From Yext to Roam: Howard Lerman’s Second Act

27:09I always wanted to play sports, but it turned out that I wasn't very good at them. But what I was good at was not necessarily what I wanted to do, but my mom sort of forced me to do it anyway. And that was singing opera. So I was a child opera singer. And every day, my mom used to pick me up from baseball practice in the middle of the practice in front of all the boys. You can imagine how this looked in front of a bunch of 10-year-old, 9-year-old boys who thought that opera was not the most masculine thing in the world. and I had to leave for opera practice every day and get driven down to the Kennedy Center because I grew up in the DC area where I was in like world productions of operas with like Placido Domingo and he would be playing Rodolfo in La Boheme and I would play a children's role because they have children's roles in these productions.

28:03Actually, I forgot about this, but when I was 10 or 11, the Bolshoi Opera from Russia right after, right before the fall, right before the coup, came to America and performed for the first time. And they brought me and my brother in because they needed two American kids to fill the roles. And so we were down there with all this, you know, all these Russians and there was all security everywhere. It was crazy. I mean, I remember there was, it was all, it was covered widely in the press. The Bolshoi Opera has appeared here and they did two Russian operas. And I have to say, I was pretty good at the Italian operas.

28:44Like, you know, we were in La Boheme and Menon, like the Puccini stuff and the Verdi stuff. We crushed this Bolshoi opera that they had us go in when I was 10. Like I did the sequence of stuff that they had, they had us doing in the music. Like I think I screwed the whole thing up. I think I fucked up the Bolshoi opera basically. Cause I was, they gave us these, I remember they handed us these dolls and I had to like throw the doll up 10 times and catch it and pass it on. It's just, I think it anyway, I had to leave baseball practice to go do this kind of stuff every day. And as you know, a half Jewish fat kid from a red state that grew up singing opera, I was, you know, teased a lot.

29:25So I got really used to just like not giving a shit what anybody thinks and just proceeding in what I believe intuitively to be the correct thing. And intuition has, for me, guided my life. Like I have just very strong intuitions about stuff. And it's like quick, that like gut feeling that happens right away. And I just, I just know like when something should be the case. And I think that's why I decided to be an entrepreneur because I, first off, I didn't decide to be an entrepreneur. It wasn't like I was like, ah, there's a career entrepreneur. I'm going to do it. I just started. I just started when I was 19, when I was 20.

30:05I started my first company and I sold it then. It was called Just a Tip and it grew to be pretty big. And Jon Stewart sent a tip on The Daily Show when I was just a freshman in college. And it took off and went viral. And I had found it with a couple of guys from TJ. and the thing about this was like, I just, when it comes to starting companies, there's not like an active decision process for me. It's totally guttural. Like I just know, I see something that the world needs. I decide that I'm the best person in the world to solve this problem with an amazing team around me. And I assemble people that are way smarter and better than me and more skilled in various areas.

30:49and then we just go and we just do it. And it's a very guttural, intuitive kind of thing. But I just, when that feeling strikes, I just, it's going to happen. Like I'm going to make it happen. And there's going to be, you know, rooms along, trash compactor disaster rooms along the way, but we will get out of it and we're going to get out of it together. And it's going to feel awesome when we do. And we're going to solve the problem and save the princess. when you met your wife, you're 20 years old. Yep. Uh, were you like this? No, I was, let's see in college.

31:35I didn't, when I first got to Duke, I didn't really fit in because TJ had conditioned me that like everyone like cared about like math and science and STEM. And like, I thought that was just going to be like, you know, Duke would have been the next extension of that. But it turned out that like people were like, what do you like? They didn't know about computer science or there's a great computer science department at Duke who I ended up, you know, knowing very well, but the majority of people were not like that. They care about other things. And so the idea of like sorority life and fraternity life, like had no appeal to me whatsoever.

32:05I have major issues with authority. All the, you know, other freshmen kids would rush the fraternity to try to get in and they, you know, the fraternity make them do It's like stupid shit to like, you know, go through the hazing process and whatever. And like, that's fine. People can do that if they want to. I couldn't have like held that in a lower regard. And so I was like one of the only people that like did not rush a fraternity, did not go through that whole Greek life thing. So maybe that made me sort of like sidelined, I guess. But I did end up joining an acapella group and that was pretty awesome.

32:40And that's actually how I met Wendy at an acapella concert because we put on this great concert. And I met her when she was 19 and I was 20. So Yext is probably your biggest company so far. Is that fair to say? So far. So far. Yes. You probably made, I'm just guessing, a couple hundred million dollars. Just guessing. I have no idea. It's about a billion dollar company today. Yep. You owned a bunch of it. Yep. Like you made a bunch of money, life changing. Plenty. Yeah.

33:16Did, okay. So like from 20 years old to Yax was about 12, 15 years when you started it. When did this metamorphosis happen? If it didn't happen when you had met Wendy, when did you go? The way I would describe it is like Spencer Skates from Amplitude was telling me a story on the show about how basically he wrote down like, what does an ideal founder look like? Yeah. And then he basically was like, I'm going to choose to be that person and everything that that means. And in many ways, like your metamorphosis kind of reminds me of how he views what he did. And I'm just curious, like what changed?

34:01Was it money? Did it happen after Yext where money afforded this? Um, yeah. What, what happened? I think, so it's interesting. So the way Spencer talks about this, he's kind of doing some top-down thinking. I'm not a top-down. I actually used to be a top-down thinker. I used to say, and I think a lot of founders make the mistake of, I want to be a founder. Let me look at all these different potential markets and I'm going to figure out which one I can serve. And I think that basically never works. I think you have to be bottom up. I think you have to feel the problem yourself and solve a problem for yourself.

34:43Because then at least you've satisfied a market of one. And you know you have product market fit with at least you. And so it gets you closer to... And I've gotten recently into this kind of empiricism versus rationalism thinking. I used to be much more rational. I'd be in my own head and I'd be trying to figure stuff out without actually doing it. And then it turns out that doing stuff is the best way to learn and being there and doing things with your hands. There's a great quote from TR on this about do what you can with what's in front of you with your hands, with what you can do right now, Teddy Roosevelt.

35:18And that I never really understood that until I started like doing stuff with my hands and started to, you know, get out of my own rational planning and decision-making and trying to strategize about how everything's going to go and plan it all out and actually do stuff. And so I don't think I'd ever start from what are the attributes of a great founder and work backwards to try to like meet those things. I will just do what I think is right. And it gets back to that kind of guttural intuition about myself. I have a very different approach from Spencer in that regard. When did you go full? Did it happen over time where the list that I just described of your day?

35:56Did your pieces of your day start to come together? And then now it's a full day? I think it is a continuous product. And by the way, the day, the current iteration that you see is the current iteration. It's going to be continuously optimized and improved. I once, was it a Google zeitgeist? Nikesh gave a book out about the click moment. And that's when I decided that every day I'm going to wake up, the first thing I'm going to do is put my gym shorts on. And it's just because it's a trigger to make you, when they're on, you work out. And so that was something I learned. And a quote that lives rent-free in my head is Charlie Munger about being able to, the smartest people are learning machines and you can get smarter getting smarter.

36:39So you don't just get smarter, you can increase your rate of learning. And for me, being able to just have this kind of disciplined routine that I can continuously optimize is it wasn't, it started, I would say when, let's see, well, I've been, I've been wearing these lands and turtlenecks for, this is a$20 lands and turtleneck, you know, and they send, they know me now and they send me sweet, you know, Christmas cards and stuff like that. in the mail. But this is a$20 Lanza and turtleneck. I've been wearing these probably since, you know, probably, probably, probably for almost 20 years, I would say.

37:29Since Yext. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, if you look back at all the Yext kind of pictures and stuff in our IPO day, I mean, this has been what I have worn always. And just, I think that subtle, I actually, I also think, by the way, and this is a crazy thing I'll tell you about, I think what you wear is hugely important. And it's funny, like the fashion industry fundamentally understands that, right? Like, um, actually you were talking about your favorite movie with Angela, uh, and Devil Wears Prada with like that color blue. And I don't remember that movie very well, but I did, I did remember the story of like, well, somebody chose that for you.

38:09And I think a lot of, a lot of people, you know, when you put on the gym shorts, it's like, I am now ready to work out. And when I put on this turtleneck, it's like, I am now ready to build something awesome. And so for me, it's just simply a wardrobe choice that is putting me in the correct mindset to do something. When I take it off, like put on like a sleep shirt, okay, it's like ready to go to bed or whatever that is. And so I think you can do these little cues that, that condition your mind in a way that get you ready to do, you know, whatever it is you're going to do. Like before I would go on TV, I'd have a routine.

38:50Like I would, it's like a, it's an athlete. They all have these little routines that they run to be able to be successful. Now you can get into the alter ego stuff, right? Like, so I think who is it that does the alter ego? Elizabeth Holmes? No, well, Well, I don't know. I don't know much about her at all. But I think I think is it is it Beyonce that had an alter ego that would jump into a different person? And she she assumes a different name, like in her own mind when she's trying to be who she is. I don't do any of that kind of stuff. This is who I am. But there was no single moment. It's been like just a process of continual evolution and trying to be the best I possibly can be.

39:31And by the way, like I do look at the clocks because what gives me joy is actually not trying to improve upon my old scores, but just not get any worse. Because at 45, you don't want to, you stop pushing it because when you push it, that's when you get hurt. And my job is to basically maintain at this point. Yeah. I mean, even for me, I'm still, I still worry about pushing it because I get injured every time. You got to be careful in basketball. Basketball. I know so many guys. Even lifting weights though. Like if I try and push to a heavier, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't, and by the way, that one's not in your control.

40:06Some other, somebody else that had a bad day and they're angry. That's true. Yeah. Does your wife think you're nuts? Yes.

40:19How old are your kids? Eight and 10. Does your wife take your edge off? Does your edge come off? I don't think so. So how we are talking right now is exactly how you would be right before you went to bed. No, I, she,

40:43I think maybe can I reframe it? Everything you do is in service to performance and your version of performance is company building. Yes. How does that make her feel? I don't know how else to ask. I guess I probably should ask her sometime. No, I think she knows what she signed up for in a lot of ways. But you haven't been this way forever. Well, I will also point out that having met her when I was 20 and she was 19, we grew up together. And I think a lot of problems today is that people, I want my kids to get married young. Like I tell them that all the time. They're 10 and they're eight. And I tell them to get married young and have kids young.

41:26And there's a lot of pressure and a lot of advice out there that say, hey, go out there, forget trying to get married, forget having kids and a family, go out and build your career for as long as you can. Move to New York and go work. And then when you're in your 30s, then you can focus on that kind of thing. And I think that advice is fundamentally, I think people can focus on their careers, but they don't have to do it at the expense of having a family and getting married young. Because when you get married or find your partner very young, you are able to grow together. And so she's not like me in any way like this at all, but she's been there through the entire metamorphosis and entire growth period.

42:09And so she knows exactly how the whole thing works. And we know each other so well that But it's not the kind of thing where I have to like ask her, is she okay that I'm now coating my shoes? Like she thinks it's funny. And she's like, you need, in fact, like, you know, we tried the shoe coating thing. I started the shoe coating thing about two years ago. And for a while, like I was struggling to find a pen that would like not wear off. And so finally she's like, you got to use the Sharpie. So now she leaves a Sharpie in my closet and it's a silver Sharpie because it's going to be black shoes.

42:47And so she's, you know, she's a partner in crime to my - She's an enabler. She's a total enabler. She's handing me the Sharpie, right? And she knows, she knows, she kind of, she might roll her eyes about it, but she thinks it's funny. Do you want your kids to be this way? I want my kids to be whatever they want. I don't want a person, I'm not like Naval. You don't care. Naval is like, I don't want my kids to go to school. Right. Right. And I think that's like, what is he talking about? Yeah. Like, I'm, I'm, I want my kids to go to school. I want my kids to go to good schools. I want them to study.

43:17I make them do math in the morning when they wake up. And that said, I want them to understand. So the best thing I can do for my kids is to set a good example as opposed to force them to do stuff. So when they see me reading, I wake up. Do you have kids? Not yet. I'm engaged, so I got to get married and then have kids. Yeah. So when I sit down and they see me, when I wake up in the morning, they come downstairs, I'm reading usually. Like that's, that's my 30 minutes of reading. And we talked a lot about the, the health, you know, the macros and the calories and all that kind of stuff. But I actually really make it a point to read something very hard every day for 30 minutes that has nothing to do with, you know, it could, like I read the NVIDIA way and I'll read books on, on business stuff, but I also will go way outside.

44:08And I try to put my, into my, into my mind, the greatest works that of mankind, things like Ivanhoe from Scotland or the leopard, you know, a fictional novel from Sicily that try to bring you closer to, you know, humanity in a way that let you then take that art because you said, you know, my company building is, the best way I can describe it. My company building is my art. And for me waking up, It's not work. I literally wake up and I get to, it's weird because when people hear about this routine and they hear about the work, they think, oh, he must be miserable. Like, oh, it must be the case that, you know, you don't go to barbecues and drink beer and watch football.

44:51Like, that's the point of like, what are you doing, man? Like, how can you not do that? And like, I just don't find that enjoyable, but it's not, but that's not the point. The point is what I do each day, I find incredibly enjoyable. I literally, I mean, I tap danced into here to hang out with you today for this talk. I'm going to tap dance back. I'm going to go, I'm going to open my laptop. I'll be right back into my virtual office. I have the best people working on the coolest new features. I mean, if you saw the thing that I was, that we shipped literally last night that we announced this morning, it's one of the coolest features we've ever made.

45:24On your lock screen, you can see all the people in the company and it's rotating around. It's kind of like the eye of Sauron and it shows you, and the icon is an eye. And I literally worked for two weeks with our designer on getting that exact interaction precisely correct in the way that felt really good to all of us. And to be able to bring that to the world today is an extraordinary luxury. And now to have all these people anywhere being able to use it. So, you know, I heard Angela talking about this. It is absolutely not inconsistent to have a regimented daily routine and to have joy. And I have extraordinary joy in the routine.

46:03And frankly, not having to, you know, stand around at a football game or have to worry about what shirt to put on, because I would definitely get it wrong, are liberators of joy for me, as much as, you know, other types of things are. So, and if you, if a friend from, if a family member or a friend from middle school, if somebody does not have value to you work-wise, will you spend time with them? Well, you know, not yesterday. I mean, my, my old friend, actually a friend from middle school emailed me. He's like, Hey, he's, he's in Dubai. He's the CFO of Turing right now that, you know, Johnny's company.

46:54And Alok Bouchon is my good friend from middle school, by the way, we went to the same middle school and he went to TJ and he worked with me at Yax for many years. And he emailed me. He's like, Hey, I'm in San Francisco for the, for the week. Let me know if you happen to be here too. And I did. And we went on a long walk And that had nothing to do with work. I mean, we were reminiscing about our middle school math teacher, Mr. Williams, who was the best math teacher and taught pretty advanced geometry concepts to seventh graders, which was super cool. And we were blessed to have had him.

47:30And that's an example yesterday of just doing that. So that said, I'm going to say no to a lot of stuff too. Yeah. Um, you have to, you have to say no all the time. And by the way, not just in people reaching out to you, but in product choices, in hiring choices, you know, this firm, how many, how many no's does a VC give out? VCs basically say no all the time. Um, and it's tough to say no, but it's also how you create your artwork. You have to whittle things away until you get to something substantive. Did money change anything for you? I would say that money gave me the right to save whatever the fuck I want.

48:18And actually, probably also not running a public company helps with that too. So when you're running a public company, you have to really, you know, you put any statement through legal because you don't want to say anything that could be construed in a way that you could get sued for later. So now you look at Some people on the other side of the spectrum here, they say whatever they want anyway, and they get away with saying whatever they want. Elon runs big companies, and he does not hold back from what he thinks. And so when I take Rome Public someday, and we will, I'm going to not change who I am.

48:52But my big, I don't want to say it's a mistake, but look, I was running Yext, and I tried really hard to fit the mold in a way of what I thought Wall Street would have wanted. And this time around, this is my second time around, I'm not going to do that. We're going to be who we're going to be. And I'm going to say what we're going to say. And, but you know, the scope of what I talk about is stuff that I know about too. It's not like I actually have a rule. I don't tweet about politics. I don't talk about politics. That's just not my area of expertise at all. I know a lot about productivity. I know a lot about meetings.

49:36I know a lot about how to not have meetings, how to eliminate meetings, how to run effective meetings, how to run a company. And so these are the things that, you know, I'm going to share my opinions on. And sometimes people aren't going to like them and I'm going to be okay with that. When I was running Yax and running a public company, I was more concerned with making sure everyone was not having their feelings hurt, at least externally. And so I won't do that the second time around as we build Rome into what we believe it can possibly be. Did making money feel as good as you hoped it would?

50:07I don't think it gives you a degree of freedom. I would say that there's a certain level at which you can feel that freedom too. And making money beyond that level does not materially change anything at all. What do you think that level is? Ooh, I think it depends on the person. Depends on the person a lot. What's the level for you? I think probably, I would say 20. Why? What does 20 million get you? Well, I live in Miami. So it's a little bit more, the cost of living there is higher than say like Virginia where I grew up. And by the way, I grew up with, you know, I went to public schools my whole life.

50:44I didn't grow up with money at all. So I think the thing that, the thing that, and again, that's just like a number. I haven't put a lot of thought into that. But I think that that's enough where you can basically maintain a million dollar a year lifestyle, basically kind of in that range if you're not done with your money, which after taxes and you pay all that out, then that seems like that's probably enough for most people to kind of to go on. That's kind of a number where, and again, I haven't put a lot of thought into this. So I'm speaking off the cuff, but a million a year before taxes and income is kind of enough where you don't have to have a job and you can do whatever you want.

51:27And you can do that really enough with, you know, with family and, and live and live like a pretty high end lifestyle. So what's interesting is I have this sort of stoic routine, but I also, I like to do cool things. And for me, the point of the money isn't necessarily for me to be able to like buy artwork. Like I don't give a shit about that stuff at all. Like, yes, I have a nice house and yes, I drive a nice car. And like, I care about that because I think that stuff is awesome. But the main thing that money does is it lets me make more companies and more art. And everything I have is devoted to trying to make Rome what I believe it can be, which is this incredible virtual office and an entire ecosystem.

52:08And I am totally committed to making that happen in an awesome way. and having money and being able to raise money from venture capitalists basically lets you hire incredible people because that's the main, I guess, compute would be the other main investment people make. We're not making like some fundamental investment in compute, but it lets me hire the best people I know and get them to go on this shared mission of building the virtual office that powers the world's work. What cool stuff do you do with the money besides put in your own companies? Well, I will tell you this. I think that money can be a double-edged sword for second-time founders.

52:50Because the first thing I did when I, the first company I started after I was, you know, after I stepped back from Yext, which by the way, that was after 15 and a half years and I did everything I possibly could there, I started a music company. And it was only out of passion for music. It was called, it was really cool. It was called Dynascore, like dynamic score. And you would upload a video and it would use AI to generate a score that exactly matched the sort of key points in the video. And it would re-scramble existing classical music, for example. So like, let's say you had a 17 second commercial you wanted or video you wanted to put out there and you wanted Mozart's Ina Kleine knock music in the back of it.

53:31Well, Ina Kleine is not 17 seconds. It's three and a half minutes. And so how do you exactly splice? Usually you'd have to get like an audio engineer to splice something to match that. But Dynascore let you upload the video and put sort of key inflection points of where you wanted to, like the scene changed or where you wanted the music to emphasize. And it would give you a 17 second version of Ina Klein App. It was really cool. It turns out that there's no money in that product at all. Yet, I put a lot of money into building the product in a way that was not economically rational. and I bought, you know, paid for incredible design and great logo and UX and all this music.

54:19And we bought, we went deep into, there's this German company called Native Instruments. You've probably never heard of them, but they actually make all of the instrument sounds that like people use everywhere. And in, in their videos and stuff, are you smiling? Cause you know, this is an insane story. Yeah. And so I, you know, I went and we cut this licensing deal with this, you know, this little company in Germany that makes all the best drum beats and all the best synth sounds so that we could use their, their sounds and use, and I was unwilling to use AI to train on the existing corpus of music.

54:53And this is where I think I was not willing to basically steal other people's music. Whereas you see some of these things out there that are trained on Sony records as music. Um, they sound awesome, but they're literally trained illegally. and I was not willing to like take that step. And so we sort of had a different approach. And as a consequence of that and a consequence of the product, I basically had, it was too much of a fun house. Like it was like, I was able to afford this fun, this crazy project, but it was not rooted in economic reality. Because it didn't need to be. It didn't need to be.

55:32There was no product market fit or it wasn't very strong. And I learned a lot from doing that. It was a big mistake. I shouldn't have funded it at the level I did. I shouldn't have tried to make it perfect. I also waited too long to put it out in terms of like, no, we have to have this and this and this. And so I ended up building something expensive for something nobody wanted. And this was right after I left the accident. It was a big mistake. Fortunately, Rome came out of that because we actually hacked up Rome as a way to stay together while we were building Dynascore. and we're turned out that we're back to the oh well let's make something for ourselves that we love to use like i wasn't making videos with music this was a product you know for adobe videographers it was a premiere pro plugin and it uh it's funny because i had a i talked to mark benioff about this and he said to say he he actually said a lot of second time founders he said you should raise outside capital for your next company even though you can fund it yourself because you don't want to turn the company into a fun house, which is exactly what Dynosquare was.

56:41And so that's why when we started to build Rome, and we started to see traction there, that's where I had thought, well, should I just bootstrap this thing? It's not bootstrap because bootstrap implies you don't really need to put stuff in, but I could have funded the whole thing. You put 10 million in? A bit more. Yeah. Okay. A bit more. So I did put plenty in, but I also intentionally brought in an outside partner because I wanted them to keep me honest. And I wanted to make sure that I was playing by the same principles of the universe. Right. That rational actors would. That rational actors played.

57:19Yeah. Super interesting. Yeah. So that was an intentional choice. You ran YETS for 15 and a half years. How long was it private for? We were founded in 2006. We went public in 2017, 11 years, 10 and a half years from founding to IPO. And how long were you at the helm as a public company? 22 earnings calls, 22 quarters. Public company CEOs will always answer it in terms of quarters. Is the story out on how and why you left? There's no story. I did everything I could. I took it to almost half a billion of recurring revenue, which I know today doesn't sound that big, but this was high margin SaaS revenue from hard customers.

58:07We sold into McDonald's and Alliance Bernstein, and we had big enterprises around the world, non-tech companies, legacy businesses. And this idea of business listings, this idea of, it's such a simple idea of when you look up a business on Google Maps or Apple Maps, where does the data come from? And being able to essentially control that. And so that you could go to McDonald's and let them have a knowledge graph system to be able to update the phone number of one of their branch locations and have it instantly update in a hundred different places so that people always find the right information was a very simple, but extremely hard idea to implement.

58:47And there's a whole story of how we broke the chicken and the egg there and finally got Google to open up their index and let us update Google Maps after Apple Maps. Remember how bad Apple Maps was when it first started? The location data problem is a huge problem and it remains a huge problem. And by the way, all the new AI search tools, there's all these AI visibility tools that I see every day coming out. They don't actually do anything.

59:15They tell you how you rank in AI search. And this was something at Yext. And again, I'm not running Yext anymore, so I can't speak to their product roadmap. But when I ran the company, it was easy to show you your problems. Like your phone number is wrong in Google. Your address is wrong in Apple Maps. That's all they're doing. But I would always say that that was not enough. I wanted to be able to fix the problem. I wanted to be able to like, thank you for showing me that I have the wrong phone number. Now, what do I do about it? Well, I don't know. And so these new AI visibility tools, which are sort of growing up in the same market, in the same space, are showing you your problems.

59:56And yes, they're saying, well, there's some suggested solution. The suggested solution is always the same. It's to write a blog about content and have a top 10 list. It's the same old SEO trick. It's like the same old SEO tricks of, you know, are working in AEO or whatever people want to call it these days. It's literally like you have to, you know, make a page in your domain and then like take the top 10 competitors that you want to talk about and put them on the page and then get people to link to it. It's not, it's, that's just, that's, there's nothing, there's really just not a whole lot to it.

1:00:29I look forward to a company like Yext. I'm not saying they can or will do this, but you would suspect they might want to be able to actually update ChatGPT's maps. And ChatGPT doesn't have maps yet, but considering they just launched a browser yesterday, you would think that they are going to be able, they must be thinking about this thing, or they're going to have to partner with some open source map. They will have a consumer app. Perplexity will have a map. all these AI search. It's funny. The whole idea of Yax was that search was always going to be changing. There's going to be new players involved.

1:01:04It would actually be really, and Mike's a great CEO. They're CEO that's there now. He has tremendous product vision. He has tremendous sales abilities. And it's a super exciting time for that company, actually. If I, you know, I don't regret leaving. I did everything I could to build the company and to pass the torch to a guy that I felt like could operate at the scale that we wanted to. But at the same time, this is a really exciting time for that space. These little things that are bubbling up, they're showing you your problem, but they're not correcting it. Yext has, I don't know the number, but probably five to 10 million authoritative businesses using the product.

1:01:44And so for an application like ChatGPT that wants to make their own app, the value prop is like, we're going to be able to give you authoritative real-time data for free. Like we don't charge you for this on the 10 million businesses people give a shit about in the world. Here, here it is. Take it, put it in your maps. That's it. So it would be exciting to run the company. It's probably an exciting time for them right now. Maybe they'll buy you and you can do Steve Jobs back. Well, it would cost them. So the answer to that is maybe we'll buy them because I think Roam is going to be way bigger than Yext ever was.

1:02:19The opportunity to build a virtual off, the TAM is infinite, which is good and bad because it's like, well, who are you going after? But the product, so Yext was really hard to build because it was hard to get critical mass to be able to get Apple Maps. You can't just call up Tim Cook and say, hey, we want to update Siri. Right, right. Like that takes a lot of business development, not just relationships, but actual leverage. You have to have leverage. And Yaks has the oil, which is the data in this world. And so that was really hard from a data perspective. Rome was a very different challenge.

1:03:06Rome was very challenging technically. And in starting Rome, I totally fucked up. I completely underestimated how hard it would be to rebuild video conferencing. There's a joke now that like when you watch the old Star Trek films, the most unrealistic technology in all of Star Trek is how fast the video conferencing is across galaxies and reliable it is. And I thought video conferencing would be the kind of thing that you could just like get from a third party, like turn it on from Amazon chime or something like that. It turns out you cannot. And that by the way, is why zoom still is dominant to this very day in there.

1:03:45They have the best, Eric figured it out. They have the best video conferencing and they still do. And they still do at scale and teams and others have caught up. Google meets pretty good. Now Google meets really good, but only for 10 people or less, like try to get 48 people or 75 people or 150 people or let alone thousands. It doesn't work as well. and we ended up building speaking of side quests we ended up in that trash compactor room for a year building video conferencing software so i went out we launched it and it turned out that video conferencing was really hard and by the way people have such a high standard for today that if you if you don't do a good job on it you're in trouble so we went out there and we built all of own video conferencing stack, our own SFU, everything bespoke.

1:04:31And that was an 18-month side quest and continues to be a side quest. And so Rome, while Yext was very difficult to break the chicken and the egg from the data perspective, Rome, the technology was way harder to build. And there's way, way, way, way, way more engineering that's gone into video conferencing and chat and the virtual office map and MagicCast, which is our, you know, by the way, we support all these different platforms. So Yax is a web app basically syncing across Apple and Google and Amazon and Meta, all their assets. Rome, you know, we've got a Linux app. We have an iOS app. We have Android.

1:05:15We have web. We have Windows. We have every version of Windows going back. We have to support all the Mac stuff. And every time a new operating system comes out, because we're a desktop app, it sits on your desktop all day. Mac Tahoe just came out and 10 ,000 bug reports show up because they changed the way a little bit how screen sharing works. And that's just like a whole situation to kind of go after. So this one has been much more of a technical challenge, but it's an exciting technical challenge. And the reason that this should exist in the world is it should not not exist because the technology can't make it happen.

1:05:50How big is the company? We are about two and a half million of ARR. We are, I actually, and I'm building in public, so I'm very comfortable talking about anything. We will, we're on, I know it's not cool to triple, triple, double, double anymore, but that's the path we're on probably a little faster than that. But that's okay. That's, competition for VC dollars much more than customers. I don't hear a lot of customers coming to us saying, why didn't you triple, triple, double, double? In fact, our customers are global. We have 30 % of our customers are in not the United States. And we have super high net retention.

1:06:31And that's what I care about. And we want to grow because all healthy businesses grow, but they're not too concerned about our growth rates. They care about the fact that we just launched our watch feature this morning. And they're all fired up about that. And that's what gets me going is when I hear feedback immediately that people are like, this is freaking cool. And you're in your CarPlay now driving around and you can glance down and see who's meeting with who in the virtual office and it rotates around and shows you. And that's just the kind of stuff that gets me going. How many people? We are 27 people.

1:07:02And the cool thing is I'm pretty sure we're going to be able to get to, you know, as a public company, so you never throw this out there, but I don't care about that anymore. So I'm pretty sure we can get to 10 million of ARR next year without hiring too many more people. I think it's going to be basically 27 still. You think it's 27? I think we'll hire a few. Why? Because of the LLMs? No, because of the 27, 24 of the people are design and engineer. We don't have any salespeople. And so I can just see the inbound demand that's happening and do the math and the compound. Yeah. But you're also getting more out of each engineer with these tools.

1:07:38I see what you're asking. You're saying the engineering productivity, not the sales productivity. Yeah. Just like in general, like wouldn't you otherwise need to add more designers and engineers? Well, one thing about adding new designers is it doesn't really work like that. If you had, if I added a second and third and fourth designer, I think we'd get probably like one quarter of what we get right now. So design is kind of a weird one where like you, you hire a couple of really good people and they can take you, you know, how many designers did Apple have, for example. It's not a huge number.

1:08:06So you can get a lot of economy of scale. Actually, one of my favorite books is an old Disney book. And I have it sitting on my... It's called 13 Old Men. It's about the 13 original animators. It's actually hard to get this book. I had to wait a year. And it's not in print. It's 13 Old Men. And it's about the Disney animators and 13 guys that made every Disney film. And I, you know, entrepreneurs in the Valley look up to jobs and to Elon. My idol is Walt Disney. Maybe that's because I live in Florida and Orlando is right there. But if you really want to see magic and craftsmanship and art, go look at the fonts in the cash registers in Star Wars world at Disney.

1:08:54You know, they've changed even the way the font works on the credit card processor when it says, like, thank you. Like, that's the level of detailed craftsmanship. They call it imagineering. And so I look at that. Our Roam team, we do everything our own way. We don't have support people. We have Roamgineers. We don't have engineers, actually. We have inventors. And we spell inventors with an exclamation point that points to, you know, to spell it differently. We do things our own way. and our engineering productivity is, we don't need to hire tons of engineers to maintain and continue to expand the product that we have today.

1:09:34And 13 Old Men is kind of the idea that these 13 animators who were brilliant and did all the films that we all know, Snow White, you know, Cinderella, all the famous ones for that kind of era of Disney from the 30s to the 60s, was basically made by 13 people. And then all the marketing happened, you know, to promote it out, you know, to make it global. But that book is a really great book. And there was a couple of guys that just made all that stuff. Do you ever need a, like, do you feel, do you not need outlets from this all? Like going back to the friends, beers, you know, you don't watch shows.

1:10:19Like, do you not need, like, I have a hard time believing that you don't need an outlet somewhere. And I don't know. When I say outlet, outlet is not something physical, not exercise. I think I've conditioned myself. I do think exercise is an outlet for sure. But my family is a great outlet. I also want to point out that, you know, we haven't talked a ton about this, but my kids, I see them all the time. And being able to work from Rome means that I get to see them when they come home at three o 'clock. and I get to hang out with them. And you'll understand that when you have kids, you're going to want to be around them.

1:10:58And I want to be present with them. And, you know, just catching them right after they get home from school for even 10, 15 minutes. Like they're all excited. They just had school. You get to kind of, they're in a great mood and they're through the high of the day. So I think my outlet is that. And my outlet is watching my daughter, you know, she's a great singer. Like I was a decent opera singer. She is like really good. And so my outlet, we, we, this summer, here's an outlet for you. We went to Austria and she shot a music. We shot a music video with her and I don't know if you've ever seen Sound of Music, but I love Sound of Music.

1:11:39It's my favorite. I love Broadway musicals. And actually maybe my outlet is, is we, we, we at Rome have done events where we bring in Broadway singers. like we'll do karaoke, but we have professional singers like in the room with you. It's actually really fun. And they'll do Wicked and the Hamilton and all the cool like Broadway shows. And, and so my favorite was always Sound of Music. And, you know, they have the Do Re Mi and all the classic favorite things songs. And we bought my daughter, who's the singer, she had written a song, we composed it, we went to the studio, recorded it. And then we, we went to the hills of Austria where those famous scenes were shot.

1:12:21Butter a dwindle, which is the traditional German outfit that Julie Andrews was wearing when they shot sound of music and shot a music video and it's on Spotify. And that's an outlet for me. What are your vices then? Probably music. I mean, I don't, I don't mean to sound like a, like a, like a virtuous, uh, like monk or something like that. Um, do you deserve? Yeah, I will. I, by the way, like all the things, the routine is, is not, it's first off, I like when I come to San Francisco, the first thing I did when I landed, I went, I went to house of non King and I had some dumplings, man. Like they were great.

1:13:06And I'm sitting there. And by the way, like I probably eat eight, 4 ,000. I don't care. I'm like, you know, you eat whatever you want for dinner. I don't care. Like I'm good. Like, and yes, I had a bunch of amazing dumplings from house of non King and it was perfect. And by the way, then I talked Mandarin to the, to the shop owner, because one of the things I did was I taught when I was running. Yes. I taught myself to speak Mandarin and it's very funny because I'm like, well, should you, you know, I always tell them like, Hey, like, yeah, they usually jump into a conversation when I hear the waiters talking, like, and I'll be like, you know, which is like my last company had an office in Shanghai.

1:13:49And like, I'll jump into the conversation or like when I'm in an Uber and I'll hear people speaking in Mandarin, I'll jump in, which is always kind of funny when they hear the white guy basically jump in. They don't expect it at all. And, and that, that was like a fun thing for me to do. I love learning languages. So I taught myself German. I taught myself Mandarin. I want to I teach myself Italian. So maybe Farsi, throw some Farsi in there. Salome. It's not very practical. Well, you know, I do want to learn a language like where you have to read different letters. Right. Like, so, you know, obviously Mandarin's like that, but Greek is kind of up there, you know, I mean, maybe advice is I like over the summer I'll travel.

1:14:32So I'll go, you know, take the family to Greece. How long? A couple of weeks. You take, do you work? Um, it won't be like the nine, you know, the nine, nine, six routine because basically the time zones are different. The thing is for me, again, working, it's not work. Like I, I know I'm just asking, do you, do you, do you, yes. As conventional wisdom goes, yes. What I won't do is I won't like go visit a Greek customer when I'm on, I won't like when I'm in Athens with my family or when I'm in Italy with my family, like I'm not going to go, we haven't, we have, believe it or not, we have customers in Italy, like in Rome, like Rome and Rome, or in Milan, I'm not going to like swing by their office.

1:15:12Old Howard would have definitely done that. I would have like showed up and like, hey, ciao, let's go, you know, I'm in Milan. I don't do that. So I will work. I'm on top of everything. I'll keep the design team going, keep the product team going, but I won't take a meeting in the city that I'm traveling with my family. That makes sense. Yeah. I'm so eager to see how things play out. How's your attrition? Employee attrition or customer attrition? Employee. Like, do people like working for you? I don't know. You have to ask them. I want to. Well, the only evidence I might give you on this one is that my founding team at Rome, my CTO, I went to middle school with.

1:15:55My COO, I went to high school with. So I've been working with, and they were the executive team at Yax. So I've been with them for, my God, I'm dating myself, 31 years. uh wendy we talked about i met when i was 19 how about this tom i met when i was 13 over a weird al song frank's 2000 h tv sean i met when i was 14 they both went to princeton their cto coo wendy i met when i was 19 the rest of my brother uh is our head of cut is our head of rome geneering so i guess i met him when i was you know two uh and then the rest of the company are people who I basically, I would say the average tenure of having worked with is probably more than a decade.

1:16:38All right. That's a fair answer. Your brother's there. Yeah. How's that? Is he like you? No, he's, he's, uh, way more reasonable and he is super patient. I'm totally not patient. He is incredibly patient. He is brilliant. He is creative. He was a Broadway composer for a while. So he was an artist and a musician. And, you know, about eight years ago, he decided he actually, we tried to do the music thing together, Dinosaur app that failed. But he has reinvented himself in tech and he's awesome. I actually think that's a little bit of a hack for any founder. If you hire a musician, first off, they've mastered a craft, like a professional musician.

1:17:25And they're usually pretty technical and pretty creative. And a lot of them, if you get them in, and they're patient too, because to play the guitar or piano with skill takes a lot of, you know, continuous focus and discipline. And so I like hiring people that have, we actually have like some pretty talented musicians at Rome. It's pretty cool. Dude, thank you for doing this. Thank you for having me. Super interesting. Like I was so looking forward to this. It's amazing. I appreciate it. Well, I'm really glad to have any time a podcast about grit reaches out, I'm going to do it. And it can be Angela Duckworth is a hero of mine.

1:18:13I've done dinners with her. And actually, I'll just leave you with this. Every employee of Rome, we send two books when they join. The first book is Ready Player One. The second book is Grit by Angela Duckworth. Why do you send them? We want them. I believe when people read the same thing, the human brain is a mirror. But why those books? Oh, those two specifically? Ready Player One is just an amazing story of a virtual world, which Rome is. And then Grit is the defining characteristic of success. And it can be learned. So why do you say that? Well, I think I certainly have gotten better at it.

1:19:00Why do you think it's the defining characteristic? Well, the data, I guess, you know, it's funny. I went on a walk yesterday with Alok. I told you my friend. And I was like, Alok, why do you think Yex was successful? What was it? And he was like, literally, we just never gave up. Literally, your determination. and he said you, but I think it was a team. We just, whenever there was a barrier, we just worked through it. We never, ever gave up. And he's like, and from the day that I joined in 2007, he's like, you talked about the day we IPO and we made it happen. And we just made it happen through sheer preservation, you know, not just like running through walls.

1:19:43Like we were running, if there's a wall, we'll like go around the wall. Like, you know, we just didn't give up. And I do believe that that, and by the way, I agree with you on the partner, are two of the most - Having a strong partner at home. 100 % for the journey are the key things in the hero's journey. And it's Joseph Campbell's monomyth, man. It's, you know, the entrepreneurial journey is rough and it's very easy to quit. and those that don't quit are those that tend to make it in the long run it's not always up into the right you can have an up into the right you can make google or facebook but most of the time it is basically those that duke it out and are good at suffering and pain tolerance the latin word for right this is what you guys talked about too for passion comes from suffering.

1:20:38And if you, if you love suffering, then maybe you're going to love making a company. Are you hiring anything you're hiring for? You know, I really could use a great podcaster interviewer guy, especially one that has an, if I had your voice, you have such, you have such a good voice. Oh, thank you. Like on the pod, like, cause I, you know, people are listening to it and I hate my voice. I hate how it sounds. I hate how I talk. And if I had your voice, I think my market caps would be like 2X. You know, I never thought of myself as having any kind of voice. I thought I had a normal voice. And then you start, you know, it turns out you start doing a podcast, people, you have an awesome comment on the voice.

1:21:23Yeah, you have a voice for what you do. How did you start doing this? how did I start doing this? I, when I joined Kleiner, I, do you do investments? I, so this is, I'll tell you the story. Yeah. Basically, when I joined KP, I was very young to join a venture firm as at the time an operating partner. And, you know, I had like not that much experience for usually a role that's like the end of your career where you like, you know, talk about all the cool stuff that you did and you have all this history and network and all this stuff. Okay. And very quickly, I realized that when I was talking to founders about the things that I thought that they should do on go-to-market distribution, for example, they'd be like brilliant technical founders.

1:22:13We would like go back and forth and then very quickly, like there was routes to go run. Right. And I'm like not full-time at the company. and I'm like, oh my God, like somebody needs to run these routes and it's not me and it's not the founder. Like we need like a CRO. We need like a sales leader. Like we need somebody to do this. And so I was like, okay, well, I know my old boss, you know, like I know a few sales leaders, not that many. Right. So I'm like, okay, I need an excuse to get to know these people. Right. So that's how the podcast started. Episodes one through 80, 75, were only CROs.

1:22:54I saw you had Sam. Blonde. I love Sam. I'm seeing him tonight. You are? Yeah. He's doing his own company. Yeah. Sam's amazing. Sam was episode four. If I could hire Sam, he'd be my first choice. Sam was episode four. He's the best. I love him. I got to reach out to him. Are you guys investors in Brex or Ram? Brex. Brex. Brex. Sam's a gem and we're investors in we're the series of Rippling which he knows Parker from the days anyway so I just needed an excuse and so you know I came up with this as a good excuse to get to know someone like on a personal level and I talked about the things that I'm a customer of one I want to talk about what I want to learn about that's it and then after that it just started taking a life of its own.

1:23:48So like my TAM was quite narrow. And then over time, it would like became CMOs and then CEOs and then CEOs that were CROs. And then by like episode 90 something, it's like John Doerr. And then it's like the AOL founder. And then it's like the Intuit founder. And then from then on, it's basically all been CEOs and founders. It just took a life of its own. But that was the original intent. And by the way, still to this day, like, it's funny you say like the voice thing, like I only do this to get to know guests. I just do this because I'm fascinated by people building companies. Well, that's the Rick Rubin approach, right?

1:24:29I mean, the artists that make the work for themselves are the ones that succeed. The audience is incremental. And then people make the mistake of trying to make it for the audience what they think the audience wants. That's when the art becomes not as good. Well, actually, I think when people make what somebody else wants, they quit. And the reason for that is because they are not actually genuinely curious anymore. They're just doing it for somebody else. And that's why most podcasts just don't make it past an X amount of episodes, because you start to get all of this feedback from the outside world, start to care about what they're saying about you.

1:25:02Right. And then you start to behave differently. And then you lose the original intent and pursuit of what you were doing. and so anyway I always say the show is over when I am no longer curious about my guests or I get Elon one of those two happens one of those two happens and it's over so this was fun man I really enjoyed meeting you thanks for doing this yeah that's it for now if you like the episode please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.