The following interview is a conversation we had with Mike Pappas, CEO and Co-Founder of Modulate, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $36 Million Raised to Power the Future of Voice Safety.

Mike Pappas
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brett
Not a problem. I’m super excited for this conversation. I’d love to kick off with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.

Mike Pappas
Yeah, so as you mentioned, I’m Mike. I’m the CEO and one of the co-founders at Modulate. My background starts with studying physics and math at MIT in undergraduate. That’s also where I met Carter, who eventually went on to be my CTO and co-founder here at Modulate. Even in undergrad, we really enjoyed sort of working together. Quickly found that we complemented each other’s skills. So were absolutely those kids in school that were already brainstorming about that startup were going to build one day. We never quite figured out what we wanted to do for that startup while were in undergrad. We did play with a lot of different ideas, experiment with some different strategies, but ultimately went into the industry to further develop our skills while continuing to be on the lookout for art, for ideas.

Mike Pappas
I mostly went into software companies that had distinctive cultures to learn more about building an effective organization. Carter went into NASA’s jet propulsion lab to go really deep into the machine learning, science side of things. And after a couple of years, we came back together and found that the technology and our understanding had moved to a place where there was some really interesting possibilities in the voice space, which is what ultimately led us into modulating where we are today.

Brett
I see you also spent some time at Bridgewater.

Mike Pappas
I’m a big Ray Dalio fan.

Brett
What was it like working at Bridgewater?

Mike Pappas
Yeah, I mentioned working technology for companies with distinctive cultures. Bridgewater is definitely one such company. I really enjoyed my time there. I got a huge amount out of the Bridgewater experience for listeners that aren’t familiar. Ray and Bridgewater are very emphatic believers in concepts of radical transparency, continuous feedback, really pushing people as much as you can in a, you know, caring way, but pushing them pretty aggressively to grow rapidly and really think deeply about everything that they’re doing. It was an exhausting place to work, to be perfectly blunt. But I also did grow very quickly, and I am really appreciative for that. So definitely was a learning experience. Some pieces of that I’ve taken with me for the modulate culture, other pieces that, you know, we’ve rethought and are approached in slightly different ways for modulate.

Brett
What are a few of those pieces that you took and what are some of those that you left?

Mike Pappas
Yeah, I mean, the basic piece that I took is feedback is important. I think having worked at Bridgewater and then having worked in some other places, it was really clear how much value you get just from being able to talk openly about, no, that mistake that you made, that’s bad, that’s wrong. We need to do something different. Just to give one example, when I was at Bridgewater, I had been there only about a week or two, and my first task had been to go around with the tech team that I was involved in and document how their existing systems worked. So I was interviewing a bunch of senior engineers and trying to write up this overview that ended up being five to ten pages long of how all the different pieces of the system work together.

Mike Pappas
I submitted that to my manager, who then shared it with his boss and a few other folks. About an hour after we had submitted it, a three hour meeting appeared on my calendar for the next day with my boss and his boss, set up by the boss’s boss. And in that three hour meeting, he walked through this document that I had written and went line by line and tore apart every single thing that I had done wrong. And it was brutal. It was a really tough experience for a kid right out of college, you know, not having a lot of experience in the company. But it also was so important because I had all of these half understandings. I had all of these ways I was trying to kind of dodge around the simple fact that I didn’t quite get it.

Mike Pappas
And by going through it this way, he was able to really kind of rip those up, root and stem and free me up to actually say, okay, no, I don’t know what’s going on, and start to get real answers. And from there, I was able to grow much faster. So I think that’s a good example of both the value of what Bridgewater brought to the table with that kind of feedback. But also while I’m glad that I was in a place where I was able to endure that kind of experience, that is a really tough experience for people, and especially people that might be coming into a job from a more junior perspective, or might have different kinds of experiences from previous jobs, having their boss’s boss tear into them like that can be a terrifying experience.

Mike Pappas
So in terms of what have I modified for modulates culture, we’re trying to still foster that sense of feedback and directness, but do it in a really sort of culturally aware and inclusive way that recognizes that there’s different people who will have different kinds of tolerance for that directness, especially right as they join the company. Different ability to sort of engage with that kind of brutal directness versus different kinds of approaches for how to walk someone through something. So trying to make sure that we’re all talking to each other, while also recognizing that we have different kinds of people on the team who will need to be engaged with in different ways for us all to be successful.

Brett
I’d love to switch gears now and let’s dive a little bit deeper into the company. So, at a very high level, what problem do you solve?

Mike Pappas
Modulates primary product is a solution called talks mod, which is a voice moderation product. And the. The problem that solves is that when you have an online platform, typically games is what we work with most. You have lots of people chatting with each other all the time, and most of those conversations are fine people, you know, having fun with each other, friendly trash talk, whatever it is. But sometimes those conversations take a dark turn and you start having some really hostile or horrible stuff being said on these online platforms. And for a variety of reasons, for a long time, the platforms had no ability whatsoever to even know what was happening. They had no visibility into this terrible behavior. Their users were just left entirely undefended to be harassed or hurt in these rare cases.

Mike Pappas
The primary problem that we’re solving is giving these platforms a window to allow them to see what is really happening on their platform. And when they do see that bad behavior, first of all, empowering them to take action against it, but also giving them a deeper understanding of where is it coming from. How did it come to be that allows them to finesse the way that they’re thinking about designing their community and encourage people towards more productive and prosocial ways of engaging? 

Brett
How did you uncover this problem? Did you have a bad experience as a gamer yourself? Or how did you discover the problem? And what was about this problem that made you say, yep, that’s it. I’m going to dedicate the next 510 years of my life to building a company to solve it.

Mike Pappas
Yeah, I don’t have something quite that poignant. My co-founder definitely had some of those experiences. He grew up in the halo online days for me. My parents were pathologically afraid of exactly this kind of thing. So I grew up playing single player, Nintendo games and pretty much nothing else. I think for me, the thing that really crystallized this, though, was looking back to those college years, Ricardo and I, we would go on these long walks and talk about everything in the world. And one of the big themes that we hit on a lot was this idea of, what is the Internet, and is it really living up to its promise?

Mike Pappas
And without going too deep into these sort of philosophical weeds, the sort of fire at the root of me is I’m the sort of person who gets very frustrated when I see something that could be working better than it is. That sort of desire to untangle the knot and to say, hey, everyone is trying to do this, but we could make it work better. We could make it work right. And the more we talked about this online space and the incredible power of what these online worlds enable us to do, and the more we looked at the reality that is so often, that this exposure to diversity actually just reinforces sort of shallowness and bias in many cases, and that exposure to information just reinforces disinformation.

Mike Pappas
And all of these ways that this wonderful possibility gets kind of misused, we pretty quickly solidified, even in our college years on if we could do something to untangle that knot, if we could do something to turn the online world into that kind of incredible resource for humanity that it has the potential to be, that would be something that we would be really excited to work on. And from there, it was really just a matter of spending some years sort of developing our skills and looking around until we found an entry point into that problem that we had sort of the technical skills and resources to make a real difference on.

Brett
Talk to us about the first paying customers.

Mike Pappas
What did you do to pull that.

Brett
Off and acquire them?

Mike Pappas
Stumble headfirst into it is probably the truthful answer. So I mentioned I studied math and physics in school and then went on to be a technologist. At no point there did I go to business school or learn how sales worked or anything like that, but I was the CEO. So in the early days when were first developing our technology, we would get a hold of studios, and I managed to kind of work my network to find a few folks in gaming that helped get us some promising conversations with a lot of different studios. I would go in and I would talk about what were doing, which at the time was not actually the moderation at the time, were looking at real time voice changing.

Mike Pappas
We ultimately moved to moderation as we found it would be a much more effective way to foster that kind of engagement. But long story short, I would go into a lot of these studios, and I would present to them this idea of, hey, we can do this voice changing in this way. And some of the studios would come and say, hey, that’s really cool, but can you moderate the audio too, if you’re listening to it anyway, that’s what we would really like. And I, being a technologist, would say, hey, that’s a totally different product. You’ve clearly misunderstood what I’m presenting. You let me explain it more clearly so you stop asking silly questions, which anyone who knows anything would be banging their head against the wall at this.

Mike Pappas
And I eventually learned, and we eventually went back, but were fortunate to be there at the right time and to have the ear of these studios that were able to kind of take the slow time it took me to sort of learn and get my head beaten into this, to finally realize, oh, hey, they’re asking this question for a reason and to understand that there was a real need there. So, long story short, the way we won our first customers was nothing, really, to my credit. In a certain sense, it was that our first customers found us and banged down the door and made us understand that this was a thing that they deeply needed. And once they had done all of that, we had the right technical skills and were able to deeply understand the problem to deliver something that satisfied that need.

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media 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 slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. When it comes to your marketing philosophy, how would you describe it?

Mike Pappas
That’s a multifaceted question, and I’m going to try and give you a simpler answer. But, I mean, first and foremost, we want to tell the truth, right? We see ourselves not just as a vendor to a platform. We really want to be a partner. We want to be consultative and supporting them. And sometimes that means saying we’re not the right partner for you to actually solve this particular shape of problem. So something that we’re always very dedicated to is trying to make sure that we’re extremely clear about what it is that we do and the value that it provides. But we also don’t overstep, overinflate the story of everything that we can do. That’s something that we see out there every once in a while.

Mike Pappas
But from our perspective, it always comes back to bite you, because the real goal here is not to get you to pay us money for this one piece of software. It’s to build a relationship together so that we can work closely with those studios over a long relationship and ultimately sort of weave together with their strategy in a much deeper way. And that’s been very successful for us.

Brett
When it comes to your market category, how do you think about the market category? Is it voice safety or something else? What’s the category?

Mike Pappas
Large scale. The term we use internally is prosocial voice intelligence. There’s a lot loaded into that term, but the basic idea is people everywhere interact through voice. It’s a rich medium. It allows us to build deep relationships with each other and in various ways in various places. Those voice relationships don’t result in what we wish they would because of toxicity, because of misunderstandings, because of simple sort of just cultural mishaps, whatever it may be. And so our fundamental sort of market vision or our focus is we want to be the entity that just helps everyone make the most out of voice interactions. From a kind of industry standpoint, we’re mostly focused in gaming and other social platforms right now because that’s where a lot of those online voice interactions tend to take place.

Mike Pappas
But that’s never as much been our kind of fence around what it is that we’re doing. We’re interested in anywhere that anyone is having voice interactions. Games are just one of those places that happens frequently and often with a lot of emotion, with a lot of nuance, with a lot of value in having a tool like Toxmod to support it.

Brett
What are some of those other verticals.

Mike Pappas
That you’re excited about? Theres different kinds of verticals that im excited about for different reasons. So I think if you look at just, whats the total addressable market here, you can look at things like enterprise applications, call centers, something like that, and say, all right, theres a huge amount of weight there. And I do think thats really interesting. Theres actually been quite a shocking number of different interesting healthcare applications that we’ve come across, too. So seeing those kinds of applications really fascinating and I think can be used in really broad ways with the technology we built. Theres some others that are maybe a smaller tan, but I think theres a huge amount of good that we can do. Online dating is one example of that.

Mike Pappas
Not a tiny market by any stretch, not quite as huge as some of the others, but its also a place where human beings are going out and making themselves very vulnerable. They’re putting themselves out there in a place where theres unfortunately, real risk of harm, real risk of mistreatment and equipping the platforms. To be able to offer a safer venue for people to express themselves and be open and vulnerable in that way feels like a really powerful thing to us. 

Brett
Trey, can you talk to us about growth and are there any numbers that you can share that just highlight the traction and adoption that you’re seeing?

Mike Pappas
Yeah, it’s definitely been a busy couple of years for us. Certainly folks who’ve been following us in the news have seen over the last couple of years, we’ve year been able to announce some massive AAA studio deals, including with Call of Duty last summer. Just over last year, we more than forexed in our annual recurring revenue, which was a huge sort of proof of concept or validation. I should say that we aren’t just a novelty, aren’t just something that one or two studios are interested in, but that theres really appetite throughout the industry that’s been great, and that’s come alongside our opportunity to grow our team further after we closed our series a couple summers ago.

Mike Pappas
So it’s really put us now in a position where we have the team have the sort of market awareness to just continue growing and really become a dominant presence for safety across the gaming and social landscape.

Brett
Trey, how big of a priority is thought leadership for you? And if so, what does that thought leadership strategy look like?

Mike Pappas
It’s definitely a big priority, especially in the context of the regulatory landscape. There’s a huge amount of activity these days in safety and privacy regulation, Europe, the UK, Australia, of course, here in the states, there’s tons of activity of people trying to update old laws, pass new laws, both trying to enforce additional sort of safety protocols and make sure that these platforms are taking responsibility. And in some cases, especially with a couple states here in America, you have the opposite kinds of bills trying to prevent platforms from imposing too much moderation or restricting certain kinds of dialogue. So there’s a huge amount of stuff for these platforms to be trying to sift through and understand. And it leads most platforms in a very difficult position. 

 

Mike Pappas
Facebook or Roblox have the resources to read thousands and thousands of pages of regulations and figure out what exactly they’re being asked to do. But most games are not that size. Most games are what you might call more mid size in a typical enterprise sort of sense, and they don’t necessarily have the resources to sift through all of this. So a lot of what we’ve been trying to focus on from thought leadership is first of all, providing the education to these platforms that don’t otherwise have the resources to really wrap their head around such a complex legislative landscape. But it’s also by providing that thought leadership, by opening those conversations, we can actually influence that legislation, too. 

Mike Pappas
Because at the end of the day, what a lot of platforms are going to be looking at is what’s the standard, what’s the normal way to solve these problems. And we think that the juxtaposition of, okay, UKS law looks slightly different from the EUS law looks slightly different from Americas. We can smooth out those edges by having enough sort of discussion out there about here is just what good looks like that everyone has kind of agreed on that. Practically speaking, regardless of all of those small inconsistencies, platforms still have a good guiding light around what does it actually mean to be a responsible technology provider and what are my obligations and how am I going to pursue that in a way that’s actually going to help my users.

Brett
If you reflect on the growth and the success that you’ve seen, what do you think you’ve gotten right as an organization?

Mike Pappas
I mean, I could list things. I’m proud to say there’s a lot we’ve gotten right. There’s certainly plenty we’ve gotten wrong, too. Theres some that are not so much lessons, but just I sure as heck picked the right co founder. For instance, I do think thats really important to have someone who not only is incredibly competent, but also someone that you work really well with together. And so maybe the lesson there is spend real time working with someone that you’re going to be co-founders with.

Mike Pappas
Before you go off on this journey together, make sure that you really do understand how to navigate disagreement, because there will be disagreement, there will always be different perspectives, and make sure that you have someone at your side who’s really going to help support you through everything and work well with you as you grow the team and as the two of you start needing to marry, very disparate parts of the company into an effective shape. So I think that was an important lesson that we got right with our founding team, and it’s a lesson that I’m happy to say I think we’ve continued to get right in terms of building out our broader leadership team as the company has continued to grow.

Brett
You mentioned series a there a couple of summers ago, and as I mentioned in the intro, you’ve raised about 36 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?

Mike Pappas
I’ve learned that it’s a different dance for every single founder because every founder I’ve ever spoken to has described it extremely differently from lifted experience. But I think for someone who’s thinking about how to raise money, one of the biggest pieces of advice that I can offer is to really learn how venture funds and angels actually work on their side. Angels are straightforward enough, but even they have, in a certain sense, their internal politics. Even just for a single angel, thinking about how much of their funds are tied up in their investments right now, what kind of liquidity are they looking for? What kind of return timeline are they looking for with larger VC’s, thinking about where are they at in their current fund? Who are their lp’s that they’re pulling in from? What are the other VC’s that they’ve liked to partner with?

Mike Pappas
I think a lot of founders are disinterested or sort of overwhelmed by the amount of information there is to learn about this stuff. But the real lesson is fundraising is just another sale and the same skills that make you effective as a salesperson, understanding your customer and solving a problem for them make you effective as a fundraiser. Find VC’s that are looking for something like you and help them understand how you fit into that shape. Don’t just pitch what you do, but pitch the partnership. Pitch the relationship. Pitch the way that you fit in as a puzzle piece to what they’re looking for.

Brett
Mike, if you were starting the company again today from scratch, what would be the number one piece of go to market advice that you’d give yourself? 

 
Mike Pappas
Listen to the customers when they tell you what you want or what they want. I told that anecdote earlier, but it really was a big one. And while I think were fortunate to have the time to be wrong and learn live on the playing field, we all could have done better if we had been a little bit more receptive to that feedback from our customers early on. That doesn’t mean you have to pivot on every idea that a customer brings. But when you’re getting that consistent message, even if it’s just as it seemed to me, a message of them being confused about what you’re building. Pause. Stop trying to hammer in your vision and really go back to saying where is the customer coming from and what am I actually trying to solve for them in the first place here, final.

Brett
Question for you, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here?

Mike Pappas
I mentioned the phrase pro social voice intelligence earlier. That phrase doesn’t just say safety, it doesn’t just say gaming. That’s a really big vision. We want to be the prosocial voice intelligence company. We want to be the organization that enables everyone across the globe to have more meaningful, richer, deeper conversations with each other and to understand each other and make the most out of those conversations. Theres a huge number of places that I imagine well end up going as we follow along that journey, but thats really what the high level vision is.

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and i’ve loved this conversation. We are up on time so were going to have to wrap here before we do. If theres any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired. They want to just follow along with your journey. Where should they go? 

 
Mike Pappas
Probably LinkedIn. I technically have a Twitter, but im a lot less good at using it. So LinkedIn is where Im pretty frequently sharing my own blogs as well as content from the team as well. So if they’re interested in following modulates journey or learning from what lessons I have to offer, that’s the right place to go. 

Brett
Awesome. Mike, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun. 

 
Mike Pappas
Thank you, Brett. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a 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.