#39 - Getting a Billion People Working From Home

We interviewed the founder of Rev.com (they transcribe audio into text), to hear how he built this into a $206M (to be precise) business. We used them to transcribe the My First Million podcast episodes, and realized how badass of a service this was. Super simple concept - create a workforce (currently 50,000) that works remotely, transcribing audio from podcasts, conferences, meetings etc.. into text, for less than $1 per minute. Jason talks about freelancers making money in their pajamas, why they opened an office away from Silicon Valley, the impact of AI on remote work, working for free to show your worth, buying his domain for $400,000 and a clever way come up with and test a killer startup name. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  We are a platform for remote work.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Our mission is to create great work from home jobs powered by AI. A lot of companies and individuals use us to convert audio to text. There's a lot of video all over the web from YouTube to Netflix and it all needs to be captioned and subtitled. And so we serve all of those needs for everybody from the one guy with a podcast to large media companies like CNN.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  Breaking news coming into CNN now.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  On the other side of our business, we have freelancers who work at home and can earn money from their pajamas at any time. And we give them the ability to choose the work they do. When they do it, they can make money to help lead the lifestyle they want. A lot of them are home with children or family obligations and we're able to fill the cracks in their day in a way they can't otherwise do.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  We have 150 employees, more than half are engineers. We've raised $31 million. There we disclosed for the first time that our last valuation was $206 million.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  There are so many people around the world that would love to work remotely but can't. They don't have opportunity in their small town or country. I just think that there's going to be a huge change in our lifetimes where by the time I'm dead, I think it'll be a billion people who work remotely.

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  Five million is not enough. 10 million. 15 million. 20 million dollars.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  100 million dollars.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Almost half a billion in revenue. 850 million dollars.

• 1:29Shaan Puri?

  One or two people in a bedroom actually the threats to these like giant multimillion dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose. Add another zero to that price, buddy. Add two more zeros.

• 1:45Speaker 04

  Every week we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast. I started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that we find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details, like how did you get your first 100 customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the fan? I ask them, how'd you spend your money now that you're rich? And what would you do if you were starting over from scratch again today?

• 2:14Shaan Puri?

  If you're like me and you want to own your own business instead of living a nine to five job, this is the podcast for you. The Hustle presents My First Million.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  My name is Jason Chikola, companies is Rev.com. We are a platform for remote work for customers. We convert audio to text and our mission is to create great work from home jobs powered by AI. So we're two set of marketplace.

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  I use you guys.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, wonderful.

• 2:40Shaan Puri?

  I transcribed our podcast using Rev.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a lot of companies and individuals use us to convert audio to text. Podcasters use us a lot. People in media use us a ton, but so do a lot of other industries, whether it's e-learning websites, they need videos captioned, whether it's market research firms that have a focus group to transcribe. There are user research teams that transcribe audio. There's a lot of video all over the web from YouTube to Netflix and it all needs to be captioned and subtitled. And so we serve all of those needs for everybody from the one guy with a podcast to, you know, large media companies like CNN who use us all the time for audio and video.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  And then on the other side of our business, we have freelancers who work at home and can earn money from their pajamas at any time. They work flexibly. They can work as much or as little as they want and we give them the ability to choose the work they do when they do it and they can make money to kind of help lead the lifestyle they want. A lot of them are home with children or family obligations and we're able to fill the cracks in their day and keep them busy, help them make money in a way they can't otherwise do.

• 3:56Shaan Puri?

  And brag a little bit how far you guys have come. So you started the company, how many years ago?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I started the company, it's almost 10 years, nine and a half years ago. We have, if I mention some of our publicly available metrics.

• 4:11Shaan Puri?

  You can mention the private ones too, it's cool.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  There you go. We have 50,000 people who work on the platform each month. We've raised $31 million. We were on the Forbes AI list a few months ago and it said in there, there we disclosed for the first time that our last valuation was $206 million. We have 150 employees, more than half are engineers. We have.

• 4:31Shaan Puri?

  How'd you get to 206 million? Usually the valuations are round numbers. Why 206?

• 4:35Speaker 00

  I think in that case.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  Is it a multiple of a number? Is that how you end up at 06?

• 4:39Speaker 00

  You know, it's always a peculiar process. I mean, I think it was a small round and I think in that case we agreed to the round size first. This is the pre-money and then that got added on.

• 4:50Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay. All right. Gotcha.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  About 2014, we were having trouble hiring engineers, as everybody does, because it's a competitive market and everybody in the Bay Area is fishing in the same pond. I started talking to advisors and, you know, board members. And one of my board members was involved in a company that had a big office in Seattle and also one in San Francisco. And he made the point, you know, SF's not the only place to hire engineers. So I thought, well, you know, that's a good point. Let me, let me think a little bit about this and look around at the world. And I realized that, you know, the Bay Area, because of the lack of construction

• 5:34Speaker 00

  and the, you know, the housing costs and the various way the labor market and the real estate market works here, I thought it would be, you know, a tough place to be, you know, only based here, right? That the Bay Area has the best of a lot of things, but I felt that it would be good to have another office in a city with a lower cost of living. Did a much looking around for a lot of reasons, chose Austin. And we now have offices in both places and we're hiring a lot in both offices. We think both markets are great for different reasons. And we have some people that go back and forth between the two. I think it's really hard to retain people for more than 10 years if you're only in the Bay Area. I think there's a lot of examples of companies that had a really strong

• 6:17Speaker 00

  start and then a lot of their people left after they vested and they ended up, you know, without maybe as much of the, of the core original people as they would have wanted. I know, I saw some interview once where Mark Zuckerberg said, if you could go back in time, he would have done Facebook in Boston. I don't know if he meant it, but he said it, which is a big thing to say for a guy like that. And I was reading one book, I think it was Chaos Monkeys, it talked about Facebook. And the guy said that when he had the Facebook, he met somebody who was employee number 29 of Facebook and that he or she was the only person of, of the first 30 other than Zuckerberg that was still there. Right. Right? And so I can imagine if that's, assuming these facts are true, he must have been

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Kind of bummed that the first

• 7:03Shaan Puri?

  His whole crew is gone.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Twenty eight people he got, they, I mean, they're their case, they made obscene amounts of money, they did great. And they went on to other things. It's got to be hard to keep innovating the way you want to when you lose talent like that. And what I see is that your Bay Area housing costs create this pressure on people to jump ship pretty fast. And it's a rational economic strategy to kind of hop around company to company. Whether you go to a big company and get paid a lot of cash, or you go to startup and you get some options that may be worth a lot of money. You do that two or three times and one of them strikes gold and it works out. And that's probably good for the individual, not great for the company if the company has long term aspirations to do big things.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Because Google's a very impressive company, obviously, they've produced this incredible search engine that is, you know, maybe the best economic asset of all time. But what I find almost more impressive is that a company like Amazon at, you know, twenty five years old can launch something totally new. Like a convenience store and see it kind of work.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  And, you know, to me, what's really impressive is innovation that can happen in the second and third decade. And I think to do that, you need a different approach to culture and you need to try to build a company where people don't burn out and where they stay energized and excited about the next chapter and building great new stuff. And I think that having offices in two places has helped us to do that, to create that kind of more sustainable culture. So right now, as we approach our second decade, our best days are definitely yet to come. We're right now building some things with artificial intelligence that I couldn't have dreamed of three or four years ago. So we're going to be producing our best products for sure in our second decade.

• 8:51Shaan Puri?

  And you guys, this is kind of an interesting one, right? Because the service you provide is really simple, which is awesome because I love simplicity in general. But B, it's just easy for customers and employees even to grok. What are we trying to do here? What is the service for? And so you guys are transcribing audio to text and you're doing it really well, you're doing it. efficiently. Companies like Google are releasing AI. I feel like every year that's getting closer and closer to being able to do real time captions. Like I was watching a live streamed video and the captions were so good and it was live. Is it only these? These are only being done, I guess, through ML. And and so like, that's an existential threat, right? Where you guys are employing 50,000 people right now, which is awesome.

• 9:36Shaan Puri?

  And people are making money in their pajamas at home. How does the sort of, obviously, you guys are using AI to assist humans, but like the AI is coming to be able to do this really, really well. How do you think about that?

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's one of our biggest strategic questions. And I'll tell you our view on that and other people have a different view.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  The, the people who want to pay, the people who care about quality, um, need the human, uh, in the loop to make it accurate. And let me give you some, some examples here. Let's just say, you know, you, you have a podcast, you actually have a lot of listeners, right? But you're, you're kind of a small business. There are plenty of podcasts that are smaller than you. And then there's This American Life, right? So for the guy in his garage with no budget, he's probably perfectly okay to use an automated transcript from Google. Or we actually have a service for that. You can get rev automated transcript that's, that's more accurate than Google's. And the automated version is probably good enough for the small guy if he doesn't need it perfect.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Plus podcasts tend to be recorded with good audio because we're sitting here with these great microphones and in a good room and so forth. This American Life wants it right. They don't want any mistakes. And even if the AI is a lot better than today, it still takes a human to make it near perfect. And when we go out to the market, whether it's our customers, they want captions for, you know, Netflix, or whether it's a market research firm that has a focus group, they want things done accurately. They don't want them full of mistakes. They want a transcript or caption file to go to a bunch of people and it can't be wrong. And as good as the AI is, it still makes a lot of mistakes, like a lot. And the AI

• 11:22Speaker 00

  We use the term AI, which is really a misnomer. It's probably more accurate to call it machine learning. Because the software we have that converts audio to text, it's not intelligent in the way that, you know, my three-year-old or my dog frankly is intelligent. It's not doing inferring and reasoning. It's doing strict pattern recognition using brute force. And so it makes all kinds of mistakes that a human just wouldn't make. Right. Particularly a human that knows our culture. So if you have, so understanding, if I'm talking to you and I know you a little bit, or I know people like you or your style, I can probably guess what you're gonna say next, based upon the thread of the argument.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  And this kind of software can't do those things. I think the way we look at the market is, the AI is definitely gonna shrink the market in certain areas, because there will be some use cases where somebody says, hey, I was paying, you know, a dollar, let's say, for a human to do it, and I could have an AI do it for a lot less, I'll do that. But what we also see even more so is that as we've rolled out a cheaper AI service, our volumes have grown dramatically. Because what's happening is people are coming to us and saying, I have a whole back catalog of content that wasn't worthwhile for me. It wasn't important enough to pay a human to do it. But at your lower AI price, I'll do all of it. Right.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  And so, you know, we're looking around and saying, well, how much audio and video is really out there? So let's just take, let's just think about TV for a minute. When I was a kid, I had a black and white TV in my bedroom, I'm 41, so I'm not that old, but it had like two knobs, the UHF and a VHF knob. And so you could count, it only had like maximum 40 stations, of which probably like only a dozen had actual content on it. Now with YouTube, I have like half a million decent stations I can choose from, right? So in my lifetime, it went from like 12 stations to like 500,000. Right. And not every station there needs closed captions, but all the big ones want it. And even the medium ones want it too, because it's better for the, better for the audience,

• 13:29Speaker 00

  it's better for SEO, it's better for. Foreign, um, you know, foreign visitors or people with English second language.

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  If it was good and cheap, you would want it. And what you guys are doing is making it good and cheap.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. So, so, um, the amount of audio and video that is of high quality is growing exponentially.

• 13:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And so what AI does is it makes things more affordable and we're seeing massive market expansion. The other example I would say is, look, how big was the taxi market in SF, you know, circa ten years, ten years ago? Right? It's a, it's a lot bigger now. Or the market for personal transport is so much bigger. Even though the price has gotten lower, how can that be? Well, now every, you know, millennial who's thinking of going to the bar is probably going to use an Uber pool and pay like seven bucks. Whereas before, there was no option. You know, the taxis weren't available and if they were available, they would have cost three times that. So, um, the efficiency.

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  People used to say this about Uber. They said, well, you know, how big could this be? Is this overvalued? Well, even if it took a hundred percent of the taxi market, it wouldn't live up to this. And what turned out was in cities like San Francisco, they, that same year, I remember this, when I, when I read this argument, that same year, they three X'd the total size of the San Francisco taxi market themselves.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  I remember some, somebody telling me, somebody told me that same thing.

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  And it's, and we see the same type of dynamic. How much audio and video is out there? It's limitless, right? Um, and how many times were you in a meeting where somebody wanted to know what was said, right?

• 14:58Shaan Puri?

  All right. It's 2020, new year. It's going to be a big year and you know, we had to come in with some new awesome partners. So for January, we are partnering up with Microsoft and my first million. That's right. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft because whether you're just starting out or you're well on your way to your first million, Microsoft Teams can help your team hit the ground running. With must have features like real time chat, editing and video calling, all in one easy to use platform. Teams is a no brainer at a price you can afford. Yep. There is a free version of Teams as in it costs zero dollars. See for yourself at aka dot M S slash the hustle. Again, that's aka dot M S slash the hustle to check out Teams brought to you by Microsoft.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  Love it. Microsoft, that is a trillion dollar company, right? We're talking about my first million. They're on my first trillion. So that's goals for everybody. They got there because they build epic products. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, these are products that stand the test of time. And now they've come out with Teams to help teams chat, communicate and work together. And I think it's awesome. All right, great. Let's get back to this episode.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  The amount of audio and video that matters is limitless. So AI is a breakthrough technology that is delivering higher value at a lower cost. And so it's going to expand the market. And you know, there's a lot of headlines that say robots are coming for the jobs. People have these sort of dystopian notions of people think of like Terminator and when are the robots going to come and kill us all? That's not what we see, right? I mean, I think it's that sells movie tickets. But what we see is that when we go to our freelancers and we give them software that does the most tedious parts of their job better, they think it's great. Because those aren't the parts they enjoy, right? They want to do the parts that require them to think and use judgment.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  So if you look across, I'm an economics geek. If you look at the history of industry, what I see is that as as factories bring in more technology, they produce more stuff with fewer people per widget. And they require more skilled people. Right now, if you talk, you know, you read the big challenge of factory owners is they need workers that can deal with robots.

• 17:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Right. And because like, well, it's kind of hard to work with a robot compared to.

• 17:21Shaan Puri?

  They need teenagers, basically.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. So.

• 17:26Shaan Puri?

  Let me ask you, when you guys, before you guys built software for your transcribers, what would the cost be if there was no software per, let's call it minute? And what is your average cost now? So like, that's the efficiency gain, right? Through, through adding the, the sort of the machine learning components where you, you help their workflow. You speed them up, you get, you take away the tedious parts.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, I'll answer your question, but I'll kind of go one step back before then. You know, um, we intentionally chose an industry that we thought was very large, but that hadn't received any real innovation ever, frankly. And, you know, once in a while, I'll be reading some book about something that happened 200, 2,000 years ago, and it talks about scribes, you know, transcribing what was said by a president or king or a general. So as long as people could talk and write, people have been transcribing. And, um, you know, when I was in high school, I remember one of my biology teacher had a wife

• 18:29Speaker 00

  who, his wife would do medical transcription, and she would get cassettes mailed to her, and she would sit there and type them out on a word processor or something, and that was the job. And so it was opening the mail and taking the cassette and putting it in and playing it, and that was state of the art when I was in 10th grade circa 1994. And so then, when I started this, you know, nine years ago, state of the art was you get emailed an audio file and you import it to some software that's designed to play audio for transcriptionists, that typically you could often control it by a physical foot pedal that you plug into your USB port. So people had tried to make it more efficient, so the software was made for transcriptionists.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  And somebody that was good would have a physical foot pedal, so that way they could have a third hand. And the reason for that foot pedal is it would, it would control things like play or pause or go back five seconds. So people had done some basic things to try to get speed, but the technology wasn't very good. It really wasn't. It was desktop software. If you looked at it, you'd just, with your kind of Bay area product lens, you'd say, "Not, not nice software." And...

• 19:39Speaker 00

  They were typically typing into Microsoft Word and that's how we started. We started doing the same thing everybody else did, but we knew we were going to build software to do everything that it could do to help in the whole process. And there's a lot of pieces to that. It took us a couple of years, but we built software to help people do the job, which is to listen to audio and transcribe it. And it was full of little productivity hacks in the software. So for example, they would have, the person would have shortcuts for things like, for a very common word, they might see a lot, they might have a little shorthand for it. So instead of writing the word because, B E C A U S E, they would type B C space and it's been informed because. And there's like 10 other different

• 20:20Speaker 00

  types of little hacks in the software that each one is not that big of a deal, but when you put them all together, it makes somebody faster. And so what, and we had teams of people that would, we would watch people work almost like with a stopwatch and figure out when they're getting tripped up and say, let's go fix that part of it. We got to unblock this. Yeah, because, because we understood that the faster they could work, the better for everybody. They're happier, customers happier, they make more money per, you know, hour of their effort, everybody wins. And, you know, we put that software through, you know, dozens and dozens of versions and it, and we believe it's the best out there. And

• 21:01Speaker 00

  so we probably, as best we can tell, cut the time to do a job, or rather double productivity, uh, to cut the time, cut the time to do a job in half or double productivity on what the norm was in the industry. And that was before we brought AI to bear. Right. And so we've been bringing AI into the picture over the last year. I think we're still, you know, inning one of this journey. And the AI is not always helpful because With AI, it's garbage in, garbage out. You know, the old saying, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken.

• 21:35Shaan Puri?

  Yep, bleep.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Bleep. And if, if I record here with you with these microphones, the AI will do a great job. Whereas, most people aren't doing that, right? A lot of it's in a conference room with an iPhone, Doritos bag next to the mic.

• 21:50Shaan Puri?

  Right, fan on.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Fan on.

• 21:52Shaan Puri?

  And a guy with a cough.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're not thinking about it. Oh, and then maybe somebody's got a foreign accent because they, you know, recent immigrant, which is, which can be harder for certain people to discern the words. And then somebody like me gets excited and interrupts too much. And so you have a perfect storm of, of like, that's, that's reality.

• 22:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Right? So there's like, perfect conditions, and then there's reality, and we get both, right?

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  It's like self-driving cars in a parking lot versus, you know, in a city when it's raining type.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  That's right. Tahoe in the snow with the fog.

• 22:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  You know, in winter. And I, and I, and I see conditions. So, uh, so the AI today, what I, what I mean by AI, we have proprietary technology that converts audio to text. And we run, we run all of our audio through it, and we find that in some cases, the AI can do a really good job. And we give it to the human being and they love it. In other cases, the AI can do a good job. And so we kind of throw away the transcript.

• 22:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  And we end it from scratch.

• 22:52Shaan Puri?

  So let me ask you a question. You started this business when you were, um, you, you left your job to start this business, but your job was somewhat related, right? You were at, I think, odesk, which has been rebranded or acquired or whatever to, to be Upwork. And, um, so did you see this opportunity while you were there that, hey, man, a lot of these jobs are transcription jobs? What if we, you know, just did that really well? You know, how did this come about? What's the origin story? Uh, from, take us from you're a guy with a job to you started this company. What happened?

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Sure. There was a step and another company in between, not a startup, I'll tell you the story. So I joined a startup that was called Odesk, it's now called Upwork, and the company went public in late 2018, so it was doing pretty well. I joined this company in 2004, when it was super tiny.

• 23:44Shaan Puri?

  And what was your job title then?

• 23:46Speaker 00

  The title, I'll tell you the title and what I actually did. The title was Director of Marketing and Sales. In reality, I did a lot of product management, I did online marketing, I did a little selling before we automated our sales process, I did fundraising, I helped the founder with the Series A and Series B financings, I kind of got, I did some operations work. I did everything to be done, except for, I never wrote software. And I had a great founder-like experience, I was an early employee, not quite a founder, but I did a lot of different things. And I joined the company early, I joined the company before they could pay me, so I worked for free for a few months with the founder before he could finally...

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Why'd you do that?

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Because I believed he was building something really important. And, and I, and I'll tell you frankly, a personal motivation, and there's a little bit, so, one of the biggest questions for somebody who wants to join an early-stage startup, is how do you negotiate with the founder, particularly for equity, which is the thing that matters most in the early-stage company? And I, I saved a little bit of money in my previous job, I was willing and happy to work for a few months for free.

• 25:04Shaan Puri?

  And give people a sense of your age at the time, are you a kid out of college? Okay, so a couple of years out of college?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Twenty-five, maybe?

• 25:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, twenty-four, twenty-five.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  And I remember calling on one of my mentors, who was a venture capitalist, for advice, saying, "I want to go work with this founder, we have tremendous chemistry."

• 25:22Speaker 00

  I think the world of him and he respects me and there's the things that he's good at are different than what I'm good at and I think together we could really do a great job building building this business and the question was how do I frankly negotiate with him for what equity stake I'd be working for because that that was the that was a one of the main attractions for joining a company that was so early they had they had no funding, no money to bank, they couldn't pay me, nobody had ever heard of them, they had like four customers, but it was a big idea and I loved the idea and the advice I got from this mentor was and I'll never forget this advice was great advice it was, look, right now the information is very asymmetric, you don't know, he doesn't

• 26:05Speaker 00

  know what you're worth and you don't know how to sell that to him, how to show him that, so he said, just work for a little while, demonstrate value and he'll realize that he wouldn't want to do this without you and it's a, you know, a lot of people want to spend a lot, I mean, I think it's a general point here about negotiation, a lot of people want to spend a lot of time, to use a different phrase, you know, dividing a pie that may that may never get baked and sometimes you want to start baking the pie and figuring out a little later how to divide up, so what we did is we agreed, we said, we'll work together for, we picked some time period, it might have been three months, and say three months, we're gonna sit down and try to figure this out and during

• 26:47Speaker 00

  the few months, we worked together as if we were married, meaning I was a hundred percent dedicated to making him and the company successful and we, you know, put in place all-in marketing programs with Google and we did a lot of product work to get customers coming off the website and we started hiring hiring people for roles that we needed and we went did some fundraising and we were having some early early traction on that process and when we sit down to to basically discuss and negotiate on

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  Talk.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Have the big talk that we built up to, amazingly, we walked in each thinking, each with the same number in our heads.

• 27:25Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  And what do you chalk that up to? You were too low, he's too generous, how do you, how do you, you know, square that that circle? Why does that happen?

• 27:36Shaan Puri?

  You both had an accurate view of what this was worth.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  You know, I think that um, there's this phrase in negotiation like, do you go for the last dollar? Um, and I think it depends on life about what kind of relationship you want with a person down the road. And I think we each tried to come up with something that we thought would be fair, fair to the person, but attractive, but mutually attractive.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  And we worked together enough that, you know, I was aware of how awesome the company's potential was. He, he had an idea of what I could do. And if we tried to have that conversation.

• 28:10Shaan Puri?

  Too early.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Too early, it wouldn't have gone well.

• 28:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Um, and you know, he could, you know, he knew that I took a leap of faith to work for no, for no pay for several months. Um, because I believed in him and the business and um.

• 28:25Shaan Puri?

  And did you, did you signal even at the beginning? Cause I've had a similar experience where I had a company, a guy literally was like, I want to work on this with you guys. I'll work for free. I'll, you know, sleep on a couch and we'll figure it out in three, six months. Don't worry, we'll, I'll show you first. And one challenge we ran into, and I love the guy, Sam, you know, big, big shout out to Sam Solly. You know, we ran into was when we, when it came time for the talk, we didn't know where the other person's expectations were at all. We had like beat around the bush so completely that when it came up and he was like, well, I, you know, basically want to be an equal partner. And we were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, we didn't even think that's the discussion we're trying to have. We thought it was between X and Y.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:08Shaan Puri?

  And um, that set off a pretty bad tone. So I'm curious, um, just to sort of compare personal experiences. It might just be that every experience is different, but did you do a better job maybe of setting the tone or, or benchmarking in some way at the beginning? Uh, or did you just happen to have a better outcome than we did?

• 29:28Speaker 00

  So it's been 16 years, so diesel's a little hazy. But I think we did have some rough discussions over, maybe not quite ranges, but some benchmarks. I mean, I was, I had the good fortune to, I was coming out of a job at a VC firm where I was a very junior person, but I had a lot of data on what people earned at startups and what they had in various roles. And we probably had a little bit of, maybe some bookends on the conversation before going into it, I think. And certainly, that's a very, it's a very delicate, that's a very delicate question, but I do think that it's important to

• 30:11Speaker 00

  always sort of have some broad meeting of the minds before you go into something. I mean, it's, and there's no easy way to do that.

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  So one question I get a lot as I do this podcast is people come to me for career advice. And I'm like, look, A, you don't want advice. And B, you gotta look at your own situation. But one question I often get is, should I, you know, go down this path, start my own company? Go down this path, work for a big company? And the other one that's most interesting, because it's, you know, I would say at least known to people, is what it's like to do what you did. Join early at a company that might make it big. And the question I get a lot is around, what are my, what should my expectations be? So for example, you joined Odesk, which became Upwork, and ultimately is, you know, a public company. So that's the, that's the win, you know, financial win is what,

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  that startup actually made it through the gauntlet of things that startups normally could fail in. And give people a sense, if they're that, you know, that person who's 24 years old and weighing their options, they don't quite have a business idea they love and want to start. They kind of know they don't want to be at a big company. They're trying to figure out, okay, the big company is very clear what I'm going to make. And at the startup, I kind of don't know how to think about these options. And, you know, if a company makes it all the way like you did, where does that set you up financially? How would you sort of inform somebody who's trying to make a, who's trying to do a sort of a rational decision financially between those two options? How would you talk to people about that?

• 31:39Speaker 00

  So it's a really important question. Obviously, there's no, there's no like the definitive answer to anything and I could give an answer and then somebody could say, well, I did the other path and I was really successful, so you're wrong. But you framed it as big company versus join a founder in a startup. And I want to add that there's a lot of room. Range in between. A lot of range in between that, okay? And I would think that for most people who, let's say somebody says, I want to be an entrepreneur or co-founder one day. If they haven't yet, I would probably advise them to get involved in a high-growth startup first because you're going to learn a lot really fast. Now, if you start the company, great.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  If you have some incredible passion for a problem, your father had a certain illness and there's a company that's going to solve that illness and you have a dying desire to solve it and you have skills to do so, then go do it. But what I find is a lot of people want to do a startup for kind of lifestyle reasons. Like, they want to be an entrepreneur, they want that lifestyle, and they're just hungry for it. And most people who haven't been in the game for a while probably don't have the background to be able to evaluate a new idea with high confidence that they're going to get it right. It's a really hard thing to do. And that's why if you go, if you look at a startup that has raised venture

• 33:07Speaker 00

  capital from some decent venture capital firms, is growing quickly, is innovating a lot, and you can join in a capacity where you're building and growing something, ultimately hiring people, you're going to learn a lot of skills and along the way, you'll get exposed to a lot of different markets and categories and start to develop a better view over.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Over what a good opportunity and company might be for you because there are a lot of people that jump from startup to startup, a lot of little startups that don't go anywhere. And they probably have a lot of fun and maybe they end up happy in the end, but I think probably they went in hoping for either a financial outcome or some kind of legacy. And if you jump into a bunch of companies that don't go anywhere, you don't get it. I think that if you find that high growth venture backed company and do at least a couple of years stint that depending on what sort of function you're into, you know, you want to get in a position where you get exposed to multiple functions. So you have some exposure to the business side of things.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Product is often a good back, a good area because it cuts across a lot of departments, but you can get, you can get that from a lot of different fields. I think most people are better off in the high growth startup as kind of a bridge or is it maybe a step before breaking out of their own. That's just doing, doing the, the, the numbers and math. I think most people are better off that way. You know, in my personal journey, I had spent the two years before joining Upwork at a venture capital firm where my job was to evaluate startups. I had the good fortune to, to be able to see probably hundreds of companies from the inside and understand how to compare things, how to benchmark companies.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  And also I had the opportunity to learn a lot and talk to a lot of people about how does a company build enduring advantages, what people these days would call a moat.

• 35:07Shaan Puri?

  Defenseability.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  And defensibility. And I got a lot of great advice from that and a bunch of, you know, very wise VC partners and entrepreneurs. And if I oversimplify that story, while there's a lot of ways to build defensibility, I think network effects is a really powerful one.

• 35:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  And it was very clear from the first minute that if, if Upwork had any level of traction, it would have great network effects and it would be very difficult to rebuild that. And that's proven to be the case.

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  So, so, uh, you know, I went in knowing that if it worked, it would really work.

• 35:37Shaan Puri?

  Right. And when you, you said, you know, you had that experience. And then you did something in between and then you decided to start Rev.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  I was at Upwork for about three years. For a lot of reasons, I decided to leave, you know, the company. The CEO changed a couple of times and they put me in a role that I didn't think was the right role for me. So I decided, you know, let me go off on my own, get a job where I can save some money and start a company on my own terms and be able to call the shots in a way that I hadn't been at Upwork. And that's what I did. I had a friend who worked at a private equity fund and he was nice enough to introduce me and I was able to get a job. And it wasn't relevant to tech directly to work, but I learned a lot and was able to save a little bit of money. So that when I was ready to start a company on my own for the first time, I could do it with the flexibility

• 36:31Speaker 00

  of not needing to raise venture capital day one. And when I started thinking about what company I wanted to start, I got to thinking about what I learned from Upwork, which is that there are so many people around the world that would love to work remotely but can't. They don't have opportunity in their small town or country. And I just think that there's going to be a huge change in my lifetime, in our lifetimes, where by the time I'm dead, I think there'll be a billion people who work remotely, up from a much smaller number today. And that takes some time because the technology has to mature, bandwidth has to get better, industries and businesses have to change so that work that is done today in a cubicle farm

• 37:16Speaker 00

  gets spread across people's homes through software. And a lot has to happen for that transition to happen. And so I thought, why wouldn't Rev be the company? Why wouldn't I start a company to accelerate that, to bring that forward, to give opportunity to people? And I was able to. More or less dissect, what did I think were the Achilles heels in Upwork's business model and build a different business model that we don't compete with Upwork in any meaningful way, but there's two things that are different about Rev and Upwork. For the customer, we guarantee quality because we only do one thing. We can't for audio to text. And because Upwork does everything under the sun, they can't possibly guarantee quality on infinite range of services.

• 37:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you pick a, you pick an Upworker, you hope that that Upworker is going to deliver what you want. With Rev, Rev is telling you, you're going to get what you want.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  That's right. A different, that's right. A different way to phrase that is that on Upwork, you hire a person and roll the dice. On Rev, you pay for a service. We stand behind it. So it's a different thing. It's staffing versus a service. And then the other side of our business is the freelancer. So if you work on Upwork or Fiverr or a platform like that, you spend a lot of time applying for jobs. The median case of somebody in these platforms is create an account, apply a bunch of jobs, don't find work. Right? And even the successful ones are applying for a lot of jobs that they don't get. So that's time they're spending that aren't getting paid for. And applying for jobs means putting yourself

• 38:50Speaker 00

  out there emotionally, getting excited about something. It's doing a sales pitch. And most people don't only have an door slammed in their face, getting turned down. And you have to get turned down a lot to get a job, which is for most people not fun. There's time. So what we felt is if we had a platform that would provide one kind of service and we standardized it. So we knew we would only accept jobs of a given category. In our case, it's audio files we can transcribe that are in English to start. Then what we could do is we could vet a workforce. So we don't let anybody do it. But we let anybody apply. And if people pass our test and meet our criteria, we have a tiered workforce where there's different levels in our workforce. If you're in the top level of the workforce,

• 39:34Speaker 00

  we let you do any job, anytime.

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  And so those people spend no time applying for jobs. Right? They can work as much or as little as they want. Right? And that's by design. So, so, so we had these key differences of I wanted to have guaranteed experience with the customer. And I wanted somebody with, with, with the right skills to be able to work as much or as little as they want. Never have to sell themselves, never have to have to bid on a job, never have a race to the bottom of saying that guy will do it for a dollar, I'll do it for 98 cents.

• 40:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Never have any of those things.

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  Wake up and you have your cue.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  That's right. That, that was the concept. And then the question was simply, well, what would they be doing? What kind of work? And we considered every kind of work under the sign. We looked at, should they do software development? Should they do graphic design? We, we looked at what are all the common job types that people do across the internet? And we studied what was out there. And we quickly rejected any job that was pretty subjective.

• 40:27Shaan Puri?

  Yep. Design can't work.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So like, hey, restaurant needs a logo for its website. But you think it's pretty, I think it's ugly or vice versa. We'll never agree on that. Uh, whereas we've chosen categories that are pretty objective. Now, there's always a little sensitivity, but what we use is pretty subjective. You give me a podcast, we give you back the words to it. Um, you or somebody else would probably agree that we did a great job or not a great job.

• 40:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Depending how we did.

• 40:53Shaan Puri?

  And not a super high skill bar either for the workforce. Right? So I don't need to have a degree or a special training of like, you know, um, programming or whatever that's harder for me to enter.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. A lot of people can do it. I mean, it, it's surprisingly, uh, challenging in that you need a good ear. You need to be a good typist and good judgment. But you're right. It's a, it's a broad, it's a broad need for businesses. Cause a lot of people have audio and video that matters. And it's a broad skill set that a lot of people know English and can type. And those are some of the things that, that led us to it. Um, as far as the name, uh, you know, a bit, bit tangent there. We started off with a, um, kind of a funky name. We started off with the name foxtranslate.com. And the reason for that was, so our first idea was to translate documents. And

• 41:43Speaker 00

  I thought, well, I wanted a website name that was very clear, not confusing to people. So I wanted the word translate to be in it. I wanted it to stand out versus other sites that were out there. And I don't know where I thought of this. No, I tell you where I thought of this. At the time, SurveyMonkey and MailChimp. Right. Were like. They're like, animal. Doing well. And task. Animals are cute. So I'm like, what animal could I get and stick in the name? And I wanted. Fox is quick. It to be short. And I mean, somehow I came across this idea of, I had a bunch of ideas, but then you look at like, what can you buy at GoDaddy for $10, $12? A great creative constraint, by the way. Totally, totally. And I knew it was temporary, but we did it. And we made a foxtranslate.com.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  I hired a cartoonist in Indonesia to make a cute cartoon fox. It was really, really cute. People would see the website and they would smile because it was a very adorable cartoon fox on our homepage. You can still find it on the web somewhere. And that was a great, perfect name to get going. So I think, I kind of tell people, when I think about naming something, I would spend like no time at the beginning thinking about a name because the odds that your business is going to work are like not super high. And so get the business to work. Once your business works, then you'll know more about what the business really is. And then think about what the name ought to be. And so we got going in 2010. In 2012, I made it my big priority to figure out what a name would be.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  And I got some advice from some investors. I read, I read books on naming companies. I read books on domain names. I looked for inspiration. And the problem is you come up with a great name that you think would be awesome for your business and you find you can't possibly get it. So it's really a two-part problem. One is picking a name you love and then figuring out, can you get the domain name? I'm just giving a bunch of steps here, but I actually hired two different domain brokers to go out and sort of buy names. Because any, people have different views on names. I, from the beginning. I had what I'll call a multi-decade aspiration for the company. I wanted to build a company that creates many millions of work from home jobs over many decades.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  So I didn't want the name to be narrowly tied to our first service. I wanted to be broad enough to give me room to maneuver. And I also thought that a good name that had some meaning to it would create a stronger brand connection to customers. I wanted people to think of us as more than just some commodity service. The first name I fell in love with that I was not able to get was Circle. I wanted to get the name circle.com and I hired a domain broker to find it for me. And she was unable to get it. I learned later that I think it was Jeremy Allaire had the name for his Bitcoin wallet company that launched like a year after I was trying to get it because, because you know, she couldn't find out where it was. And she had this, she kept me roadblocks like nobody will call me back, right? Domain broker is usually going to get a call back.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Ultimately, we couldn't get the name. And frankly, I think it's probably better that we didn't because that led me to spend more time thinking about possible names. And we ended up coming up with the idea for Rev and we paid a bunch of money to get it. I don't know if I've disclosed, but I'll say it now for fun. We spent 400 grand on the name.

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  Nice. How do you know how to, how do you know how to, where to draw the line on that, right?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  I mean, we didn't have much money. Okay. That was a big, the business was doing pretty well. So we, we weren't burning that much money. But that was, that was like a huge portion of our, of our assets at the time. But I kind of felt like, well, look, if the company is successful, it's a drop in the bucket.

• 45:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  And if it fails.

• 45:20Shaan Puri?

  It's still an asset, by the way. You could sell that domain again.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  For sure, for sure. The reason for the name is probably, um, there's, there's sort of two reasons. One is that when people hear the word Rev, they think fast. That's kind of the first thing they think about. They think speed, like rev your engines, accelerate. And the nature of our service is we're really fast because we do something that is usually done by people in a body shop that's slow. Like a typical customer that wants a 30 minute podcast transcribed prior to us, eight, nine years ago, it would take you 40 hours to get something turned around. More than that, several days, three, four days. And we were, at the beginning, we were probably like 20 hours and, you know, for that. And today, we're like a couple of hours.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  We're, we're so much faster of the alternative that customers, it kind of blows their minds. That's one of the most common questions. And because people will submit something Friday night, 11:00 PM. And then at 1:00 AM, they get it back on Saturday, 1:00 AM Saturday night. Or whatever morning, two hours later, and they're shocked. How does this even happen? And if you know how it works, it's kind of easy. Well, people are working.

• 46:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Someone, someone's working.

• 46:28Shaan Puri?

  Someone's gonna be.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Someone's working. And it was obvious that as we, more people working, we just get faster.

• 46:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Right? So I thought Rev was good for that. Um, but also, you know, there's, I thought it had some other kind of hidden meanings. Um, one of my co-founders actually did something sort of clever. This is something that, that, um, if some of your listeners can try, if they're trying to think of a name. Um, he went on Mechanical Turk with, and he filled his account with like a hundred bucks. And I think I had at the time, like 10 domain names I was thinking about. So for each domain name, he would pay people, uh, some small amount, like 15 cents to answer a question. And the question was like, when you see this word, what, what, what are the three words you think of?

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  And when you hear this word, do you think, feel positively or negatively about it? So for like $10 per domain name, we got like this tag cloud.

• 47:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Of like, here's, here's the, here's the words people think about when they hear, when they hear this. And it's, they were sized based upon frequency. So you could clearly see what words people felt positively about and what, what people thought of when they saw a word. And so the primary thing people thought of when they saw Rev was, um, was speed. There was a secondary meaning that wasn't helpful to us, which is like Reverend, like, which was not, not related to what we do. But I think maybe the third reason was, was, was revolution.

• 47:40Shaan Puri?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  And, you know, that's what we've always wanted to do. We've always wanted to, um, help accelerate this kind of new industrial revolution towards letting people be their own boss, work from home and be independent.

• 47:52Shaan Puri?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  And, um, you know, we, we thought we're going to create a new lifestyle for folks. And we wanted that to come through.

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  My mom works for a company that does a very similar thing called user testing.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 48:02Shaan Puri?

  And I remember introducing it to her because she was at home and she's like, kind of like retired now. She didn't really want to go. She worked in the workforce, but she, she didn't want to go back and get a job. She also was bored as hell at home. The kids were gone now. And, um, you know, if I told her, look, here's something you could do at home. Pick your hours as much or as little as you want, whenever you want in the day. You already have the skills to do this because you're just going to browse a website and click around and tell people, you know, it'll tell you, go try to check out and you, you say if it's confusing to you, you don't have to be good at it. You just say what your actual opinions are. And, uh, look, you're going to make, you know, 10, 15 bucks at a time. And that can add up to like, you know, money for your manicure, pedicure and taking us out to dinner or whatever, right? Like this is a little slush fund for you.

• 48:47Shaan Puri?

  Um, and she loved it. She loved it. She did it so much that user testing hired her to review other testers and basically helped, you know, sort of help build their workforce out. And, um, so I've seen this, like, what this means for her to be like, you know, four hours a day. Um, picking her own hours, doing this stuff and having her own income and her own autonomy. And it is a game changer. And so I've had specific brainstorms around, how do we mobilize the stay at home workforce, the stay at home mom workforce that's out there? How do, what are some other things? There's user testing, there's rev. Uh, there's, there's got to be some others because I just think that once you see the lifestyle that that enables, um, it's clear people are going to want that and that that's a game changer for people who are sort of bored and lonely at home

• 49:30Shaan Puri?

  and not feeling productive. Um, and, and it's a, it's a pretty big change.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Uh, that's a, that's a wonderful example, your mom's story. And, I mean, we see so many similar stories in our workforce. Um, one of the things I hear most often when I ask people, hey, you know, what's like working at Rev? They tell me, I love the content because they're watching movies. They're listening. Look, they're listening to podcasts. You're interviewing interesting people. So if somebody, and the way our, our system works is they can favorite a client. So they can put a heart next to your name.

• 50:03Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  So that way, when you have your next podcast, they can check it out. If they think that you do cool podcasts, they're going to think, man, I can't wait to hear his podcasts. The people on, on, you know, the Apple podcast app, listen to your podcast, they don't get paid to it. So, but these people get paid to hear your podcast and type it out. And if you think of, I mean, we do educational content, whether it's stuff from universities or stuff from online classes and how to use Adobe or online classes and how to cook or how to bake or how to how to sew, or we have churches doing sermons, there's content for every possible interest.

• 50:37Shaan Puri?

  And this is kind of a tough question, but we'll wrap up because it's kind of a fun one. So if you couldn't do rev, let's pretend alternate university can't be doing rev right now, but you wanted to to still work on this mission or or sort of push accelerate towards this future where people are working from home with this flexibility and autonomy. What's another what's another idea you've had that you guys, you know, won't pursue because it's too different or it's too out there? What's what's interesting to you that's in this kind of remote world that you're not doing today?

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Online education is big. In fact, I mean, it's a story here, and this is a humbling experience. We spent a couple of years and, you know, millions of dollars trying to build a math tutoring service, and we failed to meet our, you know, metrics, and so we shut it down. You know, I was a math tutor when I was in high school and, you know, I spent a lot of time driving from one person's house to another. I couldn't tutor until I could get a car. And maybe we're early or maybe we picked the wrong market. But education is education is an industry that where the government provides most of it and hasn't seen a ton of innovation.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  And, you know, I think there's there's a, I mean, everybody knows that there's this notion of the flipped classroom, that the whole model of read the textbook and listen to a lecture may not be the best model anymore. And I think it's clear that online education is is a massive opportunity. There's some big companies. There's a company out of China called VIP Kid that that has a lot of

• 52:16Speaker 00

  People in the US often, you know, stay-at-home moms or retired teachers who will work online, on video, teaching English to Chinese children. And that's a pretty big, big market. And I think if you play it out, you know, if I want to get the best education for my kid, well, where's that going to come from? There's a lot of things that you get from a teacher in person, but if you want some specialized knowledge that you can't get, or you don't have the best teacher in your school, I think it makes a lot of sense to look at the whole world. And so I think, I think education is an industry where remote technology is going to be a really big factor.

• 52:56Shaan Puri?

  Love it. Jason, this is awesome. Where can people find you if they want to, you know, learn more, connect more with you, follow you on Twitter? You know, shout it out so people who are listening to this can find you.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm on Twitter, @JasonChicola, so you can connect, DM me, and love to, love to hear from folks.

• 53:11Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Thank you very much.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  The.