EP 25: Braze’s Bill Magnuson talks the “aha moment” and advice for entrepreneurs, plus Rashad Assir’s path to Redpoint TikTok

In the 25th episode of Cartoon Avatars Logan talks with friend and Braze CEO Bill Magnuson about his start, his success, and the joke stocking stuffer worth 20k. Plus Redpoint’s Rashad Assir is back once again to discuss his own background, and how it led to his TikTok success and work with Redpoint. (0:00) Intro (0:22) Introducing Rashad (3:05) Rashad’s background (5:45) Redpoint’s TikTok (10:45) Introducing Bill Magnuson (16:27) How big is Braze? (17:36) Bill’s Background (20:48) Taking college classes as a high school freshman (25:11) Applying to MIT (29:32) Building Google android product (34:14) Bridgewater (39:42) Founding Appboy (44:46) Thesis behind Braze (48:29) The “aha moment” (52:05) Throughput vs Deliverability (55:57) Predicting the future of infrastructure (1:02:35) Advice for entrepreneurs (1:05:37) Being on the path of progress (1:10:31) Taking over as CEO (1:15:23) Recruiting your team (1:19:32) Going public (1:24:35) What keeps you motivated? (1:27:22) Bill’s bitcoin story (1:30:02) Outro Links: https://www.tiktok.com/@redpoint?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@corporayshid?lang=en https://rss2.flightcast.com/jlx9l0yn04wt3r710o051jtm.xml Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb... Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0... Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/cartoonavatars 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars About the Show A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise. 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.

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 25th episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I am joined today again by producer, behind the scenes man, known as Red Points TikTok guy, Rashad. How are we doing today, Rashad?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Doing pretty good, man.

• 0:23Logan Bartlett?

  Rashad and I were out in San Francisco together this week. I appreciate you hopping on again, back to back weeks. So this week's episode, you're gonna have, on the back half, you're gonna hear a conversation I had with the CEO of Braze, Bill Magnuson, who's a longtime friend of mine. I was fortunate enough to invest in Braze when they were called App Boy back in 2016. Bill is unequivocally my smartest friend, and now that he's a public company CEO, I don't view this as purely showing his business. I think it's much more interesting than that, but Bill is a really smart, interesting guy.

• 1:05Logan Bartlett?

  So excited for people to hear that.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had to go back and watch. So I was listening back to it. I obviously sat in on it live, and then I listened back to it. The dude is just like freakishly smart.

• 1:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Like every time I think to myself every now and then, like, oh, you know, maybe one day I could start a company, or... And then I meet someone like Bill, and I'm just like, if that's what the competition is, then definitely not.

• 1:32Logan Bartlett?

  It's like, oh, there's different kinds of intelligence. You know, some people... I always think it's funny when people are like, oh, I'm not a good text taker. I'm like, oh, yeah, sure. You know, and there obviously are biases against tests in general, but there's clearly different types of intelligence, right? And I think Zach certainly has one type in spades, for sure. I think Bill also has all of the types of intelligence, right? So yeah, no. I think when you start going to... Start taking college level math courses in seventh grade or whatever it was. I think, I think you're you're on a different trajectory, at least than I was from an academic ambition.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  But then he's also like doing like advanced debate thing and then winning the championships. And then he worked for a hedge fund and then he like, I mean, it's just crazy.

• 2:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And then he's also going to Burning Man for two weeks at a time. And yeah, all that stuff.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Right. He's like actually social too.

• 2:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, he's a social guy. Well, Rashad, thanks for, yeah, so, so I guess a little bit of context, but on some of these intros, we've been trying to figure out the exact recurring format. And Zach is flat out this week with with like team offsites and a bunch of stuff that he has going on. So we have a few different conversations in the can or on the come with with Zach here. And he's going to continue to be a recurring person. But I figured pulling in Rashad more to this just so I had someone to talk to at least for the intro segment. Rashad was kind enough to do that. So maybe, I mean, Rashad, maybe give a little bit of your your background because this is going

• 3:09Logan Bartlett?

  to be the, I guess, second time people have heard you on here, but maybe give a little bit about your role here besides helping me out with the podcast and how we met and all that stuff.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess we came into contact like towards the end of last year. I was working at Looker, which is one of our portfolio companies that was acquired two years ago. So going into year three of an acquisition, working in a pretty traditional like mid-market sales role, selling to a bunch of like the digital native, I was lucky to have New York as a territory. So that was fun. I worked with a lot of cool companies. But I was like basically fucking around on TikTok and Instagram, making videos like dunking on my coworkers and friends and really cringe sort of like millennial.

• 3:54Logan Bartlett?

  Not as a part of the job, just to be very clear, that was not helping you close mid-market New York local business intelligence sales.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  If anything, distracting me from it. But it was definitely fun. And I was like, oh, this is cool. And then TikTok, obviously, as a platform is just insane.

• 4:13Logan Bartlett?

  And you started out doing it on Snapchat, right? Just for your friends or something?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had like the best engagement metrics for an audience of like 14 people that were watching.

• 4:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, 100% open rate.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 24 hour of like it was Snapchat's very ephemeral or it was. I don't even know what the app does now. I can't like, I feel like such a boomer when I open up Snapchat now. I like can't figure out how to navigate it.

• 4:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  But yeah, TikTok blew up, went viral during the pandemic and then just kept posting videos. And eventually I think you were had sort of this thesis around TikTok and stuff. And so you were looking for people that did corporate humor, among other things that that I did. And then, uh, yeah, we met up IRL in in New York. I think we I met Josh first. He was like, hey, we're a VC and we want to do TikTok.

• 5:06Logan Bartlett?

  Josh hadn't even joined at that point, right? So like.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It was a combination of he hadn't joined and he was like, this VC wants to do TikTok. And I was like, that makes no sense.

• 5:15Logan Bartlett?

  Some would argue it still doesn't, although it is a portion of your job, but.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, trust me, a lot of my energy goes into not thinking about that.

• 5:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Those existential like, what the fuck are we doing moments?

• 5:29Logan Bartlett?

  Well, at least, uh, yeah, at least your comments are fairly benign. I I've had to, uh, you know, you make fun of Elon enough or like make fun of crypto enough. And it turns out the TikTok algorithm starts to be pretty malicious. So our podcasts, uh, comments, there's a lot of rage, rage bait in there.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  We get some, we get some backlash purely off just as the fact that we're an institution. Like I was only putting out content as an individual creator, which everyone's down to support. It's like, what? How could you hate against someone who's just like trying to make jokes and make people laugh? But all of a sudden I was making the same jokes coming from Redpoint's account and you've got like hyper, I don't know, radioactive people online like, what is this vulture capital content?

• 6:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I like all the ones where we make a joke and people are like, VCs are trying to convince you that your labor is worth less than it is. Push back again. And I'm like, oh, my God. So wait, so you started, you started in January. And basically, the whole point was, hey, Rashad, come on and do some of this stuff related to TikTok humor and video, short form video humor, basically take that and spend some of your time doing that. And then the rest of the time, kind of helping out portfolio companies, helping with stuff like this. Right. Helping us do events, helping on, you know, customer introductions and things on the portfolio side.

• 6:56Logan Bartlett?

  Right. So, so this is some portion of your job. People always, I think people are surprised to find out, one, that you work here actually officially. People are like, hang on, that's not a con. And I'm like, no, no, no, he like, he works, he works here. And

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Sometimes people will comment on our videos, like they'll, you'll see them like laugh or interact or like it. And then they'll comment right after like, oh, shit, didn't realize this was an ad. I take my comment back.

• 7:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, I like that. Or people accused us one time of stealing your content. You know, it's like, yeah, oh, Red Point stealing content from corporate corporation.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll still get like two DMs a month of like, hey, just by the way, wanted to let you know that this company's been posting all your content. I was like, yeah, dude.

• 7:47Logan Bartlett?

  And so now how much of your time, so that takes up what 20% of your time ish? And then the balance is sort of spent doing all the other stuff?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it turns out, I mean, all of our, like, the people I've met here are some of the smartest people ever. And so I try to focus the rest of my time on like helping and enabling some of our investors to also put out content in the medium that makes sense for them. And so just being sort of like a creative director on some of that stuff has been fun.

• 8:20Logan Bartlett?

  And then you've been helping, you've been helping me behind the scenes for all of this stuff. I, you know, getting Zach to come on regularly to like at least do an intro or whatever is just like his schedule is such a pain in the ass. And so I figured, I figured at this point, like, at least you are joining every time and gives me someone to talk to just for the intro and outro segments and ultimately some topics. I will say, I think at times we'll go pretty deep into the weeds on stuff. And I mean, you're still, you're, you're up to speed on the industry, right? To some extent, but also still learning elements of it. Is that fair to say?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  What was it that Zach said the other day? He was like, I, I forget which interview, but the idea of bearer bonds came on and he was like,

• 9:09Logan Bartlett?

  Bear bonds? I'm not a moron.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Right. The guest was like, I'm not a moron. Or Zach was like, I'm not a moron. I know what a bear bond is. And I'm in the background just like, yeah, totally. Like,

• 9:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's either bear bonds or like, there's the other kind, you know?

• 9:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. That's actually, that's actually from the unreleased Sam Lesson interview is what that's from. That I think we're going to release at the end of this month. I, I think we've gotten the final okay on that. But yeah, that, that's going to be an entertaining one. I, I would say that that is the spiciest episode we've, we've, we've had to date. It's, it's somehow both our worst episode and our best episode, I think, depending on what, how you're measuring it. But yeah, no, the, the bearer bonds, I'm not a moron was a, was an amazing line.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's been fun.

• 10:04Logan Bartlett?

  All right. Well, Rashad, thanks for, thanks for doing this intro here. And thanks for, at some point, we'll probably cover some topics together and at least have some continuity of the group, you know, if we can't get Zach on with, with regularity to do intros and all that.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  I'm always happy to play the, the everyman.

• 10:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Rashad, do that dumb thing that you don't know what's going on. Right. All right. So next up, you're going to hear a conversation with Bill Magnuson. This was recorded right before the 4th of July, and I think everyone's going to enjoy it. Bill's really thoughtful, smart guy, as I mentioned earlier. So here is Bill. Bill?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Logan, how's it going? Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 10:48Logan Bartlett?

  Glad we're, I chased you around for a couple of weeks trying to get you on.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:52Logan Bartlett?

  It's amazing being a public company CEO. I think it limits your window of time that you can, you can talk.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  It definitely does, especially with people in the industry.

• 11:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. I guess I am of the industry. So maybe for people that don't know, tell me a little bit, what does Braze do? And then how do we know each other?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Braze is a customer engagement platform. So we work with primarily B2C brands. And what we do is we help them manage relationships with their end consumers in a kind of more impactful and relevant way through digital messaging. So we integrate into their products to help them understand how people are using them. We track those user journeys to get a better understanding of the customer. And then we dispatch messaging on channels like email, push notifications, SMS, or in-product messaging, delivering things like surveys, or maybe running an inbox inside of an app or a website to coordinate all that digital communication and ultimately help build great relationships with those consumers over time.

• 11:49Logan Bartlett?

  Multi-channel customer communication.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely.

• 11:54Logan Bartlett?

  And we know each other.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  So we go back about seven years now.

• 11:58Logan Bartlett?

  That's right.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  I believe you were living in Boston.

• 12:01Logan Bartlett?

  I was. I believe there was a weird two-year period that I was living in Boston.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yep. And I was down here in New York, and we were fundraising. The company was actually called App Boy at the time.

• 12:09Logan Bartlett?

  Which we'll talk about.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Which there's, yeah, there's some meat on that bone.

• 12:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  And, you know, we were raising our Series C, I believe it was. It was a pretty long fundraising cycle.

• 12:19Logan Bartlett?

  Like, like 10 months, intermittently raising at different points in time. It was like June 2015, because I remember Miles had had neck surgery. You remember Miles is like laid up and unable to...

• 12:31Speaker 02

  He's paid Manning surgery.

• 12:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, he's paid Manning surgery. On the Zoom screen.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and actually, yeah, it was a little on and off. You know, we were taking the temperature of the VC markets and we were also still, you know, actively growing the business, trying to kind of time it and find the right partner. And then the early 2016 opens up and we have, you know, what was referred to at the time as a SaaS crash. We're probably in a little bit of a deeper one right now. But, you know, that was definitely an interesting time. We saw a lot of the VCs we had been talking to. I was pretty convinced that everyone out West just decided to go skiing at Tahoe for the rest of the winter and not really do any deals. You guys stayed around the hoop to your credit. And so, you know, Battery ended up leading the Series C and that was how I would say the relationship cemented itself.

• 13:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it was a great, I mean, obviously in retrospect, you guys are worth whatever, billions and billions of dollars, or three and a half, four billion, depending on where it is today, has been an amazing investment and a fun. At the time, I think, I mean, you guys were approaching double-digit ARR, probably nine, 10 million, and the deal was done at 91 posts. I remember we were haggling over, so from my side, Miles, who's the president of the org, kind of your, does a lot of the go-to-market stuff for the business. We, the market corrected and we had already passed on App Boy, I don't know, five times or something. There was a folder in Battery's box structure that said, I think it was called like App

• 13:56Logan Bartlett?

  Boy Round Six or Seven or Eight. It was just like this continuous thing. And we remember it corrected and it was always a function of price. And it's so funny to think in retrospect, we were haggling over like, is it 100 or 125 or 90 or 80 or, you know, 150, right? All these numbers seem so quaint right now.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they seem close together, but, you know, they're pretty big percentage-wise moves and it results in a lot of different dilution.

• 14:20Logan Bartlett?

  A lot of different dilution for you, a lot of different ownership for us. It's just crazy to be coming out of a time in which everyone just sort of viewed, hey, what's 100 million, 200 million, 300 million among friends, even a billion, you know, whatever, it's all the same. And it's funny to go back to that point in time and like.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were debating like, you know, is this 7X ARR, is it 13X ARR, right? And, you know, the last couple of years have really made that look ridiculous.

• 14:43Logan Bartlett?

  It's an interesting lesson. And because I was like, hey, listen, I think that there's some chance that this can be like a very big, important public company. But my base case for the business was that it was going to be a couple hundred million dollar acquisition. Right. And so I was like, oh, I want us to be under at or under a hundred post. And it's just so funny how imprecise that like logic is, right? To think through that I actually had any idea like what types of outcomes, you know, within that band, especially as multiples expanded and contracted and whatever.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, and you know, to your credit, if you guys had not stayed around the hoop like that as the market conditions went down, you know, you wouldn't have been able to make the deal at the number that you wanted to or needed to or what have you. And you know, but from our perspective as well, we spent so long waiting to fundraise that we didn't have very many choices at that point. You know, we were starting to run out of runway and that taught some really important lessons. You know, we definitely dialed down the burn from there, which is a, I think a cultural attribute that really benefits us now in the current public market sentiment.

• 15:40Logan Bartlett?

  Wait, and by the way, when you were at 10 in ARR, certainly as a percentage, but maybe also absolute dollars was like borderline the most you guys burned. Even, even like at a hundred, you were burning less in terms of absolute dollars. I know percentage, but I remember and it was something like 30 million or 25, 30, something like that.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. So the total amount raised up until that point was, you know, call it something like 30 to 40 million. And we'd been around for five years at that point. And then to market to market, when we IPO'd in mid-November of last year, you know, add another five years of company life. We'd only burned 95 million total and we actually got all the way to 250 million in ARR as we did that. So yeah, I mean, in that range, you know, we went from 10 to 250 and burned incrementally only about 60 million bucks.

• 16:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. Over, over six years. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. So how many people is raised now?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  We're somewhere north of 1300 today.

• 16:33Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. 1300 across.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yep. Spread out around the world. I used to say that we, our offices were kind of in the current and former British Empire. During COVID, we started expanding beyond that.

• 16:42Logan Bartlett?

  The current and former British Empire and also like the most expensive per square footage real estate in the world.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely. Headquartered in New York, then we expanded to San Francisco, then we went to London and then Singapore in order to kind of make sure that the sun was not Setting on the Braze Empire anymore and then during COVID, our strategy of trying to put offices in these regional hubs and then be able to travel to customers didn't really work anymore because no one could travel. So we started opening up additional offices from there. So we've since expanded into Tokyo in order to open up the Japan market. We've got a great growing office in Berlin. We recently started hiring in Paris and you know, as we get a critical mass of people there will be opening up a physical presence. We've also expanded in the US into Austin and Chicago. Those are both super fast growing here in the Midwest.

• 17:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  In the middle of the country.

• 17:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's nice of you guys to break. I know you had a rule of like, we're not willing to pay less than 75 bucks a square foot for office. That was like one of the considerations. It's nice of you to deviate from that. So I want to talk a lot about Braze and all that, but let's go, let's go background first. So from Minnesota.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:41Logan Bartlett?

  Darwin, your father.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:42Logan Bartlett?

  Wonderful man.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 17:44Logan Bartlett?

  Lisa, your mom.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Yep, Lisa.

• 17:45Logan Bartlett?

  I guess I.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  I'm gonna see them this weekend, actually.

• 17:48Logan Bartlett?

  Are you?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:48Logan Bartlett?

  Are they coming to town?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I'm flying out there.

• 17:50Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, nice.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, excited to see them.

• 17:52Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, I saw them, what, two weeks ago for your birthday?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So I guess, I guess the important part of this story, we said how we originally met, but now we're very close friends and I obviously know your parents by, by name. Was that your 35th birthday, uh, two weeks ago?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yep. Roughly.

• 18:07Logan Bartlett?

  Roughly. So, uh, grew up in Minnesota. Mom was a bookkeeper.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:13Logan Bartlett?

  Dad was a HVAC.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Maintenance.

• 18:16Logan Bartlett?

  Maintenance. And so, growing up, I assume they didn't have, correct me if I'm wrong, uh, weren't following the tech industry in, in mass. So maybe talk a little bit about like childhood, Minnesota, growing up. How did you get into computers originally and all that stuff?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I don't know all the background because I was only five.

• 18:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  But a, in 1992, a friend of my dad's convinced him to buy an IBM. And so we had a, I believe it was a 46, 33 megahertz. It had a 212 megabyte hard drive. It came with a internal 2400 baud modem, like 2.4 kilobits per second. And, uh, so that got plopped down in our basement in a little bit of a corner desk in 1992. I started. You know, using it and definitely, you know, caught on to the concepts that the computer was bringing to me and really enjoyed it. We didn't get the internet for another few years. I sort of remember the first time I ever used the internet was over at my cousin's house and they had AOL. And I, you know, came home and was trying to convince my parents that one of those floppy disks that we kept getting in the mail, we should, you know, pop into the computer and see what we could do with it.

• 19:25Logan Bartlett?

  AOL 3.0 or what was the one?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 19:27Logan Bartlett?

  AOL 3.0. I think that was the big one that like brought, that was me. I mean, obviously we're only six months apart, but that was the one that I remember we really went all in on in my family was AOL 3.0.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then a few years later, you know, they started mailing out the CDs and you could start collecting all the CDs. But yeah, it was definitely the floppy disk era of signing up for AOL.

• 19:42Logan Bartlett?

  So got into computers. You were also a pretty good math student?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually, you know, early on and I remember in elementary school, I got pulled out of math in first grade.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  They told my parents, you know, it was gifted and talented, but actually I think I was probably being disruptive because all they, it wasn't like I got specialized teaching. I was just kind of set in the back of the room to like play with. They had multiple ice cream pails full of collected milk jug caps. And then also all these colored polygons and I would just like make patterns with them and such. And that was kind of how I spent first grade math. You know, and it put me in the corner and kept me from disrupting the rest of the class.

• 20:23Logan Bartlett?

  Teachers recognized you were special in some way. They weren't just totally sure which way the specialness.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, the kind of rural Minnesota public schools didn't really have like a separate tract that was really productive to put a kid on.

• 20:35Logan Bartlett?

  It wasn't, it wasn't like a pipeline to Stuyvesant or one of these, you know?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 20:40Logan Bartlett?

  You weren't like going to Hotchkiss grooming school, I imagine.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  I don't even know what that is.

• 20:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. It's a prep school. But yes, so, so you did that. And then at some point, I assume they recognized that you were good at math. Remind me, like by the time you were a freshman in high school, you were taking college, you were going to the University of Minnesota?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So actually in kind of a funny story, my, so I lived and grew up where my ancestors who immigrated from Sweden actually homesteaded. Like literally, you know, got their 160 acres and had to farm it for five years. And so I grew up right across the street from where the original homestead was. And my family actually in the depression, something crazy happened, like the cows got poisoned and they like they, in addition to the depression going on, they like lost their cows. And so they had to sell half of it. And so the original home they built to homestead in was actually lived in by the gifted and talented counselor at my middle school. And she recommended to my parents that I take this admissions exam to do this program that the University of Minnesota had,

• 21:45Speaker 02

  which they shortened to UMTIUMP, which is an incredibly appealing acronym. Stood for University of Minnesota Talented Youth Math Program. And what that allowed me to do was actually commute down to the University of Minnesota in the evenings twice a week. My dad, bless his heart, got off work every, you know, twice a week for multiple years to drive me down there and would attend.

• 22:04Logan Bartlett?

  How far was University of Minnesota?

• 22:06Speaker 02

  It's about 30 miles from where I grew up. These are Minnesota freeways though, so it's not like 30 miles commute in Manhattan, you know, but, but still, you know, definitely a meaningful commitment. And, and so drove down there and, and went through a highly accelerated math program. And, and then also through that got to know the campus and, you know, got really comfortable down there. And then the University of Minnesota.

• 22:27Logan Bartlett?

  That started in middle school?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Seventh grade. Yeah, was when I started doing that.

• 22:30Logan Bartlett?

  And that was college level math or that was like the end of high school, like, you know, calculus and stuff?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it was, it was accelerated. So you kind of went through all of high school in seventh and eighth grade and then started into, like we did single multivariable calculus in ninth grade. So the, and then kind of rolled into it from there. But I was also then comfortable with the campus and everything. And the state of Minnesota has a program called PSEO, post-secondary enrollment options, where you can opt out of some or all of high school, starting in either your junior or senior year. And most people use it to start attending community class colleges nearby their high school, you know, as they get to their senior year or what have you. But technically, according to the letter of the program, you can actually completely leave high school in junior year. And the state actually pays for everything. They pay for your tuition, your books, et cetera. And so I applied to do that. I got accepted into it.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  And, you know, the University of Minnesota was already a kind of a known quantity to me and I had actually gotten my license over the summer. And so I was. Wasn't reliant on my dad to drive me down there anymore. So I switched to going there full-time junior and senior year, which was great.

• 23:30Logan Bartlett?

  So, so accelerated program, seventh and eighth grade, started taking college level math classes, ninth and 10th, then full-time Minnesota student 11th and 12th. Across like, whatever, English and...

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah, exactly. The only thing that I had to do was satisfy my high school requirements for like, you know, social studies and, and English. So I took, you know, freshman composition, freshman writing, I took econ and, and, you know, some other like liberal arts subjects, but was primarily pursuing a computer engineering degree at the time.

• 23:58Logan Bartlett?

  Going through high school, middle school, obviously pretty formative years and you're a pretty social person. And that's a very different program to be on than the average, like, was, were you, were you around peers as well and being social? Or were you like in this weird, I mean, why aren't you a bubble boy, basically?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Well, I had a, I had a transition period a little bit because my junior year, I continued doing debate. So I actually had done, you know, after-school activities, had done competitive policy debate. Freshman year, sophomore year, while attending, you know, high school full-time. And then I was able to continue competing into my junior year. And so I would go down to the U for classes during the day and then I would drive back to my high school for debate practice in the afternoons and evenings. And so that kept me in touch with, you know, with my friends and the student body and what have you. My coach actually ended up quitting that summer. So senior year, I was kind of fully disconnected. I only came back for, you know, prom and like homecoming and a couple of other things. I actually was rejected from my high school national honor society because I, I, you know, couldn't attend anything.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And they decided that I was not, not worthy. So actually at my high school graduation party, my mom framed my MIT acceptance letter right next to my NHS rejection letter. And had them kind of on the, on the diploma table.

• 25:10Logan Bartlett?

  I like that. And so, and so you applied to MIT.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 25:17Logan Bartlett?

  The only school you, did you think about like staying at Minnesota or?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, so Minnesota was kind of the default. And so as a result, you know, I also, first-generation college student, didn't have, my college didn't really have a concept of like a college admissions counselor or anything like that. You know, the vice presidents were-

• 25:33Logan Bartlett?

  Pachus does, by the way.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I'm sure they do. The, uh, they probably don't have quite as many vice presidents that are solely focused on discipline either. So that was, you know, that was kind of what the, the guidance at my school was like.

• 25:44Logan Bartlett?

  That's where they allocated their resources.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like a guide on how to stop getting in fights in the hallways.

• 25:48Logan Bartlett?

  The metal detector took the money over the.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so, uh, you know, I, I didn't really know what I was doing and I applied only to MIT and I actually not like early admission and I got it. I actually applied regular admission and not only that, I was like, you know, right up to the deadline. I think I, I distinctly remember the final day that it was, uh, due. My dad and I were supposed to go snowmobiling. So my dad is out in the back, you know, getting all, getting the snowmobiles on the trailer and loading up the truck and everything. And he keeps poking his head in the house like every 20 minutes. He's like, are you done yet? Like, we gotta get going, you know, it's getting dark. Like, we want to get up there because you, you drive up north generally to go snowmobiling. So we had a few hour drive ahead of us. And I was like, Dad, I'm trying to finish my college, like admissions thing. Like, I'll be done soon. Leave me alone.

• 26:32Logan Bartlett?

  It's, it's a rare, uh, college experience, I'd imagine, that the dad cares more about snowmobiling than your, uh, college application.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, to be fair to my parents, I wasn't like completely, you know, I wasn't bringing them along for the ride.

• 26:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, I imagine.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  So he probably didn't really even know what I was doing, but you know.

• 26:49Logan Bartlett?

  When you started going to Minnesota by junior year, uh, I imagine they were like, all right, my, my son has this for the most part, but yeah, that's, uh, I can picture your dad doing that.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember my mom, uh, actually calling me on a, on a similar point and I had used her credit card to register for the SAT. And so she got this unknown, you know, $35 charge to the college board or whatever it was called. And I remember her calling me and just being like, do you know what this charge is? I was like, yeah, mom, I have to take this test to get into college.

• 27:14Logan Bartlett?

  What a, uh, I think our college application processes were a little, uh, a little different. Um, yeah, going to private school in New Jersey. They, they were a little more hard on me than.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  I would assume so, yeah.

• 27:25Logan Bartlett?

  So, so you go to MIT, you go from, uh, you go from kind of leading yourself through the University of Minnesota, parents driving you and all that. And so MIT, did you start over with all the math classes?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Uh, no, skip ahead a little bit, uh, but you know, to MIT's credit, like definitely the classes with the same name. Are at a materially different, they're taught at a materially different level.

• 27:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And so I, you know, what I really took advantage of from the diversity Minnesota coursework that I did is that it gave me confidence to take more classes at the same time at MIT. So, you know, if I, if I was taking, you know, normal course, it would be four classes. I would take five or six, knowing that I had already taken a couple of them at the university Minnesota. So it would be a bit of a redo. So I, I took advantage of that to kind of optimize, take more classes and just get a little bit more breadth in my college education.

• 28:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Interesting. And so, uh, and debate was still a big part of, you debated with my high school classmate, Adam.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. On it, you know, on and off, uh, after my coach quit my junior year of high school, I actually effectively took about three and a half years off. Uh, and I picked debate, uh, backup, a different format of debate in college midway through my junior year. And so I ended up, uh, and then I, you know, we can, we'll get to this later, but I ended up, uh, coming back to get my masters. So spend a semester. So I, I had two full years, um, of debate right at the tail end of my college career, uh, with your high school classmate, Adam. And Adam and I actually, uh, closed it out by winning the North American championships, which was pretty cool.

• 28:49Logan Bartlett?

  He's a smart guy. He was, uh, most likely to succeed in my high school graduating class. He beat me.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Very nice.

• 28:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Uh, and then.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Well, look at you now.

• 28:57Logan Bartlett?

  I know, I know. I have a podcast and he doesn't. Uh, jokes on him. No, Adam Goldstein, uh, was the founder of, uh, of Hit Monk, which people might know. And now I think he's, uh, last I talked to him, which was a couple of months ago, he's like living in Montana somewhere.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. The last time I talked to him, he was, uh, he had, uh, learned to fly and was flying a small plane, uh, kind of around the country on some sort of, you know, self-guided tour, which sounded like a pretty cool adventure.

• 29:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. God bless. I think he was being, he was a visiting something for Y accommodator as well, but good guy. Um, so, so you did that and then, uh, came back and got your masters.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:30Logan Bartlett?

  At MIT.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I actually, uh, worked at Bridgewater Associates in the summer of 2008 as an intern. It was definitely an interesting time to be in the hedge fund world as the financial crisis was getting started.

• 29:41Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting time, interesting place.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely. And an interesting time to be at an interesting place.

• 29:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'd imagine.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  As they were kind of on the cusp of starting to really grow and become a little bit more notorious, uh, you know, for their culture than their, their performance necessarily. And so came back, finished my senior year and was actually gonna go back to Bridgewater for the summer again and then come back to MIT and probably work in the PDS group, which is a distributed systems group for my master's degree. But I got this call from Hal Abelson in April and Hal is a professor at MIT and I had actually worked with him as a course assistant through the curriculum. One of the upsides of me having already done the University of Minnesota's Beginning Computer Science curriculum is that when I first started at MIT, the first computer science class that

• 30:29Speaker 02

  you take, which used to be called 6001, actually used the same exact textbook as the one that I had taken in Minnesota. So there was another offering being given. It was an experimental new course of the kind of new computer science curriculum. It was being taught by Hal, who coincidentally is the person that wrote the textbook that was there. And there were only about, I think, 10 or 12 of us that opted to do it because 6001 was definitely a legendary class and a lot of people wouldn't pass up the opportunity to take it. I had already kind of taken a class with the textbook and here I had this opportunity to take a class being taught by the guy that wrote the textbook. So I took that. And then over the course of the next four years, was involved in that new curriculum. When they offered it the second time, there were only 10 of us that had taken it before,

• 31:14Speaker 02

  so we were ripe for choosing to be course assistants or lab assistants. So I got to know Hal and he was taking a year off of MIT to go do a sabbatical. And on his sabbatical, he was a visiting professor at Google, which is, in their system is technically, you're an intern. So Hal liked to call himself Google's oldest intern. But when he got to Google, he obviously had this long lineage of people that he had taught, all these PhDs and other people he'd worked with in the past. So he had pulled together a group of people that he had worked with in the past to build a visual programming language for building Android applications. And the goal with it was to kind of bring it into the lineage, if you're familiar with things like Scratch or Logo or Star Logo, which today are used to teach kids of all

• 31:59Speaker 02

  ages computer science. We wanted to kind of build one of those for mobile and bring it in. Into the classroom and so there were actually pilots with like Harvard, MIT, with Georgia Tech, with University of Michigan, with UCSF, a number of other participating schools. So Hal called me and was forming this team to start this project called App Inventor for Android. And you know, it was really exciting to me because Android had just launched that fall. And I had a lot of conviction in mobile and how it was going to change the world. I had a lot of interest as well in just kind of both the educational side of it of, you know, how do we teach more people programming? But also the idea of visual programming languages is really interesting to me. I think I had tried several of them out in the past and felt like they had a really hard time

• 32:43Speaker 02

  kind of breaking through that glass ceiling of functionality and really moving beyond being toys. And so was excited about the opportunity and, you know, called up Bridgewater, told them that I was gonna, you know, pass up on the option of coming back that summer and packed everything up, moved out to San Francisco and worked out of the Android building in Mountain View that summer.

• 33:02Logan Bartlett?

  For Hal, just for the summer?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so I worked there in Mountain View for three months. And then as we got to the end of the summer, the team included a couple other visiting professors and some other people from academia. So we were going to lose about half of the team as we went into the fall, but we're going to run these pilots for all of the introductory computer science curriculum. And so they needed more people on the team and I kind of volunteered up that, you know, I would be able to keep working as long as we could figure out some way for me to pay for my master's degree, you know, when we got back. And so Google offered to fund a research assistantship. And I ended up with a pretty good setup where I went back, you know, I had a class, one class that I had to finish for my master's and I had to write the thesis. And I continued working on the project at Google and then wrote my thesis about the project itself.

• 33:48Logan Bartlett?

  Cool. So you graduated in four years?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  So I did, yeah, I did my undergraduate in the normal four years, graduated in summer of 2009 and then came back and did my master's in a semester and then finished at the end of January in 2010.

• 34:02Logan Bartlett?

  Got it. And undergrad was in?

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Computer science, yeah. So they were both in computer science.

• 34:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, got it. And so then you did all that and Bridgewater is still hanging around? And like, what was the? I guess you were there for a summer at that point. You had been at Bridgewater doing?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so working on the team called Cortech and basically what we worked on were all the systems that were shared across other groups. So all the kind of common infrastructure, data manipulation systems, etc.

• 34:29Logan Bartlett?

  A place known for sharing, but this is actually the infrastructure. So and you went back there to pay off student loans? Like, remind me, you knew you wanted to do something entrepreneurial, but you're like, hey, I need to do something that pays me first?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I, you know, for a variety of family reasons, you know, and also with the student loan kind of hovering over me, didn't have really the financial independence to be able to go and take big risks at the time. And so, you know, I also really loved the team that I worked with at Bridgewater and the challenge of the problems that we were working on. And so I made the call to move back. And then the way that I lived my life when I was there was very cheaply. You know, I shared a house in Connecticut with like four other people. I think my rent was like 540 bucks a month while I was working at Bridgewater. And so I was able to just, you know, save a ton of money and very quickly got my student loans paid off. And, you know, the situation with my family improved over that time period as well. And so, you know, that kind of got me to the point where I felt like there was an opportunity for me to, you know, jump out of the nest, if you will.

• 35:28Logan Bartlett?

  A lot of entrepreneurs at that Bridgewater kind of Cortech, kind of coming out of that group. I know we at least have Nick from Gartner in the portfolio, Domino Data Labs, like all these guys were now Cedar are all interesting.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. It was a, you know, it was a great time. They had a few years of really good college recruiting and we were all together. You know, it was, it was kind of an awesome group to be a part of because, you know, when you look at all the businesses that have been built by people that came out of there, it's rare that you would get all of those people in one place. And, you know, the major reason we were able to is because everyone was earlier in their career.

• 36:01Logan Bartlett?

  Bridgewater's culture, for people that don't know, is, how would you describe it? How would you describe like what their ethos is and a lot of the stuff that they, yeah, kind of believe in?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the key parts of the ethos are, you know, having a heavy emphasis on direct communication, on, you know, they call it radical transparency and using that to really deeply diagnose root causes of issues. Use, you know, dig into things to get really base level understanding and then extrapolate that all the way up. And that that goes into their investment process as well. They want to kind of deeply understand all these big systems in the world, you know, they're a global macro fund. So they're, you know, they're not, you know, coming in and out of equities all the time and things like that. Like they certainly do do equity trading, but you know, they're really interested in understanding how the major parts of the world fit together, work together, interact with each other. And then they apply that same thing to a lot of

• 36:53Speaker 02

  their culture, which is that if we can get to a deep understanding of people and what their strengths and weaknesses are and, you know, how they work together and when, when we have bad outcomes in the business, if we can kind of unemotionally investigate those and really understand, you know, where things broke and we can fix them, we'll be stronger through this process of doing, you know, being direct with each other, having a lot of transparency in the environment from a communication standpoint, and then not hesitating to really dig deeply into root causes of issues.

• 37:22Logan Bartlett?

  And so that manifested itself in like all meetings are publicly available or something? All communication within the firm is kind of publicly? How does that actually?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's still strong firewalls between certain teams, right?

• 37:33Logan Bartlett?

  From a compliance standpoint.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, from it's both a compliance standpoint and also just an internal internal control standpoint. But things like the equivalent of the board meetings at Bridgewater are recorded and shared. And not only that, they're actually adapted into like coursework for everyone to do, where you listen to certain recordings and passages from what are called, you know, the management committee meetings. And so that there is a, there's a high level of transparency. One of the things that I really liked about that being, you know, a junior employee in, you know, in one of many departments was that I actually had a purview across the whole company. And so if you're a curious person, you're able to very quickly learn a lot about how the business operates and how decisions are made in various places. You, you don't need to have like, you know, you don't need to be in the room where it happened, you know,

• 38:18Speaker 02

  if you will, because the transparency actually gives you that opportunity where if your ears are open or, you know, you're paying attention, you're actually able to learn well outside of your role. And I did find that to be super valuable, especially when I first got there.

• 38:30Logan Bartlett?

  From a learning standpoint, I totally get that. Are there other elements? I mean, it's been described to me. I think Ray Dalio is a very well-respected thinker. The culture itself, I would say is unusual, at least compared to other organizations. Are there elements of that that you've internalized and have actually brought to Braze? Or is it sort of just like interesting as a young person developing?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would say that a lot of the things that attracted me to Bridgewater's culture in the first place, I carried with me to Braze as an individual. And then have expressed that into our culture. I also think that there's a lot of lessons that I learned about kind of how Bridgewater worked to scale their culture and places where they went wrong and that. I think it's also important to realize that, you know, running a hedge fund in the woods in Connecticut is very different from a labor market, you know, from a like, there's a lot of other kind of advantages that they have that most scaling startups do not. And, you know, they can lean into aspects of those in order to run their culture the way that they want to. But that doesn't mean that that should be directly applicable to, you know, other industries, other company sizes, other talent pools, things like that.

• 39:37Logan Bartlett?

  So you were there for two years?

• 39:39Speaker 02

  I was there for about a year and a half.

• 39:41Logan Bartlett?

  Year and a half. And so Appboy, tell me the founding story of Appboy.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Right. So as I mentioned, you know, got kind of out from under my, the financial storm clouds that were over me and, you know, always had this entrepreneurial itch and had also been exposed to mobile in the very early days, you know, through my time at Google and through my time at MIT. And so I really wanted to, you know, get out into what was, in my opinion, like a fast-growing, you know, market. I had super high conviction that mobile was going to change the world. You know, in much the same way that I had watched the internet change the world as I was growing up in rural Minnesota and really wanted to be a part of that. And so I, you know, started to pick my head up and pay attention to the startup world a little bit more. This was 2011. John Hyman, who is Braze's CTO today and was my other third co-founder

• 40:32Speaker 02

  back in the day, John and I were the two technical co-founders. So I was CTO at the time, John was CIO, and then Mark Girmazian was our CEO. So John and I actually already knew each other. John was my boss when I first started at Bridgewater. And you know, we quickly became friends and John really helped mentor me through my early days, especially at Bridgewater, to come up to speed more quickly. And he had left earlier in 2011 and was, you know, looking for new opportunities actively. And he invited me to participate in the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon with him. And I actually already had plans that weekend. I was supposed to go up to Ray's Vermont Hunting Lodge, you know, where they bring interns up there and you can go and shoot trap and, you know, generally enjoy the space, which is, which is pretty cool.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  But, you know, doing a programming, overnight programming competition also sounded pretty cool. So, you know, I canceled on that.

• 41:22Logan Bartlett?

  I would have picked Ray Dalio's Hunting Lodge personally, but I think this worked out.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, my girlfriend who was supposed to go with me would have agreed with you as well. So I actually did also cancel on her for that weekend.

• 41:31Logan Bartlett?

  Ex-girlfriend.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, ex-girlfriend. And the, and so, yeah, we came down to New York and did the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. That was something that we ended up doing very well in. You know, I think the headline, they didn't have a formal winner. We were one of five finalists. They said, you know, we took top honors at it. And, you know, that actually resulted in a lot of inbound interest coming in. John and I both got, you know, a lot of people reaching out. We had a couple of video interviews on TechCrunch as a result of going through that hackathon. So by and large, you know, there was a bunch of opportunity that essentially became available. And I was at Bridgewater and, you know, I kind of decided like, okay, you know, our stock is high right now, right? There's a lot of awareness for John and I.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  We should leverage this into getting started on a new opportunity and, you know, the time to do it is now. And so I, you know, decided that I was gonna leave Bridgewater and then just needed to figure out, you know, which opportunity I wanted to take part in. During that hackathon, John and I were actually walking back to the conference on Tuesday morning, you know, day two of it. And John was on the phone with his girlfriend, who is not his ex-girlfriend, but actually now his wife. And he was talking to her and so I didn't have anyone to talk to. I started chatting up the guy in the crosswalk next to me, who happened to be Bipul Singh, who was actually a partner at Lightspeed at the time, later became- The CEO of Rubrik and he then recognized us on stage the next day when we were presenting

• 42:56Speaker 02

  our project and tracked me down and the email went something like, hey, I don't know if you remember me, we met in a crosswalk, but you know, saw you up on stage and I've got this friend who lives down in Houston, his name is Mark and he's been looking to, you know, start something in the mobile space and I think you two should chat.

• 43:10Logan Bartlett?

  Had Mark started, like was Appboy incorporated at that point? Mark was doing, uh, energy trading?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, no, it was, uh, oil and natural gas, like full on, you know, drilling and production and everything. Yeah. Had like geologists on the, on the payroll and all that.

• 43:24Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. So I knew, I knew it was something like that. So, so, uh, Mark was living in Houston. Uh, had, was Appboy incorporated?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yes, it was. So Mark had actually started.

• 43:33Logan Bartlett?

  This is a long way of saying who's to blame for the name.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  So Mark had actually started, um, a different company idea called Appboy a few years prior to that. Uh, it actually, uh, he got a, some, a cool press piece where the BBC called it one of the best websites on the internet in, call it, I don't know, 2009, 2010. And that, that article is, you can still find it somewhere. Um, but, uh, it was, his idea was to build kind of a, a social network for app developers, um, where every app would have a landing page, uh, and would have like a little community on the web where their users could come and interact with them. They would, uh, suggest different features for it, et cetera. Uh, and he, you know, worked on that, started to grow it, uh, as a side project, um, ultimately ended up shutting that down, you know, like for a variety of reasons. It just didn't kind of reach the traction that he expected.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  You know, it was, it was an interesting bridge idea because it was, you know, it just had its face. It was on the web, trying to engage with mobile audiences, right? Which is interesting. Uh, but trying to build communities around it. So that had been fully shut down at the time, but, uh, he already had, you know, 11,000 Twitter followers and already had the domain names and everything. And so, um, you know, when we got things started, uh, we actually, there was, there was never even a conversation that we would change the name. We, we really just kind of drafted off of the prior work that Mark had done there.

• 44:46Logan Bartlett?

  And, and so the product itself, so now today, Breeze, uh, which was renamed at some point.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Late 2017.

• 44:54Logan Bartlett?

  Which I, which I, uh, advocated for, for a while, but, uh, there, uh, the, the thesis behind it, was it rooted at?

• 45:03Logan Bartlett?

  Always going to be mobile and marketing automation, communication. Was that like what it was from the start?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it wasn't. I wouldn't go so far as to say marketing automation because when we started, we didn't think about marketers being our customers. We actually were thinking about app developers being the customers.

• 45:19Logan Bartlett?

  For a long time, and people kind of forget this, but like there was a question of was mobile going to be its own ecosystem? And it was going to be standalone or were the communication channels going to be like marketing, marketing, customer support, customer support, you know, whatever, sales, sales and all those things. Was it going to be like a standalone mobile or was it going to be verticalized by?

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, to be fair, at the time as well, there were a lot of mobile apps that had a lot of excitement and investment, but there were none that were actually building sustainable businesses, right? Like there was no one that really had a revenue model in mobile in 2011, 2012.

• 45:49Logan Bartlett?

  Because the App Store came out in 08, right? Or oh?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it was, it was a bit later than that. It depends on whether we're talking about iOS or Android. But yeah, we were still in the infancy, right? We were in this, we were in this like period where you could put an app in the App Store and people would download it exactly because there were so few apps in the App Store that you could kind of download, you know, whatever looked cool, right? App discovery was, was certainly not a big issue at the time.

• 46:12Logan Bartlett?

  So what was the thesis at founding?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, primarily two things. One, that, you know, the huge businesses would be born and built to be mobile first. And then the second one, that the wide scale adoption of mobile by consumers would lead to, you know, a sea change in terms of how we interact with technology, how we interact with businesses, et cetera. And so what we wanted to do was look at mobile, both as the consumer touch point, but also look at how it would change our relationship with technology and what opportunities that would afford people building businesses in mobile. And so the, you know, the founding team, we didn't have experience in marketing. I, you know, speaking for myself, wouldn't have been able to tell you what the acronym CRM or SaaS meant when we started the company. And we were really just from first principles, trying to figure out, you know,

• 46:58Speaker 02

  how do you build a more engaging and long-term user base of a mobile app? So if I've got a mobile app and I want to turn it into a business, I need the kind of usage patterns of my, you know, users to be more than just them downloading the app and then disappearing. Right? I need to keep them around. I need to show them value. I need to have them develop habits and loyalty. And you know, become organic promoters of what I'm doing. You know, eventually we would figure out how to have them pay for things as well. In order to really drive those revenue models, but that that wasn't really part of the mobile ecosystem at the time. I actually remember having conversations in 2011, 2012, where we had this toolkit. And we could prove that it helped, you know, drive additional usage of a mobile app over time.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  And I had this app developer tell me that he actually wanted his customers to stop using his app as soon as possible after downloading it. Because he had already sold it to them for $1.99. And the longer they used it, the longer he was gonna have to pay for server bills for them. Right? And I just remember thinking to myself like, well, that's not a good customer. Also, this just doesn't feel sustainable.

• 48:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  That that model of like, you know, pay a pittance for a mobile app to download it and then you own it forever. And there's an expectation that people will maintain and keep a meaningful service running forever. You know, that that clearly wasn't going to work out. And that's why we see that most, you know, successful mobile business nowadays are run on some version of subscription. Or, you know, continuing transactions and things like that. And that was what we needed to eventually happen because we were really building for the long term. But that wasn't really how mobile was operating in the early days.

• 48:30Logan Bartlett?

  So from an architecture standpoint, I think one of the things that was kind of the aha moment for me when we invested was mobile was interesting-ish, but the architectural decisions that you guys made, you were early adopters of Kafka, you were early adopters of Snowflake, you were early adopters of Mongo. Like at a commercial scale. And so were you, in terms of future proofing for all the data ingestion and all that stuff? That now enables you to send notifications across email, across SMS, across in-app notification, across web push, all of that stuff. Were you just like, hey, this is cool tech and we need to? Be forward-thinking in the tech that we adopt so that we can recruit cool people?

• 49:14Logan Bartlett?

  Or were you thinking that like, hey, setting up this schema and this architecture in such a meaningful way will allow us to have a more holistic view of the customer and therefore be able to be much more flexible of the types of communication we can do?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a few things, you know, and I would also call out that with the exception of Mongo, those other technologies were not in use when we started the company.

• 49:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we have always been kind of on the leading edge of adopting new technologies. We were also, you know, I was on some of the first alpha technology preview calls for Kafka streaming and Kafka Connect, which Confluent obviously commercialized. But prior to that, we had already built out a stream processor, you know, largely on our own by kind of pulling together open source software with our own development. And those concepts were baked in from the very beginning. And it's interesting you say, you know, mobile was interesting, but the architecture, because the architecture is exactly driven by what makes mobile unique and special. I think, you know, the other thing is that we weren't held back by an understanding of how marketing technology had been built, so.

• 50:13Logan Bartlett?

  Which was mostly, I mean, all the people that you're now displacing are, their architecture is centered off of an email address for the most part, right?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, the data models are usually centered on email addresses and, you know, a lot of, especially if we're talking about the legacy clouds like Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, et cetera, you know, which were all kind of foundationally built around these ESPs, like the email server providers founded around 2000. A lot of those products were built to send email campaigns, right? And when you think about kind of the performance demands of something like that, you know, if you, just to take some simple examples, if you have a five-second delay before you get an email, you probably don't even notice that. You got to switch to your email inbox, your, you know, your muscle memory probably refreshes it when you open it anyway, you know, you've already waited five seconds.

• 50:54Logan Bartlett?

  Who knows if it was the Wi-Fi or whatever.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, similarly, like an email campaign goes out, you know, and you're actually, as the sender, probably more concerned about throughput than you are about the time to first send, as another simple example, right? But if you're gonna.

• 51:06Logan Bartlett?

  Throughput being, did it actually get there versus how long did it take to get there?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  That would be deliverability, throughput being like the rate at which something is delivered, right? So, for instance, if it takes me 30 seconds before I send the first message, but thereafter I send it 100,000 messages a second, right, I, you know, if I'm sending a big. Campaign out, all I care about is how many got sent in the first minute.

• 51:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Whereas if I'm dispatching a single message to someone, the thing I care about is the latency of that first message.

• 51:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Right? And, and the other interesting thing is that if you're going to be in a product experience, then even five seconds is inexcusable, right? You're not going to wait there while your, while a mobile app is frozen for five seconds, waiting for the inbox to load, right?

• 51:42Logan Bartlett?

  Your driver's on its way and, you know, at that point, you're too pressured.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. There's, there's a lot more real time usage that happens.

• 51:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  And so when you look at the performance pressure of being able to communicate on a one-on-one basis, which was now possible at any time, which was now possible because people were bringing these devices with their, with them everywhere that they went. Um, you were going to have to compete in a more noisy environment because, oh, by the way, everyone else has the opportunity to commute with, to, um, to communicate with people at any time as well. And so we just looked at, you know, what are the pressures that are going to be placed on this combined with the opportunities? We're going to have the opportunity to interact with consumers directly. We're going to be able to, you know, reach out to contact them whenever we want. Uh, but we're going to be in a noisy environment and we want to make sure that the experience is holistic, right? The idea that you would have a separate email team from a push notification service,

• 52:31Speaker 02

  from an in-product messaging or whatever, was like not something we ever even considered because we were trying to solve a higher level problem.

• 52:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  The higher level problem was how do you build good relationships with people? And, you know, the answer to that includes being able to communicate with them wherever they are and doing it in a way that's relevant and that is experienced by them as a holistic experience. And so you just kind of take those pressures and you put them on the technology and it demanded that we build a, you know, real time capability. And so we did that through one at a time stream processing. You know, everything in Braze is event-driven. We process, uh, new events that come to us instantaneously as they come in. That gives us an ability to be interactive in the moment, which lets us use the same architecture, the same targeting techniques, the same personalization techniques to deliver messages to you in the flow of a product experience in the same way that we would an SMS or an email or whatever that would come out of band.

• 53:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  And I think when, you know, when we looked at that, it was logical. But again, we weren't kind of held back by the way that marketing technology was built. Because we didn't even know that we were building something that would eventually be used by marketers.

• 53:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's almost like you you were baptized by fire in that mobile. You were ingesting a bunch of different data. There wasn't a single identifier that you needed. If this mobile app might be single sign on through Facebook, this one might be email address sign on. This one might be third party anonymous, and so you needed to have the flexibility around that. And then mobile app performance expectations were so much higher. And so it's almost like you had to build for the future of where everything would go, starting with mobile.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then from a systems perspective, there were interesting things, too. You know, you look at the email service providers and their Super Bowl is Black Friday every year. And that like by far is early and like Cyber Monday, just kind of that weekend. That is by far the highest load that they experienced in any given year. But you know, that's tied by and large to US, the US population, which is, you know, 300 and odd million people. And it's only for a few days and it's predictable. You know exactly when it's going to be. You know, the early days of mobile, I remember us having these huge traffic loads on Thursdays. And we like didn't know why in the early days. And it was like, it turned out that we had this application called PickStitch, which people would use to make, you know, to make like composite images that they would post on Instagram for Throwback Thursday.

• 54:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  And us being kind of, you know, out of the loop, we didn't know about Throwback Thursday, but we were just getting these massive server loads every, you know, every Thursday. And then we started to bring on other international clients. And it's like Black Friday is a big deal. You know what's much bigger deal is the Cricket World Cup, right? And not only that, but that's not, that's happening at least on a surprising schedule to us because we don't even know what these culture events were that were leading to massive audiences. And they were often happening in the middle of the night in Eastern time or what have you. And so from a, you know, kind of trial by fire standpoint, definitely the ability for the system to be able to elastically scale up and down in response to demand that would often just show up and then be globally distributed. There's a, you know, it basically looks like being hit by a distributed denial of service attack all the time as these things happen.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  And in many cases, we would cause them as well because if you send out a campaign and the campaign works, then everyone suddenly shows up in the app at the same time as well. So we actually, we were dealing with really big audiences. They were spread out around the world. Their load demands were unpredictable. And we were trying to deliver on this performance guarantee that was just as capable of delivering, you know, an email as it was of actually rendering something in the flow of a product experience, which has much higher demands on it.

• 55:56Logan Bartlett?

  How much of this, as we, I mean, we can look back and tell a narrative of how future-proofed this made you guys today to be the public company that you are. Did you, how much of this was, hey, this is where the world's going to end up going, and so we need to service this? Like, you could have said no to some of those customers, maybe they were great customers, but like, you could have said, hey, you know, this is actually going to break our entire infrastructure to deal with this, and you're a one-off person that has to do this. And so, how much were you thinking about, like, just solving the problems as needed at the time versus how the rest of the world might end up being, getting to that point, that whatever that load was on the cricket match is probably what, you know, an average Braze customer does to your servers these days, right?

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, a few things. One, I think we always embraced those, those customers that really pushed us in various ways because, you know, I think the, the power user, if you're building for them and you're satisfying them, then you're, you're gonna kind of also satisfy, you know, the rest of the adoption curve in a more meaningful way.

• 56:58Logan Bartlett?

  I remember Tinder as an enterprise customer, and I was like, I'm not sure if this is enterprise. I remember us having this debate, and you're like, no, I mean, it's actually, they're pushing our infrastructure. They're paying us a ton, they have tons of users, and they're pushing our infrastructure. And I was like, okay.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and there's a lot of people, you know, we have this expressive visual programming language called Canvas, and, you know, we would have people that would build out these campaigns that would just do, you know, I always like, oh man, that's really clever, right?

• 57:22Logan Bartlett?

  And Canvas, by the way, so just for people that, so Canvas is basically a, a visual guide of if this, then that, kind of the flow-through campaign builder that you'll do. Hey, if Logan picks up his phone and responds, then don't send another message. But if not, then if he, if he ignores that, send an email over here, or whatever, all the complicated logic.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and it's, it's kind of a full circle thing for me that I, I had to chuckle at as I realized it a few years ago, which is if you, you go back to my story about my master's degree, I was gonna go work in the Distributed Systems Group. I ended up working on a visual programming language. And, you know, when you look at Braze today, it's effectively a visual programming language that sits on top of a stream processor that runs as a giant distributed system, which is, is a pretty cool connection.

• 58:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, interesting. So in terms of, so all that architecture was built out and you guys were hitting your stride. And there was a few of these customers, I remember when we were doing the diligence, a few of these customers, we were like, are these gonna sustain, are these gonna be like huge businesses that are gonna be able to keep going? But eventually the market caught up to what you guys are doing. And the mainstream of, you know, whatever, airlines and hospitality and financial services and all that stuff, needed the infrastructure that you had built out.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And it took evolution on a lot of different dimensions. You know, consumers had to, as a simple thing, you probably remember people being apprehensive about putting their credit card number into a phone. Again, that seems quaint. I remember all the debates about like, should I really pay for an app the same amount I would pay for a coffee, you know, or this idea of digital goods? We also, you know, when smartphones first launched, like GPSs would just drain the battery down immediately. So a lot of these location-enabled services that we have nowadays were not feasible. You couldn't stream even music in the early days of mobile, you know, in the early days of kind of Android and iOS and the App Store. So there was a lot where the technology caught up, the cell networks caught up, consumer sentiment caught up. And then the businesses, you know, enterprises started to really realize that there was opportunity here.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  And, you know, that didn't happen until, in the enterprise meaningfully, until 2015, 2016, 2017. You know, it's part of the reason that, if we go all the way back to the beginning of this, you know, it took us a while to raise financing in that time period because we weren't yet at the point where the enterprise was really taking mobile seriously. To the extent that the classic enterprise had mobile apps, it was usually some sort of innovation team, you know, and they were building something and they, you know, would treat it as a toy. They wouldn't hesitate to shut it down if it wasn't getting early traction because it hadn't really been integrated into their broader strategy. And then what we really started to see that really was the turning point was when businesses started to rethink their overall strategy to incorporate mobile into it. And so it wasn't just like, oh, hey, there's mobile, what do I do with it?

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  It was rather like, oh, mobile is the way I'm gonna communicate with my customers in the future. And thereafter, how do I change the way I do business in order to take advantage of that opportunity?

• 1:00:15Logan Bartlett?

  And you had built the The architecture that, you know, a square was a rectangle, but a rectangle wasn't a square. And so you were able to use mobile as a wedge and your architecture allowed you to then go do email. I remember there was a case study I actually helped, I forget if it was you or Miles, build the night before you came into Pitch Battery. But it was the iHeartRadio example of like, you landed with mobile, right? You got some funky little app, maybe it was a side project, then you sold over to the main app, right? Then you expanded volume, then you sold over into displacing their email, right? And they were paying whatever, a couple million bucks to Exact Target or responses or Oracle, Salesforce, whatever it was, right? And you were able to use that as a wedge and then you were built to go do email as well.

• 1:00:59Logan Bartlett?

  That was almost like, you know, whatever, playing on eight foot hoop after you were competing on a 10 foot hoop.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, email audiences were kind of definitely a lot smaller than the mobile audiences. We were, we ran into a whole bunch of conversations where customers were really concerned about, you know, they were concerned about performance delivery and we were just like, we can so easily do this. Like what, what must be going on in the legacy, you know, email providers?

• 1:01:21Logan Bartlett?

  Their SLAs were like, what, 30 minutes or something? And your SLAs were like 0.3 seconds or something?

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. Like we were just operating in a totally different universe and we didn't even realize that we were. Right now, to their credit, we were also missing features that they had that were probably table six for marketers that we didn't know about.

• 1:01:35Logan Bartlett?

  Which is a lot of the visual canvas stuff.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, like, you know, for instance, we only had a drag and drop email editor as of a couple of years ago, right? And, and so there was a lot that they had built because we again, didn't think we were building marketing technology out of the gate. So we had to catch up on that, but the underlying data models and the performance of what we had was really head and shoulders above what was available. Another, you know, interesting anecdote, you bring up iHeartRadio. The first time they sent out a large campaign, they actually gave us a heads up because it included an image in it. And I guess when they had been working with Salesforce or whoever it was, they had to give them notice in advance because they needed to like seed their CDNs to actually host the images. Because when it went out, it was just like a lot of bandwidth. And we had never even thought about that, right?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Like the system was just built to handle that. So they sent us in the notice and it took us a while to even figure out like what they were asking about. And then we were like, oh yeah, no, that's not an issue. You definitely don't need to tell us, you know, before you're doing this.

• 1:02:35Logan Bartlett?

  What do you feel like, and I don't know if you, we didn't talk about this before, but was there anything that if you were giving advice to like an entrepreneur, if you were to go run it back, right? Let's just say, Braze's got acquired one day and you decided to go get, start another business, right? Was there anything philosophically that you would go do either differently or make sure you do again? That like an entrepreneur or I don't know, as an investor looking at companies that you feel like you guys really, really got right? And it could be something we touched on here or something that, you know, it just comes to mind.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, one of them is something that we've been doing since the, you know, the series C, when we almost ran out of money, which is to make sure you've got a cash cushion, right? You never know what's going to happen in the environment and you need to make sure that you can live to, you know, to fight another day, kind of no matter what, what comes at you. And so that's something where we got lucky on that, but we, you know, effectively ran out of or almost ran out of money twice before we even got to our series C. And thankfully we live, but it was, you know, it was touch and go there a couple of times. And so, you know, one of the things would just be to, you know, certainly prioritize surviving so that you can make it through any sort of market conditions. And so that's, you know, that, that is one thing.

• 1:03:53Logan Bartlett?

  Survival is a precondition to success, right?

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  It absolutely is, you know, and, and making sure that, that you've got both a handle on the financing. You always know, you know, the, the point where the crisis has already happened is not the time to be asking yourself whether you know, how to pull the right levers to be able to conserve cash and extend runway and things like that. That should be a muscle that you have all the time and it's important to put in the culture, you know, Niraj, you know, your, your partner who joined as the series C came in, he always used to say in board meetings, burn is sticky. And, you know, the, the point was that, you know, you look at so many investor decks and so many projections from so many companies, and they all project that they're going to get more efficient in outer years. And it doesn't happen, right? Why burn is sticky? A big reason for that is that it's cultural. And so I think that just having a

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  Consistent culture that that ignores the kind of investor sentiment and stays hooked on to fundamentals. Right? Like if investors are telling you growth at all costs and revenue growth matters more than profitability. Like, just don't listen to them. Like, it's not, it's, you know, it might be true in the moment, but it's not going to be true forever. And so, you know, making sure that you stay attached to long-term business fundamentals, that you keep that eye towards spend discipline and efficiency. You know, really have a good handle on your unit economics, like that always matters. And so that's, that's one big one.

• 1:05:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And just, I mean, you guys internalize this, your last round, you raised of primary capital was 850 valuation in what year?

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  That was in the fall of 2018.

• 1:05:17Logan Bartlett?

  2018. So you haven't touched any, I guess you took IPO.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also we, we then made it, you know, three years and change to, to the IPO without raising any incremental capital. And actually, I think we, we had spent like single-digit millions of that 80 when we hit the IPO.

• 1:05:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  And that included, you know, all the way through COVID as well.

• 1:05:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. One of the other things, I mean, I think you've, even when we diligent stuff and I ask you about companies. I feel like you're always thinking through the path of progress and making sure you're in the path of progress. That it's not some bridge technology that you're solving for some moment in time. And it seems like you guys have done a really good job of like, you know, the, the, the old adage of skating where the puck is going. Right? Eventually, what the sophisticated people are doing today is

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Going to be table stakes tomorrow.

• 1:06:07Logan Bartlett?

  Should go mainstream. Like, sometimes you can be academic in a lab and solving a very niche problem. But like, by and large, if you're, if you're building for the future, people are going to catch up to where you're going.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then we also talk a lot internally about making sure that we're on the right side of history.

• 1:06:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  When it comes to things like privacy and other sorts of topics like that, that have evolved over time. You know, and so the early days of location, it was exciting and novel that you could have someone's location. And, and that was pretty cool. You know, the, the launch of Foursquare at South by and kind of going back to that region. A lot of the, you know, things like Tinder and such that were, social networks or dating apps driven entirely by location. It was cool and it was novel. And there was a lot of Potential for marketing use cases, but we realized pretty early on that it was also violating people's privacy. And where you are is one of the things that you kind of hold most dear in terms of your privacy. It's, you know, it's right up there with what you say.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  And so we actually, despite, you know, we built out some early geofencing capability to help run through certain use cases. But we didn't lean into really developing the location technology much beyond that out of the box geofencing that, you know, Android and iOS supported natively. Because I felt like it was an area that would get increased consumer scrutiny over time. And then eventually, you know, what would, what follows that is platform scrutiny changes in iOS and Android. What follows that is legal scrutiny. Somewhere in the middle there, you know, journalists pick up on it. You start, you get your New York Times exposes on, you know, on where your location data is going. And, you know, those are, those are things that can be predicted, right? And there's a headline just this week, actually, that Coinbase is, you know, under scrutiny for selling location data

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  to like the Department of Homeland Security or whomever it was, right? And I don't know the details of that story, but the case in point is that, you know, that is something that is, is a, that has been a long progression of increased scrutiny on that. And we could see that back in 2013, right? And so we made the decision not to lean a ton of R and D into that. Similarly, we've never been reliant on the IDFA, right? We, in the early days, we're like, we don't-

• 1:08:08Logan Bartlett?

  Explain IDFA.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Uh, IDFA is the identifier for advertising. Was, I think, relatively unknown amongst investors until a change in how IDFA worked caused Facebook to lower their revenue guidance by $10 billion, right? But-

• 1:08:20Logan Bartlett?

  App-tracking transparency and all that.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. So it's, it's used to help identify mobile users, primarily for advertising use cases. Before that, there was a thing called the UDID, which, which was even more problematic from a privacy perspective. And we actually just, in the, from the earliest days, we actually didn't use those things. We didn't need to. All we had to know was that you were still the same person as you were before. But we didn't want to actually go and like look you up and in a demographic database and find out what the ad networks think they know about you. You know, we were content just being a good listener in the first party, in the first party data ecosystem. And so that meant that over the years as GDPR showed up, as you know, the IDFA changes,

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  like that's been kind of every 12 to 18 months for the last five years, we haven't had to waste any time, you know, running around, changing our products, like, you know, guiding customers through things because we've had those tough conversations about, you know, being on the right side of history and making sure that we're building in a way that is friendly to consumers. And that has allowed us to not have these things show up and be existential. You know, you probably remember when GDPR launched, a whole bunch of American businesses shut down their websites in Europe because they couldn't be compliant. And there were a number of, you know, members or like businesses in the ad tech space that shut down their European operations, or they lost whole lines of business and things like that. And it's so ridiculous because the way that, you know, consumer sentiment and the legal sentiment is moving was entirely predictable. And so from that perspective,

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  you know, we've always tried to not only, you know, skate to where the puck is going from a technology perspective, but also tried to pay attention to, you know, these broader things around governance and consumer sentiment and just make sure that we're really attached to the humanity of this problem.

• 1:10:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yep. That makes sense. So, so shifting gears a little bit. So you, you touched on this earlier, but you were originally CTO.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:10:10Logan Bartlett?

  And John was CIO, which is funny. CIO now in retrospect, like I didn't think anything of it at the time, but you were like a 20 person company or whatever with a CIO.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, and John and I, actually, the way that was decided, I think we were both on the couch and we Googled like, what's the difference between a CTO and a CIO and just kind of, you know, it was, it was scarcely more than flipping a coin to decide those things in the early days.

• 1:10:31Logan Bartlett?

  So you took over as CEO, Mark stepped into the chairman role and took over as the CEO at the end of 16, right?

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:10:40Logan Bartlett?

  Six months after we invested or like, whatever, kind of turn of the year.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  I think January 1, 2017 was my first day as CEO.

• 1:10:47Logan Bartlett?

  Official date. I remember talking to different leadership groups within the company at the time and everyone had, you were very much like the heart and soul of all the product direction and engineering and you had recruited all the technical talent, but you're, I mean, I think you're my smartest friend. And I think at times.

• 1:11:05Logan Bartlett?

  People in business units were unsure about like, would you understand their marketing side? I think it was basically they were intimidated that you were so smart and like going about, you know, their world, they were used to a little bit more coddled feelings than maybe the engineering culture, I guess.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, there's just, there's just major differences in culture between like a sales organization and engineering organization.

• 1:11:28Logan Bartlett?

  Versus marketing, versus engineering.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  And, you know, and then, you know, other people are kind of on different dimensions. And, and I think that, you know, there was definitely probably a healthy and correct amount of like concern and worry as to how I would translate, you know, my leadership style from the technical world into some of these other groups, you know, and, and one of the things about engineering, especially at large scale like that is, and, and one of the, the great and terrible things about software is that computers only do exactly what you tell them to do.

• 1:11:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Right? Which means that when they're breaking, it is your fault because you've told them to do something wrong.

• 1:12:00Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  You know, neural nets notwithstanding where, you know, those things get a little bit more of a, become a little bit more of a black box, but, and, and so, you know, the concepts of kind of right and wrong in engineering are, are, you know, very.

• 1:12:13Logan Bartlett?

  More blind and white, binary, if you will.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And so, but when you're dealing with humans, right? When you're in a sales cycle, when you're kind of helping customers onboard, when you're dealing with like technical support, when your counterparty is not a bunch of transistors, right? And a bunch of very clear, you know, binary outcomes, but rather the spectrum of humanity, you know, you, you have different skillsets, you have different ways of organizing the groups that, that actually work with those, like the, the ups and downs of the job are very different. You know, the way that you define success and what makes it difficult are, are, you know, completely, completely different from an engineering org. And so, that was definitely a learning process for me, you know, I had been.

• 1:12:50Logan Bartlett?

  How did you do it so well, though? Because it went from like, okay, I guess we're going to try this, like he's the heart and soul of the company, we should try it, to a month in, it was like, oh wow, this is awesome, to six months in, like, oh my gosh, this is, you know, one of the best CEOs I've ever been around, right? And so, like, how, how did you, was there someone that helped you along the way? Did you know going in, you were going to have to adapt your style? And so you're just super. For paying attention to like how people reacted to you like how were you able to do it so quickly?

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  I definitely knew going in right because I got you know this.

• 1:13:21Logan Bartlett?

  Because we told you.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, this this the sentiment that you brought up was actually brought to me in advance by you know the people around me and you know that transparency is super helpful. I was cognizant of it, paid a lot of attention to it. And you know, I think a big part of it as well is just respecting that there are differences in skill sets and acumen and the way that people think and approach things and and making sure that you've got a certain level of humility whenever you don't have that deep understanding and that deep experience, you know, I definitely even still to this day. The way that I interact with our engineering leadership is very different from the way that I interact with leadership across the rest of the company because I know that one of those areas is one that I grew up in and I have a lot of credibility into the kind of the details of the craft.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  And in other areas, I have no credibility in the details of the craft, right? Like I have intuitions and I have a purview that is broader than they do, right? So I'm seeing more of the company. And that those things are my unique value add. When I go and I work in another group, my value add to marketing or sales is that I'm also paying attention to what's going on, you know, broadly across the rest of the company. My value add is not to to be able to tell them the you know, the specifics of the craft of selling. And so I think just understanding that, paying attention to it and then learning and growing, you know, and being open to that was was really all it was.

• 1:14:37Logan Bartlett?

  Was there someone or something that helped you the most in in getting there or was it just like, hey, I'm an expert over on this side of the house? And I'm going to listen, observe and pick my spots of where I'm going to, you know, add value. This is clearly working. You guys have never missed a number, you know. The business was working extremely well, even even at this point in time. And so you were like, hey, I'm going to be in action mode over here and listen mode over here.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, I think the kind of the sum total of my team as well as having, you know, having my wife there as well to kind of bounce things off of. And that was, it was, it was great to just kind of have an environment that wasn't afraid to speak up and tell me where I was doing things wrong and and you know, and I could observe where I was doing things right and and just to continue to develop that way.

• 1:15:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So you touched on team. I think you've. Assembled a really impressive leadership team. Someone compared it to like team of rivals like Lincoln in his, you know, in the way he assembled his cabinet. But how did you think about like bringing together different personalities at times, different people that are definitely going to disagree about things? How do you think about like recruiting that group together and then making them all work to the optimal decision?

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is it goes back to respecting people and their craft. Right? And and also understanding that we are stronger if we can get a group of people with a diverse set of strengths and be able to have them coexist with each other. Right? And it's it's it's harder to get people that are different from each other to kind of coalesce as a group and be able to move forward together than if you have a bunch of people that are, you know, more homogeneous in various ways. But you also don't have as diverse of a set of strengths. And so in a world that is still so dynamic, right? We we as a company only exist because of the rapid change of both technology from a consumer and adoption standpoint,

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  as well as the kind of technology that we use to enable ourselves to be able to service that opportunity that is is coming to existence because of the way that mobile changed the world and consumers and and brands and what have you. And then we also are in a dynamic world around us. You know, the I've been reflecting recently on how the fact that I've been reading The Economist every week for the last, you know, 15 years is as important for me to make good decisions in my job as my computer science education was because so much of what we deal with nowadays is geopolitical and a lot going on in the macro environment and those kinds of things. And so just respecting that, you know, people come at problems from different ways. They bring different levels of experience. They bring different specialties and disciplines. And if we can get those groups to, you know, coexist together, we will be a stronger whole.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  And so that's something I've always prioritized. I look for that when I bring in leaders. It's funny that you kind of bring it back to Lincoln because I very explicitly actually govern the company with a influence by, you know, federalism and federalism has its faults in in government here. But one of the things that it does. Well, is that it's thoughtful about, you know, what does the kind of federal government or the company-wide, you know, processes and rules and the and the technology choices, the ways we do things, where do we really need to have a company-wide standard? And where can we enable departments to adapt the way that they run their groups in order to better suit their cultures? And so I've empowered my department heads to actually have kind of independence and autonomy

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  in terms of making decisions around a lot of different, you know, policies, everything from, you know, like, for instance, with return to office right now, we have a kind of menu of options, and we've allowed for engineering to take a different choice than, you know, our global services and support group to have a different choice from our sales team. And that, you know, is not, that's something where we certainly benefit from there not being chaos and having everyone in every group just kind of deciding on their own. So that's why we've collapsed it down to a menu. But we also respect that these groups run best if given an ability to adapt the way that they do work to the people that are on those teams and a lot of those things that I spoke about before that really makes these groups different.

• 1:18:38Logan Bartlett?

  So do you think setting that framework of the federal kind of framework for that, like, as well as hiring, as well as messaging to the street? Is that kind of your job as you think about it is to sort of set that and then enable people to succeed?

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the, a lot of that is the always-on responsibility. And then there's also just, you know, keeping a understanding of, you know, where in the business needs more attention at any given time. And that's a constantly rotating problem, right? You know, as, as the company scales and different groups are scaling at different speeds and they're running into new challenges. And, you know, I like to say every team has their own form of production hell. You know, it's, it varies from group to group, but just being there in those moments as well to help, you know, teams through critical transformations or maybe places where, you know, we've got leadership gaps for various reasons and, and, you know, kind of moving around the company in that way and personally assisting.

• 1:19:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, interesting. So, talk to me about going public. So you went public last November.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:19:36Logan Bartlett?

  I was with your, I remember watching it with your mom and dad. They were very, very proud.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Yep, we flew them out. It was well timed, like, Delta had already come back down and Omicron hadn't shown up yet. So we actually managed to sneak in a pretty meaningful in-person celebration for the IPO, even though the roadshow was all virtual and all that.

• 1:19:53Logan Bartlett?

  One of the worst hangovers I've had was the next day after that. I was, I was out too late at a karaoke bar with a lot of your team.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Very nice.

• 1:20:02Logan Bartlett?

  But a fun event. One of the things in talking to people was that you actually shifted the conversation from the IPO itself to IPO readiness.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Public company readiness.

• 1:20:15Logan Bartlett?

  Public company readiness.

• 1:20:18Logan Bartlett?

  How did you, was that something you came up with on your own? What was the principles of that? Because I think it, the way it manifested itself from my perspective was that you were preparing the company to run like your public regardless of what the date was going to be. Because I think it kicked the can at one point. We were going to do it at this point, kicked can a little bit later, and then ended up happening, but it was unclear if there was going to be a window, right?

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:42Logan Bartlett?

  Have we waited another six months? You know, probably would have been another-

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  We've waited another six days.

• 1:20:46Logan Bartlett?

  Six days, and probably, yeah, exactly. We were up against the wall on that. So, how did you think about that? And then how did that manifest itself in action?

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so there were a variety of things. One of them was, you know, advice actually at the, at the board and the investor level to years in advance, start to think about what numbers we would eventually provide guidance on and that we would eventually report on and the, and the types of metrics that, you know, the street would care about. A simple example is like ARR is very important to private investors, right? Revenue is very important to the street, right? And so, they, they basically encouraged us to start to think about, you know, guiding the business in the way that we would when we were public years in advance. And that includes things like, you know, changing the way that we measure the company's performance for bonuses, in terms of thinking about commission plans, in terms of how we qualify sales activity and things like that.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  So, there was already this idea that we should be looking into the future. And using that to inform our behaviors today. Another thing is that I saw some, what I felt were like just bad examples of strategy in a lot of these really big private companies that were avoiding going public. You know, there was all this conversation like, why would I bother to go public? Because I can raise all this late-stage money at these great valuations. And it's like, well, you know, from my perspective, they were just keeping themselves in, you know, the minor leagues for longer. And what that like allowed them to do, it's like if your goal is to avoid scrutiny for longer, you're probably going to build things in your culture that you don't want to be there, right? And you're going to allow certain behaviors to cement themselves. And so from my perspective, like there are aspects of being public, you know, the quarterly

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  cycle can lead to short-term thinking in many ways. You want to make sure you have counterweights to that. Um, you know, there's, there's, you know, all this additional scrutiny, et cetera, but so much of it actually makes you stronger and better. And so from my perspective, there was both the preparation and then also just the understanding that, you know, so many, I think, private company CEOs treat a lot of these public company activities and a lot of the other burdens that it has as like merely transactional costs that is to be avoided as a, you know, maybe it's an, at best, it's a necessary evil. I think I thought a lot about it as just like, these things make us better. They make us stronger, they make us more durable, we're more predictable, we've got, you know, there's less room for mistakes and things like that.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Like if you are a private company and you're able to pass a, you know, an audit on public company accounting standards, as the CEO, that should give you more confidence that everything's being done well, right? So I just, I didn't really understand why someone would want to avoid that, if you will. And so that was another thing that drove toward it. And then the third thing was that I got, I got a lot of advice from people just in terms of, you know, making sure that the company and everyone that was a part of it didn't think of the IPO as the finish line, right? Because it's just another day in the company's history and there's a lot of time after it, you know, if we're going to build a generational company, we need to make sure that we're, we're continuing to think for the long term and we shouldn't have anyone's planning horizon, you know, end on a specific day when we raise money, right? Ultimately.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  And so combining those three things together, just saying like, how do we start to organize our On these things in advance because you can't, you know, as agile as you are as a company, you know, you shouldn't be changing people's comp plans and the way that you define success and things like that, like on an abrupt basis. There's also cultural things that I think you want to layer in. For instance, you do need to become a little bit less transparent as you become public because you can't be inadvertently leaking M N P I throughout your business. And so those were things that, you know, we had to build controls and systems and also build replacements. Because a lot of the things that, you know, you would be transparent about are helpful for people to be able to know. And I don't want to suddenly take away data that was really helping people make better decisions in their job without making sure there was a suitable replacement.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  So those are other things that are are better to do on a longer time horizon. And then, you know, ultimately, I just thought it would make us stronger.

• 1:24:35Logan Bartlett?

  Cool. So I guess at this point, so it's been a successful IPO. It seems like you have a lot of runway from my vantage point. And it seems like you can be a very longstanding independent public company. What motivates you now? You know, people can look up, you own decent percentage of the company. You've had a bunch of success. You're going to be an empty nester at some point here, one of the youngest ones, I think, in in history.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  Relatively soon.

• 1:25:04Logan Bartlett?

  Relatively soon, two and a half years, right? Two years. So what what keeps you working as hard?

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it's just the dynamism of the challenge. You know, I've often reflected on this, having gone from CTO to CEO. People ask me a lot, you know, do you miss, you know, do you miss building software? And it's like, absolutely, right? You know, I dedicated a lot of my life to that. But the thing that I liked being about a technologist is that you're constantly working on new problems and you're always doing it with new capabilities. And it's a fast growing, you know, dynamic environment where, you know, a lot of people work together. You stand on the shoulders of giants and you build great new things, kind of on the frontier of what's possible. And in a fast growing company, you're doing the same thing. You're doing it, you know, not with software packages and libraries and the cloud. And, you know, and certainly we are doing that with the product, of course.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  But, you know, you're building new teams and new competencies and you're, you know, honing new muscles within the organization in order to go solve, you know, new problems, continue to. Expand our horizons. You know, every year we talked about the office footprint as a, as a pretty simple example, but you know, breaking into new markets, the market itself continues to change. And so the, the challenge continues to be very multi-dimensional, super dynamic. And we're, we're always able to go and approach it with new capabilities that we're constantly building and, and kind of making those investments. And so I think from my perspective, you know, the growth and the change is still a really engaging and challenging problem and, and one that, that really excites me.

• 1:26:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And the opportunity in front of you. I, uh, yeah, I remember talking to you at one point about like, you know, time horizons and long-term excitement of all this stuff. And you're like, what am I, I'll just go start another company at some point. And so it's like, I like the company I have. I'm just going to keep building and learning and the challenges are dynamic and all that.

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, one of the really interesting things about having now built something for 11 years is that we're building it at a scale that like, almost by definition, it would take a decade to get back to you. Right? And so, um, you know, I know that a lot of people kind of like to jump around, but, uh, the new experiences that are available to you at scale are not accessible in the same way. Right? And like, maybe you could go move to another company that is at a similar scale or is bigger, but you wouldn't have the history in the background and like, you know, be really in

• 1:27:11Logan Bartlett?

  The credibility that comes along with that.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, absolutely. You're, you're in rarefied air already, just by being a public company. I think you have rarefied opportunity to continue to build around this.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:23Logan Bartlett?

  Last one. Um, we talked about this before. Give me the crypto story. Jen.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, my crypto story, uh, it actually, my wife is the main character in this. So my wife and I, we met in 2013 and I had been, as I do with most technologies, just kind of figuring out what was going on in this crypto world thing. And so I thought that it would be a funny stocking stuffer to buy my wife, uh, some Bitcoin as a stocking stuffer.

• 1:27:48Logan Bartlett?

  By the way, as like, you're the one that owns my domain, right? Uh, you own a lot of people's domain. You will do these little fun projects on the side, just to entertain yourself.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Yep. I'd like to

• 1:27:58Logan Bartlett?

  Slash troll people.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Yep. And so, yeah, I'm

• 1:28:00Logan Bartlett?

  I wish you bought me Bitcoin instead of, uh, instead of bought my domain address.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Well, this is the big reveal that I, yeah, I'm the owner of loganbartlett.com. I know that you've referenced, you know, your friend that owns your domain. Name on this podcast a couple of times in the past. But yeah, so I bought her Bitcoin for Christmas and she was like, you bought me a QR code for Christmas? Like, what is this? And I kind of was like, well, you know, you make a wallet and you do this. And I explained it to her. And then, you know, she huddled it for a long time. And I, just a couple of years ago, finally sold it and netted out about 20 grand from the stocking stuffer that I had, you know, bought her as a joke all those years prior and bought a forklift with it. Wow. So my wife, actually, she runs an art studio in Brooklyn. She is a kind of travels work all over the world. It's called Jen Lewin Studio.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  My wife's name is Jen Lewin. I also own, or I rather I gifted to her for Christmas, JenLewin.f as I, you know, want to be kind of on the leading edge of buying domain names. Just in case. By the way, I think LoganBartlett.f as of this recording is still available.

• 1:29:01Logan Bartlett?

  I don't think it, I tried, I looked it up. I don't know if it is.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  I don't think I bought it. So, you know, well,

• 1:29:05Logan Bartlett?

  Someone definitely has it.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  Have to check that out. Yeah. But, you know, the, it's kind of an awesome story because the, you know, the Bitcoin investment, I effectively kind of gave her a forklift as a stocking stuffer.

• 1:29:20Logan Bartlett?

  People say there's no online to offline use cases for Bitcoin. I just heard one right there.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and by buying the forklift, she actually was able to reconfigure her studio, took the loading dock area that had been being used for the knowledge workers and built a mezzanine over her shop and moved everyone up there because they were able to start lifting all their crates and pallets, you know, up onto the loading dock. And so I would say I could credit crypto with giving Jen probably 50% increase in the space efficiency for her small business, which, you know, if that's not a real life crypto use case.

• 1:29:49Logan Bartlett?

  There we are. Zach Weinberg, if you're listening, we heard it now. Bill, thanks for doing this.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

• 1:29:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, good stuff.

• 1:30:01Logan Bartlett?

  All right. So that'll do it for the 25th episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thank you to my friend Bill Magnuson for coming on and talking about all of that, as well as Rashad for giving me someone to talk to. So I'm not just a literal talking head talking into a screen. So.

• 1:30:21Logan Bartlett?

  I think everyone's going to enjoy next week. We actually have a really nice slate of people coming on over the course of the next couple of weeks. And we have a plan to release the infamous Sam Lessin, Zach Weinberg crypto debate too. So I trust everyone will enjoy the next couple of weeks. Thanks, everyone for joining and we'll see you next week for episode 26.