The following interview is a conversation we had with Brett Martin, President and Co-Founder of Kumospace, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $25 Million Raised to Power the Future of Virtual Offices
Brett Martin
Hey, thank you so much for having me. A pleasure to be here.
Brett
No problem at all. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? Yeah.
Brett Martin
So, Brett Martin, I’m president of Kumo Space. It’s virtual offices for remote distributed teams where your team shows up to work every day. I also am the GP and co-founder of Charge Ventures. It’s a New York based precede seed Sage venture capital fund. We’ve got on our third fund, 70 portfolio companies. And if you’ve got a great new idea just getting started, we’d love to hear from you. And then finally, I’m also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. I teach data analytics and machine learning.
Brett
So you sound busy. What’s a typical week look like for you? How do you distribute your time across those three different positions?
Brett Martin
A typical week, there is no such thing. And you can’t divide time. But every day I’m in the Google space virtual office, but know constantly meeting with new founders, building their companies in there. And then I mercifully only teach one class a week, so I will spend about half a day up at Columbia with the students.
Brett
And have you done any deals that our audience may have heard of so far for charge ventures?
Brett Martin
I mean, depends what category you’re the. We do a lot of creator economy, so we’ve invested in grin, which is a billion dollar tool, CRM for influencer marketing. We invested in Norby, which is kind of a HubSpot for influencers vested in a company called electric AI. We do a lot of data science, machine learning investments. So electric AI is basically it for SMBs. And if you’re in crypto, we invested in Bison trails, which sold coinbase for over a billion dollars, and Livepeer, which is basically a distributed network for processing live video. So just some of the larger names in our portfolio, but a bunch of other great ones in there as well.
Brett
And how big are the funds? You said you’re in the third fund so far. What’s the total rate?
Brett Martin
So we do precede. So we write anywhere from like 250 to 750k checks into companies just getting off the ground. So that’s our sweet spot. We like to invest in kind of sub, ideally sub million and a half dollar rounds, but we’ll flex up into large seed rounds at times.
Brett
What’s the fund size?
Brett Martin
Sorry? Oh, our third fund is $30 million.
Brett
Okay, got it. Very cool. Now, a few other questions we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. First one, what founder do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them?
Brett Martin
Well, I was thinking about this question in advance, and I think I’ll just pick one of my founders, actually. So I’ve got a young guy, his name’s Lewis Black, and he runs a company called Just Play. And it’s a basically marketplace for local pickup sports. So you want to play a basketball game or a pickleball game or a volleyball game, you can just open up, just play in your neighborhood. Whether you’re in New York City or you’re a small town in the midwest, you can find a game and pay $10 and be part of an organized game. And I really think he’s got sports games going on all over America, all over the world, all sorts of different countries. And he has that crazy gleam in his eye of truly wanting to build a billion dollar company. And it’s cliche.
Brett Martin
He’s become cliche to say, oh, this is going to be a billion dollar company. This will be a billion dollar company. And what I’ll say is that a lot of people say that, but very few people truly believe in their heart of hearts that they actually are going to build a billion dollar company or even want to. And when you find someone that really has the craziness to believe there’s something to that, and it’s very attractive as an investor’s perspective. So I like being around young, first time entrepreneurs that have a little bit of that crazy. And so unlike a lot of other funds, they’re only going to invest in a gray beard or someone that’s thrown their third company. We really specialize investing in first time founders, and I think that’s how you get outsized outcomes.
Brett
With a name like Lewis Black, I feel like he’s destined for greatness as well. It just sounds like a famous name.
Brett Martin
I think he is.
Brett
Now, do you think that founders ever build unicorn companies on accident? We do a lot of interviews with unicorn founders. We’ve interviewed about 45 of them now. And I always like to ask them that, was this intentional from day one, did you set out to build a billion dollar company, or did you just kind of stumble your way into it? And I would say it’s like 50 split. But sometimes I wonder if they’re being completely truthful or if they’re just being humble. So what do you think? Do you think that when you build a billion dollar company, is that, like, the intention and the goal from day one, or can you just stumble into it?
Brett Martin
Well, I don’t think it happens by accident. I don’t think it happens. I don’t think that anyone who, everyone who builds a billion dollar company, their intention was to build a billion dollar company. Now, that doesn’t mean their intention wasn’t to build an amazing company or important company, right. But maybe their just focus wasn’t on the market cap. Right. Their focus was building the best possible consumer products. Right. I don’t know if even Steve Jobs was being motivated by having a billion in his market cap. I think he was motivated by, you know, world changing products and putting them in people’s hands. So it’s the maniacal drive on something that I think is most important.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now, what about books? And we like to take this from Ryan Holiday, but he calls them quickbooks. So I think he defined a quickbook as a book that rocks you to your core, really influences how you think about the world and just how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind for you?
Brett Martin
Okay, so I’ve got two here. Now, truthfully, I mostly read fiction, which not everyone in the business world loves, but I’ll give nonfiction and fiction books. So my nonfiction book is endurance, which is the story of Shackleton and his failed expedition across the Antarctic. And that book is my in case of emergency, break glass and read book. I think it is truly, if you are really in the toughest of times, and it’s been a tough year, and actually, it’s going to be another tough year for entrepreneurs who are going to raise funding in this market for another year. When you are really at your low, I think that endurance will tell you it could be worse. And you should keep going, because Henry Shackleton never took no for answer.
Brett Martin
And I don’t want to spoil the book, but let’s just say he got all of his men home. So that would be one. And then my second book would be the razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Balgam. And I think that is one of my favorite kind of transition phase in your life, a, it’s a coming of age story, but it’s also you’re, let’s say, and I would recommend that to founders who are maybe walk in the woods. They’re in the middle of a pivot, or even if they’ve actually just failed the startup and unwound it and they’re in between looking for their next thing. I think this is a really great book to really put in perspective what’s important in life and help you clean things out to move forward.
Brett
Not only do we share a name, we also share favorite books. So endurance is one of my all time favorite books. And I actually read that, and then the next week they discovered the ship, and I was so stoked and so excited about it and pretty surprised they were able to recover that. Pretty insane.
Brett Martin
Awesome. It’s the best.
Brett
If you like that book. Have you read river of doubt?
Brett Martin
I have not. I have had it recommended to me, but I haven’t gotten to it. Should I bump it up the list?
Brett
Yeah, bump it up the list. I was talking with the guests, and I told them I loved endurance, and they said the same thing. Like, all right, if you love endurance, move river of doubt onto your list and you’re going to love it. Yeah, I read that a few months ago, and I’m obsessed with it. Like, I may go back and read it again. It’s that good. So highly recommend if you’re into those types of books.
Brett Martin
I mean, I’m a crazy tr fan, so very into it.
Brett
Nice. You’ll love this one. Let’s switch gears now and let’s dive deeper into the company. So I’d introduce it as a virtual office platform. So I think listeners can kind of understand what that means. But do you want to maybe expand on that and just give us the high level overview?
Brett Martin
Yeah, I mean, Willywood productivity software, video chat, regular chat for distributed teams, which at this point is basically every team. Right? Because whether you’re a small company and you’re working remotely or you’re a gigantic multinational with headquarters all over the world, your team is in multiple offices on multiple floors at the same time. And so we’re trying to build a better place for that to happen. And so Kumo space is a piece of software that much like slack you will turn on at the beginning of your day. You’ll see your whole team, trickle into your virtual office around 09:10 a.m. In our case, sometimes ten and eleven, because we’re a bunch of engineers and designers that don’t wake up and stay out late. And everyone’s working there, they’re there. You can see your whole team all day.
Brett Martin
You can tap people on the shoulder, get an instant answer to their question. You can know who’s available and who’s not. And it just makes collaboration and building our really high performance culture, even when not sitting next to each other in the real world, it makes that possible. So in reality, it’s just a piece of software that a physical office is a bundle of things. It’s a place to do work. It’s a place to meet colleagues. It’s a place to throw events. It’s a place to store corporate assets. A virtual office does all the same, but without a physical footprint.
Brett
And then how does that fit into the tech stack? Does that replace tools like Slack and Zoom, or is it an addition to them? What does that look?
Brett Martin
I mean, a lot of companies do actually use Kumospace as a replacement for Zoom and slack. Some companies use us alongside one or the other. I personally think that we’re really focused on internal communication. So some companies will use Kumo space for all their internal video because you’re already there, you’re already on video, and you just tap you on the shoulder. You don’t need to schedule a Zoom meeting. You don’t need to chat back and forth, send links, show up, and then spend whole 25 minutes talking when you could have spent literally two minutes getting the answer to your question and gotten back to work. Right. So people tend to do it for internal video meetings, I would say, is Courtney’s case.
Brett
And do you deal with fatigue at all from people being on video that entire time? So do I have that right? They log in and they’re on video all day? Yeah.
Brett Martin
Well, so people are logged in all day. You don’t have to be on video. I would say half of our customers are not on video at any given time. And I personally think, running a fully distributed company, that when you don’t need to be on video, you probably shouldn’t. And we’re having a phone call right now.
Brett
It’s great.
Brett Martin
You have to rest the eyes for a few minutes, but video is there and it’s available and it’s one click away. So I think that people have Zoom fatigue because they’re in meetings for too long. Right? They are too many meetings. The meetings are too long, and they’re often inefficient, and so by actually using Kumospace, you’re not in meetings for as long. So people are in Kumaspace for six and a half, 7 hours a day, but they really only have anywhere between an hour and two meetings a day. Whereas I’ve seen these schedules that look like legos. You got zooms for 8 hours a day. And so actually letting go of scheduling all these meetings gives people more time to do work and reduces the fatigue of being on video.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about timing. So I see you launched in May 2020. The world was obviously in a very crazy place at that time with COVID or deep in Covid at that stage. Did you just see that this was going to be a big problem and decided to pounce on it then? Or what was that early observation you made to jump into this?
Brett Martin
Yeah, I mean, look, I think like all entrepreneurs, I’m opportunistic, but really what happened was I was happily just investing for charge. And we used to run a monthly, basically networking event, a cocktail hour for a bunch of angel investors and pandemic hit. And all those folks said, hey, why don’t you bring this online? And I said, I don’t really want to do a Zoom presentation for 50 of my friends every month. That’s not the point. The point is to create an environment where people can network with each other and kind of seamlessly move from conversation to conversation. And everyone can pick which conversation they want to be at any given time. I basically pinged my old friend and co founder and Kugospace’s CEO, Yang Mao, and we built three companies together. I told him about the idea.
Brett Martin
I knew he was a big video gamer, so he instantly got it. And two weeks later, he came back with the working prototype. And even from that first very rough prototype, we could see that there was something about being able to see everyone at the same time, but then having different audio channels and being able to move from conversation to conversation. And, yeah, that’s how it, you know, been off to the races ever since.
Brett
And looking through the website, I see some very impressive logos there, just to read off a few. Harvard, Nike, Deloitte, Capital one, LinkedIn. I think I even saw NASA there, which is awesome. How do you land logos like that? As a startup, obviously all founders struggle with this in the early days of, how do you get enterprise customers to really just give you a shot? How’d you pull it off?
Brett Martin
Do you think I will know? NASA is definitely one of our proudest as a entrepreneur and a know, having NASA as customer, actually one of our oldest customers, is something that I tell my mom about, for sure. And one of the things that got me offline, I was happily investing, right? And I had done my last startup ten years ago. And the thing about Kumu space is you see a lot of good businesses. You see a lot of businesses with high revenue and high margins and moats and growth. And I usually would just give them my money. That’s a much easier way to make money, right, than building. But Kumaspace, it spoke to me personally. It was like this mission of just making all this time they were spending on the computer, a little more human, a little more connected, right?
Brett Martin
A little less commoditized. Like Zoom, it really spoke to me. And in terms of getting those enterprise customers, it’s two things. One is obviously, it’s PLG bottoms up product, where it’s inherently viral. We’re turning video into content that people are sharing and people see someone else’s toast. They’re like, wow, that’s amazing. That’s cool. You have a fully customized office that reflects your personality. I want that, right? And so we just start bubbling up in these organizations, and folks were looking, people love Zoom, right? Zoom, it gets a job done. It truly was innovative, and it sort of just worked when no one else did, but no one loves it. And so there’s this opportunity to get in there and provide something different that people want to talk about that makes them excited.
Brett Martin
And so I think taking personal excitement, your mission, and channeling that into a product, that’s another thing I see a lot of great entrepreneurs doing that I try to emulate. It’s just like how you start to look like your dog or look like your partner. Well, I think sometimes your business definitely starts to look like you. And so if you’re really excited about your product and everyone else around you feels that. And so that, I think, is how you get those early customers. It’s just like being so excited about what you’re selling that they feel like, okay, this is something I got to be a part of.
Brett
Yeah. Enthusiasm is contagious, so that makes a lot of sense. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines IO podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now let’s talk about noise. Obviously, there’s been a lot of money that’s gone into virtual office platforms, virtual work platforms. What are you doing to really rise above all of that noise? And how have you gained the traction that you’ve gained? Which is it?
Brett Martin
Yeah, look, it’s a competitive space. I mean, I think there’s probably 40, 50 companies have launched our space and more that I don’t even know about, and a number have already gone under. Right? It’s tough. You’re competing with Zoom, you’re competing with Slack. You’re being Microsoft Teams. I mean, these aren’t exactly old, creaky incumbents. These are folks at the top of their game. But I learned from my first company. I say the only way a competitor will kill you is by leading you off a cliff. And I think you just need to block and tackle, get one customer in the door, make them happy, get another one in, and kind of not get over your skis.
Brett Martin
We had the fortune of being able to raise a really nice couple of rounds from some all star venture capitalists at Bolt, started Lightspeed, but we didn’t get over our skis and hire a trillion people and light a bunch of money on fire. We deliberate about the team, and it’s tough. Like everyone else, it’s a tough market out there, but take your time and grow in your shoes. And we’re trying to live by that. We’re not perfect, but we’re trying to just slowly build a solid, profitable business.
Brett
When it comes to your market category, how do you think about the market category? Is this a category creation play or is it consolidating some of those existing categories and just redefining them?
Brett Martin
I think there’s a degree of category creation going on here, right? I think a virtual office, I mean, historically a virtual office was a place where you could send mail to and they would scan it for you. Not a piece of software that your team essentially lived in all day, every day, while working from home or from distributed or hybrid situation. So there has to be a fair degree of education. And that’s why turning the product into content and having it distribute itself, incredibly important. That said, at the end of the day, I think that the category is evolving. A lot of people are dealing with return to the office. I think the probably dominant sort of design of white collar office work is actually going to be a hybrid situation.
Brett Martin
And so how do you make a virtual office just as useful for hybrid teams as it is for fully distributed ones? And I think for us, that’s okay. What are the core value propositions that we serve, right. Which is essentially visibility and presence, speedy communication and collaboration, and then ultimately the culture and the strengthening of personal bonds that results from that? How do you take those three benefits and then continue to evolve the software to serve them regardless of where people are working from? So I think it’s building a category, but always staying rooted in fundamental benefits to the customer.
Brett
Obviously in the media right now, there’s a lot of debating of is remote work dead? Are all these big companies going to drag their workers back into the office? What are your thoughts on that conversation? I know your thoughts on that conversation, but how engaged and active are you in kind of telling that other side of the story and advocating for this idea that remote work and virtual work is here to stay?
Brett Martin
I think that, first off, I want to be clear, I see value in being in person. Right. I think one of the problems with the remote work community is that sometimes it’s delusional about, oh, anything can be done remote, everything should be done remote, and there’s no benefit to being in person. And I’m not going to be the person to say that. Right. I just think that the model is flipped. It’s kind of like the upside down classroom, right? We used to say, okay, we’re going to lecture you all day and you’re going to go home and do your homework. And now we said, okay, you know what, actually, you’re going to watch a video. You’re going to watch a video at home and learn, and then you’re going to do your work in the classroom so you can get real feedback.
Brett Martin
And I think the office model of the future is, hey, we’re going to do work at home where we don’t have distractions, where we’re very comfortable. We got to set up where it’s lower cost, and then we’re going to meet in person when we need to build relationships and do really in depth, very loose, open ended brainstorming and communication. Right. That’s what in person is for. But we don’t need to do that all day, every day. And so I think that’s why we have hybrid situations with varying degrees. And so I think that people who are saying, oh, it’s all about remote work or it’s all about return to the office are actually missing the point.
Brett Martin
The point is that we actually have to match the tools for the job that needs to be done, and no one sort of monolithic solution is actually the best solution.
Brett
I watched the talk you gave at web summit, and it was, will physical real estate even matter in the future? I’ll link to that in the show notes, but you answer the question, will it matter?
Brett Martin
I think that physical real estate will, of course, matter. I just think that it’s going to drastically change from how we’re using it, pre pandemic. And we’re in the middle of that. Right. We have got a massive commercial in the US, a massive commercial real estate crisis that’s happening right now as the standard office footprint is being transformed, needs to be basically transformed into more modern use cases. Right? More common space, more meeting rooms, more hot desks. And so, yeah, it’s going to take a long time for the housing. It doesn’t change at the speed of software. That’s the benefit of a virtual office, that you could scale it up. You could double size your team tomorrow in Kumo space. Good luck trying to do that in midtown.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro as well, you’ve raised 25 million so far. What have you learned about fundraising?
Brett Martin
It’s not over till it’s signed. I think that there’s a lot goes into fundraising, and ultimately it’s like, have you built a good business? Do you have something with a large tam with making money, has good margins, has a leadership team that has deep insider domain experience? Are you building moats over time? And if you’re not those things, then have you identified why you’re not those things? And then what are you doing to become those things? Right? That’s the core of fundraising.
Brett Martin
And then there is this dark art song and dance of what I call FOMo fundraising, which is essentially meet people, tell them who you are, what you’re going to do, meet with them again, show them that you’d been doing what you said you were going to do, and then finally create some sort of reason, either through back channeling or pr or a fun announcement or news, that gets people to see what you’re doing and then come to you so you can negotiate with them on your own terms. That’s, I think, my model for fundraising. And so I don’t spend a lot of time talking to people unless I’m either building that relationship, starting a relationship, or actually asking for money.
Brett
Can you talk to us a bit about the PR strategy? So I was looking through the website and I saw you have some incredible coverage. So you’ve been featured in the New York Times MIT Tech Review, CNN, all the big outlets that every founder would dream of big. And how’d you pull that off? And what does that media strategy look know?
Brett Martin
Have something worth talking about and figuring out how to relate what you’re talking about to what people care about. I even feel bad talking about this because I don’t feel like I’m the best at working the media. I know there’s so many people better than me. I’m just fortunate to have been surrounded by talented people building amazing products and software, and I just get to be the face of it. Honestly, there’s no media mastery over here, just a really good team.
Brett
What do you think your superpower is? I’m sure there has to be a skill that you just are really good at and you think could be the best in the world at. What would that skill be?
Brett Martin
I would say that my ability to identify undiscovered talent is probably my greatest strength. And believing in people before sometimes they even believe in themselves, is something that I’ve done a number of times. And I’m just very proud of the alumni of folks that I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with. And I see all my former colleagues as starting their own venture capital funds, partners at big funds, pms of big billion dollar businesses inside of big tech. And I think that nothing makes me happier than seeing the people I love succeed. And something about that just people keep giving me the opportunity to work with them. And so whatever that is, that’s what I’m most grateful for, and hopefully what I’m not so bad at.
Brett
Final question for you here, let’s Zoom out three to five years into the future, what’s that big picture vision that you’re building?
Brett Martin
Well, look, I’ll tell you this. If the future of work, and is sitting on Zoom and slack all day and becoming increasingly commoditized as humans and becoming little API endpoints for work, whether I’m distributed in office or working from home, that’s a pretty sad state of the world. And so we are fighting against that entropy at Kumo space. We are trying to create a more human world where you continue to be a person in the metaverse and distinct and have your humanity and leverage the benefits of humanity connecting, have spontaneity and true human connections that create something greater than the sum of the parts, and creating technology and software and tools to facilitate those connections and the emergent greatness that comes out of them. That’s the core of the mission of Kumo space.
Brett Martin
And you look at it, existing tools like Zoom, and they’re not even networked. You don’t even have any intelligence. You have an organization with 10,000 people and they’re all in video chat and video calls all day, and yet you feel, when you sitting at home, you feel like you’re literally working in a box in a little silo. And I think there’s just such an opportunity to create a network there and really connect people across all these calls and harvest that intelligence and share it intelligently across the organization. And you can imagine how AI is going to play into this. I think it’s just a massive opportunity for information orchestration in the future, and I hope Kumospace gets to play a leading role in that.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. I love what you’re building, and I love the problem that you’re solving and the approach you’re taking to solve it. Brad, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do have any founders listening in. Want to follow along with your journey? Where should they go?
Brett Martin
Yeah, well, connect with me on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter. It’s Brett 1211. And just if you started a company and you want to talk about it, just hit me up on email, Brett at charge BC and just reference this podcast so I know where you’re coming from and you instantly had that credibility.
Brett
Amazing. Brett, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. I’ve had a really fun conversation with you here, and I know our audience is going to really love it as well. So I really appreciate you making the time.
Brett Martin
Hey, Brett, thank you and hope to come back someday. Have a great rest of your day, and best of luck to everyone out there getting started.
Brett
Thanks a lot, Brett. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If at B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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