EP 114: Emery Wells (CEO, Frame.io) on Selling to Adobe for $1.3B, Working with SNL and High Pain Tolerance

Emery Wells https://www.linkedin.com/in/emery-wells-5624161/ is the co-founder and CEO of Frame.io https://www.linkedin.com/company/frame-io/, which he sold to Adobe in 2021 for nearly $1.3 billion. In our conversation, Emery shares his journey from NYC bartender to startup founder, including his agency work with Saturday Night Live that highlighted the pain points that led to Frame.io. We dive deep into his rejection of the lean startup concept, how he gets his team to obsess over design details, and the cultural reset at Frame.io that set the stage for its success. (00:00) Intro (01:34) Emery's Journey to Founding Frame.io (03:23) SNL Digital Shorts and Post-Production Insights (08:30) From Bartender to Entrepreneur (11:45) Building Frame.io: Challenges and Philosophy (23:14) Leadership and Decision-Making in Startups (28:40) Cultural Crisis and Turning Points (30:10) Understanding Company Culture (32:57) The Big Reset: Leadership Changes (34:16) Defining and Implementing Values (38:09) Hiring for Cultural Fit (39:18) The Importance of Design (46:06) Framework for Quality Execution (54:23) Building a B2B Brand (58:17) Effective Launch Strategies (01:05:36) Fundraising Lessons (01:08:30) The Art of Storytelling in Presentations (01:09:19) Meeting Key Industry Figures (01:10:06) The Acquisition Dance with Aaron Levy (01:16:04) Adobe's Acquisition Interest (01:18:12) Navigating the Acquisition Process (01:27:04) Lessons from Adobe's Culture (01:29:59) The Impact of AI on Creativity (01:34:16) Advice on Board Selection and Dynamics (01:41:40) Final Thoughts and Reflections Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with co-founder and CEO of Frame.io, Emery Wells. Now, Emery sold Frame to Adobe at the end of 2021 for nearly $1.3 billion. Emery and I talk about his journey to founding Frame, which included moving to New York without knowing anyone in the technology industry, working as a bartender for a number of years before founding a digital agency that worked alongside SNL to make their digital shorts. This led to Emery's recognition of the pain point that ultimately led to Frame. We talk about a number of different things related to operating a startup, including why Emery categorically rejects the lean startup concept and why he thinks it's done far more harm than good for businesses. We also talk

• 0:50Logan Bartlett?

  about his near-Jobsian obsession with design and getting into the details of almost everything he cared about while operating Frame. We also talk about what culture really is, including a near fatal experience that led to a cultural reset within Frame and ultimately set it on its course to its sale to Adobe. You'll hear that discussion with Emery here now. Emery, thanks for doing this.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:13Logan Bartlett?

  So, maybe for people that don't know, can you describe what Frame does?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Sure. So, Frame.io is a video review and collaboration platform. At least that's where we started. We've expanded a little bit since then, but essentially, you know, if you're a team working on video, like this podcast here, you're recording a video, you go through an editorial and review process after we're done recording, and Frame is the platform that teams use to do that. So, you can upload the work in progress edit, leave comments at different points in the video, you can draw and annotate on the frame. So, really kind of everyone from Hollywood studios down to teams that are doing podcasts like this.

• 1:50Logan Bartlett?

  We use it all the time. We were just talking before, I think Slack maybe is the thing we're in the most, but Rashad on our team, he said this would be the single tool. If it went down, it would ruin us week most. So, I think that's a good place to be.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  A big responsibility.

• 2:04Logan Bartlett?

  Stickiness to it.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's funny, because I remember in the early days of pitching, you know, the common thing that, you know, investors ask or think about or talk about is, you know, are you building, are you building a vitamin or a painkiller?

• 2:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think early days, people were, I think there was a consensus with a lot of the early people I spoke to, that it was, you know, it was a nice to have vitamin.

• 2:23Logan Bartlett?

  And then it gets embedded in the workflow and probably in the early days too. I'd be interested. Who are your initial customers? I assume VCs doing podcasts weren't in the TAM analysis originally. It was probably a lot of media and like agencies.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think our earliest customers were, well, our very earliest customers were a lot of kind of individuals and small teams that were making, that were making video, a lot of, you know, small boutique post-production companies and, um, but, but yeah, I think that media focused companies were our first enterprise customers. And then it's expanded to kind of like all sorts of people that make video.

• 2:58Logan Bartlett?

  You evolved this out of SNL in some ways, uh, like, I mean, I realize the through line is not perfect, but maybe, maybe talk about the, uh, the SNL digital source shorts and how that came to be a part of, uh, Frame's founding journey.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I had a post-production company prior to Frame. So it was a boutique agency that, that did all kinds of post-production, did visual effects and color grading and finishing mostly for broadcast advertising, like commercials. And, uh, one of our clients was SNL. And so I used to do all the, the digital shorts for SNL, did a, you know, for, I don't know, four years or something. Everything that was pre-recorded for SNL is what they called their digital shorts. And that's their movie trailers and, you know, fake commercials and music videos and things like that. So my company did the post-production for those and, um, we were, I, you know, I was working on those while building Frame, incubating Frame in my post-production company amongst other, amongst other things as well, but.

• 3:56Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sure people remember a lot of those, like Andy Samberg and Lonely Island and all that stuff. What was the biggest one that you, it was already kind of going before your production got in, right? So what was the biggest one you guys worked on that was kind of viral on the internet?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Um, so we, I started working with SNL, you know, the tail end, tail end of Andy Samberg's time. So they had already done like, you know, the, the big viral like.

• 4:20Logan Bartlett?

  Lazy Sunday, Dick in a Box.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Lazy Sunday, I'm on a boat. Those were like the, like three early viral hits they did. But, um, but we did start working on them for like, so Dick in a Box wound up being a trilogy. There were three of them. So there was two more after that with.

• 4:34Logan Bartlett?

  Three dicks and boxes.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  It was, uh, I think the names were, um, uh, it was, it was, one was called Mother Lover.

• 4:41Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Another one called Not Gay in a Three Way.

• 4:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And then, uh, yeah, there were some other big ones. There was, uh, um.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, there was a, there was one with Kristen Wade called Red Flag. That was a really, a really big one.

• 4:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I remember all these.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that was like a dating one about like signs of red flags or something in the, in the.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like, if she was like in a beautiful ballroom. It was like a perfume commercial.

• 5:08Logan Bartlett?

  That's right.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Perfume was called Red Flag.

• 5:10Logan Bartlett?

  That's right.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  And they were talking about like, I don't know, you know what?

• 5:14Logan Bartlett?

  Different red flags.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Red flags.

• 5:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, I remember all that.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Like, you know, her pinky fingernail is longer than all the rest. Red flag.

• 5:22Logan Bartlett?

  Did you, uh, did you get in with that group at all? Like, did you get to do after parties or go to any of the shows or anything?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. I mean, there was, uh, yeah, it was, it was like, it was a tight, tight group. And, um, yeah, I was always invited to like the, the, um, I usually, I mean, so, so generally the way that it worked is, I mean, when the show was on airing, we were usually still working. So the whole nature of SNL is like so live. It's so last minute. Um, the digital shorts, you think, well, they're pre-recorded. Like they probably do those well in advance. No, they don't. They're, um, the schedule for those is they, they would, um, they would shoot them on Thursday. So they would have, uh, sorry, they would shoot them on, on Friday. So they would, they would have their, I forget the exact schedule. Like they would have their writer pitch meeting on, I think Wednesdays was the, was the pitch meeting.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Um, they would have one day and that's when they would decide like what they were going to shoot, like of the things that were pitched. And then they would have one day of pre-production on Thursday. They would shoot on Friday. And they would air on Saturday, which means that we were working on them. Usually, uh, usually, you know, we were still, you know, putting the final touches on them when they, when the show had already begun airing. So oftentimes like, you know, you're delivering the final piece, sometimes 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes before.

• 6:43Logan Bartlett?

  So are you on site? Cause I'm just saying file, file transfer times and all that. Like, how are you actually getting them the files?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So no, we were, um, I had my, I had a, I had a, you know, my post-production company office, which was, you know, 15 blocks from. From where they were from, you know, from SNL and no, I would, I would, I would upload stuff. I would like FTP stuff to them. And then sometimes we would have like random slow internet days and I would have an assistant that would like literally just like be running up the street.

• 7:15Logan Bartlett?

  With like a USB.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  With like, with like a hard drive and stuff. So we would ship hard drives. I would Messenger hard drives, but then I would Messenger hard drives and then, you know, for like, for the, the main delivery and then we would upload FTP stuff like last minute for like replacement shots or whatever. And then sometimes somebody would just, you know, have to like sprint up the street. So we were building Frame while we were doing all that work. I mean, that's the thing. I think Frame, you know, was very, very classic founding story of we, we built what we needed and there was no question, there was like zero question in my mind what needed to be built. I knew that, you know, the, how we made video and our experience working with clients and back and forth. I knew that was completely universal, even though we were doing, you know, broadcast advertising. So very much a product that

• 8:00Speaker 01

  was, was built from, you know, a deep insight of doing the work and, and needing the product ourselves.

• 8:06Logan Bartlett?

  So, so normally I don't like to go linear in this, but you have an interesting, I guess, story to New York. So you grew up in Miami, moved to New York, didn't, didn't do college. You were originally going to go to.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Skip college.

• 8:18Logan Bartlett?

  Skip college.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:19Logan Bartlett?

  And did you always have interest in media and entertainment movies?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I moved to New York with the intention of trying to be a filmmaker.

• 8:27Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, got it. So, so that was the intention and you bartended for a while when you were initially here. I guess any interesting things you learned about the service industry or like that made you into Frame from bartending?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Actually, I, I think that, that being in the service industry, I bartended for three years when I first moved here. So from like 20 to 20, I moved here when I was 20. So from like 20 to 23, I was bartending. And yeah, I think you learn a lot in the service industry. I mean, you know, I worked at, I mean, a lot of them, I'm sure you know it. I bartended at, at Bond Street Sushi. So I was, you know, in the lounge bartending. This is over 20 years ago and.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  You know, you in the in the in the service industry, you learn to be of service. Yeah. You know, you say yes a lot and you you have to, you know, kind of get cater to the to the people who you're serving. And that apps that that that absolutely stayed with me for years. I mean, when I started my first post-production company, you know, I went from being a bartender to starting my first company. And I'd never worked in a company. In fact, I've still never basically worked in anyone else's company. Oh, I'm at Adobe now. But I I brought that mentality into, you know, starting my post-production company. And doing doing a post-production company is a service business. And I would, you know, I think the thing that made me successful in the early days

• 9:53Speaker 01

  is I said yes to everything all the time. I just like there was no, I don't, I can't remember the time I'd I'd say no to to a client. You know, whatever they asked me for, I said yes. And I don't, I don't think that's common. I think a lot of people are, you know, they, I don't know, they they are, they bring their ego or their, I don't know, I just, I always said yes. No matter what it was, I said yes. And I did that for years and years and years, which meant, you know, my life was was was pretty tough for those years. I mean, I slept in that office. I don't know, thousands of nights, really thousands of nights. Over the years, I mean, I had that company for almost 10 years, for eight years, I guess.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So post-production, you know, it's a, it's a very 24 hour business. So the big post-production companies, the big post-production companies basically do run 24/7 because people are shooting, they drop stuff off late at night. It's like, I don't know, these things, the post-production companies really literally do run on a 24 hour schedule. There's a, there's a, you know, there's a morning shift, a day shift, a night shift, an overnight shift at all these, at all these companies. And, you know, I was in the beginning, a company of one, trying to compete with that stuff. So, I mean, I lived in that office. I slept because people would call, hey, we we got this shoot. Can we drop off at 10pm? You know, they'd call me at like 5pm and I'm like, Yeah, yeah, sure. No problem. And I'm there till 10:00 PM and they needed something the next morning.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And I would just, you know, I would stay up all night and do it. And I did that hundreds and hundreds of nights.

• 11:21Logan Bartlett?

  Did you have an inkling of being a software entrepreneur while you were doing this? Or like, when did that start entering the considerations?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always did. I, because you know, one of the things, so one of the, the, the areas of post-production that I got really into was visual effects. And the thing that I love about visual effects, which I think is very similar to software, is visual effects is deeply technical and deeply creative. It lives at the intersection, depending on what type of visual effects you can do. Eventually, visual effects, by the way, becomes programming. I mean, you know, if you really get into like complex stuff. And so that was my entry point into, into, into coding. I mean, you know, you start by doing, you know, Python scripting. And then you have to build, you know, kind of more complex workflows. So, so my entry point into software was through visual effects. It is not full scale. I mean, at least what I was doing back then was certainly not full scale software engineering.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  But, but that was my entry point. And I always wanted to do software. I always, always, always wanted to do software.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  I never really, I mean, eventually I think the opportunity arrived when I met my co-founder. And I hired, I hired my co-founder as an employee at my post-production company. And he had, he minored in, in computer science. I hired him right out of, right out of college. It was his first job. So he likes to tell people that his, his first interview ever was with me at my post-production company. And I hired him and he never did another interview and has never worked anywhere else. So he likes telling that story. But, but he had a minor in computer science and together we started tinkering on software, which ultimately led to doing Frame. But we did other stuff before that.

• 13:00Logan Bartlett?

  Was there a unique why now for Frame, like in the moment in time? Or could it have been started a couple of years before? Could it have worked a couple of years later? Was there something special about when you actually got going?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  I don't think, I think a couple of years before would have been tricky. I think even you might argue that maybe. A couple of years later, maybe would have been better for Frame. But I think it was about the right moment in time and it was. I think bandwidth played a role, like you needed, you needed better bandwidth. Like video on the internet's gotten, you know, now it's, it's commonplace. But, but just being able to like upload, move files, watch high resolution video, like all of that stuff. We launched Frame in 2015, so it was about the right time to, you know, to build a product like this. You needed, you know, you also needed.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I mean, you basically needed, you know, video, like high bandwidth video to work on the internet, which it was pretty much working at that time. And you needed cheap storage. And so like for the workflows that we were doing and how much we needed to charge per month to make this a service that people would pay for and offer them enough storage to actually utilize it. That was probably around the right time. But I, I, I think that the first couple of years of Frame. I guess the only reason it would have maybe been better a few years later. And, and this might've only been true of, of some other players that come into the space. But we spent years kind of educating people about the problem. And back to the thing earlier about whether Frame was a painkiller or, or vitamin.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  It absolutely is a painkiller and has proven to be, to, to be a painkiller. But, you know, sometimes people don't realize the pain that they're living in until they take the painkiller. Right? Like if you've just done things a certain way for a certain amount of time.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Because there literally was no other solution. You just sort of don't, don't know that you're living in the pain. And then, you know, when the solution comes along, you realize that. So it took, it took years of kind of educating the market.

• 14:55Logan Bartlett?

  At one point you had tweeted a bunch of different lessons that you had learned or some things that were maybe contrary to popular opinion. And one of the, the ones that stood out to me was. CEO shouldn't get caught up in the details. And you had said this is a myth. And if you consider leaders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky and the Coliseum brothers, all are slash were deeply involved in the intricacies of their businesses. Can you, can you speak to that point and how, how you were able to do that within Frame?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of touched on this, but I think people, people have the idea that a CEO is supposed to do business stuff. And like, I honestly don't even know what that means. It is the most important thing that your company does is, is build a product that your customers buy. And I think that, you know, it is your, it is, it is, it is the leader's job to, you know, to be deeply involved in creating that, that outcome. And I, you know, I think the people who I think do, you know, incredible work and build the best products are the ones who are, who, who know every single detail of what they're building and are deeply involved in it. Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I mean, my experience of scaling frame was that a lot of people around me told me I was doing it wrong. You know, because I was, I would, if I would look at a design, like what, you know, CEOs don't, like CEOs aren't involved in designs and, or they're not involved, whatever it is that I was, that I was looking at. And, um, you know, and I think in those days, I also, I was trying to, because I never, I never built a software company. I never really scaled up like a, a large company. I was trying to listen and be like, maybe I shouldn't be like, am I, like, is it weird? And everyone tells me like, I shouldn't really be so involved. And, um, I would, you know, I would listen to an extent, but then, but instinctively I knew that,

• 16:53Speaker 01

  I just knew there was no other, there was no other job that was more important than, than manifesting the outcome that you give to your customers. And that comes through, that only comes through details. There's not really, it's not really a high level way of, of doing that.

• 17:06Logan Bartlett?

  I've read that you've said something about lean startups doing more harm than, than, like that methodology. Maybe, can you speak to that? And I guess the derivative of how it informed your philosophy around frame?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I read lean startup when everyone else did. And I, you know, this is before I had ever built any software and. I remember leading, reading the book and thinking at the end of the book like, wow, there's a magic formula that you can just like, sort of like mathematically find your way, you know, to success. A B test your way. A B test your way to success. And, um, and, you know, I mean, I subscribe to like, part of it for, for some time, but, but when I really started getting into, um, building the company, you know, I think a lot of the people that we hired early on, where we were all young, I was young, I was inexperienced, we were hiring young inexperienced people. And I think what young inexperienced people do is they sort of like, you know, they like,

• 18:04Speaker 01

  want to read what the internet's saying and sort of follow those, those formulas. We had a lot of people that were, you know, really trying to kind of follow that, that lean startup methodology, which now, you know, sort of 10 years into building software and, and having an exit and everything. I, uh, yeah, I, I fully reject lean startup as a, as a methodology. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't like use data as, you know, one input into, um, the decisions that you're making, but, uh, I think it really has done a lot of harm. I mean, here's, here's my, my realization about lean startup is years later, I went back and I, I looked at, um, and by, by the way, I think Eric Reese is, you know, a really brilliant guy. Um, I don't agree with his, his framework, but I went back years later after reading

• 18:47Speaker 01

  the book and I was like, man, I wonder what, I wonder what product Eric was building. Cause he used his whole experience of, of lean startup was this, this game he was building. And I went back and looked at the product he was building and it was, I'll, it was an abomination. I mean, it was a terror, it was clearly something that was built by people that have absolutely no idea how to build a product. And lean startup was, you know, sort of like their mathematical approach to trying to build a product and that was not their skillset. So, you know, it's equivalent to like teaching an artist how to paint by numbers. Like you can, you can do that, you can try to like, you know, learn how to paint by numbers, or you can learn how to be an artist. And I think that product. I think there, I think product is an art.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  You know, I think that if you're gonna, if you're a founder or a product person and you have this, you know, company that you want to build, I think you have to have really strong internal conviction and you have to be able to see the world more clearly than everyone else. And yeah, like along the way, like you should have data kind of start, you kind of bump you, you know, two degrees this way and bump you two degrees that way. But if you have to use that sort of, um, that sort of approach to, to building software, I don't, I don't think you're going to make it. And I think that I've seen a lot of the industry kind of turn and, and start to kind of evolve their thinking. Um, because what happened was we sort of lean startup just built tons of really bad products. They were too early. That was the other problem, you know, this whole idea of like getting the MVP out.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And we've evolved since, I think the market in general, the industry in general has evolved past like, like what a lot of, I think a lot of people maybe were misinterpreting, you know, the, the MVP approach, the minimum viable product, because people were just putting out products that were just not good. You know, and they're like, well, I guess it doesn't work. And it's like, well, no, it's just the product's not good. It's not fully baked, you know, it needs other things for people to, um, to love it and, and think that it's, it's valuable. So, um, yeah, I mean, internally at Frame, we spent, we did spend a couple of years building it before we released it. But that, I mean, I don't know that that was intention, I wasn't even thinking about it back then. That was just me and my co-founder, because we were the only two people who, who built the first version. And we spent about two and a half years building it before we, we launched it.

• 20:58Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm. Did you pick some point in time in the future of what you needed the product to look like? And just build to that, was that the journey? Or were you getting feedback incrementally from other people from the outside as you were going along?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  We actually got no feedback.

• 21:14Logan Bartlett?

  Really?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:16Logan Bartlett?

  So it was just, it was just, hey, I know this is what the market's going to need based on my experience and let's go from there.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, we, we actually really, I mean, we, you know, a couple of friends here and there. We would show it, but we didn't have any, any formal feedback for the first initial launch. It was like two and a half years of building. And, and I don't think that, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. You, you certainly should. Uh, I think it depends on what kind of. Like who you, you know, what your, what your founder market fit is, you know, I was building a product for myself of a, in a problem space that I deeply understood, um, which I think, by the way, is a very valid way of building. I think that building a product for yourself is, is a great way to build. Like let you, you let, let yourself be customer number one. And I still, I would still do that. Uh, if I were to do another company, maybe in a space I didn't understand as deeply, I probably would incorporate, you know, more, more customer

• 22:02Speaker 01

  feedback along the way. But no matter what product I build, I would try to make sure that I was customer number one, even if I wasn't the real customer. I think that you can try to like psychologically shift your mind and say, I'm going to be the customer now. And there's a real, there's a real mind shift. And I even did this with frame, even building frame. There's a difference between a builder mindset and a user mindset. And even as the designer and the builder and the, the product thinker of frame, I would have to very intentionally shift my mind and say, now I'm going to use it. Now I'm going to experience it. And I want to, and I want to, you know, experience it from the mindset of a, of a user. Um, so no matter what I did, I would always put myself as customer number one, and I would have to be personally satisfied and sort of, you

• 22:44Speaker 01

  know, do I like using this product? Does it solve, you know, my problem when I'm in that, in that user mindset?

• 22:49Logan Bartlett?

  I, I heard you say, uh, something to the effect of, um, as a company scales, it's inevitable that founders spend less time focusing on what really matters, which is the product and get more involved in process and all that.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:05Logan Bartlett?

  Um, was that something that you made the mistake of getting more bogged down? Or were you able to, to focus on product as number one throughout the journey?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Oh, I definitely got bogged down. And I think that, you know, one of the things that also I was, I would hear a lot from kind of my own internal echo chamber. And I think that a lot of founders experience this is that, you know, my own, I think that, that- A lot of the company, and again, I think we're all pretty young and inexperienced, but everyone thinks the founder should be this like business guy or girl, right? Like as the founder, you have all these executive things that you have to, that you should be doing. I don't even know what those things are. The only reason that a company exists is to build the product that it sells to its customers. And so I think that that should be the time that a founder spends, you know, the most amount of time on.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And I would, I definitely always stayed close, but you know, it got, it got harder and harder to.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I stayed close, but I think what got harder to do is, is

• 24:12Speaker 01

  maybe be a, be a driver of, of the vision as you know, the company scales, there's more people involved. And this gets to, you know, like, how do you, how do you set up like a culture around decision making? And what's the founder's role in decision making? Cause you know, people think that distributed decision making is another thing that should happen as you scale. I, I don't believe that. I think that as you scale, distributed decision making is really just going to make everything substantially slower and worse. It doesn't mean that people don't have lots of responsibility, but you know, you, you need clarity of decision making and clarity of vision. If you think about all the best products out there, the ones that people universally love, the ones that's like, no question. Everybody loves these products, whether it's software or hardware or whatever the case may be.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  There's probably a very good chance that those are the companies that are led by founders who really drive like that singular vision. And the companies that do distributed decision making, probably less so. And I, and I think this is, you know, I'll just say one other, one other thing about this is like, I'm not saying that there's one right way to, to run a company or build a company or whatever. And this was a key insight for me. I think that, you know, to build like a really world-class product, it requires, you know, A founder or a small group of people to be directly driving and making decisions. But there's obviously lots of companies that are not run that way that are incredibly successful.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  And there's just not one right way to do anything. You know, there's just like lots of paths up the mountain. The most important thing is that you build a company where everyone knows and understands what your path up the mountain is. Because if you have a group of people that think, no, we should do it this way, no, we should do it that way. And there's disagreement. That's when, that definitely doesn't work.

• 26:02Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think that the point about having more centralized decisioning leading to better products, is it, what do you think that is? Is it the consistency of the design and the experience? Is it just the more opinionated nature that you get from having a more narrow subset driving the vision?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. One, I think that, you know, I mean, first of all, some people are better at making decisions than others, right? I mean, there's people that have, like, you need to find, rather than distributing decision making, you need to find the people who are, who have proven over time that they are best equipped to make a lot, you know, that they're best equipped to make decisions and be right a lot. And I think it's one of Jeff Bezos's like leadership principles is that executives are right a lot. And the idea that everyone does that is just not, is just not true, right? We'd all have, if people were like, oh, you just distribute decision making and you'll have a lot of great outcomes, I think some people are better. So you've got to find those people.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  It doesn't necessarily mean that that's always the founder, certainly not. But you've got to find the people who are best equipped to make decisions. And then, yeah, I mean, when you have one person who's really thinking holistically, and again, this doesn't always have to be the founder, but somebody has to be thinking holistically with deep ownership about what every part of the product is going to do and how it works together. And inevitably, you know, when you distribute decision making, everyone has squads and they'll have their areas of responsibility and they, you know, they're trying to, you know, Make great decisions for their areas, but they absolutely have a gazillion blind spots of, you know, every other product's responsible, every other team's responsibilities and then

• 27:52Speaker 01

  how it all fits together as a whole. So, yeah. And then just generally somebody that has a really clear vision of what the future is supposed to be and someone that can be thinking about the micro decision that you're making today on one small team and how that's going to evolve three years from that decision into, you know, wherever you're trying to get to.

• 28:16Logan Bartlett?

  Implicit to all this is an element of culture and how you define, you know, what it is that your business stands for. You guys went through a period of time where there was a little bit of a, I don't know if cultural crisis is the right way of articulating it, but if, if, if my research was correct, you had to fire your VP of engineering and then three directors of engineering, like all resigned in the same day?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  We had, yeah, we had, um, we did, we did have some cultural crisis and it was, it was over a short period of time, but I mean, basically, um, yeah, we had, we had three directors of Eng, which by the way, you shouldn't have three.

• 28:49Logan Bartlett?

  I was about to say, I'm not exactly sure how that happened.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  No, no, we had three directors of Eng that, that all left within a couple of days of each other. Um, you know, partially because we had some cultural crisis, partially because I had already hired a VP of Eng and, and that person didn't work out. And so, you know, there's, there, that is a risk often as you hire, and when you bring in an outside leader, sometimes the people who are doing the job don't like that new leader and that can drive them out. Um, I think there was, there was, there was definitely an element there, but, but overall, yeah, we, we were, we did have, um, some, some cultural crisis and, um, and really was, you know, kind of a reset moment where, um, that was a big turning point in, in the company's.

• 29:29Logan Bartlett?

  How far into the business or how many people were you around then?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  We were probably 60 ish people.

• 29:37Logan Bartlett?

  And so a couple of years in.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple, a couple of years in.

• 29:40Logan Bartlett?

  And had you, had you not been explicit about values and?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Definitely had not been explicit about values, but here's the thing is that, you know, um, the, the.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  To me now, what like what culture is, is very, very, very clear. And I, it was very, it was something that I didn't understand for a long time.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And I would always listen to people talk about it. And even still, I hear people talk about culture and I don't think they describe culture in the right way. Culture is the, is the political affiliation of your company or the religion of your company. You know, when you think about, I like to think about it that way because it's, it's much clearer. Right? It's like, you think about a political affiliation, you're like, oh, it's a group of people that all have these like strong convictions and values about, you know, a certain way of thinking. And, and what we know is that, you know, two different political affiliations, like they cannot work together. And I don't know, I'm not, I'm not saying one is right or wrong, but like you, you have to get a group of people that share the same, you know, political affiliation or religion, the same thing with religions.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  I mean, there's some very, you know, uh, strong shared ideas in one religion, which would be not okay in another religion. So it has nothing to do with like, you know, what do you guys do for fun? And do you hang out after bubble? Like that, that's not culture. Culture is, you know, what are the, what is the shared belief system about how you build? How you make decisions, et cetera, et cetera. And I, you know, I just, in the first couple of years of building frame, um, well, in the very, in the very beginning, I had never even thought about this, never, never even crossed my mind that, you know, like this was something I had to care about. And I thought, well, you know, you hire people and you're the boss and they'll sort of like follow your lead.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And, um, I didn't even understand that there was such a wide range of, of ways to like, I don't know, make this, it sounds silly thinking back on it. I didn't even understand there was such a wide range of ways to, to make decisions that could, you know, lead to, that could lead to so many disagreements. And so I wound up just, you know, hiring. Also, I was, you know, I was hiring kind of whoever I could get. This was, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017. I'd say kind of early in the, you know, sort of Zerp cycle. But, but, you know, very hard to hire. I didn't have a network. I was, you know, you're hiring who you can get. And, but anyway, yeah, we wound up hiring people that just a

• 32:06Speaker 01

  large group. And it wasn't like there was just one sort of cultural ideology that existed at the company at that time. There was just a lot of different ideas. And it just led to a lot of internal debate, you know, in an unhealthy way. And, and so we, yeah, we did wind up having three directors that left in the course of a couple of days. And then, you know, maybe like a month or two later, I let go of, of the VP of Eng. And so at that point, it was kind of like a big, a big reset moment where I had to take in everything that I had learned and say, okay, well, how do we want to move forward? And, and there was three people I brought in at that time. I brought in a new head of Eng, a new head of product, and I brought in a chief of staff. And, and,

• 32:51Speaker 01

  and then, well, later, a new head of design. But really, those three people at that time came in and, and, you know, we really sat down and intentionally started kind of working on, kind of repairing, you know, the, the culture and the team that was still there. The most, we didn't, we didn't really have that many people leave. It was actually, you know, those three directors left and most, most everyone stayed. It wasn't really like a big exodus. And that, and that was the beginning of a, of a new chapter.

• 33:18Logan Bartlett?

  Did you all, was that the group that ended up defining what the cultural values were?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:23Logan Bartlett?

  And what?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And that was essentially my leadership group through acquisition.

• 33:27Logan Bartlett?

  And so what, what did you find, I guess, in, in going through that process and coming up with the values? Was it, was it things that you think everyone mostly agreed with within the company and you just needed to codify it and make it more explicit? Or were these more aspirational traits? Like, how did you kind of go about actually assessing what the culture was?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that culture, I think similar to, I think that, I think that, I think values need to be potent and come from, you know, one or a small group of people. I think with any type of, you know, decisions that you sort of like lay on people, you want to make people feel like they were part of the process. I think that's one of the, you know, that's like the magic is if you're going to set values, you want to set them yourself, but somehow make people feel like they set them or they were part of it. And so the way that we went about it is, and I had gone through, actually this is, we had gone through a few, yes, we did sort of officially set values as part of this exercise. And I had

• 34:35Speaker 01

  previously tried to do like a value setting exercise where, you know, like we had, you know, we had polled, like that we'd sent out surveys and asked people like what they thought the values were and blah, blah, blah. I'd done it a couple of different times. We never, we never had rolled, we never finished it because it was such a like, I don't know, it seemed, one, it seemed unimportant and two, the process that we were running to try to like set the values, we were just getting such watered down stuff. If you do, if you've sent out a survey to your company and you ask them for values, I promise you, you're not going to get anything. You get like platitudes. You get platitudes, you get platitudes back. So the process that I wound up going through was, we didn't have any, there's no values committee. There's certainly no committee. First of all, if there's ever a committee for almost anything is probably a bad idea,

• 35:20Speaker 01

  but there was no values committee. But what I did do is I reached out to like 15 or so people that were, you know, who had been at the company for a while and, and I thought were kind of, you know, important figures in the company. And I asked them to, it's just over Slack. I just said, hey, like I'm, we're working on values again. Can you please tell me like the one, only one, the one most important value to you personally, or like, you know, an idea or a principle or whatever that's most important to you?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And when you ask one-on-one, there was no, nobody could see what these, you know, what someone else was thinking. And you said, just for the one most kind of potent idea, I actually started getting some, some, some better stuff. So I, I think I wound up asking even more people, maybe asked like 25 people. And then, um, and I, I took all that and I, I sort of wordsmithed it and distilled it. And I actually had a lot of good ideas in that, um, but I could shape it into kind of, you know, what I wanted the values to be. And then I would go back to that person and say, hey, I interpreted it this way, or I shifted it this way. Does this still kind of align with, you know, the, the core idea of what, of what you were thinking? And they'd say, yeah, yeah. And say, okay, well, I want, will

• 36:35Speaker 01

  you be, you know, the, the kind of the spokesperson of this value? And so when we rolled it out, um, I didn't roll out the values. I had, I had a group, I'd have like three people that would speak to each value that they, that they had selected it. This was the most, this was the most important idea to them. And so they got up in front of the company and said, you know, this is the value. This is an example. This is what it means. So really it was delivered, you know, uh, as if it was all from the company. Um, and if I'm being honest, it really was all from me. But, but, you know, I think that's like a really important part of leadership is you have to make, you know, you, you have to have like clear potent ideas. And it doesn't mean that people, they, they legitimately did

• 37:19Logan Bartlett?

  Inform.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Inform, you know, those ideas. But I ultimately got to like, shape that and, and have it be what I wanted the identity of, of our culture and values to be. Um, and it was, it was really, I mean, it was a really successful rollout. It took time, you know, like it took time to, you know, kind of work those into the fabric of, of the company. Uh, but, um, but, but we got there.

• 37:44Logan Bartlett?

  How many, uh, how many values did you end up landing with?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Nine.

• 37:48Logan Bartlett?

  Was there anything you did in the hiring process then subsequent to that to make sure you were, like, did you have someone that was responsible for assessing singularly in an interview? Did this person map to those, uh, those values?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Kind of. I don't think I ever perfected that, to be honest. You know, we, we tried. I would, um,

• 38:09Speaker 01

  I think I would, I would continue experimenting with, with better ways of, of sussing that stuff out, but we did, you know, we did, we did culture, you know, we certainly did like cultural value interviews. The, the number one thing that I would do personally is, you know, over time, you learn like what your more controversial ideas are, you know, the things that you get more pushed back on and whatever. And I certainly had learned them in a couple of years in. And I, when I would interview people, I would just unsell them. I would just say like, these are, I would just, I would unsell them based on all the most controversial idea, you know, controversial things I'd learned about the way we operate, myself, and, and, and I would just unsell them on it and, and make sure that they're signing. Throw it all on the table and say, hey,

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Throw it all on the table. Yeah. Like one of the things that was just, you know, I'd say that I probably had a, I'm not comparing myself, but I had a Jobsian obsession with design. I am insane about design. I'm a maniac. I didn't know that about myself until I really got into it. And I have that maniacal, you know, obsession with wanting to have great design. I'm not, I don't even know, I'm not saying I get there, but I certainly have the, the pursuit, right? I have the, the goal and the desire of getting there. And how does that manifest itself for an individual employee in this case? Is it just constant? Well, I think the difference, yeah, it's just, I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it's

• 39:34Speaker 01

  a lot of iteration. I mean, I think the difference between, um, look, let's, let's, let's start with like, there's, if you want to have the world's best design, it starts with, you need some people that are at least capable of reaching there from like a hard skills, you know, perspective. But let's just say that you have those people. Still getting to that, you know, kind of apple level of execution creates, you know, requires a, a culture of, of, of deeply caring. And what deeply caring means is really, it's probably just iterating more than other people and, and not stopping when, this is actually the key difference. It's the hardest thing about getting to like 11 out of 10.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  It's not even the work. It's pushing through the emotional boundaries of people thinking they've put in the work and we've hit the, we've, we've reached the point where we're done. And it's, it's pushing, it's pushing past those uncomfortable moments and, and doing it again. And then it's doing that five to 10 to 15 to 20 more times where people, they're like, you're, you, you push people to their limits, right? And there's an art to that as well. Cause there's a way of doing that where people just burn out and, and, you know, don't like you at the end of the day. And there's a way of doing that where people get to the other side and say, wow, I didn't know I, I, we, we were going to get there.

• 40:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Because you can get, you can do half the effort and get to some, to get to 95% of the outcome or something. But then you need that other half to get to the last 5% or whatever, which is unnatural. Most people say this is, will this actually, will the customer actually ever notice this? Or will they ever care on it? So in an interview process, did you, was there any way of teasing that out?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would tell people, I would tell people, especially with leaders, cause I think I could be a little bit more open and direct with leaders. But I told people, one of the things that I would, that I would, that I would battle with is that, you know, I would hire people who would be really interested in frame and think it was like a cool, exciting company to work at. And they would, one of the things you'd always say, oh, we love the brand and the attention to detail and the design and everything. And then they would come in and be at, be in opposition to the very things that, that created those, those outcomes. And often had the experience of like, why would somebody come in and say, we want to make the company worse? We want to pull it down, you know?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And so I, I would tell leaders, and this is something I would, I did, you know, only kind of a few years in. But I'd say the one thing that you can never, ever do, and I just want to be really clear is that if you ever lower my standards, we're not working together. Your job is to come in and raise my standards. I want you to pull me up. Like you, you should be pulling us, you know, getting, getting us, getting us higher. And my, you know, my, it was hard because my standards are really high, but that was one of the things that I would, that I would tell leaders. And it is probably one of the things that is like,

• 42:35Speaker 01

  You know, where I get probably would make you would make someone incompatible to work with me if they try to lower the standards.

• 42:44Logan Bartlett?

  The the best employees at frame, if you were to go run it back and start another company, was there a shared characteristic that stood out for the people that you had the most success with?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like working with people that have high pain tolerance. And, you know, I think that's, I think that like on the journey to great, you know, and doing like, doing great things. I think, I think you need, I think you need really high pain tolerance.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that tweet I shared about pain tolerance. I deeply believe that. I mean, I want to work with people that have a high tolerance for pain. And I remember when I tweeted that I people said, yeah, well, like pain tolerance sounds painful. You could, you could say like, you know, why don't you say, uh,

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, what were people trying to rephrase it as? Because it sounds like you're just like rephrasing it in a nicer way.

• 43:33Logan Bartlett?

  A willingness to do their best or something.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, if it's uncomfortable to you to hear pain tolerance, that this did that, you know, that that's one of the things we look for. That means you don't have a high pain tolerance. Like if you have to like soften it to, to, to make it okay, then I'm sorry to say you don't have a high pain tolerance.

• 43:51Logan Bartlett?

  Some of the most important things about values that I found is the opposite also. If the opposite also isn't true, it's a platitude. It's everyone will agree for it. If you can't frame the, the, the counterbalancing thing in a positive way, then what you're saying is probably hollow in some way. And so having high pain tolerance, there's probably, there's an opposite version of that of, you know, being inclusive or empathetic to other people's feel. There's some version of that that's probably also true. And you want people to opt into your way of doing things. If it's true for every person or the majority of people in the population, then you're not discerning or you're not getting people to opt in in some specific way.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36Logan Bartlett?

  Is the design side of doing, building product, was that, when you think about what motivates you and what drives, drove you through the ups and downs of, it was a, how long was the journey? Seven years before selling to Adobe and now you're nine-ish?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:52Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:53Logan Bartlett?

  Was design what you came back to as the thing that most motivated you and most drove you through it? Or was there some other element of building a company?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Uh, it was probably definitely design.

• 45:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:04Logan Bartlett?

  As you got more and more senior within the organization, or as the company got bigger, you stayed the same, but your responsibilities started to become more dispersed. Was there a structural way that you maintained responsibility for design so that didn't like start to be decentralized?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  No, I think it was something I struggled with. I mean, I did wind up, you know, hiring some really good people in the design organization, which, you know, which they brought a lot of intensity to, to design. And so, yeah, I mean, naturally, like naturally when you scale, I mean, you, you just, it's, it's impossible to be like involved in, you know, every minute little detail. But the thing that, um, so, so this was the big, so, so one of the big turning points that we did and something that was really critical for my continued involvement in, in not just design, but product and just kind of overall high-quality execution. Um, so like after we had the big reset moment and we brought in these new leaders and then shortly after that, we brought in a head of design. So

• 46:09Speaker 01

  we had this new leadership team and, you know, my, you know, my objective with them was like, we want to really elevate the, the, the quality of, of our execution. And so we set up, um, we set up a, a pretty simple, a pretty simple framework, um, where we would have on, on Fridays, we would have what we called, uh, stakeholder reviews, which were, you know, sessions to kind of review the work. But, um, let me, if I back up, like, when, if there's, if there's ever a problem within a company, um, you know, and this is super common, right? You're like, you know, you, you sort of expect something of the team and they deliver something else, right? That's just like one of the most- Common things you can experience as a leader.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I have developed what I think is a pretty straightforward, simple framework. And these are ideas that are not new. They probably exist in every management framework. It's just that management frameworks have a lot more steps that I don't think about. So I just use three things, which is the key to changing anything is, is first you just have to sort of align on expectations. Like what does success mean? What are, what if we were all say, yeah, we knocked it out of the park? What does that look like? And the more detailed you can be, the better, right? Like write it down in excruciating detail and then get everyone to sign up, you know, sign up for it and say, yep, we all understand that this is what success looks like. Because now you have this thing you can all point to. If you ever stray from it, you have this shared understanding of expectations.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  So, so expectations is one. The second is accountability. Like, how do you hold people accountable? Or how do you, how do you ensure that, that people are aligning to those expectations? You have to do check-ins. You have to do inspections. A favorite quote of mine that I did not come up with is that people do what you inspect, not what you expect. And so if you're not inspecting the expectations, I don't think you're, I mean, through some process in the organization, I don't, I don't think you're ever going to get there. And then the third thing is, is actually the accountability or the action. Like what happens if somebody is not meeting those expectations, right? You've aligned on them. You said it, you, you check in to, to make sure that they're happening.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Now what happens when they're not happening? And obviously like, you know, firing somebody is the most extreme thing you can do, but usually that's not the right tool. And, you know, that's a last resort tool. And so for us, what we did is we set up these stakeholder reviews. They were held every Friday. We, every, we basically took all of Friday and it was, we had every single team had a slot on Friday they could use to present work. But, you know, sometimes they weren't ready to present and so they didn't have to use the slot. But when they did have a piece of work that was ready to present, they would use these slots. And, and so as we were trying to change the kind of internal expectation of what we were delivering.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  One of the things I did is, is when we rolled out this program, is that prior to the Friday presentations, the teams would come in and they would present their work. I would have my leadership team do like a pre-inspection of the presentation. And in this case, let me just clarify, we had, we had two types of meetings. We had what we called a stakeholder review, and that was they could present, you know, a work in progress design, or kind of anything to get feedback. And then we had something called the build review, which was like, this was a finished unit of work, and it had to meet every expectation that are, you know, that meets kind of our shipping criteria and what customers would experience. And so importantly, for this builder view, you know, I don't know how many times you've

• 49:47Speaker 01

  been in a meeting, and I'm sure founders can relate to this, you're, you're sort of, the team is doing the demo of the thing they're going to ship, but there's like always a caveat. There's like 10 caveats. It's like, okay, well, yeah, so there's this, we're still working on this one thing. And it's like, this meeting was to say, no caveats. At what point do we have the thing that's going to be the thing that our customers use? And that's what this meeting was for. And so our, my, my leadership team would do a pre-inspection of the work to make sure that it met the criteria. And one of those criteria, among many, was that, you know, we, that the, that the execute, the build, the execution of the build had to be pixel perfect. And so that what pixel perfect meant was, you know,

• 50:27Speaker 01

  not 99.9% accurate, but 100% accurate. So that meant if one pixel was misaligned, or not centered, or whatever the case may be, we actually would cancel the meeting. And that seems like, kind of like, not a big deal, right? Like, it's not like, certainly not the same as firing somebody, but it actually was a really big deal. And because what it meant is, when we, when we rolled out these, you know, kind of the expectations in this new program, the builder views, we canceled these meetings for months. I wouldn't look at the work. For months and months and months, the meetings were canceled. And it created a lot of tension on the teams, a lot of tension internally.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  But eventually, you know, we, we, uh, the team had to build the muscle and all collectively, we had to build the muscle and ultimately kind of became part of our, our, you know, culture, I'd say, um, that this is what it meant to ship product at, at frame. And, uh, and after those, you know, sort of three, four months of, of pain, I mean, I'd say that we, one, just like across the board radically shifted our quality of execution up. And I think after those three, four months, I don't think I've ever seen a pixel off. I don't like in like years. I don't think you just, you know, and it's one of those things like you experience with, with Apple and it's not to say that Apple's perfect, but one thing that you know you'll get with Apple is like shit's gonna be like a hundred percent. Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  It's gonna be polished, right? And now maybe there's other things they didn't get right or idea, but like there is a quality of execution that is just fundamental. Like they can't, they, there, nothing will ever come out of that company that doesn't have that veneer of polish. And that's even just that. Forget about like all the foundational decisions underneath that. That's really, really, really hard to do culturally and at scale. Um, and so we, you know, we, we got there and, um, and that, and that whole kind of builder view, I, I think, um, it was cumbersome on the teams. I don't think the teams always loved it. I would imagine getting their meeting canceled was the. Yeah, but just overall, the, the, like, I think, you know, it was cumbersome on the teams. There was, we, we actually wound up getting rid of them as we were trying to

• 52:37Speaker 01

  accelerate our speed of execution after, after working on quality of execution. Then we worked on speed of execution and, and one of the things we tried, um, when we were trying to accelerate our speed of execution was to get rid of those meetings because teams wound up putting a lot of prep time. You know, it's one of those things like when you're, when, when a team is presenting to a leader, an executive or the CEO, you know, even if you don't want them to put a lot of prep time, you're like, hey, just show me what you're doing. It's impossible.

• 53:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  They will spend days and days. They spend so much time and I've experienced this like now being at Adobe and I'm not the CEO and I'm not the boss and you know, I and I and I and I have to go and present, you know, to senior leadership or to Chantinou, the CEO and you're just like, gosh, I can't just roll in, even if their expectations are different. You feel like you're not doing your job. If you you don't show up like buttoned up professional presentation, it's designed well, the whole thing. And like, you know, sometimes that's necessary, but a lot of times it's not. And anyway, we tried, we tried, we tried getting rid of our, our kind of review process and I don't think it really accelerated us.

• 53:49Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it accelerated us. And I think that there was a hit in like that. That was like, that was like these gates that ensured we were always shipping.

• 53:57Logan Bartlett?

  The quality.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  The quality. Yeah.

• 53:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Brand is an interesting thing for B two B companies. I think you guys were pretty purposeful about the brand of frame. How did you think about going about building a, a brand in the B two B world?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't think about it a lot, other than the fact that I, you know, I think I probably just instinctually built frame. I wanted to make it cool. Number one, like I just want, I wanted to make it cool. I wanted to make it a desirable brand. I had never worked in enterprise software prior, prior to, prior to launching frame, I had really never bought enterprise software because I had a small boutique agency. Any software I ever bought was just, you know, something I could sign up with a credit card myself. And I think I built overall from the, from the brand to the product and everything. I, we started by building frame in the way that like, I don't know, I would use

• 54:56Speaker 01

  it, buy it, et cetera. And so we had this kind of very kind of more consumer looking motion, you know, from sign up with a credit card, self-serve, focused on brand. But I've come to, you know, I've come to evolve my thinking. And I think there's people who think, you know, maybe brand is not a worthwhile effort in enterprise software, design is not a worthwhile effort in enterprise software. I mean, I've, I've, I've shared tweets around, you know, how

• 55:23Speaker 01

  There's such an opportunity in enterprise software. If you just come in like, just like, do like, high-quality execution, you can basically just win in any vertical. And there's people that are just like, hundreds of comments of people saying, "Nobody cares about the product. Nobody cares about quality. Nobody cares about design. Like, that's not going to matter to the buyer." And I'm like, "Guys, this is why enterprise software sucks." You know, because this is, there's a belief system that whether, you know, a brand doesn't matter, design doesn't matter, you know, quality of execution doesn't matter in enterprise software. And I, and I think that that might have been true, truer, you know, earlier, but I think today where, um, one, we've seen this, this big shift in the consumerization of enterprise

• 56:04Speaker 01

  software. And what does that mean? It means that like, I think people's expectations of what software is, is just different, right? Like, we all use much more high-quality software. And whether you're using software at work or using, you know, Instagram on your phone, you just have like, an expectation of what good software is. And I think the end-user within organizations has a bigger voice than they've had, you know, than they've had before. Like, whether it's IT or, you know, whoever's making the buying decision, they're much more careful about buying something that their users are going to hate or not use. And, uh, and so I think there's just been this big kind of consumerization of enterprise software.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Anyway, you originally asked me about brand. We built a brand because I love, I mean, this is fun for me, really. And I, I don't know if it's like, this is what I'd say. I think that anecdotally, I think that our brand, both our go-to-market motion and our, our brand, probably made it a lot easier to start enterprise conversations.

• 57:09Logan Bartlett?

  Was it just an outgrowth of your own style and personality? Or were there frameworks or methodologies that you used of how to actually actionabilize what the brand was and what you wanted people to, to feel? Or was that just more innate to you?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  I think it was probably more innate. And, um, you know, my background was in post-production and, and, uh, production and post-production and filmmaking. And so I just, you know, I'd want to use that toolset as well. Like, we, we were able to do stuff that, you know, maybe less expensively than it would. You know, then someone else could do it because we, you know, I just literally had done that work for years and knew the freelancers and the people to hire and things like that. So, um, yeah, I think it was more innate.

• 57:53Logan Bartlett?

  You have a methodology or a style of launching twice, doing a pre-announcement and then an announcement. Can you talk about that and what the benefits of it are?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that you just basically want to milk a launch for everything that, you know, for as much as you can. And for most of our launches, we would always do, we would do a, you know, like a teaser. So you want to let people know that it's coming. And a lot of people do this, but I think, I think we would, you know, maybe milk it a little bit more. So you do, you know, you do some kind of teaser where you get people excited and let them know that it's coming. And there's lots of ways to sort of maximize, you know, that experience. I'd say like, if I go all the way back to our, like, actually launching Frame for the first time, and we use the same framework for subsequent launches,

• 58:42Speaker 01

  but we would do a, we, you know, we do this sort of like an announcement launch and, um, and, you know, build a landing page and experience and a teaser video. And then, you know, we would build, you know, lots of kind of gamification around, um, you know, like, if I go all the way back to the, to the original launches, this is before anybody had access to Frame. And I'm sure we've all seen like these gamified launches. I guess you see less of them now, to be honest, but, you know, back in 2015 was like the era of gamified launches. And so what we did is we, you know, we had a, we had a landing page that wasn't just any landing page. Like, we put a lot of effort into creating like an experience of a landing

• 59:27Speaker 01

  page. And most people, you know, when they're launching something, it's like, hey, drop your email in, right? And then to get notified when it's going to be ready. And that's sort of the end of the journey. But I think that's a missed opportunity because when people are interested and engaged and excited and wanting access to something, you can usually get them sort of do more things on your behalf. So in the, in the earliest launch, We had this landing page where you could drop your email, get notified when it's ready. But then as soon as you put your email in, we kind of took you through this whole gamify journey where we had like a point system and we said, you can do this for five points and this for five points and this for five points. And the more points you gain earlier, you know, like kind of you raise your ranks in terms of

• 1:00:07Logan Bartlett?

  What, some of them were like, if you send this email and share with five other people that

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was shared on social. I think we had, I think we had back then Twitter and Facebook. So we got, you got points for sharing it on social. You got points for, I think you could add friends email addresses in. You got bonus points for, oh, you had to answer a survey. It was like five questions. And then you got bonus points for following us on social. And we had like 15,000 people go through that, go through that flow. This was when we were literally zero, no one. I mean, you know, it was just me and my, this was our earliest launches, me and my co-founder. I had no one else that were helping us. And, and that early launch got like 15,000 people to sign up.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  And then

• 1:00:58Logan Bartlett?

  And what do you think, I mean, was it, were you previewing on the landing page what frame was? And so

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  We were previewing what, what, what made it, what made it work, what made sort of the, the viral loop work was we, one, we seeded it with, it did just like kind of grassroots marketing, like, you know, we were, we, we come from the industry. So our, my previous industry was in post-production. So knew all, you know, knew all those people in the industry and identified, you know, people that were kind of influencers. That word didn't exist in 2015, I don't think, like commonly, but you know, that we identified people that, you know, had a following and asked, we just asked them, hey, will you, I mean, like people, I don't think people were getting paid to do a kind of influencer stuff in 2015. I think, so we just like asked people, hey, would you, you know, we're launching this thing, would love your support, would you share this?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  And so we kind of seeded, we seeded the, the, the sharing with, I don't know, 50, 75 people that, that would, you know, share the announcement on, on Twitter. And, and then

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  And obviously, we did Trade Press and we were on the front, we actually were on the front page of Hacker News because we were using a, we were using a front-end framework that was new at the time for the landing page called Famous. It was this like front-end framework, JavaScript framework that was supposed to like, their, their, their mission was to sort of build once, run anywhere and do like, you know, iOS level animation on the web. We wound up using it for the, for the landing page, not for the whole product. But just because we were using that, that, that framework, we were front page on Hacker News. And I think that, you know, that got some, actually probably got more like Silicon Valley types of investors, potential investors, that's where they found us on, on Hacker

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  News. We were also on the early version of Product Hunt, like when it was back as an email distribution list. But it was all just through these like organic seeding and then the social sharing flows and, and it just kind of worked, right? So like, somebody would, would tweet it and another person would see it. They'd go, they'd sign up, they'd tweet it. And we got that loop going. So we had 15,000 people sign up for, for that initial launch.

• 1:03:08Logan Bartlett?

  And you also did a personal touch, like automated follow-ups? You would reach out after 15 minutes or something to someone?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was really important as well. So you'd sign up and then you would get an automated email from me 15 minutes after. And I think a lot of people do this now. But the email that you got from me 15 minutes after signing up was, it was totally plain text. There was no one subscribed, which I know technically is, you know, not, you're not supposed to do that. But I was really trying to make it look like it was an email that I wrote. And it was super plain language. It was like two sentences, I think. It was like, hey, I just noticed you signed up, you know, you know, what interested you in, in frame? What pain points do you have? And I got thousands and thousands of responses. Which I went through every single one of them. And I went through and read every single one of them.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  And that was, and in them, there were like, you know, there were, there were potential future enterprise customers. There were, there were investors. And the, one of those emails was from Balaji at Andreessen. He was at Andreessen Horowitz at the time. And that was my, that was like first contact with Silicon Valley. I was a total outsider. I didn't know a soul, like not, I didn't know an engineer. I didn't know a founder. I didn't know a venture capitalist. I knew zero people. And sort of like my first contact with Silicon Valley was, was this email from Balaji. And I remember getting that first email and I'm, I'm a pretty mellow guy.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  I don't really like show a lot of visible excitement, but I was, you know, it was, I couldn't believe that I, one, it was, you know, it was an investor who was voicing interest. And it was from Andreessen Horowitz. And I was like, oh, like bingo. And that, anyway, you know, of course I responded and that led to an introduction to somebody. He introduced me to Stephen Sinofsky. But those, those responded, those, that automatic response email.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  You really kind of like opened up these conversations with, with VCs.

• 1:05:12Logan Bartlett?

  What, what did you learn about fundraising? So you went in and met Andreessen in the early days, pre-product fully launched?

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  We had, yeah, so this, this, this launch that I just told you the story about, that was an announcement launch. The product was not ready to use. And I, yeah, so I, so Balaji, you know, responded to that email from Balaji. And he, you know, he said, you know, not really my space, but I think, but I'd like, you know, to meet my colleague, which was Stephen Sinofsky. And so I went in, my very, my first, first, first like contact in person, or really, I guess at that point, other than that conversation with Balaji. You know, my second conversation with anyone in Silicon Valley was, was Stephen Sinofsky. For those listening, I think most people know, but you know, Stephen was the president of Windows at Microsoft.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  He had left Microsoft and he was now at Andreessen. So that was, I came in and I, you know, had a, had a conversation with. With with Steven, which did lead to a board pitch at Andreessen, you know, some weeks after that, but I they did not invest. But you asked me what I learned about about about pitching. There was a really important thing I learned about pitching, which was, you know, when I came in, first conversation with Steven, I mean, I don't, he kind of knew a little bit about the industry and the space. So he did get it. But I mean, my original pitches, I think, were all were just all were all bad. And one of the things I noticed is that if you were to sit down and

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  ask me, hey, tell me about frame, tell me about the story, like on a phone call or just like casually, whatever, I would, I would tell you a story of who I am, what I'm doing, and why it matters. And when I but then I looked at my pitch, and it's like, well, this the pitch looked very looked very different. And so basically, my realization was if somebody just asks me about frame when I'm not doing like a pitch with a deck, I I'm able to tell a really compelling story. But my my pitch isn't there. So one of the one of the conversations I had upcoming with a an investor who had reached out, you know, typically, and when you make first contact, you're like, oh, so tell me the story,

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  right? You're just like, tell me about what you're doing. And I knew that my storytelling that I just would do off the cuff, I couldn't like recreate, I couldn't sit down and think about it and recreate it like you just have to do it. There's something about I have a job where I'm communicating to a human, this thing that I need to tell, and your brain just like, works differently. So I recorded my conversation with this investor, just my side of me pitching my story. And then I took that recording, and I'm like, Okay, this is the this is the narrative. This is the framework. So I took the story, and then I made the I put slides to the story, which I think other people, it's just I've done this a lot now, like, I always just want to first like, let me just, let me just like, talk and tell a story. If I'm doing a presentation, I try to just talk and tell a story. And since I

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  would do that, you know, with my chief of staff, I would, you know, just sort of or, you know, dictate and talk about what thing I wanted to tell and then go back after I had that story and start working on how the Pitch in the slide deck sort of aligns to it and that made my pitch like infinitely better.

• 1:08:26Logan Bartlett?

  Rather than people inevitably speak to slides and they just kind of go slide by slide through it. And ultimately oftentimes slides are a an amalgamation of a bunch of people's thoughts and feedback all going into some version of it. Versus what you naturally want to want to communicate. Did in the early days, you got an acquisition offer for like 10 million bucks?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Oh, this is a great story. Yeah.

• 1:08:51Logan Bartlett?

  Why? What made you say no to doing that?

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  The first two people I ever made contact with was was first thing was the Bellagio that got introduced to Steven Sinofsky. And this and the third or second person was was Aaron Levy from Box and he had also responded to that auto responder. He saw it, you know, wherever he saw it, he responded. He's like, hey, Aaron Levy here, like, you know, think what you're doing is really cool. So when I flew out to San Francisco, which, you know, by the way, when I flew out to meet Steven, when I flew out to meet Aaron, they weren't like, hey, come out to me, you know, you're, I'm just like, hey, I'm going to be out there these dates if you want to meet. And I'm like, I'm no reason to be.

• 1:09:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And they're like, I'm not here. And I'm like, actually, it's these other dates. I'm going to be here.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So anyway, right. So I went out and I think actually, I'm trying to think if I, what was it? Was, did I meet Aaron first or did I meet Steven Sinofsky first? I forget which one, but I went out same trip. And anyway, you know, Aaron was interested in what we were, what we were building. And I met him for dinner at Fuki Sushi on El Camino, near the Box headquarters back then, I think they moved. And he brought like his whole executive team, team too. And we had this like long, my first contact with, I think I'd maybe had a phone call with him prior. I don't remember, but we had this like long dinner. And then after dinner, we went back to Box HQ and I gave him a demo of what we had.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  This is all pre-launch. We hadn't launched anything. It was pre-launch, gave him a demo of what of what we had built. And and that kicked off a series of conversations with with Aaron, who, you know,

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  I think was really kind of interesting. You know, Aaron's background, I think he famously was like an intern at like a movie studio, I forget, like Universal or somewhere. And he'd always had this interest in filmmaking and I think saw the angle for kind of what we were doing and had that fit into box. So it kicked off a series of conversations. And, you know, I loved getting to know Aaron. He's a great dude and someone I've stayed in touch with over the years. But it did ultimately culminate, like I knew that there was a, I knew, you know, the nature of the conversations were like, leading towards some conversation around, around an acquisition. And we had met, you know, I don't know, four

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  or five times, different scenarios. And I kept thinking, you know, it's actually funny as I think back about this, this, these conversations with Aaron, I really only had two, I call, I guess, kind of serious acquisition dances. I had interest along the way of the years, but nothing that was like really real. It's funny, as I think back about these conversations with Aaron, it was similar to acquisition conversations with Scott Belsky, where there's a dance, you know, like- Scott Teddoby, who ultimately acquired- Scott Belsky's at Adobe, he ultimately acquired. There's a dance where you're getting to know someone and, you know, thinking back to those early conversations with Aaron, we had met like, you know, four or five times. And I'm like, you know, I remember thinking then, I'm like, gosh, the next conversation's got to, there's got to be like a serious,

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  there's got to be like, it's got to lead to an offer, right? Because the first year, you're kind of getting to know each other and all these things. And so I remember after, you know, several, several meetings with Aaron, we had a meeting scheduled, I was back in New York, I'd met him a couple of times in San Francisco, he was in New York, we met somewhere in New York. We had a call scheduled, it was like late my time, it was, I don't know, 10, 11 PM my time.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  And I'm like, okay, there's only one thing we could possibly talk about on this call. It's gotta be an offer. And prior to, prior to that call, I called my co-founder and I said, okay, like I, you know, Aaron's gonna call me, I think there's gotta be an offer, right? So like, let's, we, I wanna, I want you and me to be aligned on like, what's our, what's our buy it now price?

• 1:12:52Logan Bartlett?

  And by the way, are you dual processing with VCs at this point? Or are you self-funding as this is going on?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  I was just self-funding. I mean, I was just self-funding. I was dual processing with VCs. We didn't wind up actually getting, we were not able to raise until after we'd actually launched the product and then we had a lot of early traction and everything. But, um, but yeah, I called my co-founder before the call with Aaron. I was like, what, I just wanna be aligned, like what's our, what's our buy it now price? And I think, uh, honestly, I don't remember what our buy it now price was, but it was something like north of $20 million or something like that. And, and mind you, this was, it's pre-launch, you know, like we were, it was just he and I and yeah, I had a company that was doing well, but like, that would have been, that would have been a lot of money for me, for me back then, for all of us, for anybody. Um, and so Aaron called and, you know, we're having our back and forth, we're talking and

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  hey, let's gotta get to the thing, like, when's it gonna come out? And I think, uh, I think he had sort of, I think he'd offered like, you know, uh, a million dollars was the opening bid.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  And I, you know, I, I told this story before and so like, I, I wanna be consistent as I tell this story, I think I've told it like on an interview before, but I don't remember what number I countered with, but it was an absurdly high number. Like it was a number that, you know, he was just inappropriate to.

• 1:14:14Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, like 30 or like?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  I think it was like 50 or something like that, you know, like something stupid. Uh, and, you know, I think his, I remember his, his, his response was like,

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  His response was funny because he's a very funny guy.

• 1:14:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  He always goes, he's got a great joke and he was like, his response was like, god damn it, you really are a founder.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it, um, I think that, uh, yeah, he, in that conversation, he was, you know, he was pretty, I think we got, in that, on that phone call, he got up to a verbal like, he's like, look, there's the highest number that we could ever acquire a company for, that's like a pre-launch company with two people, um, is $10 million. Like, the board would never allow me to do anything above that and it's just probably wouldn't, you know, and so we, and I don't even think, I don't even know that that was like an offer for 10. It was just basically like kind of setting a

• 1:15:10Logan Bartlett?

  Just so you know.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Demarcation of, yeah.

• 1:15:12Logan Bartlett?

  But you used that and that was the anchor for the seed round, right? That was the

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  I used that, I used, I used that and I, yeah, so that was my anchor for the seed round when I, when I, um, when I pitched Andreessen and then later Excel and that was our valuation. So we did our, you know, we raised 2.2 million in the seed round and a 10 million pre. So I used that as our, as our anchor for the valuation.

• 1:15:34Logan Bartlett?

  Flash forward all the way to the actual acquisition. Uh, so how did, uh, how did all that come to be with Adobe?

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Uh, it started off with a DM on X, then Twitter, still Twitter back then, from, uh, from Scott Belsky, who, uh, yeah, he just, he just sent me a DM on Twitter like saying, hey, um, you know, been following you guys, would be, would be great to connect. And I, and I knew getting the, the DM from him already was, uh, you know, I think, I think I sort of right off the bat kind of knew like, okay, this, this is, this is probably going to lead to some kind of interest in a conversation around acquisition because

• 1:16:14Logan Bartlett?

  Is this the end of 2020, beginning of 21?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  It is the beginning of 2021. So I think it was, um, March of 2021 when he reached out, uh, the first, the first

• 1:16:24Logan Bartlett?

  Kind of surprised you guys didn't know each other.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Well, that, that's what I was going to say is that, you know, I mean, one is Scott is, you know, a really prolific investor, he's, you know, really prominent, you know, figure in, in, in, uh, the industry.

• 1:16:38Logan Bartlett?

  You guys are both in New York.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Both in New York, both in the same space. But yeah, so I had, I Fifteen people along, you know, over the years had offered to introduce me to Scott and I always said yes. I was like, yeah, yeah. Because every person I would talk to, every VC I would talk to, like, hell, you know who you should talk to?

• 1:16:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Like, do you know Scott? You should talk to Scott. And I'm like, great, I'll talk to Scott. But then it would always just go silent. So, you know, I think on the other side, Scott was like, nah, you know, because he was at Adobe and they're basically, you know, they were competitive, right? So he didn't, Scott doesn't invest in competitive companies and things like that, right? So I never,

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  I never met him, but then he reached out over DM and that kicked off, you know, a series of conversations, similarly to the Aaron conversation, you know, a series of conversations where it was like lots of getting to know each other, lots of walks in the park. You know, there's a lot of, you know, over a period of a couple of months before we got to, maybe not a couple of months. It was like, probably six weeks from initial contact to a negotiating a verbal offer.

• 1:17:47Logan Bartlett?

  Mentally, at that point in time, you're running a business and you're planning for a subsequent fundraise, an IPO, whatever the things are. And then there's this orthogonal.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Well, we were actually, we were actually closing our Series D. So it was like, it was close to $100 million Series D. That was all being done by our insiders, our existing investors when the conversations started. And Scott actually convinced me to pause the closing to see if there was a path to acquisition.

• 1:18:26Logan Bartlett?

  That would have been a very unnecessary dilutive amount of capital taken.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, one, my board was supportive, you know, they were like, they were, they were supportive of pausing the round. So we did pause it. And we did, we did pause it for a little bit, but we reached a point in the negotiation where we felt like we were probably too far apart on valuation. And so, you know, I had basically thanked Scott and, you know, just kind of said, hey, like, after we eventually did get to that first offer, I said, hey, I think just indicative, I think, I think the offer is indicative that we just have more work to do. And so I'm going to close the round and, you know.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Maybe we'll, you know, there'll be an opportunity to speak in the future. And, um, and I, and that, and that was my true intention. I, I was like, I, cause I talked about it with the board and, and it's, you know, we, I needed to capitalize the business. Like we, we needed to get this, this round done and I had been holding it for, for a while. So I reached out to, uh, my, uh, lawyers at the time, Gunderson was the team we worked with. And I told them like, we're good to go, like send out the wire information. And I think this was, um, it was Friday, it was a Friday and I, and I told Gunderson to send out the wire information. But then I got another, I got like another follow-up call from Scott and he was like, he's like, Emery, don't do it. It's like, just give me one, give me 24 hours, give me one more day.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so I, I called, you know, I called the lawyer back. I was like, hey, did you, did you send the wire information out yet? Like this, no, don't, don't, don't send it. He's like, I was just about to send the email. I was like, don't, don't send it. So we paused it for one more day and then it was that next day that we wound up, uh, having our, our verbal agreement.

• 1:20:12Logan Bartlett?

  Was it hard, uh, through that period of time to, to have these two things going on?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it sucks. It's, I mean, it's really hard. Yeah. It's really hard. I mean, cause you know, the, the full, the full acquisition took, um, from first contact in April to closing in October. And during that time, you know, you're, I, I was spending 90%. I spent, I was spending 95% of my time on the acquisition and, you know, 5% of the business. And then as, as things progressed and it, and it actually we got to the LOI and we signed it. Then you have to pull in more people and like, you know, diligence is intense diligence for an acquisition. I mean, I've only gone through one, so I don't know what other acquisitions are, but you know, it's, it's like a venture capital diligence, uh, you know, but like times a hundred.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just like, it was, it was intense. We also, as part of our. As part of the acquisition, we had never done an audit and Adobe being a publicly traded company, they required that we complete a three-year audit. And to do a three-year audit in the course of like a six weeks diligence period, which normally a three-year audit, I'm told would take, you could spend like six, eight months, even longer, depending on like how much you want to, how much time you want to spend on it. Like, we did a three-year audit in about, I think it wound up taking about eight weeks, which was intense. I mean, like, it is, you know, you are digging up, I mean, the amount of crap you got to dig up, like some random receipt that like, you know, the auditors

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  pull out some random charge and you're like, trying to find some receipt, because, you know, in the early days, you have like, people are just spending on credit cards and whatever, whatever. Anyway, yeah, it's intense. I mean, that was, that was by far the most intense period of the entire journey was trying to do the acquisition while continuing to run the business. Also, the business was going through its deepest growth inflection point at that time. But yeah, it was, I mean, I would start, I would start, I would do like a, you know, because, because we were trying to run the business and the exec, my, my, my leadership team had all their normal responsibilities, we would start with a exec

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  team morning huddle at 8 a.m. And then, of course, we're in New York, Adobe's in, in San Francisco, and our bankers, we were using Catalyst, who were based in San Francisco, and a lot of times Adobe would have like their acquisition update meeting around like 6, you know, 6, 7 p.m. or something like that, usually late. And then, so that was already even later in New York. And then, you know, my, my team at Catalyst would usually like have dinner with their family. Anyway, I would be, my, I would talk to Catalyst in the evenings at like 11 p.m. midnight. And, and then we were just dealing with all of the diligence stuff like throughout the whole day. So, and I did that for, you know, six months. It was intense.

• 1:23:07Logan Bartlett?

  Is there anything you would have done differently in the process, or if you were advising a founder to be prepared for something that could be, I mean, this is the outcome for 99.9999% of companies, maybe audit sooner? I don't know.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff you can do just hygiene-wise that, you know, if I were doing differently, I would just know to, you know, have a little bit of better hygiene about. Yeah, you should do an audit. You should probably do, you know, a yearly audit.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  I think that, um, I mean, trying to honestly, like, I've sort of purged a lot of this from my, from my mind.

• 1:23:41Logan Bartlett?

  There's some trauma compartment in there.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:44Logan Bartlett?

  Put you on a couch over here.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, there, there is, I, I'd have to sit down and think about it. There's, there's a number of things from, from a hygiene perspective, like, um, just keep, you know, like the, how you, you know, keep all your, just like your enterprise contracts, keeping those like, making, making sure that like you actually have like every executed, signed, like, you know, sign both sides, the final executed contract, like, you know, in your Salesforce database, along with the blah, blah, just like, you just gotta have good hygiene. Like, you, you gotta, I mean, our, we, you know, we're a little messy. Like, we, some, like, we're like,

• 1:24:18Logan Bartlett?

  A startup.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  You're a startup, yeah. Like, we couldn't, like, we couldn't find, like, our fully execute, some of our fully executed contracts, you know, like, their side signed, but then, like, we didn't have, like, our counter signed and blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:24:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, just a lot of little stuff.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  A lot of little stuff, yeah.

• 1:24:33Logan Bartlett?

  On the way. Was there something unique at that moment in time that you felt like, uh, it was going to be a good partnership with Adobe versus going, uh, on your own? Or did they just end up making the compelling offer that made it worthwhile for everyone involved?

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  No, it was definitely, I mean, I think, I think a big part of moving forward was, was Scott, you know, Scott, uh, Belsky is, is a really, um, he's just, first of all, he's just like a really good, he's a good dude. And anybody that knows him would all say that he's like a good, kind, like, honest, but like, he's the type of person you're like, oh, I want to work with Scott, you know, like, he's super likable. Um, and he's a start, you know, he's a startup guy. He, he was, his company, uh, Behance, was acquired by Adobe, and so he was able to really relate and tell me about his journey of Behance being acquired by Adobe. He was also really transparent about the things he was trying to change at Adobe, the things that he was like, hey, these are the things that, you know,

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  I think we're not good at, and, you know, we are, we're trying to, we're trying to change, and, you know, would love your help with it, and blah, blah, blah. So I think a big part of the deal happened, I mean, no, first of all, like, the reason the deal happened was Scott. I mean, he sponsored the deal, sold me on it, sold it internally. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, the, the, the deal happened because of Scott in a lot of way, in, in more ways than one.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  But, uh, for me personally, he really, he really sold me on it. And I, you know, I think also, I looked at it as Adobe was Adobe was the natural home for for frame. We didn't have a lot of like natural acquirers, you know, there's always like a random like, oh, Amazon somehow thinks they should be involved. But in terms of a company that's like this is in their wheelhouse, what they do like Adobe was the the company.

• 1:26:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, so it just made sense. That makes sense.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Like maybe Autodesk a little bit, you know, like they were they were sort of in and they were they were kind of sniffing around around the same time. But it was I really like and then but Adobe was the more natural fit.

• 1:26:34Logan Bartlett?

  So you've been within Adobe now for?

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  About two and a half years, a little more than little more than two and a half years.

• 1:26:40Logan Bartlett?

  What have you taken from Adobe's culture, way of operating that? I don't know if you were to run it back with another startup in the future, just something that you've uniquely learned from working within it?

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, I think that

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  I'm super grateful for the experience of, you know, of working at Adobe. I think it's it's a really it's a really great company. But, you know, I think that I think the key takeaway is

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  and granted, I'm not running Adobe. So, you know, it's not like I have the same the same purview of running frame versus running Adobe. But, you know, I got a seat at the table. I'm in a lot of the important meetings and a lot of the exec meetings I was reporting, I was reporting directly into Scott. You know, who's the I was reporting into the into the E team, the executive team.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  So point being, I've had some purview and my experience is that it's not that different. And if anything, it is it's like it's all this. It's all the same stuff. It's a lot of the same problems, like, of course, like

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  You know, the bigger the company grows, like the the nature of them change a little bit, but the problem solving is is kind of the same. And and it's funny, something Scott said to me during our our early walks is, you know, he's like, you know, Adobe's a giant company. It's over 20,000 people. But at the end of the day, like, still just like five people in a room making decisions. And that's true, you know. So if anything, I think it's given me

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  maybe more comfort or confidence that like, I don't know, I guess I I think I could do that. It doesn't seem that different.

• 1:28:28Logan Bartlett?

  What's that Steve Jobs quote that like, you look around the world and like, anything you see is created by people no smarter than you or something. When you get into these big companies, you meet these people. It's a

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think

• 1:28:39Logan Bartlett?

  They're normal people.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they're they're they're normal people. And I think what I'm about to say is not, it's not indicative. It's, you know, in many ways, the jobs that people have at startups are a lot harder. There's a lot more responsibility. And, you know, at startups, I think that, you know, just naturally, the scope of responsibility can be much more narrow.

• 1:29:08Logan Bartlett?

  At big companies.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  At big companies, sorry. At big companies, the scope of responsibility can be much more narrow. And, and, you know, so I think that like, I don't know, I'd like to maybe have somebody have the opportunity, I'll come back on and tell you after I've run a 20,000 person company, like, is it any harder? But, you know, from I think in some ways, startups can be a lot, a lot harder.

• 1:29:34Logan Bartlett?

  Adobe spent a lot of time thinking about AI. I'm sure you have as well. There's been a number of different tools that have come out related to video, generated video. There's there's so rare from OpenAI, Runway, there's a bunch of stuff related to that category that seems to be coming out. What's your, any high level thoughts? I know you've tweeted a little bit about different things related to AI. Being in the creative world, working with design tooling, it sort of feels like you're in the the eye of the the storm to some extent. What's your what's your purview or perspective?

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Unlike how it's going to impact the creative world?

• 1:30:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, just in general, any thoughts, observations?

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  I think predicting the future is really hard and I don't, I don't, I don't proclaim to be able to do it. But, you know, I think we're a couple of generations away from seeing how truly impactful, you know, kind of video generation, you know, can be for the, for the creative industry. You know, you, it's certainly potent enough to be involved in like a creative process and you can, you know, sort of do a shot, you know, you can generate a clip and use it as a B-roll or, or whatever, but it's still, you know, it's, it's still tricky to kind of guide it.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  And when you get into really like what, you know, like professional creative workflows, I mean, there's a lot of intention around what they're trying to create. And I think that, you know, AI is, it's hard to, I think everyone's trying to work on controllability. Like, how do you, how do you sort of steer this thing? Cause it's obviously incredibly powerful. But, I mean, I, you know, not, not speaking for Adobe, I, I think of like over the next few years.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  It's like, I don't know if it's two years, three years, 10 years, but there's clearly going to be a day where it's probably not so far off that you can really just like input a script and output a movie and probably be as good as like great, great movies. And how does that change the landscape, landscape of creativity? I don't know.

• 1:31:44Logan Bartlett?

  Does it lend itself to more, I mean, I guess inevitably it will lend itself to more taste in some ways and more like back to the original point around what motivates you design? And some of those considerations as the functional skills maybe get upleveled in a more meaningful way?

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think absolutely taste is, you know, I think. In an AI, in a kind of a Gen AI world, taste becomes, you know, a more important skills than creation. There's a lot of people that have the technical skill to create, but you know, maybe their taste is lacking. And if you can put these tools in the hands of people who have great taste, you know, I think that'll be, it'll be fun to watch. And, and, you know, back to like, great, I think great things in general come from a framework where you have one person driving really clear vision and then, you know, lots

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  of contribution for, from other people. And, you know, movies are, movies are really, really hard to make. I mean, if you, it is, it is a shocking number of people that have to collaborate. And, you know, movies do have like, culturally, it's about like a director driving a vision. But still, there's just so many people that have to, you know, come in and be part of that to make a movie happen. And it's so expensive that your ability to iterate or fix something that didn't work well, like just doesn't really exist. You can't really do that. So when you get to the point where you have a tool that one

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  person's mind can, can guide and, you know, create a story around and iterate and iterate and iterate basically for free until they can find what they love. I, you know, maybe the best, you know, maybe we'll have some of the best content we've, we've ever had because you'll have absolute clarity of vision. It'll cost nothing to iterate and explore different ideas. And I think we're going to see a ton of cool stuff.

• 1:33:44Logan Bartlett?

  Is there anyone from the outside in that was particularly influential to the business or the outcome? Anyone you would want to shout out or give credit to?

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  I will say that I had a really awesome board. You know, I think that startups go through tons of problems and for many startups, board problems are one of them. And I just never had board problems. I had-

• 1:34:04Logan Bartlett?

  You had Voss from Excel-

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Voss from Excel, Amish from First Mark, and Etai, who was a board partner on behalf of Insight, but now has his own fund, LGVP, Etai Sidon. But those were my, those were my three board members and- For a long time, it was just Voss and Amish. And I also had Chris from Signalfire. He was a board observer. He was also involved from, but all of them, you know, I think that I really heavily leaned on, on my board. And I think there's a lot of conversations around like how much value add do investors bring? And I don't know, I thought they brought a ton of value because for me as a first time founder, they really had just like, didn't know a lot about business,

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  especially when it came to really thinking about like, how do we, you know, how do we think about capitalizing the business, setting, you know, success milestones, you know, scaling a sales organization, thinking about like, I mean, I think a lot of, I think a lot of the stuff I did wind up talking to the board with was, was on the, you know, kind of the business side. The product side I always drove instinctually, but I mean, I thought they were invaluable.

• 1:35:18Logan Bartlett?

  Was there anything you did in selecting them that was purposeful?

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:23Logan Bartlett?

  Lucky?

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  I was lucky.

• 1:35:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  I was lucky. I think I was lucky. Yeah. I, I mean, I'd say that I, for our seed round, we had a competitive seed round and I wound up choosing Voss from Excel. And I think I chose Voss because he, he did seem to like, just truly get the frame IO value proposition the best. There's, you know, there's the, the term founder market fit. I think there's also like investor company fit, you know, in terms of like, who really understand, like he just, he, he really understood it. He was an investor in Envision.

• 1:35:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Which was, Envision was similar to Frame. They were kind of like, you know, Frame for Design and Envision was ahead of us by a few years.

• 1:36:07Logan Bartlett?

  And Amish was as well, right?

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Amish was as well. So, so, you know, I, Envision was a great company that kind of like, set a path for us. It can be so much easier when there's a company that's kind of like proven something out, you know, and I think we had a lot to prove in our market because, you know, there wasn't, you know, video collaboration like didn't exist and kind of the review and approval market was like pretty nascent. But, but Envision has at least charted a path for us and proven like this space can be valuable. So, yeah. Uh, Voss and Amish were both on the Envision board and they were on, on our board and, but I think that what it, what it meant was when I would speak to them, they, they really, they really got it and they really understood it. So, um, and they're both great SaaS investors.

• 1:36:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  Both great B2B investors. They work well together. That's important too. It's like, you know, there's like the board dynamics of like, do your board like each other? Because you might like all of them, but they don't like each other and that can create, you know, tension. So I never, I never had any, any board problems. The only time I had a little bit of tension with my board was during acquisition. And that was because there was one board member that was really playing his fiduciary responsibility to like, you know, maximize the outcome. And, and I, there was a little bit of disagreement on like, when we should like continue to push on the negotiation where I felt I had pushed. Like I was on the front line of negotiating. So I had all the, you know, kind of.

• 1:37:28Logan Bartlett?

  Easy for the armchair quarterback to say, you should push harder.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, but I, I felt like, you know, I really knew what the limit was of the pushing and I, and, and so anyway, but.

• 1:37:39Logan Bartlett?

  In retrospect, I guess.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  But it's fine. We had, there was, I mean, that was just like a little moment in time.

• 1:37:42Logan Bartlett?

  Small and the.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Small little moment.

• 1:37:43Logan Bartlett?

  So, so if nothing purposeful in retrospect, uh, if you were giving advice to someone and picking a board member, picking an investor, would you probe on how deep they can go into the space and how unique their actual interest is in the space? Would you just spend more time with them and get the vibe check and really pin that down?

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think that, um, yeah, I, I mean, I think that especially, you know, especially for, I guess for all board members. It's not dissimilar to hiring, you know, an executive. Like I think it's super important that you like each other.

• 1:38:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  You know, like if you don't, if you don't want to hang, if you don't want to go to dinner with that person, uh, this is actually both, this, this very much applies to hiring executives. And it's something that I kind of came around to, uh, a little bit later. Cause you think that like, nah, you don't have to be friends. Like, that's not what it's about to like work with someone.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  I think you kind of do.

• 1:38:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  I think you have to like each other enough where like you, there's some level of enjoyment of spending time with each other and I call that a friend.

• 1:38:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Um, and I'm not super, I'm not like, I don't, I don't like hang with my employees a lot. I'm not like friends, but you do have to like each other. And I think that's important for the board, like you, you gotta like each other. I think their, their conviction in the spa, in your space, their understanding of the space, I think really, really does matter. And then, and then I think you want to understand, you know, like talk to other founders and founders, hopefully founders that have, it's probably much more valuable to talk to founders that, you know, of companies that did not succeed or went through some moment of crisis and understand how, uh, how, how the board would, you know, respond to that. We did go through one moment of crisis where I had to like, I think was a, you know, the wrong board maybe would have led to, I can't talk about the moment of the crisis, but it

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  was, I think the wrong board would, would have maybe led to a, a different outcome. And it all turned out to be totally fine because, um, because we had a good board. So, you know, it, it, it is a marriage.

• 1:39:43Logan Bartlett?

  Marriage with, uh, not necessarily the recourse of divorce, I guess.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:47Logan Bartlett?

  It's hard to divorce your board.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, I think, you know, I, I, I've heard like other founders where you have like a board member, they're out of, they're out of, you know, they're out of fund and like, you sort of don't think about it, but like, um, they leave the fund they're at and then you're sort of like giving it over to somebody else or whatever. I mean, I think kind of understanding where they're at in their careers and, you know, their intentions of, I mean, I don't know you can really like learn that much by asking because whatever's going to happen is going to happen, but I think it's good to sort of maybe have a conversation around that and think about it. Um, uh, I think the seniority of the person kind of does matter. Uh, it, it matters, I think the seniority of the person matters. There's probably some people that are not as senior that is just as helpful running the business, but the seniority matters in terms of like, let's leverage on being able

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  to get stuff done for future rounds, whether it's them doing a round or helping you do, you know, a round with somebody else or however you construct that.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  Voss was particularly, you know, Voss was actually kind of early in his career. When we started working together, he was, he was, he was pretty young. But one of the things that Voss did do is we worked together on every single fundraising round. We worked together on every single pitch deck. We built every pitch deck together. Every single one. I mean, I would go to his house and we'd sit down at his table and, you know, and, and, and go through the pitch and rewrite the pitch and practice the pitch. He was, he was particularly helpful on, on, on pitching.

• 1:41:14Logan Bartlett?

  Well, good. Well, Emery, thanks for doing this.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Logan Bartlett?

  This was fun.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:41:22Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you for joining this episode of the Logan Bartlett Show with co-founder and CEO of Frame, Emery Wells. If you enjoyed this discussion, we'd like for you to subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to us on, as well as share with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. We look forward to seeing you here next week on another great episode of the Logan Bartlett Show. Have a good weekend, everyone.