The following interview is a conversation we had with Andy Berman, CEO and Founder of Vowel, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Meetings
Brett
Hey, everyone, and thank you for listening. Today I’m speaking with Andy Berman, CEO and Founder of Val, an AI powered meeting platform that’s raised 13 million in funding. Andy, thanks for chatting with me today.
Andy Berman
Thanks for having me. Breath.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, before we begin talking about what you’re building, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Andy Berman
Sure. So I started my career in venture capital. I worked at one of the oldest and largest VC funds out there. I started my first company about ten plus years ago, at this point, called Nanet. Nanet is the leading video based baby monitor on the market. We track breathing, sleep and movement from a video feed. Google Ventures is our largest investor and super successful company there. And now I’m CEO and Co-Founder of Val. And so Val, we’re a smart eating platform. We’re AI powered. And after the meeting ends, you automatically get a summary, the action items, the next steps from the video feed. So I’d recommend everyone check it out@val.com. Nice.
Brett
I love it. And let’s talk about that transition then from Nanet to Val. So were you CEO of Nanet?
Andy Berman
I was Chief Operating Officer.
Brett
Got it. And when did you leave there operationally to focus full time on Val?
Andy Berman
I left there at the end of 2018. We started Val in early 2019.
Brett
Got it. Was that hard to leave a successful startup that you had built to do something unknown and do something new? Or did just feel like the time was right for you?
Andy Berman
It felt like the time was right for me. I thrive in uncertainty, and so I love the early stages, the building, the throwing ideas against a wall. So it was a great time for me.
Brett
Nice. And I saw on LinkedIn that you were at Lehman Brothers at an interesting period, 2007 to 2009. I think some interesting stuff happened there.
Andy Berman
Oh, yeah. I swear he had nothing to do with the bankruptcy.
Brett
What was that experience like? Do you deeply just remember everything that was happening?
Andy Berman
It’s like PTSD. It never goes away. So I deeply remember everything that happened. I was on the West Coast in a small office in Palo Alto, so very disconnected from what was going on Wall Street. But I can vividly remember the day went bankrupt and the feeling and what it was like to watch. And then were subsequently acquired by Barclays capital.
Brett
Wow. Crazy. Now, a couple of questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one is, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Andy Berman
Well, CEO. Snowflake. I’ve read his book. Amp it up. I think he has a very interesting management philosophy. And I think he’s just proven so successful, specifically being able to take service now to the heights it was and then being able to take Snowflake public and continuing to grow that. I think he has a very unusual management style that takes businesses to $100 billion in market cap. And I find his books to be fascinating.
Brett
Yeah, he’s so fascinating and so cool to read a book from someone who’s actually operating in the trenches today. It’s not a management consultant, and it’s not a Founder who sold the company ten years ago. It’s really someone who’s doing this stuff as we speak and as he writes about the book, which is super unique, I think.
Andy Berman
Yeah, I’ve only written the most recent book. I think he wrote another one in 2009, 2010, after Data Domain. But I think this is a continuation. So it’s on my reading list for sure.
Brett
What about other books? Are there any other books that have had a major impact on you? And this can be a business book like Amp It Up, or just a book that personally changed how you view the world and think about the world.
Andy Berman
So I don’t read nonfiction. I am very weird. I only read business books. Basically. I liked zero to one. I thought that was very good. I most recently read Amp It Up, trying to think what else is on my Kindle. Yeah. I mean, amp it up is the most recent thing I’ve read. I’m going to have to open my Kindle app to figure it out what else I read before that.
Brett
Yeah, no worries. We won’t put you on the spot there and make you dig. It’s always so hard, right? And someone asks, what reading right now? I feel like everyone’s brain just turns to Bush, and it’s very hard to think about the title for some reason.
Andy Berman
Yeah, definitely. I read product led Growth by Wes Bush. Before that. I’ve actually got the app open right now. Amp It Up was the most recent book I read. Yeah. So that’s why Amp It Up is fresh on my mind. I read the Great CEO within. I think that’s been a very popular book in Silicon Valley. It’s a famous executive coach kind of playbook for a first time CEO. I thought that was a very interesting book. And I can go on and list everything else that I’ve read and my Kindle library, but I think that’ll bore your listeners.
Brett
Yeah, I think we got a good idea of the types of books that you like to read from those couple of examples. So let’s switch gears here now and let’s talk about what you’re building. So take me back to the early days and tell me about the origin story behind the company.
Andy Berman
Sure. So at Nanit, we very much focus on providing parents with analytics from video. So we track sleep, movement, breathing. We do it all from a video feed. We use computer vision and machine learning. We’re quote, unquote, an AI company. But until last quarter, I would never have called any company an AI company because my viewpoint was the consumer just thought AI didn’t work. And we ran Distributed, we had a lot of people in a lot of different locations, and were always constantly searching for a conference room, catching people up just to move work forward. And so what ended up happening is we tried the modern video conferencing tools, whether it was Skype or Zoom or webex, and we just couldn’t find a platform that actually helped us work the way we worked. So most of the time you’re in a meeting, you have video open.
Andy Berman
On one side, you have a document open on the other side. You’re copiously taking notes. And I just thought, there has to be a better tool out there that’s much more focused on collaboration, how we work together instead of communication. And it was also a bet on distributed work. And so what we do at Val, before the meeting, everyone contributes to a shared agenda. During the meeting, everyone stays engaged and energized with a suite of collaboration features. And after the meeting, that’s the real magic. Instead of this repository of meetings, we give you instant searchable, shareable content, and you can share with anyone who needs to know. You also get an instant TLDR of what happened in the meeting about 7 seconds later, and we detect the action items and we give you the decisions and next steps. And we’re integrating that. So in about a week, we’re rolling out our Zapier integration.
Andy Berman
We’re rolling out a whole host of other native integrations to the collaboration tools like Notion and Jira that you use. And when our customers talk about Val, they talk about it as time travel because it really is the type of tool that you could log into after being out on vacation for a week and read the TLDRs from six or seven meetings and know exactly what happened. So that’s valid in a nutshell.
Brett
Wow. Super interesting. And what was that like when COVID started for you? I’m guessing that had to cause a big uptick in users.
Andy Berman
So at the beginning of COVID were building our product. So we brought the product to market in early March of last year, and we launched our AI features and functionality about two months ago.
Brett
Okay, got it. And obviously there’s some competition in this space. Zoom, Google, Hangouts, what are some of those features that you see users get very excited about when we compare against those competitors?
Andy Berman
Sure. I mean, there’s a great quote on Twitter from one of our users and he talked about how he’d never pay for video conferencing, never paid for zoom, but the auto record, transcribe and search functionality that was so powerful for them at a company called the Brag Media. And that’s why they signed up for a wall to wall contract with us. So it’s customers who are focusing on the information that happened in the meeting. How do you share it asynchronously with other individuals, and how do you extract the information out of it? That’s where we win. And it’s a different type of tool than just a generic communication tool.
Brett
Got it. And what does that look like in terms of when a company adopts the platform? Does this start with just a small team and maybe two people are using it to go back and forth and then that goes up into management or what does that adoption look like?
Andy Berman
It’s typically a small team and then it spreads throughout an organization. We’re bottoms up and we’re self serve. So people come to our website, they sign up for a product and they adopt it. And that’s how people end up. And it typically grows in an organization, organically, virally, and that’s the most exciting part about it. And we focus on distributed teams. Typically it’s focusing more on product engineering and design folks. But we have functions throughout the company that adopt us. And they adopt us because we’re a tool that helps them push work forward.
Brett
And are there any numbers, metrics that you can share that just demonstrate some of the growth and traction that you’re seeing right now?
Andy Berman
Well, our user base has, I think, tripled over the last 40 days. I’m not going to give you the numbers behind that, but it’s been pretty fun to watch.
Brett
And what do you think you’ve really gotten right? What have you done to rise above all that noise in this space? Because it feels like it’s a pretty noisy space.
Andy Berman
Sure. So I think a lot of people actually talk about AI. They talk about a summary, they talk about instant notes from the meeting. But from what I’ve seen in terms of the products out there on the market, no one actually does it accurately. And so the meeting ends and seven to 10 seconds later you get the notes or the summary of what happened in the action items and they’re formatted and they’re ready to go. And maybe it takes you 30 seconds to clean it up, but it’s 85 95% accurate. And that’s very different from anyone else in the market and I think other people. It compares to the magic that people have seen with Chat GPT.
Brett
Interesting, I guess I should name, but yeah, I use a different tool for AI meeting notes. And when I first started using it, like a month ago, I was super excited. And then I actually started really reading the notes and realized that it was maybe 50% accurate at best. And it was very difficult because it felt accurate. When you skim it looks good, but when you actually read the words, it’s almost like it’s nonsense. So I’m guessing accuracy. There must be mission critical for you.
Andy Berman
Definitely it’s accuracy, but it’s not just accuracy, it’s what’s actually important. And so anybody can try to build some kind of summary using some type of open AI model, but we do a lot more. So we build a lot of custom AI ourselves, and we’ve just really focused on this problem from day one. So it’s not something and it’s not an add on. And I can guess which one or two of the products you’re using out there that you’ve had that experience with. And I’ve heard that actually from another podcast host, from a podcast I was on last week said the exact same thing that you did. So for anyone out there listening and you’re curious about our product, val.com, we also have a coupon for three months free of Val with the coupon code visionaries.
Brett
Nice. I love it. Bringing value to the audience always.
Brett
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Brett
Now let’s talk about market categories. So I introduced you as AI powered meeting platform. Is that a category and a term that others are already using and other platforms use to describe themselves, or is that a category that you’re really trying to create?
Andy Berman
I think in general, we’re creating a different category and we play in a different category. If you go to our website on val.com, what you’ll end up seeing is AI powered meetings for fast moving teams. And there is a new category here. Historically, most of the tools are focused on communication. And communication, you don’t really care what it is. Is it FaceTime? Is it zoom? Is it meet? It doesn’t matter. The only reason you’re doing it on video is probably to see people. But when you’re sitting there working together in a distributed way, maybe someone’s not in the office today, maybe they’re on a different floor or maybe they’re on the different side of the campus. That’s a 30 minutes walk. You sit there and you’re trying to move work forward. So you have an agenda, you have action items and you have next steps. And those are the type of people we focus on.
Andy Berman
And we’re creating a category to give you superhuman style efficiency from these meetings. And so we’re trying to give people energy back in their day because zoom fatigue is real.
Brett
Absolutely. And what are you doing just in terms of activities or tactics to build that category and create that demand for something that people maybe don’t know that they need yet?
Andy Berman
It’s very interesting. I think there’s a massive AHA moment for people when they just land on our website and see the video. I think once you start thinking about never taking meeting notes again or automatically having a meeting summary, that gets very powerful. And I think everyone who’s ever worked wishes there was somebody taking notes for them. Because if somebody’s taking notes for you can pay more attention in the meeting and the distractions are so much greater on video than they ever were in person. Your dog may bark, you may get a text message, there may be a pop up notification or a slap or a team’s notification and it’s so much harder to stay focused today. And so what we do is we give you that perfect recall and that’s very different than what everyone else is doing.
Brett
Also, everyone listening. I recommend to check out your site because you guys have just done such a killer job on your messaging. It’s so clear what you do. It’s so clear the value that you add. And I see a lot of startups struggle with that. You go to their website and it’s even something I bring on the show. I’m doing my research before and I spend 10 minutes on there and I walk away wondering, what the h*** do they do? I still have no idea. But you guys have nailed it. So how did you do that? What was that process like to really nail your messaging in the way that you have?
Andy Berman
Well, I think messaging is a very interesting exercise. So you can be very lofty with your copy and people may never understand what it actually means. My belief is the average user lands on your website and basically forms an opinion within, I don’t know, 15 seconds. Are they going to stay? And the messaging has to be clear, it has to be concise. People have to instantly understand what it is that AHA, and you want to do that with both objects and also the copy. And so you have this instantaneous moment of land on my website and understand what it is. And so we’ve refined this so many times over. We’re constantly testing it. And I think it’s very difficult to get messaging right, but it’s very easy to get messaging wrong.
Brett
And where did this obsession with messaging come from for you? Because it sounds like you didn’t have a marketing background. You were COO and obviously Co-Founder at the previous company. So where did you end up getting really involved in marketing and messaging?
Andy Berman
Sure, so I think at Nanad we’re primarily DTC brand, so we’re direct to the consumer. So we sit there and look at the conversion rate on a daily basis. Or we did, rather. And what were always doing is were always running tests on different messaging and different copy. When I learned the lofty, futuristic type messaging never converted. And maybe that’s my category, but Simplistic getting the user to the AHA instantly, that’s what converts people. And we would test it. And so it just became a test and iterate type exercise and there’s always a hypothesis behind it. How do you describe what you do? How do you create that category? Category creation is a real exercise in itself. I think Qualtrics has probably done it the best of anyone out there. But when you’re doing your own messaging, you have to take a hypothesis on it and then you have to start driving traffic to your website and seeing the conversion rate and constantly iterate on it and see if you can improve it.
Brett
Yeah, that resonates a lot. Especially a lot of what I hear in the Enterprise B, two B marketing world is, hey, US enterprise B2B marketers need to be stealing ideas from the D to C brands and the consumer marketers, because that’s who really gets marketing. Right. That makes a lot of sense then as well. This is where you learned a lot of this stuff was at your previous company when you were marketing to consumers and you weren’t marketing an enterprise B to B product.
Andy Berman
Yeah, I think what you’re describing is a theme called the Prosumerization of Enterprise. And it’s that enterprise buyers, they care about design now, they care about the messaging. And marketers have to adopt tactics from the consumer world. Everyone wants an enterprise tool that looks like it was designed by Apple, not that it looks like it was designed 25 years ago by IBM.
Brett
Makes sense. And it seems like that trend is slowly taking hold of a lot of these different markets and especially a lot of the founders that I’ve been bringing on lately, where the status quo for them is this old clunky, ugly enterprise software. And then the new upstart is the beautifully branded. Like you said, it looks like an Apple product. So for sure it seems like things are headed that way. And it just makes logical sense that they would.
Andy Berman
Yeah, because people have the ability to choose their own tools today. I mean, what people talk about in It is shadow it. So do you actually know across your network or across your computers what people are using, what applications on a daily basis? And today users have the power to install any web app, pretty much any app, and is your data in those applications. And so a small team can adopt something you can grow in the organization, and then the It buyer ends up signing up for compliance and security features and functionality. So it’s a real trend to build a product that looks like it was Apple or Slack designed it.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Now, as you’ve brought this idea to market, I’m sure you’ve experienced some challenges along the way. What would you say has been the greatest go to market challenge and how do you overcome it?
Andy Berman
That’s an interesting question. Finding people where they are is always the most interesting challenge. Finding your early adopters iterating on your product and then you sort of get to a place where you understand you have product market fit or you have a semblance of it and people love the product experience. And what we’ve done is consistently iterated on craft and speed while building new features and functionality to give you that incredible product experience. And users notice lack, users notice performance, users notice when design is off and Apple products always are incredible. So we consistently focus on trying to iterate on our product and then iterate on our marketing message and find the early adopter user base. What we’ve done is we’ve partnered with a lot of great channel partners on their startup programs, whether it’s Twilio or techstars and you name it. And so we’re trying to find early adopters where they are and we want people who are coming in to use our product at the earliest days when they’re choosing the new tools for their company.
Brett
And last couple of questions for you here. What excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Andy Berman
I mean, I feel like we’re inventing the future every day and I feel like I’ve been doing that for the last ten years. It’s challenging. I get to work with incredible people. My team is amazing. They constantly surprise me in how far they’ll go to execute and just they go above and beyond. And so I just love the people I get to work with on a daily basis and I love championing my customers. And really there is a customer quote on Twitter where they say val saves them 6 hours of admin time per user per week. Now that’s real meetings are expensive, they’re the most expensive activity in your company. If you get four or five people together, how much does that hour actually cost? That could be thousands of dollars. And so I’m saving you that. And that’s what we can provide for our customer base.
Brett
And let’s zoom out now into the future. So three years from today, or maybe five years from today, what’s the company look like and what’s the impact you’ve had overall on your customers?
Andy Berman
Well, that’s a great question. So I think you used to come today, you’re starting to come to Val and you’re searching for your information. I think three to five years from now we’re pushing the information to you. So any given moment at any given time will tell you what’s relevant and give you in the moment the knowledge you need, whether it’s in the meeting or after the meeting, to be a superhuman. And I think that’s what AI can do. That’s what our product category can do. And we’re digitizing one of the last spaces that’s not digital today and that’s meetings.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Andy, I’d love to keep you on and ask you another 20 or 30 questions here, but unfortunately we are up on time. Before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Andy Berman
Well, val.com is our website. I’m on Twitter and we build in public. So at Berman 66. Also at Valhcube for the Val twitter. And we have that coupon code for anybody who’s listening out there. So the coupon code is Visionaries, and that gives you three months free of Vowel.
Brett
Awesome. Andy, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story and talking about.
Andy Berman
Everything that you’re building.
Brett
This is all super exciting and hope to have you back on in three years to talk about everything that’s happened.
Andy Berman
Cool. Thanks, Brett.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Brett
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Brett
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