Asking The Founder Of Grammarly How He Built A $13 Billion Company

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sits down with Max Lytvyn (@Max_lytvyn), co-founder and head of revenue at Grammarly, to talk about the founding story of the company, how he grew it from 0 to $13B in revenue, why he decided to hire an outside CEO, and much more. ----- Show Notes: (00:00) - Max's background (05:15) - Why people underestimate Grammarly (12:00) - Grammarly's breakthrough moment (24:40) - Business ideas that go with Grammarly ----- Links: * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. * Grammarly.com ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:06Sam Parr?

  So basically, we're Facebook friends now, so we talked a little bit there. But I first met you at HustleCon, I think, this event that I hosted in 2019. And you're one of the best people we've ever had. We've had hundreds of people. And I'll tell you why. Two things. The first, I think you spoke right when... So this is Max. He started Grammarly. We'll do an intro in a second. But I think you spoke when you guys had just raised maybe $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation, or something like that. Is that right?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, uh, yeah, that was 120. And we didn't disclose valuation at the time.

• 0:49Sam Parr?

  But if I had to get... Yeah, you didn't. But I think I'd heard rumors and like, I just am guessing. It was like in that range. And it doesn't matter. But basically, um, I made a comment to you. I'm like, "That's pretty cool, right?" And you, you kind of replied back. You weren't cocky, but you were very confident, and still humble, but you kind of had a grin. And I forget exactly what you said, but it was something like, "Yeah, it's gonna get much bigger, too." And I loved that, like, subtle confidence. And then at the event, what you talked about, I don't even remember the title, but the idea was basically like, you're an engineer, but you've done a really good job of like, evolving past just engineering. And you like, said, "This is how like, I engineer like, good products."

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  And this is like, everything you looked at was from an engineer, like, about reverse engineering, different stuff. And I thought that was incredibly fascinating. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I do. I remember that. I actually use that mantra a lot inside the company as well, when we look at different markets and where to go next. And it's just a universally good framework that works for many things. Yeah, just kind of looking at things narrowly, identifying the sweet spot, and then just going broader from there.

• 2:04Sam Parr?

  So this is Max Lytvyn. He started this company called Grammarly. Before Grammarly, you had another company called Blackboard, I think, right?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  That was not my company. That was a company that bought my company. So my company was my Dropbox. Uh, not to be confused with Dropbox. It was a plagiarism detection company and it was bought by Blackboard in two thousand seven. Um, and then they spent two years with Blackboard, uh, kind of a part earn out, part just being, uh, being there.

• 2:34Sam Parr?

  And that was like a, a, a compared to Grammarly, a mild success, right? Like it was, it was financially good, but it wasn't like this huge, huge multi-billion dollar company.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, that was, uh, that was, uh, just a start. It could have grown big, uh, but education is, was at that point, uh, relatively difficult market to, to be in and wasn't as big of a market. Uh, plus our product was fairly narrow. It was just doing one thing, uh, for one group of people. So we kind of saw that it can grow to this point, but further it's going to be very slow and very difficult. So that's why we decided to sell. Plus we had bigger ideas.

• 3:18Sam Parr?

  And you started Grammarly and at this point, can you reveal, can you reveal how big it is? Because I, I like, it's shockingly large.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, so we raised at thirteen billion valuation and we disclosed that valuation. I still think it's a conservative, it's conservative one. Why? Because Grammarly is a very non-standard company and very non-standard product. Uh, it's easy to see it for less when it is. Um, and, uh, and that, uh, that's kind of reflected, uh, often in, uh, in, in perceptions of, uh, of everyone. If investors of, uh, uh, sometimes even potential team members, we have to explain why it's big and you know. But, uh, that also helps with, uh, less competition.

• 4:05Sam Parr?

  Well, and like, and, and by the way, you guys bootstrapped it for a long time. So like you and your co, co-founder, like, it's not like you own like four percent of this company. You guys probably, you own like a, a very substantial amount. So like, actually, so you're on paper, you're, you're probably a multi-billionaire at this point.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Uh, it depends on whom you believe. Uh, there is some information that's not fully accurate. Uh, but, uh, yeah, we, we, we managed to keep significant portion of the company with the founders and employees. Uh, employees own actually quite a lot.

• 4:38Sam Parr?

  Did, um, When I heard about Grammarly, the reason why I wanted you to come on to the podcast and at HustleCon is because I think my reaction is the same reaction most people in business had, which is like, A, this is just a Chrome plugin, B, this is just spell check, like, there's no way that either of those things are interesting. And then I learned about it and I was like, oh, this is like way bigger than, it just looks like that. It's way more than that. Did most people were like, there's, were most people dismissive of like it just being a Chrome plugin?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Some people are dismissive, quite a lot. And I wouldn't say dismissive, it's not like completely all this nothing, but underestimate the impact and the importance of it. And that's, that's an interesting conversation, always, always very similar because they kind of think, oh, this is a good product, this is a cool product, but not for me because, well, I know what I'm doing. And then they try it and it helps, it helps the material ways and especially when you measure results. Because you know, when you're, don't measure things and I'm

• 5:52Speaker 01

  just, you know, typing away, it saves you from an embarrassment or helps you phrase something more clearly, kind of, yeah, that's cool, but what's the impact of that? Show me the money. But when it's done on the business scale and it's measured and it's kind of assessed, you can see like percentages, improvements in different metrics, productivity, satisfaction, so on. And that adds up, that adds up.

• 6:19Sam Parr?

  We bought it at the Hustle, so I had it for the whole company. I don't remember what it, what it cost, but I remember seeing the bill every month, hundreds of dollars a month and everyone loved it and I loved it. I still use it. So like, I totally, I totally buy, I totally, once I started using it, I was like, oh my God, I get it. But one thing that I've always been fascinated with is, is just plugins as a business, particularly two types of plugins, WordPress plugins. There's a bunch of guys that have like some substantially sized, substantial sized businesses selling WordPress plugins, you know, like 25, 50 million dollars a year. And then Chrome plugins, which do you, I don't know if you like describe yourself as a Chrome plugin as a business. I don't think

• 7:03Sam Parr?

  you are, but like, it's definitely like the, one of the main ways in which most people interact with you, right?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  For now, yes. We just recently switched over to our Flexship product being operating system level integration. So it works similarly to Chrome plugin, except it integrates with all the apps, not just web apps. So that's, that was a big switch over that happened in December. So just about a month ago.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  So that's, that expands the surface area programmally. Now it's in Microsoft PowerPoint and Oracle applications and wherever, wherever you want.

• 7:48Sam Parr?

  Did you, why'd you hire a CEO and when did you do that?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  It's kind of jumping topics, but yeah, we, we brought in a CEO, I think in 2011. And one reason, one big reason for that was that both Alex, my founder and I, we have a philosophy that everybody should be doing, should be in their zone of genius, doing what they like and what they're good at. And nobody, no one of us was really experienced or, or even that passionate about scaling organizations. And that's what we were kind of the biggest thing we were looking for from, from a CEO. Teaching us and, and doing that basically scaling the company.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Cause we realized that to do what we need to do, we need a lot of people. We need a big company. It's a kind of a number of people and size is not a kind of a desired outcome in itself. It is a necessity because the goals are so big that you can't do it with 20 people or 30.

• 8:57Sam Parr?

  How many employees did you have when you hired Brad?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  I think 20 something.

• 9:02Sam Parr?

  Oh, wow. Nothing. I mean, it's small.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Small, yeah. Yeah, we were fairly small. We were, we were making good revenue and being profitable at the time already. But the company was still very small. And that's, that's kind of a, that, that realization, we need to, the opportunity is big and we need to scale. That pushed us to look for kind of external expertise.

• 9:28Sam Parr?

  How did you, because at that point, you, I guess you didn't raise money. So you and your partner were like, oh, it was like your business. It was your company and like your money. How did you, how did you not micromanage Brad? Because I did the same thing and not micromanaging is tough because you're like, oh my God, if you make a mistake, you're going to lose money. And that's like my money. And so it's like really stressful to like let someone fail sometimes and learn. Were you micromanaging or were you pretty emotionally healthy about it?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I'd like to think we were emotionally healthy. Maybe Brad would disagree. I don't know. I wish he, I actually will ask him, but I think part of it was out of necessity. There was just so much to do that if you're micromanage, you get stuck. You don't, you're not make progress. So there was just no time or resources or energy to micromanage anybody. We had to divide and conquer to, to actually keep making progress. Cause it's, it's a lot of work. So just, just from the volume of things to do, everybody had to do their own thing. So that, that happened naturally and part of it is, is a philosophy that again, Alex and I share that basically if you bring in smart people on board, like not listening to them or not letting them think independently is a waste.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Basically, there is no point in bringing smart people on board. So that's, that's, that made it easy to kind of a give freedom and give space to, to Brad and then other leadership team members.

• 10:59Sam Parr?

  What were your goals early on? Like when you started the business, we're like, man, I think this can make $10 million a year and provide a good lifestyle. Or like, I think this could, or was it like, I think this could be like a multi-billion dollar thing. Like what were your goals early on?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I think we decided that it could be a multi-billion dollar business.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  During our conversations with Brad, partially. Uh, so kind of Alex and I, we, we, we hoped that it could be. But then, once we started talking with Brad about valuation, plans and all that. Um, when he was thinking about joining, then it become pretty clear that yes, there is a multi-billion dollar market out there. Uh, are we gonna capture it or not? To be, to be determined, but um, at that point. But uh, there is definitely an opportunity. So the sizable opportunity became clear fairly early. Uh, but uh, past there, that, that took years.

• 12:00Sam Parr?

  What was the vision? That may, or what, what did you see that made you feel? That it could be a multi-billion dollar opportunity? And what was the vision? And were there any? Was there any numbers that you saw? Early on, that would said like, oh my gosh, there's something here.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the breakthrough moment was when we saw that it is possible to help not just professional writers, people who write for a living every day, but also help casual writers or people who write as part of their job or part of their life, but not like a key part. So writing is not their like main product. They're no, no like novelists or, or researchers who are published and so on. So when we saw that it's possible to make a product that's useful for everybody else. Uh, then it clicked. Uh, in the very simple formula, if you look at amount of time we spend communicating, creating knowledge. Uh, as a humanity, as all people in the world.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  It is a huge percentage of our time and it's increasing because we spend less time doing things with our hands. Manufacturing is being automated. It's not like we were doing it manually anymore, uh, as much. So if you take this time that we spend communicating and creating knowledge and make it even 1% more effective, the impact is in trillions, not even billions. So can we do something that makes communication 1% more effective on average for everybody? That doesn't sound impossible. That sounds like something is doable. That's doable. So

• 13:38Sam Parr?

  I had that same insight, except I did it in such a horrible, worse way. So basically, I learned how to be a copywriter. So like I read books on copywriting and like on persuasive writing. And my theory was like, oh my gosh, like with texting or like online dating, I was single at the time and 21. So it was all about like dating. I'm like, oh man, if I weren't learn how to write better in my messages to girls who I match with, like my life is going to be better. And then I was like, wait a minute, if I learn how to write better, I could sell more stuff. If I learn how to write better, I can make people feel emotions about like this cause that I want them. I'm like, just writing better, like it changes, it makes

• 14:19Sam Parr?

  it life more practical, but also it it makes you think better. So like if you can, if you have an idea for something and you're forced to write it out, you'll see all the holes in idea and you'll and you'll force yourself to like lay it out. And so I was like, oh, I'll teach people how to write better. And so I created a course on how to write better. Of course, like, obviously, creating a software product was out of my league, but like that was clearly the better move to do. But the same insight was like, everything that we do is via a text, whether it's a text message or an email or a website. And even if it's via like the spoken word, I have to write that anyway. So like writing is like the

• 15:01Sam Parr?

  most important thing that you can master. I just wish I would have approached it in a software way as opposed to just selling a $300 course.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, software is more scalable, that's true. And actually, what you said about writing, it also applies to speech. When we do user research, we notice that people who use Grammarly repeatedly adopt patterns of communication, more effective patterns of communication, and translate it to non-written communication as well. So for example, if Grammarly keeps suggesting that you don't use kind of a wordy or vague or weak sentence structures, you stop or reduce use of them in speech as well.

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  So I

• 15:43Speaker 01

  So kind of good habits rub off and translate to other modes of communication.

• 15:48Sam Parr?

  So here's my opinion. So have you ever heard of copy work?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:53Sam Parr?

  So in like the 1700s, 1800s, and up until like 1910, one of the ways in America that we would teach children how to write well is the same way that we would teach them how to play an instrument. So if I wanted to teach you how to play the piano, I'm not going to say like, go ahead, like, write, go write a piano song. I would say, well, let's play Jingle Bells. Let's learn how to play Happy Birthday. Then after that, we can move to like some more pop songs that you really like. And then you do that for like two years and you like see patterns and you like understand you just copy other people's music. And in doing that, you see patterns. And then eventually you're like, oh, I know the rules to the game now. Now I can decide to follow them, to break them, but I can make my own. And it's the same thing with writing. But we don't do that.

• 16:38Sam Parr?

  And so what that means is I think one of the easiest ways to learn is you find great writing that you really like and you just literally copy it by hand. And in doing that, you like see the patterns. And that's called copy work. It's not a very popular way to learn how to write now. But in my opinion, it's one of the most powerful. I would say Grammarly, in a sense, is doing that because in real time you're learning. But it's far better than just saying like, go and write, like just like spend a lot of time writing your own stuff. I think copying other people is far better. Anyway, it's something I've been playing with. I'm, I'm, I'm, not a lot of people have heard of copy work. I thought maybe you would have, but it's like not very well known.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  No, I haven't heard about that, but I've seen it done in many, many fields. Like at one point, I was passionate about photography. And same there, you just basically try different, try to basically copy different photographs and recreate them. And then this way you learn the language of that art. So yeah, that applies to many, many areas.

• 17:43Sam Parr?

  Were you, how technical were you and your co-founder? Were you technical enough to build the first handful of iterations?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  So I was very technical. So for example, the previous plagiarism detection company, I wrote the core, the core algorithm and most of the code originally, most of the kind of backend code, not the frontend. But when we were working on Grammarly, I don't think I did any production code. I coded some of the like experiments, landing pages, payment checkout processes, like some stuff.

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  Something that you don't even need to code anymore today if you didn't want to.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I coded some of that, but I didn't code like a real production grade stuff. Mostly because I'm, I'm not formally a software engineer. I'm a kind of a self-trained coder, but kind of building a real complex software is not my thing. Plus I had to, I had to manage the business full-time. So when we started out, I was responsible for finance, marketing, like pretty much like lots, lots of things. Like basically everybody has to wear a lot of hats in a small company. So the running the business occupied pretty much my whole time. So was no time for, for.

• 19:08Sam Parr?

  So you just hired, you, you, did you guys just self-fund it and hire a couple of people to help build the first version?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  We hired quite a significant number of people. We also had a technical co-founder on board,

• 19:24Speaker 01

  a Dima leader, who helped build out the technical team. So he was responsible for the technical side initially. But yeah, because of our previous exit, we had some savings that we could put into Grammarly, some substantial savings we could put into Grammarly. So basically, we were both founders and the first investors.

• 19:46Sam Parr?

  How much did you spend to make it work until it was a sellable product?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I don't remember, but it was quite a long time.

• 19:57Sam Parr?

  Like a million or 10 million, 500,000? Do you remember?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I think it was close to a million.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  But it was a product that worked only for very small audience, very, very small use case. And it was not real time. So basically, what happened was you write a book, a chapter of a book, because it couldn't check the whole book at once. Or you write a research paper. You submit it to the initial, like the old Grammarly. And then you go make a cup of coffee. And then you drink the cup of coffee. And then you wait a little bit more. And then it's spit out the result. And the result was probably half of it was real issues and half of it was false positives. But at the time, the audience, the target market was fine with that

• 20:50Speaker 01

  because if you spent like two months writing a book, like what's extra half an hour to review all the potential issues, right? Even if they're not real. But that wouldn't fly with business writers, for example. If you're writing a business email that you need to send in 20 seconds, you're not going to deal with false positives.

• 21:08Sam Parr?

  And did that version get you to profitability?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:13Sam Parr?

  No shit. What'd you charge for it? A hundred dollars a year?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  We charged, I think, ninety dollars a year, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, or hundreds. Yeah, I think ninety-five dollars a year.

• 21:27Sam Parr?

  How did the people hear about it, the first users?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  So that was interesting because we launched two parallel streams. One to consumers and one to businesses. Educational institutions, publishers, basic companies, consulting companies. And the consumer channel took off. Like it grew exponentially from basically week one. And enterprise or B two B, it took longer to build. So once we kind of pushed both of them in parallel for about half a year. We saw that, well, kind of makes sense to focus on consumer for now because it's just growing like wildfire.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  But B two B requires much more pushing, much more hiring, more people intensive because you need a sales team and all that. So we kind of decided to slow roll it a little bit. And focus on consumer for first few years.

• 22:34Sam Parr?

  And do it through paid marketing or organic?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  We did everything.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  We, we tried all the channels available to us and obviously different channels have different benefits. At the time, social was also easier to, to get free promotion from. Right now, obviously kind of Facebook and others just want to capture all the value they create. But back then it was easy to get, easier to get stuff viral on social and just get free promotion from that. SEO was easier as well. So many things were just, like many channels were quite easier to do. But we relied on paid early on quite a bit because it's, it's a very quick feedback.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You design an ad, you send it or kind of put it in a system and then you get back resolve like within hours. And it tells you if the message resonates, if there is a market for that, if you're finding that market correctly. You know that within like hours. It's in, in more traditional world, it's a weeks of.

• 23:45Sam Parr?

  And hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's uh, that was uh, that was kind of why we were so uh bullish on paid from early on, even though it costs a lot of money.

• 23:57Sam Parr?

  What companies, are you guys trying to buy companies?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Um, not specifically, I mean, we're open to that, uh, but we're not like hunting to buy them.

• 24:08Sam Parr?

  Is there a problem that you need to be solved? And then you saw that this other company was solving that problem that you'd buy it? So like, let me give you an example, the uh, the founder of Jet, you know, jet.com? They sold to Walmart for some billions of dollars and he's like, man, if Walmart, if we could figure out a way how to reduce returns by helping people pick the right sizes, we would buy that company for a lot of money. Is there anything inside of Grammarly where like, man, we haven't figured out blank yet, but if someone did figure out blank, that's a cool company we would buy. That's a cool problem solved that we would buy.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, there are many things, um, like things around um, doing more on device. Uh, like doing more and more processing on device. I think that that that would be very interesting to us because uh, um, it it didn't, it enables uh, better user experience, lower lag, uh, potentially higher performance. Um, it also helps alleviate some potential privacy concerns. So kind of a uh, a no brainer to do more stuff on device and it's cheaper for for for us to.

• 25:22Sam Parr?

  Sorry, what does that mean? You mean uh, like instead of you paying for all this cloud space for everything for the the for?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, calculating the suggestions on device. So basically whenever uh, we say, oh, this needs to be shorter or rephrase it, like that making that determination on your phone or on your laptop rather than sending it to cloud and and having our servers crunch the numbers. So that's uh, that's kind of a, that that that has number of benefits for uh, for both us.

• 25:54Sam Parr?

  Actually, I I don't know what those costs are. So how much does it cost to, like, what percentage of your revenue do you spend on? Or maybe like, how does the payroll compare, the payroll cost compared to like your hosting costs?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I would say it's comparable. Hosting costs are, even though we don't host much of the data, we're not like Dropbox where we store files. But the processing, the processing is quite expensive, especially if you consider that we have tens of millions of free users who are not paying us anything. And we don't monetize them in any way at all. Because we don't, we don't sell user data, we don't show ads, we don't do any of that. So basically, all the free users are not monetized until they subscribe. So that, that makes it, that makes us be conscious of processing costs. Especially for regions where not many people can upgrade to premium, like developing countries.

• 26:51Sam Parr?

  How many employees do you have?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I don't recall exactly, but I would say somewhere around eight hundred.

• 26:58Sam Parr?

  Damn, so then you're paying a shit ton for that hosting.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say it could be less than payroll, I don't remember exactly. But yeah, it is a significant amount, I mean, that many, supporting that many users and providing a reliable service, it does.

• 27:15Sam Parr?

  Who do you pay?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  It's mostly Amazon.

• 27:17Sam Parr?

  Isn't that crazy, man? Like, it just runs the internet, it's crazy.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we evaluate from time to time, bring in some things in-house. And actually, some things we do have in-house, not necessarily like the hosting infrastructure, but like some train model training and all the stuff we do in-house. But, so we look into that. So it's not like we're just Amazon and forget it. But it is an effective way to scale businesses, it is an effective way to run.

• 27:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's just like crazy that, it's crazy, it always freaks me out a little bit that, like, we use Cloudflare, and I remember one time Cloudflare went out, and like, our website was dead, and so was like, a quarter of the internet.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it is, this concentration, it is kind of scary. Yeah.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  It freaks me out a little bit.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has its benefits, but it is, yeah, a lot of places have a single point of failure for significant portions of our infrastructure.

• 28:29Sam Parr?

  Are you, and we'll wrap up here in a second, but I asked you about Hemingway earlier. Do you view them as competitors at all?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Not really, no. They do something that's similar and something that's basically part of what we do and the number of people use both products simultaneously. So we don't view them as competitor because they don't take business from us. So yeah, so it's not like.

• 28:57Sam Parr?

  Who do you view as a competitor?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Who do we use as a competitor? Well, the biggest one is complacency, just people not realizing that they can benefit from this. I think that that's the biggest thing, that's by far bigger than any other competitor.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  But other than that, once you get to a certain size, everybody becomes a potential competitor. Because you know, when you look at big tech companies, they all compete in some ways and all do some things that are similar or the same. So that's kind of the mindset, that basically at any point, anybody can become a competitor.

• 29:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but are there any, I've never seen any like upstarts or any small companies try to compete with you guys. Is there many?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  There are some, but most are focusing on either niche, like a primarily for a specific market.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And I think that's a good way to start. And obviously, we're watching them and seeing what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong and so on.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  There's similar products, Microsoft, I think, has a similar product, but again, it only does part of what we do. So it doesn't take away much business from us, if any. So yeah, I wouldn't say that there are any kind of direct competitors at this point. And I'm not too worried about competition, frankly, because it's just such a new field that most of the market is just untouched by anybody.

• 30:31Sam Parr?

  Cool. Thanks for coming on. We're gonna wrap up now and I'm gonna let you know when this is live. It should be live in like a week, I think. But I appreciate you coming on. It means a lot.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Ah, great, thank you, thank you so much for having me!

• 30:51Speaker 01

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