Going for Broke to Solve Remote Work's Problems with Erik Braund

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. how Katmai got started, how they got funding, the problem they're trying to solve, why other tools are not working, what he thinks about Pomeranians, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Eric and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Eric, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:15What's up, Fire Nation? Becoming successful. There is absolutely no blueprint. I don't know if I'm successful or not. People have told me I do everything upside down and backwards. I just do it the way that feels right. And that has worked well for me so far. Is there a Pomeranian print? Absolutely. Maybe two, maybe three, maybe four. Fire Nation, we're talking about some cool stuff today, specifically how going for broke to solve remote works problems just worked out. And I want to start by talking about the how and the why. How and why did Katmai start? Katmai started because there was a new problem to solve.

1:54Well, there were many new problems to solve. One, my business was going out of business. I was an audio video production. We needed to be in rooms, breathing the same air close to each other, making videos, recording things that became impossible. Two, people needed to be together, not just me and my old business, but the world needed to be together. And somehow we had video conferencing that saved the world. That was great. We got Zoom, Teams, Meet, Skype, all the things back then. Do you remember there was a time when people hadn't heard of Zoom? Isn't that crazy? That's nuts to me. It's nuts.

2:30And then there was a time where Zoom was worth more than like the top seven airlines combined or something, like something else totally equally insane. Not trash talking video conferencing. I'm very happy that it exists and it kept our economy moving, but there's something missing. There is an emotional connectivity. There is something personal missing. I feel very strongly from looking at a Brady Bunch square of faces on a grid at a time and place that's been pre-agreed upon. That is not spontaneity. That is not how people are meant to connect with each other throughout the day, week, month, year, all those things.

3:07There are means to an end, but man, it's not natural. Fire Nation, I do pre-interview prep calls with all of my guests. And I'll tell you, the one with Eric was amazing because he actually got me into Katmai and took me around his office. I got to meet many, many people that were working in his office. Of course, all virtually. Virtual is the word. I mean, but it felt like we were there going into offices, closing doors, hanging out in lounge areas, people saying hi, people kind of like just being, seeing the face, making eye contact. Like it was really an interesting, really cool scenario. But the thing is, Eric, you got all of that existed?

3:46Because like right now I was like, how do I write a check to like invest in this company? Cause it's amazing. But you had to get funding before somebody like me could actually see all of that. So how did you do it? It's really simple. I used to have millions of dollars and now I have thousands of dollars. Damn. I wish I was kidding too. Uh, five years later, um, I invested everything that I had ever earned and saved and had in contract. I mean, And for the first year of Katmai, I was still video editing, doing remote broadcast work so I could make payroll for Katmai. I exhausted my checking account, my savings account.

4:21I don't have stocks and bonds anymore. I've got, as my mother-in-law says, I've got a website. And she's not wrong. It's a web app, but it's pretty funny to be like, how's your website going, Eric? Right, right. You're like, oh, you know, we've got over 40 patents granted on it now, but the website's going okay. now question did any of your pomeranians ever miss a meal never no pomeranians have no pomeranians were harmed in the making of this company now i will say we did lose one throughout the journey but he was almost 13 and now there's two so rest in peace goonie but all right on batman are here uh they're at my feet right now um but yeah i self-funded it this was bootstrapped there was this is an accidental story honestly this is i did not go to business school i dropped out of college three times.

5:08Then I dropped out of grad school. Once I finished, I should be a doctor and a lawyer. Instead, I've got a bachelor of fine arts, nothing against fine arts. I love music, but I didn't set out to create a technology startup. That being said, it does make a lot of sense looking back like, oh yeah, this is probably where Eric was always going to wind up. If you, if you've known me throughout my life, I was able to self fund this into a very functional proof of concept, got a customer, got a large customer somehow in the mix of all of this. And it was 2022 when markets were raging, money was almost free interest wise.

5:47And metaverse was the word. I never used the word metaverse. I've always thought of it as a four letter word. And we found money to raise. Now in the time, I'd never raised money. I'd never done like, I didn't have a board. I didn't have lawyers, all these things. Right. so I had to figure this out as I go and it's pretty wild I had almost 50 million dollars committed in a series a raise and the time it took for me to get my paperwork done and all sorts of stuff I lost about half of that because a war started interest rates crept up the market went down and I'm talking within like 48 hours like it was wild the kind of the wheels kind of fell off and no, when I closed the first$15 million of investment, guess how much money I had in my checking account?

6:3815 million. Well, 15 million, 2000. I was close. I had two grand left. I took a screenshot in tears. I mean, I like I had 2000 bucks left to my name, let alone the company and everything else. When we got the first$15 million wire in and it was a very important and life-changing moment. A lot of gratitude there. And I'm happy to say the lead investor there is still alongside of us supporting the company and believes in what we're doing and has formed a great relationship. And this tech and this company has enabled me to meet people and get in the room I never thought possible. It was pretty awesome.

7:17Now you mentioned Zoom, you mentioned Teams, Skype, all these crazy things are going on. So I don't want to say it was a saturated market. I I mean, it was obviously ripe for disruption, but the question is why? Why are you trying to solve this specific problem? It's a great question. We've been given freedom as a society globally, which was everybody can stay at home. You can do your laundry. You can pick up your kids. You can have a little more flexibility as long as you get your work done, right? There's a little bit of trust there. Now, people are going to take advantage of that, of course, but people are going to get a second job and lie to their boss and yada, yada, yada.

7:51But as a whole, a lot of people liked the flexibility. One of the problems was, I don't know what anyone's doing on my team. I don't have access to people. Then it turned into like, oh my God, my calendar is bricked. I can't even get any work done because I have nothing but endless 30 minute meetings and 60 minute meetings. When do I actually work? Right. And then all that kind of got shuffled into, all right, everybody, time to come back to the office. I mean, literally Zoom CEO said Zoom had to come back to the office. You can't run a company on Zoom. I probably didn't help their stock price when that thing got leaked.

8:24I think part of that too was there's no culture. You can't have culture remotely. And if I take a big step back, I'm like, hold the phone a second. It's 2025 today. You're telling me the only two options are everybody piles into an office, central location in one office, or Zoom and Teams, what I call traditional video conferencing. These are the only two options? I think that's insane. Then you've got Meta trying to solve a similar problem that we were at the beginning of this which was hey maybe there's another way to enhance you know digital presence together except i think their problem their solution to that problem is totally insane it's like you expect everyone to strap a headset on a laptop on your face and totally disconnect from reality and look at cartoons of other people and build culture and build relationships that way no we're human beings we want to make eye contact we want a sense of place we want flexibility we You want dynamic interaction.

9:16So the problem kind of evolved into like, there's no connective tissue on a day of endless video meetings. It just never ends. Also, people have moved. People like the flexibility. People want to go be remote. And I'm like, all right, we have a white space opportunity here to do something differently. So we have immersive 3D environments, virtual headquarters. You can move freely through environments. There's security. There's pop-ins. You can bump in. It's the literal water cooler moment that sounds so cliche, except for when you experience it. You're like, this is powerful. Oh, I have an idea.

9:52I can go talk to someone. And then I can tag in someone else that's halfway across the country, but they're right there. And I can talk to them. And we can solve the idea. Look at that. We didn't have to schedule a meeting next week. We just had a conversation now, today. I just logged out of my office so I could be here entirely with you. But there's 25 people in our virtual headquarters right now spread across, I don't know, 10 hours of time zones. We have people in the Netherlands and people in Alaska and North America, South America. They're all in a place together just doing their work, whether they're at home or traveling.

10:21It doesn't even matter because they're in the office. I often tell people like you are more likely to get a hold of me by coming to visit our virtual headquarters than you are trying to get me on email or telephone or my landline or whatever, because I'm not paying attention to those things during the workday. I'm like in with my colleagues or if I have a meeting with someone else, they're coming to visit our virtual office from their laptop or their phone or whatever. And by the way, Fire Nation, like I mentioned, when I was in Katmai, I felt that too. Like I was in the office. I really felt like it was the first time I was like, man, I haven't really worked in an office since 2008 when I was in corporate finance with John Hancock.

10:55But I was walking around, there's like glass offices. We're like walking in, closing doors. We're hanging out in the lounge. Like, I mean, there was just like this different vibe of like, you know, like connectivity, I guess would be the word. Like I actually did feel connected because there's people. And, you know, Eric was like, hey, that person's over there working on this. he's living. It was just like, it was a very interesting vibe and I really was digging it. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. You've got AI helping you write emails and name your dog.

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13:54Why are other tools just not working? Let's really go deep here. Let's really identify like why this is so important now. I love it. Okay. So we've got email. Sure. We can email. That's fine. Email to me is a very formal. Can you sign this contract? Or can you accept this calendar invite? At least that's how we're pretty formal that way. Slack is fine. Slack is super helpful. We actually use Slack. Slack, I say, is great for asynchronous communications. You got a distributed workforce. You're not all in an office together. You got different time zones, locations, and you need kind of a central place to DM or chat about something.

14:32I have also noticed, I'll use our company as an example. We had a project go entirely off the rails in the span of like 90 minutes and 100 Slack messages while me and another guy were out of the office giving an on stage talk about catmine and we went and we were just like have you looked at slack like holy shit what happened and it was like oh we got to get back in the office we each went to separate ends of the expo hall got our laptops and went into the virtual office met with the team and ironed it out in five minutes because it's just like if you're if you're a couple degrees off you get off real quick in slack and it's so easy to misinterpret things and it's just writing and everyone's got different writing styles and like the written word can be misinterpreted super easily and ultimately the problem was we just kind of got off the source document of what we were building and that was fine you want to know it's hilarious what we got off on was the slack integration we're building for catmire it was just so funny i was like it's meta man like and so um and then you've got you've got video conferencing, which primarily is used.

15:40It's like, okay, I need to have a meeting about a topic. So-and-so is out of the office. So-and-so is in the office. And the other person is external. We're going to meet on zoom. Everybody has a 30 minute availability next Friday at one 15 Eastern time. And then that goes on the calendar. And then, you know, think about that topic until then. And then you get to that meeting next Friday and everybody has, someone's late, someone's on their phone, someone's mic screws up and you have to remember why the hell you're having the meeting. catch up and it's like what's even been done right i just think like this meetings for the sake of meetings has become way too easy with the with the access of video conferencing and you go like i don't know if you've experienced this if you go into any major office like big office that's totally back to back in the office what you see is a human sitting in a desk with something open on one screen and zoom open on the other screen and you're just like look at they're back in the office, but they're still in endless video meetings.

16:37Like, what is this? Like what world have we moved into? And so like the office has a lot of value because you're there, there's energy, it's electric. You can look people in the eye. Conversations are meant to have a foreground and a background and a lull and a rise and a fall. Like they just are like conversation is like it's it's an art form it just is and like everything gets really forced when you're all on a 30 minute block of time on a video call and then someone's camera's off and like this is weird so we just modeled like what is the best of the office okay everyone can have quick access see availability be around their peers feel a little bit energized what sucks about the office you have to commute like you don't you you don't get to live one place and have i don't know just the commute.

17:28So we're trying to take the best of both worlds of going to the office and being anywhere. And we've also got some peers in this space. There's other companies tackling this like virtual remote headquarters concept. We're doing it very differently. We focused day one on a really robust 3D world. Most companies I've seen that are tackling this are kind of a legend of Zelda on the NES, you know, top down, not talking, just like the different approach, right? Kind of cutesy or retro looking. Let's say that we were the opposite. I was like, we found some really brilliant people that are on our team that are just at the bleeding edge of this technology and built our own 3D engine and built our own tech.

18:12And that took us a really long time to do. It was hard to do, but now we can deliver like insanely rich 3D environments that look like the company and feel like whatever company, it looks like your brand. It feels like your brand. You can have the office that you could literally never afford in real life and have it virtually. And it just like assigns place to a way of working, which actually feels really comfortable for a lot of people. This is actually bringing up a lot of memories for me. And there's a stat that I always used to look to, which was something along the lines of every minute after a 15 minute commute.

18:48So a 15 minute commute, like people can kind of wrap their, their hands around that. But every minute after 15 minutes, like 16, 19, 26, 35, it's like, it's just exponentially more depressing for people. And it's just like, oh man, like I used to live literally two miles from my office when I was living in Boston, but it would take me forever to get to my office just because of traffic and because of like one way streets. And then I had to park in this parking lot and that cost me$250 per month, which was a decent percentage of my paycheck back in that day. Like, and so that was painful. And then I didn't mind actually being in the office.

19:23Like I had a beautiful view of downtown Boston. Like I remember one day snow was coming down and I'm like, this is a really cool place to be. We had a big auditorium where we would get together and people would give presentations. There's some things I miss about being in that office, like going down to the lunchroom and like eating with people. I mean, like, so there's things that I definitely miss. There was a gym that we use there, but man, like I would wake up every morning. The first thing I would think about is I am going to, I'm going to battle right now. Like to just to get to work, just to get there.

19:50Like I'm going to battle. Like it's going to be painful. And then you get there and you're like sweaty and you're just like, now I'm in my nice shirt and I worked out my sweat getting to work. I don't like this. No, I was not a fan. In fact, halfway through my work there, I ended up going in my gym clothes because of that very reason I would work out first thing in the morning. Then I would change into my workloads there. But then that added a whole nother component. And I mean, it was just like, there's so many things that were not ideal about that. And Eric, we could go on and on. I know there's a lot of people in Fire Nation nodding their heads right now, because guess what?

20:21Tons of people are listening to this on one of their crappy commutes to or from work. I mean, this is what we do to get out of this situation. So if you had to just give us one takeaway from everything we talked about here today, that our listeners could really walk away with knowing exactly what Katmai is all about, how they can connect with Katmai, learn more. What would you want that takeaway to be? Yeah, someone is out there solving this problem, fighting the good fight that says, well, help your company save money. We can add to culture. You can work remotely in a way that makes sense. And this software is meant to blend into the background.

21:02You forget it exists and you're connecting with the other human being on the other side of the computer and you're doing it in a way that you haven't done before a because we invented it and b because it just feels natural it it assigns place to digital interaction and there's a lot of psychology around the involvement of place to memories that you've had in your life like whenever you think about like an important decision you've made or conversation you have, close your eyes. You can picture it. You know it. Like you just know it. And it's crazy. And you'll have to take my word for it. But it happens in Katmai.

21:41And where can Fire Nation go to learn more? What is your call to action for our listeners today? My call to action is visit KatmaiTech.com. It is K-A-T-M-A-I-T-E-C-H.com. There's a free trial. you can sign up. You need to, you don't experience the magic until you've invited someone else in. So it's like a tree falls in the woods. Anyone hear it? You log into your cat by yourself. You're not getting the experience. You need to have some other people in there. My greatest thing, my greatest joy in this job right now is inviting people into our headquarters. So anybody who wants to reach out to me directly, Eric Brand, E-R-I-K-B-R-A-U-N-D, I will invite you into our headquarters.

22:24You can meet some people on the team and you can see a buzzing office in action. The only thing I won't do is invite you into our customer's headquarters, but you can come into ours. And by the way, Fire Nation, take them up on that because I took them up on that. It was a unbelievably cool experience. I really rave about it. And I just want you to know, Fire Nation, there's a reason why you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with EB and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Eric, E-R-I-K, in the search bar.

22:55the show notes page will pop right up. And one more time, Eric, if our listeners want to reach out to you for that tour, what's the best way to connect with you? Yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn, Eric Brand. I will be the only Eric Brand on there that has a very adorable Pomeranian in the headshot. B-R-A-U-N-D, Brands. That's right. Not to be confused with the famous rapper Eric B of Eric B and Rakeem. Eric, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today For that, we salute you, brother, and we'll catch you on the flip side. JLD, thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it.

23:30Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Eric for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who is looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest, and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.