Marty Ringlein (Agree): Manufacturing Serendipity, Getting Acquired Twice, and Taking on DocuSign

19:22Andy Budd:Like how did that come about?

19:24Marty Ringlein:That was a fun one. And this is one where my advice to the world is, I think this should just be normal. You know, don't, don't be an asshole is what they say, but like, you know, be nice to people and realize that even if you are taking like a capitalistic approach to relationships that if you, you shouldn't always try to get the value out of a relationship day one, because it might take a decade. And so one of my interns from Include, that agency where this all started, her name was Lauren Moon. She starts as an intern. She leaves before we get bought by Twitter. She wants to go back to Silicon Valley and she gets a job at a company called Eventbrite.

20:06Marty Ringlein:And that's where she works as a designer. And so when I'm starting up Invite years later, I ping her, I let her know what I'm working on. I want her advice, her feedback. And she says, hey, I think the crew here would like to know about this. Do you mind if I share it with the VP of strategy? And I said, yeah, absolutely. Share it with him. This gentleman, Randy, eventually goes on to be their CFO. So he turns out that he's pretty important, even though he's only a VP at the time. But he likes it. And he takes it to Kevin Hartz, who's the founder. and they offered to fly us out to San Francisco to meet with us.

20:39Marty Ringlein:And this is, we hadn't even raised a million dollars yet. We haven't even really launched the product yet. So this is very early days. So for our team, it's just, I'll take a free flight to San Francisco. This sounds great. Put me up in a hotel. I'm in. And that was 2014. Yeah, so it's two and a half years later when they acquired the company. So we start that relationship and we just stay connected and close. And as we're building, we share things openly with them because we just know at that time they were 13 years old they move slow even if they stole our ideas they're not going to execute them as well as we do we still beat them to the punch so you're

21:13Andy Budd:in conversation because i guess like you hadn't been around for that long like my memory of you literally it felt like you'd you'd launched invite and then you know a few weeks later i'm sure it wasn't that but like you know really really quickly you were kind of being brought into to Eventbrite? Was it just a no-brainer? Was the whole plan to try and sell really quickly? Or did you have that kind of founder's challenge where it's like, we could sell now and make a decent sale, but what if we stayed? What if we carried on? We could build a competitor to Eventbrite. We could become a billion-dollar unicorn business.

21:50Andy Budd:Was it a difficult decision to make or was it like super easy so it was another fun one where um it's just timing again

22:01Marty Ringlein:and we get lucky with timing because what's happening in the world is um spotify is becoming a thing and there's a few other competitors now spotify is kind of the winner spotify and apple music but at the time there's pandora there's a few others um and And Pandora, who's probably a little bit bigger than Spotify, and now today everyone's like, what's a Pandora? But they were the leader. They acquired a company called Ticketfly. And this freaked everybody out. It scared the heck out of Spotify because they said, hey, they're going to use event ticketing for music venues to get artists and to get indie artists.

22:41Marty Ringlein:And they're going to use that as leverage to beat us. and then it freaked out Eventbrite because they said, oh, wow, they're definitely going to lock in all the best music venues and they're going to steal our market share on the music side because they've got all the great streaming capabilities. So everyone's freaking out. It turns out nothing ever happened with any of this, but everyone's freaking out. Spotify says we need event ticketing and we have two options. We got to go fast. We can build it quickly or we can go buy it. somebody introduced us then we had an M &A conversation with them I use that as leverage to Eventbrite to say hey we're probably going to sell to Spotify Eventbrite is as scared of Spotify owning us as they are Pandora owning Ticketfly and so for Eventbrite we got them to move faster because they didn't they want us I mean they did buy us so at some point they wanted us but more than wanting us they didn't want Spotify to have us because they didn't want them to get into ticketing also, because then they're definitely going to lose.

23:37Marty Ringlein:So that where, again, we just got lucky. And then for us, I think we were just really excited about the opportunity to build. I think we got it in our heads. We're going to go build something bigger together than independently. And we could do that inside of Spotify or Eventbrite. And honestly, I think it was more the Spotify conversations got us excited. And then it became kind of unromantic. It was like, OK, who's going to IPO? What are the teams going to look like? What are we going to work on? And then it became like more of a decision between two parties. But then we got lucky again because that's end of 2016.

24:12Marty Ringlein:We do that deal. You know, a few years later, we get this global pandemic. That's just as bad as Cambridge. Cambridge Analytica might have killed us. And if we survived it, the global pandemic for an early stage event ticketing company, I think, definitely kills us. So, again, maybe we could have, you know, gone off and been bigger on our own. But without knowing that there was a global pandemic coming, but knowing that there was one coming, in hindsight, I definitely would have done the deal all day long because that would have been horrible to survive that.

24:43Andy Budd:I mean, most of your stories lean heavily into timing. There's an element of luck. There's an element of like finding yourself in a competitive space where two large companies want to buy you to take you off the market and they're competing against each other. It's really interesting because a lot of founders, they don't think of luck or timing in their story. It's all their own genius. Like, I had this brilliant idea, yada, yada, yada. I'm kind of curious, like, how much of this was luck or how much do you credit yourself in seeing an opportunity and leaning into it?

25:16Marty Ringlein:I think that's the part, the seeing the opportunity, leaning into it. I think it's important, but I think seeing it. And I love this phrase that we always share internally. We go forward as though we're right. We prepare as though we're wrong. And I think we have the confidence and the grit and the conviction to say, yes, that is the future. We're doing it. We're going to own it. But with every step we take, hey, well, it might not work. And so we're prepared for how to pivot quickly. So I think in the success of it all, there's these big moments of success, but there are a thousand little failures that are, but we pivot and correct so fast that they're not even worth talking about on a podcast because the failure lasted a day or a minute, a week.

26:04Marty Ringlein:And then we course corrected so quickly that I can't even remember what we had failed at, but we have tried it. And then I think I'm constantly just on the lookout for opportunities. I don't think that I ever think that my time is too good to catch up with an old intern or to not give an intern or, you know, treat an intern with respect. It's just everything's an opportunity. Everything could be the massive thing. And I just don't know if it's tomorrow or if it's in 10 years from now. Even this, like I saw you were doing a podcast. Like I totally want to get on it. Well, yeah, sure. It's great to say shameless self-promotion or whatever I'm building now.

26:38Marty Ringlein:Great to catch up with you. But like, you know, someone somewhere, one of your audience members, you could give me a whole list of awesome audience members who listen and tune in every episode. But it's the one that you don't even know about, who's, you know, 19 right now, just listening to both of us. And then 10 years from now, when they're 29, they're like, Marty, I actually, I heard first on that Andy Budd podcast. And I'm not even going to realize. And then that leads to something. And, you know, maybe they're working at some VC and they fund me. but they're going to their origin story is going to be like i first heard you i'm like so glad i did this podcast that i took this hour to be with you because of some weird uh circumstance of the

27:18Andy Budd:universe that comes together i think this is absolutely right i think you know a lot of people find themselves in lucky situations but a lot of people make them make their own luck by having lots of connections by putting themselves out in the world by constantly kind of checking with people who, you know, maybe, like you say, in a few years time, will end up being in the company that ends up acquiring you. So there's a lot of activity here. Just sort of switching tracks slightly, like, I know, obviously, you've now you've been in two really, really impactful companies, Twitter and Eventbrite, you've sold two businesses.

27:53Andy Budd:When did the interest in angel investing come on? Because you were one of the first people I met, one of the first designers I met that was public about your angel investing. I've met a lot of people since that were also angel investors, but I've kept it a little bit sort of quieter. But I always looked up to you as someone that was kind of really good, even while you were building businesses, engaging with other founders, giving advice and help, maybe writing kind of small checks. Like, when did that interest come? How did you write your first angel check?

28:23Marty Ringlein:Yeah, it's another one where it's the luxury of a little bit of privilege because of the Twitter deal. I had a little bit of disposable income. And I'm just, I'm excited. I'm in the middle, the heart of Silicon Valley now. I'm just surrounded by it too. Like there's everyone's building. There's so many ideas and I've got a little bit of money to put into it. And so that excites me. But the first one was actually a buddy. Well, we did a few, and you probably even at Clear Left might've done this a few times because it started to get popular around that time where we would work with a startup, but they might give us a little bit of cash, but we'd give them a discount on our rate and we'd get a little bit of equity.

29:04Marty Ringlein:So I started to understand how it worked and how that worked and what those documents look like. So I had a little bit of that. None of those ever really ended up going anywhere, which is probably why they gave me equity instead of cash. But that was the first sort of dabble into it. But then when the Twitter deal happened, I met a lot more founders who were raising money. And it was a guy in DC. This is another good story. His name's Andrew Mason. I forget what the startup's even called now, but it was an event tech. And this is before I started Envite, but I was really – the noodle of the idea, it's for me.

29:39Marty Ringlein:I'm angry with the problem. I have a bunch of solutions, but now I see events everywhere, and he's solving something in a very particular way. Event stir is what it was called. And I'm just like, you know what? I like you. I hate this. I love this space, but I like hating it. So I'm in for a little check. it fails. I lose all my money, make a good friend, me and Andrew are buds. Andrew, years later, probably 12 years later, he goes and starts a fintech company called Pala. And it moves money mostly between Latam and Mexico. And he just closed his Series A. And I was an investor in the pre-season, the Series A, because I was nice to him way back then.

30:23Marty Ringlein:So yeah, that one didn't work out, but this one's totally going to work out. The valuations have gone through the roof, which is great. It looks good for us as a fund, but I get all of that because of that early investment. And then there were some others where I got lucky where you're at a place like Twitter, a lot of people who are early at Twitter go on to do awesome things. And so there's another gentleman who I really like named Michael Ducker, a great product leader, was at Mercury and Twitter, but he had started a startup. And there was one where when I heard about it, I was just like, okay, if Ducker's in, I'm in.

30:55Marty Ringlein:I don't need to pitch. I'm just in. I'm blind in. And that ends up getting acquired by Chime. Luckily, he asked me, him and his founder at the time, for some advice on that acquisition because I'd been through it before. And my only ask was, don't give me – I don't want Chime money. I want Chime stock. And that got me my first into Chime on the cap table. And, again, I wrote a small check, so I'm a small investor. but it was so cool to be a part of the Chime story. And I only get that by being a part of the Michael Ducker story.

31:32Andy Budd:Amazing. When you were sort of really, really active with angel investing, did you have like a strategy where you're like, okay, I'm going to write four checks a quarter of this size. I'm going to have a certain amount of money that I'm going to invest in. Or is it a little bit more opportunistic? Was it mostly like, hey, look, you know, a friend comes, I share the idea, I love that. I'm going to put some money in and maybe one quarter you invest in six or seven startups and maybe you don't invest at all for the next quarter. Like what was the process like?

32:00Marty Ringlein:Yeah, at the very beginning, it was loose. It was bad just because I had no thesis, no formula. It was just kind of opportunistic as they came along. If it sounded cool, if I liked the person, all the wrong reasons to make an investment decision. But then as we started up our own fund, We got much more strategic about it. And then I learned about this thing called the power law, which not only drives early stage venture capital, but now I've learned it drives almost everything in my entire life. I see the power law everywhere. My entire life, I realize, has been run by the power law. But now it used to be, even with the fund, we thought, hey, it'd be great to be able allocation and do like one startup a month.

32:52Marty Ringlein:But then we realized, oh, yeah, you kind of force yourself to find an investment. And that felt like a bad way to invest. So then it was, no, let's just find the best investments based on the thesis that we have. And it has to be really great talent because that's the world I come from. Because I want worst case scenario, this thing doesn't go to zero. Worst case scenario, somebody acquihires this thing. The second thing I want is really great technology. I want to know that, hey, there's valuable technology and somebody would acquire this if it doesn't go the full path. And then the last one is just the product vision.

33:27Marty Ringlein:Are they building something that really feels like it's going to be disruptive? Could be a billion dollar enterprise.

33:33Andy Budd:Brilliant. I mean, you touched on it. I was going to sort of lean into a venture fund in a second, but I'm just kind of curious, Like of your private angel investments, do you have a sense of how many you've made? And like, are there any that you're particularly proud of that have kind of worked out surprisingly well? Because often I see you kind of mentioning like when an IPO happens, oh, I got a little bit of a share in that. So like, how are you feeling about your private angel portfolio? Obviously, it must be pretty strong because you decided to turn that into an adventure fund. I've got my, just opening my mail before this call.

34:07And I've got my Figma letter for getting my shows out of wherever they stick.

34:13Marty Ringlein:And that was another fun one to be a part of. Yeah, so I think, well, the fun ones for me are when it's somebody I know, like Michael at Chime or Tom Genitasio, who's another one who worked for me at that very first company, Include, who's gone on to do a few cool stuff where he sold a company to Envision. Envision didn't go anywhere, and that's unfortunate. but then he sold a company to Figma and that obviously did go somewhere and that was a big deal. And then for the fund, we get into some interesting ones where there's one that I love called Beehive just because it's a great product. It's a competitor to Substack, but it also just has been a rocket ship.

34:56Marty Ringlein:They ship faster than almost any other founder I've seen and they keep raising money, keep raising valuation. So it just seems like it's constantly going up and to the right, which is what you want to see. But then there's, you know, there's always the ones that you've never heard of or that you haven't heard of yet that are going to, you know, they'll become, because that's the fun part of early stage. You get to watch them go from literal zero to something to, and then, and then there's some bigger ones where this is my new shtick is we're an early stage fund. We invest in early stage companies that usually means zero to one.

35:30Marty Ringlein:It means it's the basis of an idea, no users, no revenue. But there's some companies that we've made investments in that you definitely would have heard of, but you would say like those aren't zero to one. And that's like Anthropic or SpaceX. But our thesis was, if we get into something ridiculous, like a$10 billion valuation, that's much different than a$10 million early stage valuation. But if we believe that the early stage company will be a billion dollars, and that's why we invest. Well, if this company is going to be a trillion dollars, then it's the same point in time. So it's still early stage.

36:07Marty Ringlein:What I do like, I think all the way back to the beginning with just about everything we ever do, later in life, they all seem obvious 20 years later. But for most of the things at the moment that they're happening, the majority of other people are kind of questioning it or laughing at it or saying that doesn't make sense. And then I have some version of this conversation 10, 20 years from now. They're like, oh, that makes a whole lot of sense. Why wouldn't everyone do that? And I think this early stage approach is one where I'm seeing it unfold in real time, where when we started doing this four or five, six years ago, does it make sense?

36:44Marty Ringlein:Other VCs would be like, well, you have no idea what you're doing. And now it's like you see a lot of early stage funds starting to get into some of these bigger deals because this math sort of adds up. So it's like one where it's like, it's a little bit of validation of like, yeah, yeah. Sometimes we know what we're doing or we just take the bet that, you know, the coin toss that works out in our favor.

37:02Andy Budd:So for folks who don't know a venture fund, could you give a quick sort of description of what it's about, what your thesis is, how it came about, what, you know, what vintage or what fund you're on at the moment, just to give folks a bit of background.

37:18Marty Ringlein:Yeah, so early stage fund, small fund, all things considered. So$10 million fund, only invest in early stage companies. companies and it starts, um, because I had, you know, been angel investing for a number of years. Some of those enough time had gone by where it'd been at past a decade where some of those had started to, um, uh, show returns. So now I've got a little bit of, um, history under my belt so I can go because for a fund to work, if you don't know, you got to go raise money from LP. So people with, with money, give you money and then you invest that money on their behalf, but they've got to trust you with that money.

37:52Marty Ringlein:And so now I have a little bit of a track record and I've shown that I can get into some interesting deals in a variety of different creative ways. So we start the fund and this is right around the pandemic too. So a few things are happening. Again, timing, the world's a little bored because we're all locked in. The market was horrible in that first week in March in the pandemic. And then the market was incredible, therefore after, and now we call that the top, but I also, as a emerging fund manager, I had merged out of this, the top, the ZERP era. So I get the benefit of just starting a fund during a great economic sort of boom time.

38:31Marty Ringlein:But thankfully our investments have done well. And so we were very cautious about non-investing in things that we felt were overvalued. So we were still very conservative, all things considered um but yeah it was i just i went to a few friends and i during the pandemic kind of bored and i said hey wouldn't it be fun if we like pulled our money together and made like an investment club and um they wrote me back in the group thread and said you know one of them i think was poking at me just like well sounds like you're talking about a fund and i was like googling how to start a fund carter came up i was like oh yeah they kind of make this easy for us uh i was like all right if i start a fund are you guys in they're like yeah and then there was i think it was in nine days the first million dollars it was just like you know people said they'll put in money i was like oh well that feels like in the product world product market fit and then i think first like 60 days there was another three million so i was like oh okay there's something here even if it's a really small fund like this is great let's do this let's have a good time with it um and then from the thesis perspective power law we live and die so i'm a big proponent of make sure it's clear to all the LPs, hey, 11 of these things are totally going to go to zero.

39:39Marty Ringlein:Don't get mad at me when they do. But yeah, one or two of them need to be knockout successes. And this is why I love the beehives of the world. I think I got one. Or even now, because people, even our own LPs, kind of question SpaceX. Now, it's the only thing they ask me about. Tell me about SpaceX. Now you like SpaceX. Okay, that's great. But I've already looked smart, which is good for me. But yeah, it's all early stage. We usually love founders at the earliest moment where it's the highest risk. And we know that. And that's what we're signing up for. So it's just an idea. So to me, you've got this spectrum.

40:17Marty Ringlein:And what you can't have are all no's. So you can't have no experience, no domain expertise, no traction, no sales, no revenue. But if you sold your last company to Google for$100 million, I don't care if you got no and everything else. You got one yes. Or, you know, if you and your co-founder are just coming out of Berkeley or Stanford, but you have a wait list with a million people, that's, hey, you got one yes. So if there's one yes on the board, usually we'll have the conversation. Then it's talent. Well, we have four T's, talent, technology, the terms of the deal, just to make sure, you know, not crazy valuations.

40:54Marty Ringlein:And then traction by any way they define it. And I don't care how you define it. It could be ARR. It could be a wait list. it just could be some prototype that you put into the world that did something.

41:07Andy Budd:Brilliant. I mean, so it sounds like there's an element of gut, which I think a lot of investing is, but also it sounds like you've got a structure, you've got a bit of a rubric. When you're looking at deals, you're kind of checking off some lists and going, okay, this fits with our belief and this doesn't. I'm curious, is a lot of your deal flow just coming into your network? It sounds like you've worked in lots of big companies. It sounds that you've done lots of investment before as an angel. Is it all kind of organic or are you actually having to go out there and hunt? Are you on LinkedIn looking for people changing their status from, you know, like head of engineering to starting something new and are you jumping on them?

41:43Andy Budd:Like how are you finding these early stage deals?

41:45Marty Ringlein:Yeah, it's almost all inbound and all from my network and my personal network. Beehive is a great one because there's, I had one of the Like, it all comes back to Include. There's an intern at Include named Evan. He's a New Yorker. There's this little tiny newsletter starting up in New York that's getting a lot of – everyone's excited about it called Morning Brew. And Evan's like, hey, I just signed up for this newsletter. I think it's great. I love what they're doing. I think you would like it. I was like, oh, cool. Morning Brew. Yeah, I'll sign up. I'm not a big newsletter guy. And I was like, yeah, it became one of my favorite newsletters.

42:22Marty Ringlein:I was like, I really like the way they've done this. morning brew gets acquired by business insider um but i was a fan of the morning brew crew and then you know early now some of them are like you know well known and famous and big you know business podcasters um thankfully they still kind of remember their buddy marty who's just you know an outspoken advocate who would tweet them today if i tweet them they don't care because my voice is so little but when they're first starting and i tweet them they're very appreciative and then they remember the appreciation and one of the gentlemen that worked there his name is tyler dank.

42:52Marty Ringlein:He built sort of the product that Morning Brew was built on. When he leaves, he kind of tells the world, hey, I think there was the underlying architecture of that thing could be productized. And so he goes on Twitter, because now we've been Twitter buds for five or six years, and he just says, very cryptic, starting something new. That's it. That's the tweet. So I DM him right away. And I was like, hey, whatever it is, they kind of like Michael decker i'm in blank check like don't need the deck i'm i'm in because i have a sense of what i probably think it is uh he wrote back lol i was just like i don't know what that means and he just tell me to you know piss off is am i not in is he not doing anything uh and then three months later he re-dm'd and said hey you know i am gonna go raise some money here's what i'm building if you're if you're interested let me know i was like yeah 100 i'm in man uh and then i think a a few things because Tyler's like now a big deal in the Silicon Valley sort of founder space.

43:51Marty Ringlein:But I think he'll always, you know, remember his buddy Marty because, you know, I'll go in blind. And I think he's appreciative of that. So, you know, as Tyler goes off and do great things in his life, I at least get that like, oh, yeah, I remember you. And then who knows where that goes next. But I think just as a minimum, the story with Beehive will be really good for me and the portfolio of the LPs and the fund.

44:14Andy Budd:with with your fund with a venture fund are you mostly giving them capital are you also giving them knowledge expertise i'm just kind of curious like the people that come to you like are they already kind of fairly well established founders are just looking for cash or are you helping them struggle through early product challenges giving them advice on go-to-market strategy like how much of you are kind of a value add versus just an investment vehicle Yeah.

44:43Marty Ringlein:So the economics of it is it's just a check. So I don't get extra equity as an advisor for any of my knowledge or thought leadership. So it's just a check, just cash for equity. But we do tell them like, hey, our goal here is to make sure you're super successful. And the game we play as being founders ourselves is they've got something to build. They've got a monster to go build. So they don't have a whole lot of time. So they don't want me breathing down their neck, asking a million questions with every investor update. So I look at the investor update. I look at the metrics. So how much is in the bank?

45:19Marty Ringlein:What the burn is? I look. Everyone has a good and a bad. I skip the good. I assume it's always good. And then I go to the bad. Is there anything that I think I might know about? Hey, the bad, my CTO just got hit by a bus and died. That's really bad. So let's recruit it. Like whatever we can do. Let me go find it. But then they usually have an ask. And I'll immediately go down to the ask next and I'll see if the ask is in the vein that I can provide help for. Maybe it's, hey, we're going to launch something in a couple of weeks. Can you tweet it? LinkedIn is 100%. Easy, easy. I'll always tweet LinkedIn.

45:53Marty Ringlein:But our rule with them is always our ask is don't wait until it's so bad that it's too late to help. Like, yes, we're technically investors, but we're so little compared to probably some of the other people who invest in terms of check size. they're like, look at us as friends. Like, like you shouldn't have an ego with me. You should be like, Hey, Marty, things are bad. Like, this is not going well. So cool. Like, let's, let's whiteboard this man. Let's solve it. I'm not going to look down on you. Like, Oh, my investments, who cares? You're, you're part of the power law. You were supposed to fail or one of you was supposed to, maybe it's you, but like, let's solve this problem.

46:29Marty Ringlein:But our role with the portfolio founders is we won't bother you, but the second you need to bother us, like do it. And we're in, we're all in you know whatever you need we'll rally troops and this is what i like about rlp base um it's some of the folks you know like um greg story and some other we're just like they've done some interesting things at some interesting companies like he's seen stuff at like ibm that i've never been exposed to so i can find one or two people that have seen some version of this problem and i can't solve it but i can put you in a call with them and maybe they'll put you in a call with somebody else and then maybe we get to a solution did she come from a design background

47:07Andy Budd:Do you think that that affects the companies you invest in and the advice you give? Or does your background not have any real impact on the investment side of your life?

47:18Marty Ringlein:I'm 100 % biased and I'm aware of this and I'm fine with it. You've got to have a good brand name. You've got to have a good logo. And if I can tell as a founder, even if you don't have any design sensibilities, that you're not appreciative of design. if I can just smell like an iStock photo logo a million miles away it's just it's just an easy pass because to me it's not about like the craft of the detailed design it's about the attention to detail and you to know that that detail matters to your the perception that your customers have of you to investors and so I want to know that you've got that now it doesn't have to be a beautiful logo but I want to know I can tell that you put time and effort into this and you knew it was important.

47:59Marty Ringlein:And so I will always look for that. And I always be biased towards that. And then, and then, yeah, I think I get it. I get excited when I can tell that the founder has every founder, usually great ones will have found some kind of wedge in the market that they use as an edge,

48:16Andy Budd:that they found some gap or some opening that no one else really sees because they see in a very

48:20Marty Ringlein:particular way. And usually the opening is around some kind of consumer behavior, The behavior of how we buy or transact or interact is going to shift and they're going to be in front of it. To me, like that's a design sort of solution to a problem, even if it's not like I think when we say design, we think pixels and pretty. But I know it's like, no, creating an experience for an end user that is changing. And what I like is when it changes in a direction that's hard to create an experience around because it's never existed before. Like I think about like Coinbase and buying Bitcoin. It'd be really hard to design that app because we've moved money, but we've never moved to digital currency.

49:03Marty Ringlein:So it's a different kind of experience with a different kind of audience.

49:06Andy Budd:Do you find that the folks who reach out to you, the founders, do they have an appreciation or an understanding for design? Do they care? Is it something you need to kind of help them understand and educate them about? Or is it not even part of the conversation anymore?

49:25Marty Ringlein:I would say 80 % of folks that I talk to or come across have an appreciation for design. So they have, you know, they understand its importance. And then the 20%, I don't think we ever get there conversationally because I think I just, wrong or right, I write them off. And I probably never even get on the call. I see the deck, like instant pass. Because even if you have the technology, I mean, there could be four MIT PhDs and they've cracked the code. It's the greatest technology ever made in the entire, if Marty's just going to miss that deal. And that's bad on Marty. But if it's that worst, terrible deck, I can't do it.

50:06Andy Budd:So obviously, you know, you're in VC and investing land, but you're building again, aren't you? um what's what's going on with agree do you want to tell us a little bit about the the seed of that idea and like how far you're in and where agree is at the moment yeah and it's a good segue from

50:23Marty Ringlein:adventure fund because part of our thesis with adventure fund since we are builders and designers and entrepreneurs uh in the fund um one of the thesis is what do we think should exist and if we were to build it, how would we do it? And then let's just go find that. And so when that hits, when that gets put in front of us, like one of them, when, when AI is hitting the storm, it's like, okay, AI plus what? To me, it's never just one technology, AI, it's AI plus what? And one of the ones we had was, well, CAD, CAD software is really old and there's like one or two players. So I think a generative AI specifically on top of CAD is going to be transformative and disruptive.

51:04Marty Ringlein:And then we thought, okay, how would you build it? What would it look like we meet this group uh zoo.dev is doing really great raised a couple rounds since we got in but as soon as we saw the picture they were like that's that that you know it's almost one of those that's my idea they stole my in a good way it's like oh yeah this is exactly the way you would do it and agree was very similar where we said hey it's weird that at the end of almost every signature someone has to pay someone money there's almost always an invoice or a purchase order that followed that but then they're disconnected like well that is weird like why why doesn't someone just connect I was like, okay, let's stop complaining.

51:37Marty Ringlein:Let's just pretend we were to build it. What would it look like? Even as far as what would I call it? What would a logo? We get really into it. And then I start looking for e-signature companies. And I realized that that was my own flaw is I needed to look for payments companies. I needed to look for the invoicing billing side of the equation, not the e-signature side. So we never found it. We found a bunch of e-signature companies, but they all wanted to be a better version of the 22-year-old DocuSign. None of them wanted to be a leapfrog moment on something that didn't exist and be transformative.

52:08Marty Ringlein:And so then we got to a point where we just got so frustrated. We had to build it ourselves. And I also felt like the market was changing. This is going into 24, the economy. And this is no politics here, but love him or hate him. When Trump got reelected, the economy went up, whether it's supposed to or not. and then LP money went in, investor money went in. And so it was just a good time to fundraise. And so we were like, hey, let's lean into the market dynamics and let's just see if people are interested. And we have the benefit of now being on the other side of the investor table where we could craft a really good deck and a really good pitch in a way that I know I'm going to get the most out of my 30 minutes with an investor because they almost don't ask any questions.

52:58Marty Ringlein:I lead them to all the questions. I know what they want to cover. I know what they're after. I know the metrics they're looking for at this stage I'm at. And so it made the seed round. We raised$3 million, but it was three weeks. It was pretty fast. And then right after that, we raised another seven, and that was in two weeks. So$10.6 million in total in a year, which, again, just kind of knowing how to sort of orchestrate the pitch and the fundraise around a product and develop the product in a very particular way and then go to market with what I think is a very obvious idea. but in a very sort of novel way.

53:35Yeah.

53:35Andy Budd:I mean, it is an obvious idea, but you've got a brilliant name and a brilliant domain name. I mean, it's very memorable. It's very punchy. I'm sure that must have cost probably half of your marketing budget or half of your raise just to keep acquiring that.

53:48Marty Ringlein:But it tells you, I eat my own dog food. If I'm only going to invest in a great name and a great brand and a great design, then I can only put that in front of other investors. Yeah.

54:00Andy Budd:I mean, I think that was a really, really smart move. One of the things, like when I speak to a lot of founders, I talk about the need to do things that don't scale. I think a lot of the time we live in this kind of, you know, automated world, a lot of go-to-market strategy. People are looking for programmatic ways to scale. They're looking to kind of, you know, be sat at their desk at home and figure out ways of finding customers. One of the things I've found with you and agree is you're quite happy to go out there and do things that seem slightly unusual. I can't remember if it was for agree but I remember you posting about going to airports and dropping kind of flyers or printed material into books I've seen pictures of you standing outside events with a coffee cart just to have a conversation with people like none of these things seem like they're clever sophisticated scalable digital things but as a as a founder you you are willing to go out there and like do do the hard yard so I'd love to hear a little bit about your your strategy there Yeah.

54:58Marty Ringlein:So I'm big on doing things that don't scale. I think we live and die by that. Because I want to watch when as soon as the don't scale system breaks, and you're so frustrated and stressed that you're ready to give up or quit, that's when you start scaling it. And so as soon as the team's just like, can't do this, too many emails, too many, like, you know, even with support, we do things that don't scale. But yeah, with some of the guerrilla tactics, you know, I just think I got to go on flights, I got to go to meetings. if I'm going between New York and San Francisco, I could play the game where I try to time it perfectly, where I get right through security.

55:33Marty Ringlein:I walk right up to the gate and I get right on. But hey, how about I show up 20 minutes early this time? Don't give myself the stress. Give myself a Starbucks before the plane. And then, you know, if I got 15 extra minutes, go into a bookshop and drop a few postcards, you know, in a few magazines that I think are targeted to my ICP. And then same with, you know, when I'm in San Francisco and there's an event going on, like HubSpot's conference or Dreamforce, my co-founders in San Francisco will. And him and I, we need to talk. We need to do strategy sessions. We could do it on a Zoom. We could do it in a conference room at a WeWork, or I could just do it outside in front of a light post while we're taping flyers together why would i just max value my time so hey will and i are having basically a board meeting while i've got like masking tape i'm putting signs up and then one of the stories i like uh we're doing it on second street in san francisco and uh these are i like to think really well designed eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper because i love design and i'm a designer uh but this guy walks by in a you know his little vest and his collared shirt.

56:45Marty Ringlein:And he's like, Hey, that's a really well-designed flyer. I like that. And I was, thank you. And he's like, are you guys, the founders? Like, yeah, we're both the co-founders. Oh, that's so great. You're doing this. And he's a partner at a really big VC fund down the street. And so he's like, Hey, I'm about to go to lunch. I've got four blocks. Do you guys want to walk with me? And we did a four block pitch down the street, but only because, so to me, I still get value. I don't think it's a total, because you never know. Did I go there to meet a VC? No. Did I meet a VC? Yes. Was it awesome? Will they ever invest?

57:19Marty Ringlein:Like, who knows? I'm almost like, who cares? There's one more person out in the world who thinks that I'm clever and creative, who likes me, who met me. And, you know, maybe one day on LinkedIn, he's like, oh yeah, Marty, I remember you on the street corner hustling, doing the work.

57:36Andy Budd:brilliant i mean this is great and i think it gives it gives a lot of sort of um inspiration for young founders who are looking at how they can kind of get the word out and there's lots of ways they can do it the guerrilla approach i think is definitely working for you how is agree.com going at the moment are you hitting your targets are you is the product improving

57:56Marty Ringlein:are there future rounds or yeah and this is one where you know just honest talk uh every day you wake up and it's either oh my god things are moving so fast how are we going to deal with it or oh my gosh things are moving so slow like we might die and every morning i don't know which one i'm going to wake up to uh january has been really good for us but like december you're kind having this like are we going to do it are we going to hit our numbers you know we're going to hit the numbers that anyone cares about and now in january it's like oh my gosh now my biggest fear is january's so great what if february is not as good as january it's like you know now it's like too good of a problem uh but no things are going great i'm just looking at the numbers before this call it's like we'll hit 75 000 users uh in a few weeks so that'll be a fun big number uh because It was just 10 ,000 last year.

58:50Marty Ringlein:So it's grown a lot. But for us, what I'm really focused on from the next raise, the Series A, will be invoice volume. So how much money is being invoiced through the platform? Now, originally, we set ourselves a goal of let's get$100 million through the platform. It's going to take us a while to actually move$100 million. But of all the new customers that we've onboarded over the last three weeks, the amount of revenue they do through invoicing annually is$97.1 million. So it's like, oh, OK, it'll take them 12 months to do it all. So annualized. We're going to hit our, you know, the fear of not hitting our goal will go away.

59:30Marty Ringlein:Now the problem will be, well, how do we get to, that was$100 million. How do we get to half a billion now? I've got to get to$500. So just you hit one and then you've got to hit another. And then now I'm over the fear of not hitting this one. And now I've got tremendous amounts of fear and doubt about hitting the next one. But the premise of Agree is really playing out. That's where I'm excited about. So this idea that if you, from a design UX standpoint, let's grab the buyer at the highest moment of buyer intent. And that is right after they sign. So right after they sign, why would you wait one to three days to have your finance team send somebody an invoice?

1:00:11Marty Ringlein:That would be like going to a website for Banana Republic, wanting to buy a pair of jeans, telling Banana Republic, I want these jeans. The Banana Republic would be, OK, we'll get back to you in three days. We'll send you an invoice. You pay the invoice. Then we'll talk about the jeans. That's silly, right? Put it in the cart. Let me check out right here, right now. Have it shipped to me in one to two days. We figured we could do the exact same thing. Let's get you right after signature, immediately give you that invoice. You're already in the moment. You want what you're buying. Give us your billing information or pay right now.

1:00:41Marty Ringlein:So some of the fun numbers, it's seven hours is the median time from when a contract's sent to when it's signed. That's just like astronomical. Like DocuSign comes nowhere close. And a lot of that's just really good design. But it's 36 hours is the median time in which somebody signs to when somebody pays on the platform. And then the one I'm most excited about is it's 90, I think it's 96.7 % of all invoices paid on the platform are paid within 10 days of the first payment reminder, which is, again, just for anyone that lives in a net 30, net 45 world, that's just like, they want that metric all day long.

1:01:22Marty Ringlein:And that only exists because the secret sauce, there's no secret here, just combine two things together at the moment that they should be combined.

1:01:31Andy Budd:I'm really, really impressed with what you've done with Agree. So look, thank you so much for sharing your amazing journey. If people want to keep in touch with what you're doing, like where can they go to kind of find out more, get all the Marty goodness?

1:01:45Marty Ringlein:Yeah, I love meeting new people. Again, you never know where it's going to go. So my email is really easy. I love a good domain name. So Agree is Agree.com. So go check it out. Use it for all your e-signing and invoicing needs. But then me, I'm Marty, Marty.com. So you can go to marty.com. And then my email is marty at marty.com. You can just email me. And then I'm on Twitter for better or worse. I'm still like 10 tweets a day every day for the last, it'll be 20 years in 2026, June 2026. It'll be 20 years of Twitter, but I'm still doing it, still calling it Twitter. And then I'm pretty big on LinkedIn too, or active, I mean, famous, just active.

1:02:22Andy Budd:Well, thank you so much, Marty. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you and reconnecting and hearing all about your journey. I'm sure the audience have been super inspired. And yeah, if you are a founder watching this and you need to get paid, you need to get signatures done, definitely go to Agree.com. And look, thank you everyone else for listening. Thank you for tuning into the Design VC. If you've enjoyed this show, please do subscribe, leave a review, share it with somebody who cares about the kind of intersection of design, startups and venture. But for me and Marty, It's been nice chatting and see you soon.