Jon Steinback, Co-Founder and CEO at Marker: BREAKING: Marker raised $13m Seed

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today I'm joined by Jon Steinback. Jon is the co-founder and CEO of a very exciting new AI tool that is coming out of stealth today with some very exciting news. Jon, thanks for joining me.

0:13Jon Steinback:It is so exciting to get to share this news with the world. Sam, thanks for having me. Let's go. Tell us, what have you built and what have you raised? Oh my gosh, we're building this company called Marker and we're coming out of stealth and announcing that we've closed our seed round led by Index with participation from a bunch of other amazing people. And we're building what we think is the future of writing. I think if you're a writer today, you have two choices. You can use software that's decades old, like Microsoft Word and Google Docs, which is ill-suited for the modern world. They're largely typesetting tools.

0:44Jon Steinback:Or you can put a prompt into an LLM and hope that the output matches what's in your head. And we think there's a better path. So we built Marker, which is, I think, a modern writing tool for people who believe in actual writing. And what does it look like in practice? You know, is this something that lives in a Word document? Is it a simple piece of software entirely? What is it? I think something we realized is if we wanted to do this right, we needed to build the whole stack. Because writing is not just the transcription of text. It's the whole process. It's like thinking of the thing. It's writing the thing.

1:15Jon Steinback:And then it's editing the thing. So we've built what is a clean and beautiful screen. And that's, again, just to like take away all the distractions and keep people in a place of discovery where they're sharing their thoughts. It's got a ton of really interesting tools, many of which are AI, but others are just logical. Like, how could you improve upon the commenting experience or the collaboration experience? And then we built a best-in-kind AI editor to help people develop their ideas. Really cool. So who are you talking with this? Is this anyone and everyone? Are you talking creatives, journalists?

1:47Who are you talking to?

1:48Jon Steinback:Oh, man, if you talk to me, I think everyone should be using this. Is it? And I don't like there are billions of people using word processors today. And I think a lot of those people will want a tool that's better suited for the art of writing. For us, though, specifically, we think of people who are trying to communicate ideas to other people. And the best proxy for us is people who run things like newsletters like Substackers or people on Ghost or Kit or Patreon or one of those. These are people who write regularly to an audience of people. And it's important to them that they get their ideas across in the right way.

2:21Jon Steinback:And I think that is the foundational idea about writing. It's taking an idea and put it in on a page and giving it to someone else. And we think we have by far the best way to do that. And you have been in stealth. There have been people testing it, trialing it. You've been inviting people to the platform. Who have those people been and what's the feedback been? It's a bunch of writers. And I'm going to use the quote writers because I think of writers as people who write. Some of these people are novelists. Some of these people are people who run newsletters or journalists. Some of these people write memos to their team, and some of them just want help with their day-to-day communications.

2:55Jon Steinback:Like we had one person who really helped them compose a sense of email to their family. And I think one of the beautiful things here is when you look at writing, like the idea of writing is sharing something with someone. And you look at the tools we have, whether LLMs or word processors, and they do almost nothing that helps with that. And the feedback we've gotten is that this helps me feel better about the words on the page. It makes me feel more confident that I got my idea out there. And hopefully it helps with the process of that without robbing people of the feeling of authorship. That's really interesting.

3:31You're right. I mean, there is no way of, yeah, they're very, yeah, that's pretty interesting. How did you know what to build? And how did you know when the product was ready?

3:41Jon Steinback:Ah, these are, that's a great question. I think we intuitively felt that there was nothing cool for writers. Like if you're in any other creative field, you have amazing tools that people keep on one-upping for you to help you do what you want to do. Like if you're a designer, you have Figma. If you're a coder, you have cursor and all of its ilk. But if you're a writer, we've just had these old things. Luckily, I think intuitively and through decades of research, we know a lot of the best practices of writing. And it's, again, like how to keep people in that place of discovery and how do you just make better tools that reflect the writing process.

4:20Jon Steinback:So we've been slowly chipping away at those. I think we had some early assumptions that were strong and turned out to be right. We had other ones that our alpha testers have told us were not as right. But I think overall, the North Star has been clear and we've just continued to tag away at something that feels really good. What do you think is the right balance between letting people do the writing and using AI to, I guess, do something for them, as opposed to just the editing or grammar? Where do you find the balance? Where do you think that balance lives between somebody doing the writing themselves and AI actually putting words on the page?

4:56Jon Steinback:yeah the distinction for us is always we wanted this to be something that writes with you rather than for you i think writing is a fairly nuanced thing like every word you choose has a meaning and every mean every word creates nuance so when you're not choosing all the words you often feel like the meaning and nuance of what you're writing deviates from what you imagine so for us that central the central uh column where people do their writing is a place that the person and owns. So the AI will never write there without your confirmation. It might make suggestions, it might give feedback. But again, the final choice of what's there is deeply aided by the tools we've built, but it's yours to own and you maintain authorship.

5:38And when you look at some of the writing that is being cut out by LLMs today, what do you think is wrong with it? Why do you think it is not fit for purpose in helping people best express their ideas or getting their thoughts in their beliefs in this paper?

5:52Jon Steinback:I think each of us feels it like ourselves. There's a lot of really interesting studies about this, like how when you see LLM writing, it anchors your thinking and restricts your creativity, or it has really sophisticated grammatical constructions and word choice, but that it doesn't echo what you feel or what you'd use naturally. And I don't think a lot of that is style transfer, like it getting your style wrong, or it not getting your idea. I think it's just trying to fill in the gaps there. And I think it's really hard to do that. And if you ask a lot of writers who use LLMs, they spend more time editing it than they would if they just wrote it themselves.

6:30Jon Steinback:And obviously, that's not a good solution. And we thought there are ways to use the LLMs to provide scaffolding and provide assistance in that process without actually just filling in all the gaps that you need to provide a little bit more clarity on from your thinking. Amazing that you've got some amazing investors who are joining the round and who are backing you. What did they like about it? And what did you like about them? Where did this marriage come from and what did they see in the product and what did you see in them? I mean, we have such an incredible set of investors and we're so lucky.

7:05Jon Steinback:I think a lot of them, I think there's two things that we felt really strongly. One is, as one of our investors put it, we have a contrarian philosophy. We've met with a lot of investors who are like, writing won't exist in five years, which is obviously something we don't believe, but it's also something we want to manifest, not into existence. We want to create more writing, not eliminate it. And I think the investors we have really agreed with that philosophy. I think there is something to the humanity that you see around certain things that are shared, both on the internet and off, across all mediums, like what you do, Seb.

7:40Jon Steinback:And those investors wanted to double down on that idea, rather than let it all be subsumed by generated text. That's really interesting. Yeah. I haven't heard anyone say that writing is going up, but I can imagine some people saying that. I can imagine, especially if it's the need to be very... Rhetorically pull things out of you. But I think it's an interesting idea. If you spend all your time on a place that is full of slop, like a lot of what people post these days, it's easy to imagine that that's the way things are going. But I think a lot of people want to change that future. And how did you find going through the fundraise?

8:19You know, in many ways, you're not a classic tech archetype founder in the sense that you are probably more creative than a lot of founders that I speak to who are either highly technical or highly commercial, ex-McKinsey. You've got this background in, I guess, that marketing creative industries for a long time. How did you find the process in trying to articulate your idea, your vision to investors?

8:41Jon Steinback:I mean, I'm going to go heavily contrarian here. I love the process. My co-founder and Ryan, my co-founder Ryan and I went into a lot of these meetings and we just really enjoyed the discussions we were having. People are deeply passionate about the future of writing. And it was also really clear to us who was on board for that journey and who wanted to support it. And we're not only lucky because I think the process was something we enjoyed, but the investors have really leaned in to help in so many different ways. Because again, they want to be part of that future, I hope, I think. And that's what we're seeing right now.

9:20Amazing. And can we talk about your time at DeepMind? So I think you spent three years at DeepMind. You were in the creative and marketing team and it looked like you were working across everything from AlphaFull to Gemini. can you touch a bit on what your role was and then how that has impacted the way that you've

9:34Jon Steinback:built the company that you're building yeah so i uh i was at deep mind for about four years i led the creative brand and marketing team i mean deep mind's the most amazing place uh and it's full of the most incredible research and development and the most incredible people driving that development and i learned so much um and i think part of it was it was like seeing where the technology was going. I joined in 2020, which is not early in AI terms, but is relatively early. And seeing how that was going to affect everything and having a front seat to Demis and all the teams working on that was really incredible.

10:12Jon Steinback:I think for me, what became very apparent was I've always been fascinated, like through my career, of where technology intersects with humanity. Like what is the layer through which it affects the greatest swath? And you could really easily see how AI was going to touch so many, so much of the surface area, like so many of the areas there. And writing is one, like as somebody whose career has involved a tremendous amount of writing, who studied writing, like that just felt like something super important and something that I wanted to be more directly involved with. Amazing. And now that you've raised this round, you know, what are you going to be using the money for?

10:52You can be building out the team, I'm hiring more people. And what does that look like? And what does a team structure look like for this? Often when I interview, you know, founders who are building AI companies for specific niches, they end up hiring a lot of people in that niche. So whether it's like engineers or, I don't know, experts in material science, are you building a team of great writers to help you shape the product? Like, what does that look like?

11:16Jon Steinback:It's, it is basically that. Like my co-founder, Ryan, who's the most incredible guy in the world, is been working in the publishing areas, like adjacent publishing areas for two decades. Our founding engineer, Yanni, studied comparative literature. Like he is deep in this world and everybody, I think in the sense that like everybody writes, everybody's a writer. All of the people who've joined our team, there are eight of us now, and that's engineers. We have this wonderful woman, Amy, who's leading the business side of things. AI researchers, they all have a specific deep interest in writing and the future of writing.

11:54Jon Steinback:And I think, you know, we're a mission-driven company. We have a strong sense of purpose, so hopefully we'll continue to recruit those individuals who do that. And I think what this funding means for us is we can continue to focus on this problem. Like, writing is a deeply complicated space, both from an analysis and composition perspective. And as one of our investors told us, it's a very long journey we're on trying to do this right. It's not a simple press a button and get something out. And we're really excited. We're in alpha now. Our alpha users have expressed that they feel much better about the writing they do in Marker, both the process and the final product.

12:36Jon Steinback:And we have a wait list now. So if you want to go to marker.page and sign up, you can sign up there. And we're letting people in as fast as we can right now to just learn what we need to take it to each stage. but we hope to happen to have it more broadly open in the not too distant future uh so if you're somebody who's writerly if you write a sub stack or you write to your teams or anything like that hopefully marker will be a place for you to write in the future amazing and what do you want to get out of this announcement is it more people is it people trying testing it what's the vision you know yeah i guess like what what impact do you want to have with the announcement coming out of stealth Yeah, I think there are two things for me.

13:18Jon Steinback:One is we want to help build and support the community of writers out there. Like we often say that writing is a social activity you do alone. And we want to foster something that is right for the community. So the more writers that are using Marker, giving us feedback, telling us how we can build a better tool for them. We also have an office in Shoreditch that we're using as a writer's hub. We have writing circles, we have events, we have all sorts of stuff like that. So definitely swing by for that. And I think the other thing we want to do is start shifting the discourse around writing. Like AI and writing has been in the news a lot these days.

13:58Jon Steinback:And it's usually two very polar extremes, which is either LLMs are the future and AI writing is going to subsume us all. or we have to turn these things off and pull out our quills and ink pots and go back to that for writing. And we certainly understand and have had a lot of conversations on every end of that spectrum, but we think there's a middle path, which is how can technology enable more amazing writing while not robbing us of the essential humanity at the core of it. And what does this look like in one year, five years, ten years? like what is the ultimate future that you'd like to build with Markup?

14:40Jon Steinback:I mean, our goal is we have our mission, which I'm sure will change at some point or evolve at some point, because we scribbled it down at the start, is to help people turn thoughts into words. And our goal is that 50 % of the words that people write go through tools that we've created. And we think that writing is something we do all the time. we've chosen you know the blocks of text the the newsletter or something like that as a starting point but we write in all sorts of formats for all sorts of purposes and we think it's amazing that you could get the chance and this is what the funding does to create tools that help all aspects of that amazing look i'm really looking forward to to jumping in and trying it myself and i'm really excited for you and the team to meet the world and get your product out there but look John, thank you so much for joining me.

15:32It's amazing news.

15:33Jon Steinback:Thank you, Seb. Really appreciate it.