The following interview is a conversation we had with Marc Bernstein, CEO and Founder of Balto, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $52 Million Raised to Power the Future of Contact Centers

Marc Bernstein
Brett, great to be here. 

Brett
Super excited for this conversation. If you want to go ahead, let’s just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Marc Bernstein
Sure. Well, I grew up in the Washington DC area and moved out to St. Louis for school and I studied entrepreneurship, marketing and psychology. A lot of people will tell you that your undergrad degree is useless. I thought it rocked and was super useful and apply all those things today. I asked a mentor of mine if I want to start a business at one point, what is the best career to start in? And he said sales because you’re either doing sales to win your first customers, no one’s going to do it for you. You’re doing sales in order to recruit talent and bring people onto your team and share your vision or you’re doing sales in order to raise money. But you probably need to get good at sales. So I started at a B2B sales software company in St. 

Marc Bernstein
Louis called Top Ops. A lot of folks dont know the people who founded top ops that already founded Gainsight before then. Big unicorn out in the valley and I learned a lot from that founding team. One of the things that I experienced there was when I was in sales, id go in my managers office for coaching and id ask him for feedback and he pull up the call recording and give me good feedback. And then I’d go to my call with the customer and apply none of the things I had just learned in my coaching session. And the realization was that’s one thing to know what you should do, it’s another thing to do what you need to do actually in real time while you’re talking to the customer. 

Marc Bernstein
And that ended up being the inspiration for Balto, the company I founded with two other founders in 2017. 

Brett
On the topic of inspiration, who inspires you when it comes to founders, entrepreneurs and builders. 

Marc Bernstein
Of course, there’s some greats that are just very obvious, and those will be the Elon Musk’s and Steve Jobs. The world. I love how Elon Musk approaches things from first principles. I love how Steve Jobs is willing to take a bet on something the consumer might not even know themselves. But maybe a little bit of an out there answer would be Leonardo da Vinci. I actually learned a good bit about him on this podcast called how to take over the world. Really, really awesome podcasts. And they kind of covered his thinking style. And the thing that was so different, especially about Da Vinci, is he did a lot of things. He was an artist, he was an engineer. You know, he did painting and he did sculpting, but he got bored easily and didn’t finish his projects. 

Marc Bernstein
And I think a lot of folks who are startup founders think, you know, well, if I have a lot of interests or, you know, I get really excited about something and then I lose interest and I move on the next thing, that’s a weakness, and that means I’m going to be a bad Founder. But I think the answer is it’s also potentially a strength. It’s also something that you can really lean into, and you can use this sort of knowledge, this intelligence, this working understanding of the world across art and science and all those things in order to be a better Founder. So it was really cool kind of hearing how someone did something really legendary and world changing, even though he thought in a very different way than today. We would say someone who successful thinks. 

Brett
You’re the first person I’ve ever met who has listened to that podcast as well. How to take over the world. That’s one of my favorite podcasts. I think Ben Wilson is just such an awesome host, and it’s such a great show and just so well done. So that’s awesome to hear. 

Marc Bernstein
He’s a great historian as well as a storyteller. He tells the facts like they are. And he also says, and here’s what I think, and it’s delightful. It’s enjoyable. They’re not too long. And, you know, when I’m kind of cycling through my podcast queue and I want a little bit of a pump up and say, I want to take over the world, I’ll flip one of those episodes. 

Brett
Did you listen to the one on Queen Elizabeth? 

Marc Bernstein
No. That sounds interesting. 

Brett
It’s good. I listened to, like, right around the time that she passed away, and he kind of ended it with, you know, he went into it with this idea of he wanted to understand who truly has power in the UK and who is the authority there. And his end takeaway, after all of that research and all the study he did was it’s the media and the newspapers. And the newspapers have absolute authority and absolute control in the UK, which I thought was just a fascinating final takeaway there. 

Marc Bernstein
What a take. 

Brett
What about Walter Isaacson’s book on DaVinci? Have you read that yet? 

Marc Bernstein
I have Walter Eisenstein’s book on Elon Musk, and it’s. I’m looking at it now, 500 or 600 pages. So I’m gonna take a deep breath, start there, then I’m going to Steve Jobs, and then I’ll go to da Vinci. 

Brett
Nice. Yeah, I’m following a very similar path. I did Elon Musk. Just finished that one. It’s a beast. But luckily it’s, like, very digestible. It’s kind of like reading a blog post for each chapter. And I just got the DaVinci book over the weekend. It got delivered, so getting ready to dig into that now. But, yeah, his books are big, but they’re, I like the style. They’re easy to read. 

Marc Bernstein
One of the things I was thinking about Steve Jobs is, you know, again, from that podcast, I actually listened to it today, is how his companies, like, nearly all failed at one point, like Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. Pixar started out essentially as a computer company, and they stopped shipping physical computers and said, we’re going to pivot. We’re going to try software. And that didn’t work. And they said, well, as a last shot, let’s make a movie. And when Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, he also started this company next, basically to say, you know, I’m going to make the next computer you all watch. You kick me out of Apple, but I’m going to make an even better device. And all three of those companies were truly on the brink of failure. 

Marc Bernstein
And I haven’t listened to the Elon Musk episode yet, but I wonder, it doesn’t seem like any of his companies were on the brink of failure. I guess Tesla got close, but that was really a financing issue. But PayPal didn’t seem like it was close. I don’t know. It almost seems like Elon Musk is an easier go than most folks, but I get. He’d probably disagree with that. 

Brett
Yeah, I think he’s described it as no one would want to be him. So that. But I think a lot of people still would really want to be Elon Musk. Even with everything that they know, and I’d probably be in that camp. I would. I would take the pain, I think, to be in that position that he’s in, to just build and create and put things out into the world that really transform the world as we know it. 

Marc Bernstein
Yeah, I felt myself eating my words as I said them. 

Brett
I do that all the time. So you’re not alone. Let’s switch gears here, and let’s talk about Balto. And I think it’s a perfect way to dive in, is. Let’s talk about low points. So you founded the company in 2017. Have you experienced any low points? Were you ever on the brink of failure? Or what was that kind of lowest point that you’ve reached so far? 

Marc Bernstein
Well, anybody who has been in the tech startup world for the last couple of years felt a tectonic shift in the climate. And some folks felt it on a financing side, some folks felt it on the demand side, some felt it on a labor market side. Some folks felt it everywhere. But certainly the foundation upon which a lot of tech starters built their company have shifted dramatically over the last couple of years. And that is required every tech company, if you want to be viable, especially if you are VC backed, and your plan is to be burning money for some period of time, and your plan is to raise around some period of time, you have to switch your operating model pretty substantially. And we had to cut down our burn substantially. 

Marc Bernstein
We had to get our Runway and say, how do we build an infinite Runway? How do we become efficient enough that we can persist as long as we want to, and that we don’t need to rely on massive amounts of VC capital in the future, and that our future is in our hands. And doing that meant going from a massive headcount. At one point, we had 165 people, the company, and now we have about 55. And we’ve been able to keep that headcount for the last year. And we did the difficult work in 2022, but that was excruciating. That was really excruciating. And I know a lot of founders have felt that, but you’re not alone. And I can tell folks that once you do the difficult work and you say, hold on, we now are looking at a more finite set of resources. 

Marc Bernstein
We need to focus. We need to focus. We need to choose a couple of things. We need to do them very well, and there’s nowhere to hide. Everyone needs to be executing. Every single person at the company needs to be absolutely excellent at their role. And that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to build the sort of world changing company we want to build. Once you do that reset, the world looks a lot better. So 2022 was just a really tough year for us, and that’s where were going through that transformation. And 2023 has been our best year on record. So there is a bright spot, but, you know, boys, the dark spot. Dark. 

Brett
As you said, many founders, or I would say most venture backed founders, had to go through something very similar in 2022. So fortunately, you weren’t alone there when it comes to making that transition and doing that downsize. I’m sure there are a lot of lessons learned. What would you say was, like, the biggest lesson learned? 

Marc Bernstein
Well, I’ll say the first thing was a surprise, and that was that I was truly shocked that when we got leaner, we also got better. I had thought that you make cuts and you get leaner. And I was like, crap, we’re just not going to be as good. We’re not going to sell as much. We’re not, we’re not going to build as good product. We’re not be able to take as good care of our customers. We’re not going to have as good market presence because we don’t have as much people, we don’t have as much resource going out there in the world. We’re not going to be as good. And that turned out to be totally wrong. You know, I kind of learned that there is almost like a natural optimal size for every company, depending on where you are in your stage. 

Marc Bernstein
And when you’re bigger than that natural size, you actually operate less effectively than you would if you were a smaller company. And you can promote that culture of ownership, and you can promote true excellence in every role in every department of your company. And theres fewer layers between the founders and the senior management and everyone else in the company. So its not like youre a shadow to anybody in the company. Everyone knows who you are, and that allows some of the way you think and the values that you have to permeate better throughout the culture. So I would say that was probably like one of the biggest learnings. The biggest surprise is you can get smaller and also get better. Id also say that, you know, one of the things I learned there is that if you don’t own the message owns you. 

Marc Bernstein
And I think very fortunately, we had a lot of practice in owning the message, especially internally, because we have a weekly all hands. So every single week we’ve done this, the entire history of the company. We bring everybody together and we give updates on what’s happening in the company. The form of the all hands has shifted throughout the year, but we do it every single week without fail. And that was an opportunity to really frame for folks what happened and what were going to do going forward and also get people’s pulses because you can’t just have a message and you can’t say, well, we had a cut, but that’s behind us now, and we’re just going to move forward and onward. People are going to be sad. People are going to be frustrated. People are going to be scared. And you can’t ignore that. 

Marc Bernstein
You have to sit with that a little bit. So it really was kind of a masterclass in balancing fear and apprehension and frustration and sadness with the really important work that we needed to do. And there was a certain point where I gave a talk to the company and I said, hey, everybody, I want you to look at the metrics that we’re doing right now. I want you to look at what we’ve accomplished this year. We’re not losing anymore. We’re not losing anymore. We’re winning again. And I want everyone to feel that. I want you to see it. I want you to look at what we’re doing. I want you to look at this with fresh, objective eyes. We’re not losing anymore. And we had to reset that narrative for folks after we did a cut because that’s how it feels. 

Marc Bernstein
It feels like you’re losing. And you need to both acknowledge that while also make sure you’re keeping your eyes forward and keeping people focused on the bigger mission. 

Brett
That’s helpful context and understanding what’s been going on at Balta the last couple of years. But let’s go a bit deeper into the company history. Take us back to 2017. When you were first founding the company. What was it about this problem in the contact center space that made you say, yes, that’s it. I’m going to go build a company around this problem and dedicate the next 510 15 years of my life in this space. 

Marc Bernstein
It started bit by bit. So it started just with the own personal insight of me getting off calls after getting a lot of coaching and then saying, shoot, I didn’t do any stuff I was coached on. And everyone who has been in sales or customer service who’s had a customer facing role has experienced it and felt it. There really is like a visceral, almost gut punch you have where you hang up the phone and the second the call is done, you know exactly what you did wrong. And like why didn’t I know that 5 seconds ago? It’s almost like one of these movies where you have like a, you know, guy or girl, folks are in love and one of them says something stupid and can’t believe it came out of their mouth. Like that happens while you’re talking to customers. 

Marc Bernstein
I said that’s clearly a human problem. And I actually created a little Excel macro for myself, the Excel Macro. I could type in a topic in the macro and I could type in implementation. It would go up and pick up my talking points, my coaching points that I had written in there for implementation and pop it up on the screen. One of the other balto founders, Chris contest, had the idea and he said, mark, what if were able to use some sort of speech to text and automatically populate your macro so you weren’t having to type it in, it was just doing that for you. And then turns out sometimes in business you’re smart, sometimes in business you’re lucky. I got super lucky. 

Marc Bernstein
It happens that my oldest childhood friend, one of the other founders, Davidson Gerard, is a freaking excellent coder and expert in AI. I told him about this idea and he goes online, he hooks in a couple APIs and says, hey mark, I just populated the speech to text into your Excel macro. Now you have your work in program. I think when I saw that and when Chris contest saw that, we said, shoot, we might actually have a business here. So it started with that very human experience, that very human insight and experiencing the problem myself. And then what we said is, well, what market experiences this problem most acutely? Because I had been in the B2B SaaS world. 

Marc Bernstein
I actually told the advisor of mine were starting this business and I said, okay, im going to go build this product in B2B SaaS. And he said maybe thats the answer. But don’t just assume because you came from B2B SaaS that you should build this product for the B2B SaaS market. You should ask what market is experiencing this pain most acutely? I did a whole bunch of market research and said I think its the contact center where you don’t have five or ten or 20 bdrs making dials. You have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people and always hiring, always new folks in seat, very high attrition, always folks leaving, very difficult. 

Marc Bernstein
If you have an.org change or a process change or policy change to actually get that scaled throughout the organization, how do you get 10,000 people doing something differently? And that pain is very acute. And we realize the contact center space was where the biggest opportunity would be. 

Brett
Can you unpack the market research that you did to come to that conclusion? And the reason I ask thats something that a lot of founders struggle with, is choosing your market and deciding which market to go into. So what type of market research did you find and what types of steps did you take to really make that decision? 

Marc Bernstein
Trey it actually started with almost like thinking about the problem in a matrix. And we first said, where does getting the conversation right matter the most? So where are you having a five or ten minute conversation where that conversation is really important, where if it goes well, it’s dollars in the bank, it’s a new sale, a cross seller, an upsell, or it is a saved customer, someone you’re retaining an account, or it is a complaint that is resolved and the customer doesn’t leave and they’re happy. Or if it doesn’t go well, it’s someone blasting you on Twitter, talking about how terrible your brand is, or it can even be a compliance problem. So we first kind of put it in the Matrix and said, where is the conversation getting it right? The most important? 

Marc Bernstein
And that led us to a lot of these big brands, folks in the insurance industry, folks in the financial services industry that have that high customer lifetime value and also that high compliance and regulatory need and risk of getting something wrong and getting blasted out on social media. So we kind of went from almost this logical matrix to the industries, and then we said, oh, wait. So all these folks in these industries, they’re essentially in, you might classify them as a formal contact center and an informal contact center. Formal meaning they call themselves the contact center. They say, this is our call center. This is our contact center. Informal meaning it could be a sales floor of 500 property and casualty insurance agents, and they’re all slinging deals. 

Marc Bernstein
They might not say it’s a call center, but they might say it’s a sales floor, but it’s a high volume environment where they’re having a lot of conversations that are make or break with a high customer lifetime value and also a compliance or a risk element. Again, we fell into it. We just started looking at the problem logically, saying, where is this pain the most acute? Where does it matter? And then we said, oh, let’s just kind of follow the breadcrumbs and find out where these people are. 

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. Tell us about the first paying customers and especially the big enterprise accounts. How were you able to pull that off? How did you get them to trust you and really just give you a shot? 

Marc Bernstein
Its super interesting. The lean startup, Eric Rez or Eric Rise, I think its Reese. That was one of the biggest inspirations for how we started our company and how we started going to market. And one of the big principles out of that book is build an absolutely minimal viable product, the most basic form of your product that solves the customer problem and do it as fast as you can and get it out there in the market and get the market to actually buy it and use it and test it and give you real feedback about what’s going well and what’s not so you can make your product better. And we took that to 100. We took it all the way to the end of the scale and we said, we’re going to build the demo in three weeks. 

Marc Bernstein
So we built a demo in three weeks and we said we’re going to start selling it right away. We’re going to demo it by calling folks up, doing prospecting, booking demos, just like our sales experience taught us, and saying, hey, here’s our product, we’re showing you a live demo. Do you want to buy it? Of course, everyone said, no, you made this thing three weeks ago. This is not a ready product. And then we would say, perfect. That actually makes total sense. We wouldn’t buy it either. Tell us what’s missing, what needs to change? What do you need to see? Different folks would give us ideas that they had and they’d say, well, you got to change the UI a little bit or you have these four custom objections that it’s helping out with. But I actually have different objections. 

Marc Bernstein
Or what if the UI were a little different and it gave key points that you need to hit or need to remember? What if that were in there? Those are all the things we got actually in those early days by doing those demos. We ran that process 82 times. We got 81 nos. But the 82nd deal was our first customer and they were one user for one month for $500. And that was our first sale. That was a really transformative experience. We did all of that over four months. That was the pipeline that just two passionate founders hitting the phone were able to build in four months is 82 demos and a closed deal. And from there were able to hit our first year sales goal of 100k. 

Marc Bernstein
We actually did one hundred one k and we did it with 15 days left in the year to spare. So thats, I think probably the biggest thing is just start selling immediately, start getting feedback immediately, I think, and potentially avoid free trials. We didn’t do any free trials because we wanted folks to vote with their dollars and say, this actually matters. I’m not just giving you feedback because I like you, because you’re my friend or my family member. I’m giving this feedback because it’s real. 

Brett
Any metrics about growth or anything like that? 

Marc Bernstein
Sure. I can say that in Q two, we did 148% sales of what we did year over year. 

Brett
What do you attribute to that growth and that success? 

Marc Bernstein
I think honestly, the biggest thing is not a big shift in strategy, it is execution. I think the strategy, we definitely tightened up and we focused and that has helped a lot. But when you set really clear standards and really clear expectations, clear is in. When folks tell you that they’re booking a next step with an account. Our next steps always have the same format. It is what is the action you are going to take and for the purpose of achieving what. So a next step is not, you know, I’m waiting for them to get back to me. That’s not something you’re going to do. I guess you could say waiting is something you’re doing, but that’s not how we do our next steps. We say, what are you going to do? 

Marc Bernstein
What’s the action you’re going to take and what is the outcome you want to achieve from that? Everyone has a common language, a shared language when you define all these things. Next step, next meeting, last meeting, last touch. Various different sales stages, milestones, forecast categories, percentages of expected win rate from each of the forecast categories. Your business has a shared language around what to expect. And when something falls outside of your expectations, you’re able to say, that is an outlier. Let’s analyze it. So I think that actually the biggest thing was just execution, execution, and now we’re a freaking execution machine. And the question is, okay, let’s pick our heads up and look at the strategy again. Let’s look at what’s next. Let’s look at the next big thing that Balta is going to bring in the market. 

Marc Bernstein
And we got some pretty exciting stuff coming out in 2024. 

Brett
We’ll have to bring you on to talk about all that stuff. But a few other quick questions for you. When it comes to your marketing approach, how would you summarize your marketing philosophy? 

Marc Bernstein
I was actually thinking about this today, and I think the first thing where it starts is you have to ask yourself, who are you? Who is your company? What are the core attributes of your company? Almost like a personality. And I think it starts there. And I think that in the age that we’re in this digital age, social media age, 2023, 2024, I think people want. It’s to see you and they want to see an authentic you. And I think it’s funny, I think it was might have been time tremendous. Which publication said authentic was the word of the year? That was the 2023 word of the year. And I think that rings very true in marketing. So I think if you can first figure out who you are, then the question is, how do you communicate that as effectively as possible? 

Marc Bernstein
But first thing you got to do is figure out who you are, because then you can just blabber, you can just spit it out. People will give you more grace than you might think. Then when you get your message out there, the next thing you want to be thinking about is how do I make sure this message hits the right people? I think that you can actually be a little bit less scalable than you might appreciate. On LinkedIn, I try to connect with all of our customers, every single customer. I try to connect with everybody. I try to connect with our customers, peers and partners. And I try to build a community of folks who are either our customers today or could be our customers in the future. 

Marc Bernstein
So it’s not that hard to be able to build a base of 5000, 10,000, 20,000 people that you’re constantly talking to in one way or another that could be potential candidates for you. You don’t need to do a Super bowl ad. You don’t need to do mass global marketing with Google. You can, but it can be as simple as just building a base of contacts on LinkedIn and keeping your message in front of them. 

Brett
When it comes to your market category, how do you think about your category? 

Marc Bernstein
Our category is changing a lot. And honestly, our category is trying to figure out what our category is. It’s gone by. Originally the name speech analytics then shifted into conversation intelligence and the big shift, there is a different user where speech analytics was a lot of data scientists and revenue operations folks who would look through these massive amounts of data and pick out different insights from the data and put together reports. It shifted conversation intelligence to a more frontline manager user. So you didn’t need to have the same amount of data set. You’d be able to have technical chops in order to pull out insights. You can just do it on the conversation intelligence level. But then there started to be a new challenge, which is managers are getting these insights and they don’t really know what to do with them. 

Marc Bernstein
And we identified a Balto that there was something almost called an insight backlog, which is all the things that these companies had discovered that were just sitting on the shelves and not actually being applied by the sales force or the customer service center. And then there ended up being kind of this broader evolution of conversation intelligence into real time conversation intelligence. Today, what’s now happening is everybody’s doing this race toward AI. So it’s not about speech analytics, it’s not about conversation intelligence, it’s not about real time. It’s about being able to deliver to the contact center a suite of AI technologies that allow their agents to be as effective as possible, their supervisors to be as effective as possible, their quality management team to be as effective as possible, and their leadership to be as effective as possible. 

Marc Bernstein
You have to serve every stakeholder, you have to be focused on efficiency, you have to have more than one offering, but it also has to be real. It can’t be vaporware. And that’s one of the things that up until call it a year ago, very few AI companies actually had an AI product. I would say most AI companies had more marketing than they did AI. And now with the evolution of chat, GPT and all the different APIs and OpenAI and anthropic and now gemini, we’re going to see AI truly everywhere. So the space is getting shaken again. And it’s not necessarily conversation intelligence. So I don’t know. It’s up to you and it’s up to me. It’s up to the world to see, what do we want to name this space? 

Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 52 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Marc Bernstein
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned about fundraising is that investors are people too, and that the best pitch you can give is not walking folks through a slide deck. If you think about someone who you meet, who you want to get excited about your podcast or adventure, you might have. How do you do that? Well, often you’ll sit and have a cup of coffee with them, or you’ll have a drink with them at the bar, or if you’re on Zoom with them, you first want to understand what do they care about, and not just the stock questions that you might ask a venture capitalist around. What’s your fund size? What size checks do you write? How do you like to help your, you know, your portfolio companies? What’s your value add? 

Marc Bernstein
But real questions, like, real questions, like what kind of companies have you enjoyed working with the most? Like what’s a board you’re sitting on now? Or you might not be able to talk about the board specifically. What’s an example? Can you give me like a picture of a board you’re sitting on where you feel like you’re really able to help that company out? What’s an example of like a tough situation you went through with a Founder where ultimately ended up well, like, those are the sort of questions that’s why VC’s wake up, that’s why these investors wake up every day, is because they want to build great companies alongside, you know, their portfolio companies, their partners. They want to do it from a financing perspective where, you know, their capital has a lot of leverage. 

Marc Bernstein
So I think that was probably the biggest thing is to approach these pitches. Not like, you know, slide one, slide two, slide three. But I’ll start a zoom and just have a normal conversation. Someone will ask a question and I’ll say, oh, I actually have a slide on that. Then I’ll pull up and I’ll flip the slide seven and say, look, you can see the data here, you can see the graph, but it flows very organically. It’s not like I’m pitching them. And at the end, I am waiting for applause. 

Brett
Based on your entire journey, what would you say is the number one go to market lesson that you’ve learned so far? 

Marc Bernstein
Get out in front of your customers. I think that folks are often afraid to do the grind. And remember that any sort of outcome that you want, pretty much any outcome in business, you can kind of think about as almost having like a numerator, denominator, numerator number of successes or denominator number of attempts. And there’s always some number of attempts where if you attempted a thousand times or 10,000 times or a million times, that one of them will hit. If you go and you ask every single millionaire in the world to invest in your startup, one of them will invest in your startup. Okay, but that’s not really practical. So how do you go down a notch? 

Marc Bernstein
How do you say, I need my pitch to be effective enough where I want one out of ten to hit or one out of 20 to hit. So I think that a lot of folks are afraid to do the grind because it’s partially unpleasant, partially because it has a lot of rejection, but also because if you get rejected 19 times, in general, our society teaches us that means that you should take that as a signal that you failed. And I think that the real answer is sometimes the really great things in life. Take 20 attempts. Think about the Olympics. Think about people doing some crazy gymnastic act like they didn’t get it right on their fifth time or their 8th time. They probably got it right on their hundredth time. And I think that we have underappreciated that muscle. 

Marc Bernstein
It’s very true for go to market, you got to get out in front of your customers, you got to get out in front of the market, you got to make the ask, you got to make the pitches. And when you do enough pitches, you will get yeses. The trick then is to be able to improve your ratio of yeses to those. 

Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building? 

Marc Bernstein
Well, three to five years, the world is going to be very different than it is today. I have a bit of a controversial stance on it. I think AGI will exist artificial general intelligence, which is basically AI that is as smart or as capable as a human in as many domains as a human would participate in. So the AI is as good at math as a person is. The AI is good at writing as a person is. The AI is good at music and art as a person is. And I think that, to be honest, we might already have that today. Like, how many people can write as good as chat, GPT can write? How many people can create art as good as dolly can create, or mid journey? I don’t know many people that can. 

Marc Bernstein
So I think we’re actually very close to artificial intelligence being as capable or more capable than a human being. And that essentially takes the labor force and turns it from United States, I think, where it’s 140 or 150 million to infinite. You can scale up and down workers with the push of a button, up and down human level intelligence workers. I think we’re going to be there in the next three to five years. So what does that mean when your workforce is unlimited? You don’t have to wait for someone to get born or to immigrate or to pull them back into the workforce if they retired, or back in workforce if they were taking a few years off, being a first time or recurring parent. It’s going to be a really crazy world. 

Marc Bernstein
What Balto is thinking about is what is the relationship that people will have with technology in those three to five years? Where will technology be totally autonomous? And that’s the best experience that it can give someone. And where will a person still be operating in a role? Probably out of desire, not out of necessity, because an AI would be able to do that function. But maybe there’s places where we want a person versus AI simply because we want something or someone to connect to. And we feel like we connect inherently to our fellow people. So we’re asking, how can we help those people be as effective as humanly possible? And we say tongue in cheek more effectively than humanly possible? Where can we give people capabilities that you’d have to be a super human to have? 

Marc Bernstein
You know, superhuman memory, superhuman information retrieval, superhuman accuracy and answering questions, superhuman persuasion skills and prediction skills. Those are the sort of things that we want to equip people with. So we keep this place in the workforce for talented, passionate people because we will be competing with AI soon, and we’d like to have AI augmenting people’s abilities, not just replacing them. 

Brett
I love the vision. It’s a little bit scary to think about the world that we’re going to be living in, but certainly sounds exciting. Mark, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

Marc Bernstein
You can find me on LinkedIn.com in Balto. Eo name is Mark Bernstein, or you can find Balto at balto.ai. 

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

Marc Bernstein
Thanks, Brett. You too. 

Brett
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