know, in that kind of environment. 00:49:32 - Scot Wingo Awesome. 00:49:33 - Eric Boduch Yeah, I think it's important. Like, you know, We've talked about VCs, right? And we've talked about technical talent, we've talked about people that have had the experience growing companies. And entrepreneurs are like, see, none of this is my fault, you know, it's the area if I don't, you know. But entrepreneurs have a responsibility too. And their responsibility is to buy from other entrepreneurs. There's a tendency for entrepreneurs, especially in some of the more technical towns like Pittsburgh and Raleigh, to build stuff like, oh, instead of buying from XYZ startup, we're going to build that ourselves. It's not going to be as much and we'll throw some. That's horrible. Both for their companies, I would argue, but also for the area. One of the great things about San Francisco, and you can take YC as an example, is they buy from other startups. Their first million dollars of revenue in a lot of YC startups is coming from other startups. There's pluses and minuses to might be discounted in some ways when VCs look at it and say, oh, most of your customers are startups. But it's not discounted 100%. It's probably discounted like 10, 15. Entrepreneurs have a responsibility here if they really want to make it easier for themselves to raise money and the people coming after them to raise money to buy from other startups that can solve their problems and work with them to build the products that fit their needs. Be those early design customers, write the checks, get involved, you know. 00:50:47 - Scot Wingo Yep. 00:50:48 - Eric Boduch You know, I think it's important. There's a company in cycle that I just met with right before this, this morning and I'm like, they have a really cool product. I'm going to figure out how to use them at some of our studio companies. Right. And it's two co founders and an outsourced team in the Ukraine. Right. I don't even think they're paying themselves right now, but they've, they've bootstrapped themselves to this product and now they're going to go and they have a cool product around sales, coaching and contact management. That would be pretty awesome. So, so we need to go out of our way as companies, as startup, as entrepreneurs, as startups themselves to buy from other entrepreneurs. So some of the responsibility for making this area successful falls to the startups themselves and building an environment that's more friendly for startups to get funded, for startups to hire people that have done it before, for startups to have the technical talent. And part of that is buying from other startups. 00:51:42 - Scot Wingo Gotcha. All right, so we need an accelerator. We need $100 million fund. We need some, some of these big companies to be successful and shed off more. 00:51:52 - Eric Boduch I think we have, I think we have a lot of that. I do think we have a lot of that. 00:51:55 - Scot Wingo And we need to buy from each other. 00:51:56 - Eric Boduch I think we could, we could use like a really strong early stage VC that wants to invest in people like, you know, the CEO of Jupiter 1, right. You guys got in a tweener. Like, I'm not going to pre announce anything. I have no idea where he is. But you know, he's. People know in town, he's doing something right. Like those are the deals that have to get done by that VC that would be here. Right. Like, you know, and it doesn't have to be every single one of them. There might be reasons that I'm not saying do every single deal that, you know, a past entrepreneur has come up with, but you know, if they're successful and they're not funded by it, it just looks bad, right? 00:52:27 - Scot Wingo Yeah, absolutely. 00:52:28 - Eric Boduch The Duolingo is not getting funded by a Pittsburgh VC look bad. You know, similar things. Yeah. 00:52:33 - Scot Wingo Awesome. Well, thanks, Eric. That's a good formula. That's your platform for being mayor of Entrepreneurville. 00:52:40 - Eric Boduch Than Scott, I heard you're mayor of Entrepreneurville and you're not giving up that position anytime soon. I've seconded your nomination. It's a lifetime award. You can't leave. 00:52:52 - Scot Wingo Okay, well, thanks for being on the podcast and for sharing all your stories and for what you're doing to continue to contribute to the ecosystem. 00:52:58 - Eric Boduch Absolutely. Always. Always willing to help. 00:53:00 - Scot Wingo Awesome, thanks. 00:53:01 - Eric Boduch Thanks, Scott. Bye. For more tweener content, check out the Triangle Tweener time subst@tweener.substack.com for more tweener content, check out tweenertimes.com thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon on Triangle tweenertalks.