No Co-Founder, a Year in Stealth and $20M to Replace Slack | Sara Du, Ando

17:05Sara Du:So I'd love to talk about that as well. But maybe just a little bit of context on how Alloy came to be and how you ended up having a co-founder for it.

17:12Ando:Yeah. It was just a friend of mine who we'd been working on projects throughout high school. So it wasn't even this intentional co-founder search. We had a project and kind of fell into it. And so I think that's a bit of a flaw when you're a young founder sometimes, because I think a company, like, you know, you start something because you see this like market and you see this possible future. And I think the beauty of being a solo founder is you can very clearly see what the company needs. And actually just because you're solo at the start doesn't mean you bring people on later. And so I think it's important to actually feel that out.

17:49Ando:Like what is the type of person that would fit into the like puzzle piece, right? The shape of the company. And then how is the company like evolving? Like what does it need? I think I've been able to actually kind of, I think after starting out, I realized like the company has like a soul of its own. Right. And so, yeah, I need, I think it's important to like kind of piece that apart. And as a solo founder, you just have such a clear like feeling around that versus I think with two people, especially two first time founders, it's just like there's lots of little like personality and like ego things and lots of just like things to figure out.

18:24Ando:And that's why so many, you know, co-founders go to like therapy together. Right. Yeah.

18:29Sara Du:I think it's also the reason why so many companies fail too. Right. Something like 65 % of companies fail because of people issues. But usually they don't have any people other than the co-founders when they do fail, or it's a very small team. I'd be really curious to hear specifically how you think about sort of, I know that you've got very strong opinions on product. Obviously, it's a core part of what differentiates you from Discord or Slack or something like that. I'm really curious how you've cultivated, what some of those opinions are so people can hear them, and also how you cultivated that within the team, how you attracted people who had similar sort of ways of viewing the world, how you found people who complimented you, that sort of thing?

19:13Ando:Yeah. So one of our core beliefs and the way we operate inside of Ondo, because we've only been on Ondo since January, like no Slack for us. We think most of the world still treats and views agents as tools, like the way you talk to them, right? Like the way you just interact, it's more like an app that you install into your Slack workspace versus a colleague you're inviting in and onboarding. And so that just manifests in so many ways in the product, how we've designed the agent experience. Like, it's not something that humans see. Like, you can obviously go in and look at our, like, MCP tools and try to understand that.

19:51Ando:But there's lots of details in that that I want to make the experience for agents, like, really great so that they can show humans, like, you know, where they shine and where they can take up work that a human might not expect they can do, right? The best co-workers, I mean human co-workers, are proactive and do things that wow you. So I want agents to be able to do the same. And so a lot of my teammates are actually very into the philosophy around consciousness, what separates man and machine. There's a lot of great stuff in the early 1900s that's more relevant than ever. because if you zoom out, right, language was this technology that allowed humans to actually coordinate and even to talk about things in past and future tense because when we only had gestures, you couldn't do that, right?

20:42Ando:So then language kind of came about and we had these symbols and tokens to finally do things at scale and communicate more abstract things. And this is the first time in human history we have non-humans who can use the same symbols. they use them kind of differently right like lms are very verbose because you can communicate more context that way and consume like more and maybe it's a flaw of humans that we can't actually express ourselves that well like i'm on this podcast and sometimes i'm kind of trailing off and it's like i'm using sort of tokens that might not resonate in the same way for you like we're picturing two different things and i think agents are actually even though a lot of stuff for us is off-putting about them, like huge blocks of text, it actually works well for them.

21:27Ando:So anyways, to go back to the point, we as a team are actually quite into a lot of these types of just being able to zoom out and think about, oh, where we're sitting in human history, and then kind of zoom back in and be like, okay, humans find it uncomfortable to process all these tokens. How do we mold the product experience for humans and then mold it for agents? So an example is we have this really silly like kind of hidden tool where agents can basically like squish the text that they like send out but they themselves see the same original copy of the text that they were communicating so that for example if we're trying to resolve like maybe like a PR review thing you know how agents they say a bunch of crap right and sometimes they say things that are like hilarious to us like they have a tendency to say trying to like merged exact head on this branch right it's like really weird language and it makes sense to them it doesn't make sense to us so they can use that almost like translator and make it palatable for humans and so yeah our team like you can see on our website we have like a little library section that's kind of hidden we like share our readings like maybe once a month we'll host like something where we just like go over a few pieces of philosophy text and invite some friends in the company.

22:49Sara Du:That's really cool. How did you think about building out the initial team? Because it's really interesting when you think about co-founders. The idea of co-founders is that they kind of are all you need in the early days, right? But as a solo founder, even if you can code, you can market, there are a lot of things that you need to do. Unless you're trying to build a truly solo company where your goal is to never hire other humans. Some people are doing that. My friend Ben from Pulsia is one of them. Most people are intending to hire actual other people to work with. It's culturally a different dynamic.

23:26Sara Du:When you hire is probably different than when you have co-founders. I'm curious what your experience has been like with hiring as a solo founder. What are things you've learned and what were things that you were really intentional about when you got started?

23:38Ando:Yeah, I think it's more important for you to just like share these values with your teammates if you're a solo founder, because I think you'll kind of distribute your time with them versus with like a co-founder. You kind of lock yourselves up and then interface with the team. It's a different dynamic, actually. And so I like I wish I could say I was very intentional, but honestly, I spend so much of my time building and like thinking about product that often the best folks have come inbound because they kind of see a sliver of what I'm building. And they're like, oh, like I really believe in this future, too.

24:14Ando:And like maybe something about the design bothers them or like they want to contribute in like X, Y, Z way. And so it's sort of like I've put out like this, like everyone in the world can see I'm building this puzzle. And it's very clear actually where I can like contribute like good pieces, but then there's like missing ones. And so my goal is as a marketer, right, I just do a good job marketing this problem and this product and the right people find and, you know, reach out. Although, you know, I should probably reach out to more folks myself. But I think attracting is sometimes better than chasing because, yeah, like with chasing folks, the timing's not always right.

24:53Ando:You end up burning a lot of time as a solo founder.

24:56Sara Du:I'm curious for the team that you have now. Like one thing that I really believe in is this idea of keeping lists of people you want to work with someday. Even though there may not be any sort of clear sense of how you'll work with them or when you'll work with them. But if you keep these lists and you kind of follow these lists and keep in touch and just sort of continue to monitor the situation, you might actually end up working with like a surprising number of them. It's happened with me over the years at OnDeck and now solo founders, both in terms of, you know, having people as teammates, but also investing in people.

25:28Sara Du:I'm curious, you know, the first people that you brought on, I don't know how many people on your team right now. What were they people that mostly came in cold? Were there some people that you'd sort of been following for a while? And how do you think about sort of staying in touch with people and kind of consistently making sure that you're, you know, not missing out on great people that you've met and you kind of maybe they weren't available then?

25:51Ando:Actually, yeah, I made it sound like everyone was cold, but actually over half the team was people I actually one guy on the team worked for me for over four years at Alloy and then joined me on Ando. Another we'd actually he'd been a founder. we had offices across the street from each other when we were doing our previous companies and we'd like stayed in touch I invited him to dinner I was hosting and then there's another person who I'd followed his work on Twitter for a while and basically just DMed him and I think the best folks like for him in that case he started by contracting right and like helping out a little bit and then you slowly loop people in so I don't really believe in this like black and white hiring sort of like you start into like outer circle of like friends of the company and we like try to

26:39Sara Du:like pull you closer and closer that's really cool i mean i think that something that has come up many times over the last six months i've been recording this podcast is this idea of starting with contracting and not trying to go immediately to convert somebody full-time i'm curious what you've learned about that um sort of is that partially a dynamic of maybe they are not sure they want to commit to something full-time and you don't have to talk about like an exact case but I'm just curious what you've learned over the years of doing sort of full-time hires and also contract that eventually converts to full-time.

27:13Ando:Yeah I think it's actually a really nice option because you can kind of mutually vet right because the worst is when you hire someone and both parties like find out things and it's just like within the 90 days or even after it's not working out. So I think you can get far more signal. And like for a lot of people who aren't sold, it's part of like nerd sniping them. It's like, oh, you now have this thing that it's hard to, if you actually really like it, it's hard to step away from it. And so, yeah, I think it's just, it doesn't work for everyone because some teams are like not as into this fluidity and there's a lot of whiplash that comes with it.

27:50Ando:So you have to make sure you set up good infra for like provisioning, deprovisioning, people are very used to and don't take like departures too like seriously. It's like, oh, this is just someone who's coming here to help out, right, for a little bit.

28:04Sara Du:I think there's something really, really great about sort of, you know, it's not devious, but it's clever, and I think it's the right thing, which is if somebody does get nerd sniped, meaning they're just like, you get them in there and they say, I'm going to spend this amount of time on it, but they just can't help themselves to spend more. That's great because ultimately it shows them that, you know, they actually should potentially ramp up more. And if they aren't nerd sniped, well, they probably weren't necessarily a fit for what you're working on anyways. So it's, it's probably just a really good, a really good thing either way.

28:40Sara Du:But I think it's like this very good way of getting great people to start working with you and sort of dip their toe in and then realize that they just want to jump in all, all the way.

28:49Ando:Exactly. Yeah. And I feel like like the art of hiring is about getting people to care and in a just standard interview process it's kind of hard especially these days there's so many contract recruiters and platforms like paraform and it's all very transactional it's almost like people are on these dating apps for hiring people and it's just like swiping and you can tell the people you meet through those things

29:13Sara Du:are pretty mercenary they're mercenary and also the the companies kind of treat them as just another number too, generally. I mean, it's really hard not to when you've got so many applications coming in through these different platforms. It feels like the great opportunity is for people who are not necessarily actively looking or they're just really genuinely interested in what the company is working on. And I think that that ability to give them sort of the way to see what you're working on, which you've done really well, even though you've been relatively quiet with Undo is really great. Maybe you could share a little bit about where you're at today with the company.

29:52Sara Du:You announced the funding right before we published this. Where are you at with the company? What are the things you've learned along the way?

30:02Ando:We're basically a year into building this. We have an early alpha group of over 100 users now. and we announced the funding because we wanted to make sure we were on people's radars. Team messaging is a multiplayer product, so it's not about just getting one person to really love it. You have to get them to convince their teams, and so I thought it was important to start building our brand at this point. But yeah, I would say it's really interesting the types of teams that find us um it's really maybe 15 to 20 sf based teams we have 14 or 15 countries represented in our alpha and there are plenty of teams outside of our bubble who are way more agent pilled um both than i would expect and even if you benchmark them with how they're using agents compared to like even let's say neolabs and sf like what are some examples of that yeah like there's like an a venture sports company in New Zealand that I'm like, first off, I didn't know you would just be on Twitter.

31:06Ando:And then you also have this whole crazy agent set up. And you're teaching me things on this call. Like, that's the type of, like, just encounter that makes me really love building this because they are the ones who are like, Slack is really not cutting it. Neither is Discord. And like, we really need this. Like, we see what you're building. And so they are the ones who then push us on, you know, what their agents need. It's really cool.

31:30Sara Du:I actually was at a health spa maybe a couple months ago in Santa Cruz. And I was shocked by just how much the guy who owned the spa was completely agent-pilled, Claude Code-pilled. He owned a bunch of different businesses around the area. And he was telling me about all the different things that he built and the way he uses agents. And I could tell from the people who were front of desk that not necessarily all of them had sort of gotten up to speed on this the way he had, but he was all in on it. And it just goes to show that people that you might think are pretty traditional are actually like really adopting these tools.

32:08Sara Du:It's just not fully distributed yet. It's like that idea about the features already arrived. It's not distributed. But it's really cool to hear that people are outside of sort of the traditional swim lane of like Silicon Valley startups using this and they're benefiting from what you're building. I'm really curious, what do you think people are doing right now on Slack with agents that is just not the right way of doing things? And it's maybe not their fault because they haven't heard about Undo yet. And they're ultimately going to be able to use agents in a better way. But I'm curious what you've seen so far about sort of the, mistakes isn't the right word, but something close to a mistake, like missed opportunities, I would say, with agents.

32:51Ando:Or perspective shifting. Yeah. First off, it's not people's fault because the way Slack is built, it just doesn't enable these experiences because Slack, you know, it's like this big office building that was built 15 years ago for humans, right? And they have this concept of apps. They have their app platform, which agents live on top of because it existed, right? And in the early innings of agents, it kind of made sense to just tack it on. But it makes it hard because then your first encounter with agents inside Slack is this install thing. It's like install a coworker. Is that even the right frame of mind?

33:27And so that's

33:28Ando:one. And then if you think about that underlying architecture, agents are not treated the same as humans in the way their data model is set up. It's not really possible for an agent to join this workspace and understand like what are the channels i can join like when i need to sidebar with people how do i create a group dm with them there's so many things they just cannot do it's like being dropped into like imagine you're an agent you're literally just dropped into this office building that was not built for you like you can't really use the doors or hallways properly maybe you can't open the doors because you don't have the same limbs as you can't even read the signs yeah you can maybe read the signs but it's like people are referencing stuff in like file cabinets that they've locked right it's just like okay like what do i do i'm like this super intelligent intelligent being and like yeah people are asking me to do stuff with very little context and then berating me so that's what i mean when i say we really actually care about the agent experience because when you add an agent into the workspace and ondo they are like a type of entity that joins a channel like a human and then they actually have both the tools and the context is kind of packaged for them in a way that helps them understand what's going on.

34:47Ando:An example is etiquette. So with humans, you actually, it actually does take us some time to like warm up, right? Yeah. You join a company and you have to observe a bit and not everyone is like going to be everyone else's cup of tea. Like everyone develops like a little bit of their style. And so what's been really cool is to see how agents even develop their own sort of slang and style based on a mix of things. Like obviously the workspace has like overarching, like this is our style. And then channels have different etiquette. And then based on who you're talking to, you might adjust. Right.

35:21Ando:If it's your manager, you're not going to be like, yo, what's up? And so, yeah, agents can truly, if you give them that context in the right way, they can learn very quickly.

35:29Sara Du:That's really cool. It definitely makes me think about how people will switch sort of the way they talk, depending, you know, manager, you know, team, things like that. But also outside of work, how you talk to different types of people or family members. We haven't really seen agents sort of exhibit that level of adaptability outside of what you're building. And it feels like that's it treats everything in somewhat similar of a way.

35:52Ando:Right. But it's not like it's totally easy to build. And it's not an intelligence problem. It's very much context. Yeah.

35:59Sara Du:And the other thing that you said that's really interesting is like this idea of sort of adaptability and sort of, you know, people need to sort of warm up and they need to kind of have, they often call this like the first 90 days, right? There's a really famous book about the first 90 days that both like people who are hiring sometimes read, people who are joining companies read. I think it's a great, it's a great read in general. all. But I'm curious, what's the first 90 days for an agent? Because of course, maybe an agent can warm up much faster, right? But at the same time, the first 90 days aren't just about the new employee, they're also about the company, right?

36:35Sara Du:So I'm curious how you think of an agent sort of onboarding. What is their first 90 days with the humans that they're working with and the other agents that they're working with?

36:44Ando:Yeah, agents have a very high pressure job. They need to find how to be maximally helpful within the shortest time period. Otherwise humans get frustrated. Um, and so I think there's ways we as a platform can help them. So for example, I'm actually very anti thinking traces because I think it's so crazy that like, like imagine if between you and I, like we, you could see like Sarah working one second, two seconds, it's 60 seconds now. It's like putting that little UI on an agent just makes you very like impatient, right it's like why is it still working um and so there are all these things where i'm just like it doesn't belong in this platform like we're gonna not have this ui and that way the way humans even perceive their agent colleagues just puts them on a more even footing with other human colleagues i think it's important that humans have patience with agents and that you don't have these crazy expectations of like the agent is just immediately going to read your mind and do everything that a human colleague couldn't.

37:42Ando:It just takes like maybe a few hours, a few days to boot up. And then like once you're past that, it's extremely helpful. And so what basically the TLDRs, there are these visual and literally just software interface things we're doing to make it such that humans come in and just have the right expectations.

38:02Sara Du:So Claire Vo, who's building ChatPRD, I don't know if you've ever met Claire, She runs a lot of open clause, right? And she talks about how each one of them has sort of its own functions, its own sort of things that she counts on it for. I'm curious sort of your philosophy, or maybe you actually are allowing people to sort of make this decision as individual teams, but sort of the specialist sort of agent versus the agent that can cover a lot of territory. You know, the more anthropomorphized version of this is the agent that has some level of specialization, just how teammates generally have some degree of specialization.

38:44Sara Du:But, you know, there are some people who believe that maybe you should actually have more of an agent that is kind of serving a broader, you know, pool of needs. I'm curious, like, what you've learned about that, sort of your perspective on it, if you have one.

38:58Ando:Yeah. So we're a messaging platform where people can bring their agents. We actually do have our own harness. So you can spin up a cloud agent very quickly that we host. But generally, we see it like you bringing on coworkers. Different solo founders have different philosophies on how to build a team, right? You can get pretty far with one person. But some people like having multiple. And so on this point, we're unopinionated as a platform. Like all we want to optimize is just how can you coordinate between humans and agents and just through message sending. So people should all perceive this as a messaging platform.

39:36Ando:I actually think like my personal opinion is that it's a flaw of humans that we need to have many agents. For example, technically, we could have just one agent that's really intelligent, can figure out your permissions are like this. So you shouldn't see this. You don't want this other person to know about this other thing. like an intelligent, both high IQ, high EQ agent could just do everything. But the problem is humans like to see some separation of identity. It's like this agent specializes in this and has access to rippling. I don't want to feel like I'm talking to the same agent about rippling salary stuff when someone else is going to talk to it about their notion or linear tickets.

40:18Ando:And so it's really, it's not a functional or technical thing.

40:23Sara Du:Yeah, so it's purely sort of like a user experience, kind of like what they're used to. Do you think that that is a holdover from this period before AI? And do you think that that will actually change over time? Or do you think that this is more of a long-term sort of sociological phenomenon?

40:44Ando:on yeah i am curious what the time scale looks like because i think human trust like the speed of gaining human trust has not changed but if we can build agents that get to that level of trust where groups of people can be like we're all going to use like one agent and we trust it to do everything correct um i think it's possible on like a few year time scale but the problem though is there's like like i was saying earlier humans are really bad at conveying what they want to do and like conveying context. So often it's like user error, right? And not communicating to the agent, the parameters of who should be able to see what or like what's privileged information.

41:26Ando:And you know how in organizations, sometimes information leak and gossip is like a feature rather than a bug. So all of this stuff is, again, kind of fuzzy. And so I think it won't be anytime very soon that organizations will all just have one agent that everyone talks to.

41:44Sara Du:It's kind of interesting because when you hear some teammate maybe accidentally like reveal something that they shouldn't have revealed to like some other person, you know, depending on the severity of it, I imagine that that changes the response. But if it happens with an agent, you're probably just like way, way more sort of concerned because like with a human, it's like one lapse of judgment or maybe one sort of just mistake and slip. with an agent you kind of look at them and you're like is that going to be something that happens all the time you know or is that is that i'm curious if you have any thoughts about that sort of like human mistakes versus agent mistakes and how uh how humans sort of judge human versus

42:28Ando:agent mistakes yeah humans are so intolerant of agent mistakes versus humans it's like the inverse of that like human trust takes a while to gain like the speed of that is slow and then the speed of losing trust is fast with agents. But like the thing is with human to human trust, once it's established, it's actually much more resilient than human to agent. And I think that's, that's something that's going to be tough for a lot of platforms. It's like, how hard do you want to push on helping agents get the trust of the human users? And so I actually think that like visual software design, I know everyone's like super bearish on interfaces, but I do think there are places where interfaces help bridge that trust gap.

43:15Ando:That's like the role of interfaces.

43:17Sara Du:Say more about people being bearish on interfaces. Could you try and steel man their position and then talk about your position about it?

43:25Ando:Yeah, honestly, I do buy that many companies will shift to be harness companies, right? Like humans don't really want to use Jira and linear all day and deal with the UI. So maybe it's better if they're just harnesses that are excellent at using those tools that they've designed. And it's kind of like the data structures and the logic behind them are what matter. But it's still, there are types of software where interface matters. Like, so it really depends on what you're building, right? I like to believe that messaging is one of the last human-facing pieces of software because it's where we do a lot of our planning, coordination, et cetera.

44:07Ando:I actually like to think of software on the spectrum of whether it's past, present, or future-facing. So what I mean by that is with GitHub, it's kind of past-facing in the sense that you can't tell what's done or what people are doing in it until the thing is done. Not even the present.

44:23Sara Du:You can only see what was committed. Exactly. So GitHub is past, linear is present,

44:29Ando:and then say Zoom and onto our future because it's where we talk about what we're trying to do, what we want to do. I mean, technically, say it covers the spectrum of things, but what's special about it is it's future-facing. We are literally talking things into existence if we can execute on the things with the other tools. So I think with this spectrum of software, present and past-facing ones, the interface doesn't matter so much if humans can communicate and convey their intent and the agents can pick up from there.

44:59Sara Du:How do you think about different sort of modalities for chat? So for instance, on mobile, voice-based, I'm curious what you think about that, sort of what you're doing with Ondo. Because ultimately, I mean, Slack in many ways feels like it was designed for desktop only with no real thought given to it existing on mobile. And then, you know, there's really no thought at all in terms of voice on Slack. So I'm curious how you think about those when it comes to what you're building.

45:35Ando:Yeah, I think for us, mobile will have to be very voice-based. It'll look quite different from desktop. We do have a mobile app, but it's kind of similar to Slack. I do think humans have natural tendencies to prefer one modality over the other. For example, I'm actually not a very voice-based person. I prefer to see things. I'm very visual. It makes sense that I'm design-oriented. whereas other people, like people who are dyslexic, it's painful to read the text. And so we have to design, as long as humans are using this piece of software, we do have to design for those aspects.

46:13Sara Du:The thing that drives me crazy is when I get a stream of voice notes from somebody on iMessage or something, I'm like, oh, I have to listen to all of this? The transcription is terrible. So it's kind of like you've given this person an assignment to have to listen to them talk and there's not even a speed multiplier. But at the same time, it does feel like there's this aspect of transformation around content, from text to voice, voice to text, that sort of thing. I agree with you that I much prefer to read things, but I much prefer, at least on my end, I much prefer to input things with voice, but I don't want to be the person who also just gives somebody an audio file that they have to listen to.

46:52Sara Du:So I'm curious how, when you talk about voice as a means for inputting text, I'm curious how you think about that, what you've done so far. And then also, does the team use things like Whisperflow? I'm curious to just hear about that as well.

47:08Ando:Yeah. I mean, one thing I do believe in is the way you create data or content affects your thinking. So actually writing something and typing something, right? One surprising thing is seeing how many people type and then delete, delete, and then type. and it's like a way of thinking that sometimes like voice-based doesn't quite capture like you know the paper was a big invention for humanity because you could actually write things and look at it and reason right and so maybe this will change as more people get comfortable with like tokens out in the air just like spoken but um this is part of why we actually care about the text the text-based experience in Ando and like actually still optimizing around written experience because I think a big part of human coordination is still reasoning over the tokens that other people share with you.

48:01Ando:And so total voice-to-voice coordination is still very hard at scale.

48:06Sara Du:It's a really good point. I think that it's kind of... Root is probably overstating it, but I think that it's maybe not very generous or very sporting to just do voice-to-text and then just hit send. I think that the move is you have to read what you've actually had the voice text do and then edit it. I generally think of it as like the starting point for the text versus the end point, unless it's like a very quick message where it's something like a sentence or something that I'm dictating.

48:40Ando:Right. But in different cultures too, there's sort of different expectations. Like in Asia, people just do voice message all the time. So I kind of wonder how that affects cognition and work.

48:51Sara Du:That's interesting. and also speed of communication and sort of what's actually communicated. Writing culture, I mean, it seems like it's writing culture in some ways is going down, right? Is that something that you're feeling like you have to sort of work against or encourage? Or how do you actually think about writing culture and reading culture for that matter?

49:12Ando:Yeah, it's a good question. For us, we have PRDs that agents tend to write, but then we have a tiny RFC that humans have to write. It's like, what is the intent of this feature? So in our work, we do force a lot of human writing because it creates clarity in the process, right? If you cannot articulate the thing you're thinking about and then reason upon it a bit before you share it with agents or humans, it's usually not a well-formed thought. So I think it's going to be an advantage as more people offload their thinking to agents. I think like a lot of the world is just going to like people are lazy right we just want to offload things like I would love to just not have to explain myself and for the agent to read my mind but until there's Neuralink it's still very valuable to think things through for example like we have this really complex Slack sync feature for people who need some continuity actually and it works for Slack Connect but it's incredibly like there's lots of like diagramming behind the scenes And it was not like something an agent could have one-shotted.

50:18Ando:Like a lot of people are like, oh, you could just be like, yeah, slash goal, like build Slack sync. But there's edge cases like what happens when someone has two different emails and they're on to Slack? There's all this like unsexy stuff that, I mean, maybe if an agent was really good at recursively looping through thinking through these edge cases, it could do that. But at least at this point in time, human reasoning is important enough where at Ando, everyone writes before they build, even if it's just a few lines. And then sometimes we'll do a diagram or an ASCII diagram. Like having the agent diagram is also really powerful.

50:58Ando:Actually, on a related point, because like, you know how humans, we benefit from writing and seeing and then reasoning on what we see. I've noticed that agents, when you have them diagram and then look at that diagram, it improves their reasoning. So it's not to say I'm very anti-agent writing initial RFC.

51:17Sara Du:There's this very famous, I don't know if it's real or not, or if it was some sort of approximation, this flowchart of sending a message on Slack. I don't know if you've seen this. It's crazy. It's got so many things going on just to send one message. It kind of reminds me of when they try and trace, I forget what it was. It was trying to trace the origin of one salmon for sourcing and cooking food and actually putting it on a restaurant table. It's just crazy to think about the amount of things that go into sending a single Slack message. What are the things that surprised you about building your company?

51:54Sara Du:Real-time messaging, team multiplayer. These are a lot of really big things. I'm curious, like, what's something that surprised you about that process?

52:05Ando:I would say there's a lot of, like, details around the edges, right? And it's just, like, the stuff that you, you know, just have to iron out because it's what people expect in a messaging platform. Okay, there's two types of things that have surprised me, though. One is how many random feature requests we get from people where we just cannot listen to them. It's like some people, like one person was like i want to be able to swipe between like i want to swipe my messages it was like a weird like interaction thing that someone requested but we get those requests all the time and it just goes to show like every individual has these weird desires for like custom software and they will be fulfilled by agents but for a messaging platform that a whole team uses you need to kind of build like a lowest common denominator like we're still far from like onto having custom skins for every single person who uses it, right?

52:57Ando:And the second is how much human feeling matters. It's more like building a game than a B2B software company. So that's why if you study the founders of messaging platforms from previous eras, they're all actually gaming founders because it's not a standard B2B SaaS build. So that's what's exciting to me because that's a thing that's kind of hard for LLMs to simulate. It's like, how is someone going to feel when they go through this sequence of screens? Obviously, there's all these simulation companies, but like what like what is a human going to feel like that is kind of hard, actually. And so that's what human designers and software builders are better at.

53:36Sara Du:So maybe just typically do this earlier. But before we go into sort of like the final round where we talk about solo founding a little bit more specifically, maybe you just rewind all the way back. I mean, what was, what were you doing before you got into the world of startups? Like, how did you end up here, like working on these things? How did you end up in San Francisco? I think it would just be useful background for folks.

53:57Ando:Yeah. I grew up in Georgia and I was actually not a very ambitious kid. I was just playing like, first off, I grew up like two hours North of Atlanta. So there's not much going on. It's super boring. And there were just like fields and houses were far apart. So we just like, and my parents actually were busy working. So me and my brother just entertained ourselves like playing out in nature. And it was kind of, it was, I guess, an interesting childhood because it was both like a bit lonely. And then also I learned what like deep boredom feels like. And I realized I really don't like that. So I was constantly trying to find stimulation.

54:37Ando:And honestly, the only form of that was books. And so that's why I kind of love like history and kind of thinking about some of these other things. And that was what I was up to. I played sports actually a lot. I was on like swim team, basketball team, golf team. So tri-season. And I didn't learn to code until I was 15. And it was actually because it's a long story, but my little brother, he's a bit smarter than me. We had our IQs measured as children. Like my parents are very harsh about those things. And so they sent him to this coding camp and it was expensive enough where I could not do my sports camp for that summer.

55:17Ando:And so I was jealous and I basically took his like children's like coding books and kind of taught myself at night just out of envy. And then as part of that process, I went online to figure out how to use like an online compiler. And then there are these like random sites where you could do these challenges and there were small bounties. And so I started to make little bits of money and, um, I met some really like just like interesting characters online. And I actually started building my Twitter following when I was, I think 16. Um, so very shortly after that, and that's when I found out what a VC is, um, because I got random followers from these firms and I learned all about the scene here.

55:59Ando:And so I ended up coming out to SF, um, because I just like, it felt like this better way of living was to like build and like chase the dopamine of actually doing something productive. So yeah, I've really like, I've actually left SF for a period of my life to live in New York, but I came back because I just love like technology.

56:21Sara Du:Awesome. And in terms of team sports, you know, swimming is a very different dynamic than other team sports. I'm curious if you learned anything about like the team sports where you were all playing usually on the court at the same time. Basketball, obviously, some people are sitting and getting up and down, but you know, like it's a lot of people on the court at the same time versus swimming. It's more of an individualistic team sport. Is there anything interesting that you learned from the juxtaposition of those?

56:48Ando:Yeah, it was great because I would do golf in the fall, basketball in the winter, and then swim in the spring. And, you know, swim is such a solitary, almost like meditative sport. Um, but it's very intense because like, I actually had to train the most for that for, um, I guess there's no reason I trained the most, but I just spent like three hours in the pool every day during swim season. And then off season, I would keep going. Um, and then golf is one of those things where it's super mental. Like, you know, you kind of swing slightly the wrong way and you like chunk it or you slice it. And then, um, you constantly feel like you take two steps forward in your game and one step back.

57:28Ando:And so I learned a lot of lessons actually from golf and like patience and precision. And then basketball too. It's like, I think the kind of personalities on the team, there are a lot of different ones and learning to like play and like execute on the plays together, I thought was pretty cool to experience. And so yeah, like the three sports, they were a big part of my life actually for a long time. And so I feel like I've kind of shed a lot of that identity. Like I'm very unathletic these days. I just go to walk to work and my teammates are extremely athletic. So they've actually inspired me to do more.

58:07Sara Du:And in terms of coaching, I mean, you obviously had coaches for the different sports, maybe other coaches in your lives or your life. What else, what has coaching meant to you? And do you, do you do anything with coaching nowadays?

58:20Ando:These days, I don't have a coach, but I have had coaches and what I've appreciated is how they act as this mirror for you. I think actually, my teammates have done a really good job of being that for me. I think that's actually a great qualifier for someone to be like an early team member if you're a solo founder is you feel like you can build a relationship where they can actually like give you a sense, right, of like what you're better at and even just like help you reflect in some ways. There's a like, I can talk more in depth about this but one of my teammates actually wrote me this like amazing um doc about eliciting my values he's like this is what i've observed about you and what you um value based on your actions it's like you seem to value um like i forgot the specifics actually but um it was pretty cool to like receive that from someone and be like wow i didn't actually notice this stuff about myself.

59:18Sara Du:That was unprompted.

59:20Ando:Yeah, unprompted.

59:21Sara Du:Yeah. And so, and this was like early in our

59:25Ando:collaboration. And so I thought that was really cool. And I would love to have more of that in future teammates.

59:30Sara Du:Was that something that you think that person sort of had courage to do or sort of just didn't like, they just didn't, that wasn't the thing that worried them at all about sharing something like that? You know what I mean?

59:43Ando:Yeah. No, I absolutely have not necessarily created like the perfect environment for these things i think he's just he's had a lot of experience and there were certain things that he felt weren't going necessarily in the right direction so it was part of like kind of molding things towards it and yeah it was like courage and then um he's very discerning and so um like that also made me reflect on like how do i make sure that other people can feel like they can do this um it does take a lot of maturity i think like with all parties involved.

1:00:14Sara Du:It's remarkable. It's one of those things where you need to create somewhat of an environment to encourage that sort of thing, but also have people who are default open to it. Because if they would feel awkward about that in any way, it doesn't matter how nurturing the environment is or encouraging the environment is to maybe share something like that. If they're not ready to sort of act in that way, it might not work. So I feel like that's an interesting aspect of when you're evaluating these people who are your early teammates, are they going to feel comfortable? Will you create the space for them to feel comfortable to actually do that sort of thing?

1:00:51Ando:Yeah, I think maybe it's a side effect of like some folks being into like philosophy, because a key question is like, how do you live well, right? And so being able to like interrogate those questions together in these more like free form, like dinners where I'm inviting like my friends and like cool people in industry. And like, I invite my teammates when they're free and we can talk about those things. And I think when you can kind of front load that like values alignment, it's just like things flow a lot better. So an example is I have always just like never been explicitly nine, nine, six.

1:01:25Ando:I would never like force the team to be that way. But funny enough, we actually are literally like probably nine, 12, like sometimes seven. Like it's not forced it's just like in some weeks it's like we're not there on the weekend and so it's very much like you can feel other people's like energy around certain problems and then it's like it doesn't feel like work at some point when you just like are staying up late to try out this like agent memory experience or experiment you know there i think it was the founder of walmart

1:01:54Sara Du:who somebody asked him why isn't work hard one of your values he's like well if you need to be told that. You probably shouldn't be working here. So I think it's like, it's like anybody who says 996, it's like, do you really need to say that? I think, no, it's like one, it's like people should work in the way that's most productive to them. But also I think that if it's the right people for the right thing, they're just going to naturally be completely absorbed by this. You know, if that, if, if they're a right fit for the stage of the company at this time, it just seems like that's an organic thing that happens with the right people.

1:02:25Sara Du:You don't need to do all this posturing and stuff. I'd be really curious to hear, we'll close on sort of like the bear case for solo founding and the bull case for it in a second. But I'd be really curious to hear what's something that has sort of changed about how the way you think about building teams from Alloy to Ondo. Yeah.

1:02:51Ando:For one, I have become an extreme minimalist. when it comes to hiring and doing things generally. I think often founders have this itch because you raise money and it's so easy to raise money these days, right? And then it's like, what's the best way to deploy capital if not compute and like talent, right? And then when you have more talent, it's just like, let's do more things. I think that's, I guess, okay if you like have very, very clear PMF. But before that, it's sort of like, you got to figure out the like core of the thing. And sometimes it's just way easier when you have fewer people, fewer things being done.

1:03:27Ando:It's just like, let's focus on the core. What is the activation metric? What's the thing we're trying to learn? I think pre-PMF is just like, the only thing that matters is rate of learning. And that's really hard when you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

1:03:43Sara Du:Last question before we get into the bull and bear. I really want to understand sort of how you thought about it when it came to building something that was a long-term sort of time investment and also advice that you would give to founders because there are so many people who are seeing the tweets and the blog posts about the thing that went, and some accelerators really try and really emphasize the hockey stick, right, of things just going out of the gate and ramping revenue super quickly. And there are some businesses that obviously can do that well and they'll ultimately be successful. but there are a lot of businesses where it really does take time and thoughtfulness and, you know, concentrated effort and focus before actually having something that people use, let alone pay for.

1:04:35Sara Du:So I'm really curious sort of what you've learned about that with this company, which is different than your first company, and also what advice you'd give for other people to consider, you know, working on something that's longer term and not kind of getting distracted by, you know everybody else who's sort of really pushing sort of the hype cycle yeah i do think

1:04:57Ando:you have to love the lifestyle that comes with it um just being obsessed with the problem and the act of working on the thing every day right because if you just fall into this like you just come to work excited to think about and work on this problem like time passes by very quickly i think these days people are impatient because like the hockey stick graph is just like a thing you're chasing, right? It's kind of abstract versus actually loving the day-to-day is a very different feeling. And so I think for myself, so actually my family, there's like way more academics, like they're super like not entrepreneurial.

1:05:36Ando:And so part of that is as an academic, you just like go to the lab and like you work your whole life on like a problem or like a few problems. And so maybe that's where like my inclination to do that comes from. And then I like to select for people who maybe feel similarly about different domains, right? Like, obviously, like, I want to make a lot of money, like, we'll make lots of money from building this. But now, like, there's seasons for different things, right? And the season for us right now is a lot of building. And so, yeah, attracting the people who can see beyond the short term are less swayed by what they see on Twitter and more truth seeking about like, what is the state of like technology and what it can do and what are the decisions we make today that will allow us to get to the growth we want.

1:06:28Ando:That's what we talk about a lot more. And so it's like we feel extreme urgency because we want this thing to exist for people who are pushing technology forward, but it's not this urgency to prove to anyone, like investors, like, oh, we have this growth thing, right? So it's kind of a different frame of mind.

1:06:47Sara Du:That's a really important point, which is there is urgency. It's not like we're just hanging out, taking our time. But the idea is the urgency is towards getting something to these customers. But with also the understanding that what we want to get to them is going to take time. We're not going to sit around and hang out, but we're also going to realize that we cannot get this in a month. And, you know, there's a company, another solo founder, his name is Phillip. He's building DocMost. And he spent about, I think, 8 to 12 months heads down building DocMost, which is effectively sort of a notion sort of alternative.

1:07:22Sara Du:And he was really just trying to build something that he knew would be great for people. Now he has Airbus and defense departments of governments using this. And it's like he spent all this time because he knew that if he shipped something that was sloppy, none of these people would care. It was better to go heads down and build something that he really believed in, that he wanted these big companies that were really focused on privacy or these, you know, these governments to have access to. And it's working out really well for him. But I think that a lot of people would look at what Philip was doing throughout that entire journey, or maybe even what you were doing, and say, don't, you know, just try and get something out there really quickly.

1:08:03Sara Du:You know, I think that's the popular sort of narrative right now. But I hope more people will watch what, you know, what you're doing, watch this podcast, but also watch what you're doing, and see what you're like when you go heads down on something, really focus on building something that's great for other people, but don't feel like you have to like, you know, run up, run up this like revenue growth curve immediately. Um, when this is a 10, 20 plus year, you know, journey with this company. Right.

1:08:33Ando:And a lot of people are just bad at nuance. It's like some products in some markets need products that are just more fully baked. It's like human trust is so easy to lose, right? it's like trying to i don't know sell wine and it's like you're not going to wait to age it like you don't have wine it's like the market wants this product that just requires time to build

1:08:51Sara Du:that's a really good way of putting it okay so let's let's uh let's let's wrap this with the two customary questions which are uh first off sort of the bear case the bear case for uh for solo founding meaning like what is the reason that somebody should consider not being a solo founder and then after that we'll we'll maybe discuss that for a second then we'll pivot to of course the case for solo founding but what's the bare case i think a lot of solo founders

1:09:14Ando:probably overthink things right you don't really have many people you can bounce ideas off of or more sensitive topics off of because like even very smart people outside the company don't have the full context um and so that's probably bare i assume most solo founders are pretty good with like loneliness so i don't think that should be accounted for there really quickly on that end

1:09:39Sara Du:when was it when did you make your first hire with ondo probably like few several months in okay so so you really had to be very careful about what you were doing over those few months in terms of getting sort of other people to riff with you or just like making sure that you kind of didn't rabbit hole in like an unproductive way um is kind of what i'm hearing from from

1:10:01Ando:that comment yeah personal time management is just a very interesting art for solo founding especially pre-employees.

1:10:10Sara Du:That's really cool. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's partially why we're doing all this stuff for solo founders with this idea of like solo together, not just about the loneliness, which I think does happen when you're, when you have things that are discouraging. But, you know, I think it's also just like this, Hey, like have other people around you who have context on what you're doing because I think it really can make a big difference. Okay. So, so we talked about that. I think that's a really good point that solo founders can like easily get sort of pulled in the wrong direction. I really want to hear the case for what's the case for solo founding.

1:10:43Ando:Like I said, companies are like entities, they have souls of their own. And if you're a solo founder, you can actually listen to like what the company needs based on how it's growing. And you can choose like who might be worth being a co-founder later on in the journey, or like if how you need to evolve to best fit what the company needs as the leader. And so I I actually think it's probably the, it's probably truest to building a company if you can adapt yourself to it. It's awesome.

1:11:15Sara Du:Thank you so much for doing this. This is amazing. Yeah. Maybe the last thing I will ask you, because this tends to have something really interesting happen, is imagine, you know, we hit stop on the recording. We stand up, you're walking out the door like, oh, we should have talked about that. What is that? The thing that we should have talked about that we haven't touched on right now?

1:11:36Ando:Oh, yeah. Let's see. I think building culture probably is an interesting topic with solo founders. I think that that's another, I don't think it fits in bearable. It's just part of the art is figuring out how much to sort of create or put structures and rituals around and how much you just vibe, create culture, right? Because so much will emanate from you. and so I think some of it comes down to people selection like people who amplify the parts of you as a solo founder you want to see ripple into the culture an example is like yeah what is the balance at least for us of like how how often we'll have these sort of intellectual like salon style dinners right it's like I'm not always going to be the one hosting them so someone else should like pick that tradition up right and then another like example is my teammates are super like they're super athletic actually and so in some ways they've kind of gotten me to like take care of my health i have like the whoop we experiment apparently i am severely under hydrated all the time um so someone like snuck these electrolytes into my water one time and my hrv like skyrocketed in a good way right like my whoop was green the next day so um i think like yeah people selection culture building it's like some of this is emergent I guess but I do think there's ways to be intentional about it or at least when you bring on the first person even it's like what are the things you regularly do together it's like before you bring the person on I think it's worth thinking about like those structures because once they're on and you have multiple people it's kind of weird to be like let's start doing this thing and then it's like what the other people bring that becomes part of the traditions and culture that's really cool I think it's I think it's a

1:13:24Sara Du:really great way to end it because it talks about, you know, how sort of the solo founder starts it, but the people that join these early founding team members have perhaps an even greater influence on the company culture than they would if it was, you know, a company with multiple co-founders that were already sort of lots of people who are sort of culture carriers. This has been so amazing. Thank you so much for doing this, and I'm really excited to be amplifying and celebrating your more public sort of facing launch in the fundraise announcement.

1:13:54Ando:Yeah, thank you. This is fun.

1:13:56Sara Du:If you enjoyed this conversation, we would love it if you could share solo founders with everyone you know, particularly people who are considering starting companies solo or who are already doing it. You know, the entire goal of what we do is to normalize solo founding, encourage more people to solo found instead of end up with co-founders of convenience. If you'd like, and we'd really appreciate it, you can go leave a review on Apple, you can go give us a thumbs up, you can subscribe on the YouTube channel. Anything helps. And of course, if you are starting a company or considering starting a company, you should go look at the Solo Founders program.

1:14:26Sara Du:We work together with you in San Francisco alongside a bunch of other Solo Founders. The idea is it's much better to be Solo together than to be Solo alone. I'll spend a lot of time helping you. And we also invest $100 ,000 in your company. So if you're excited to learn more about that, go check out solofounders.com slash program.