Episode 33: Making remote work work with Erik Braund
In this episode of What Worked, Tyler interviews Erik Braund, Founder and CEO of Katmai, a virtual office platform. Erik discusses transitioning from his AV production company to founding a tech company during the pandemic.
Erik shares his insights about:
- His decision to raise capital after 2 years of bootstrapping
- The cultural and timing issues that can arise with traditional remote work
- Operating a company with a no standing meeting policy
We'd love for you to connect with us:
Transcript edited for clarity:
Tyler Rachal
Welcome back everybody to another episode of What Worked. I'm here with a wonderful guest, Erik Braund, founder of Katmai, with a bunch of incredible equipment. If you're watching the video, he's got some serious recording equipment behind him. So if you've ever listened to some of our What Worked episodes, you know that anytime a guest is on here and they have anything to do with music, I'm going to end up going into a deep dive of music because I love that. So Erik, fully expect that.
But we are here today to talk mostly about Erik's story, the founding of his business Katmai and a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is remote work. Is it broken? Is it not? We'll dive into it. So Erik, on that note, I will ask you to just introduce yourself.
Erik Braund
Well Tyler, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Where to start? 40 years old, Virgo, Ginger, kind of look like Conan O'Brien, I was on his show once, as a look a like. I mean, if you do this with the hair much bigger.
Tyler Rachal
Really? No way! You got to do the signature like Conan mannerisms.
Erik Braund
Oh, I did the string dance on stage. I made it absolutely full of myself.
Tyler Rachal
Amazing. By the way, I'm also 40. So 40, 40 and killing it here. That's awesome.
Erik Braund
Yeah, background in music. I was a musician turned music producer, turned video producer. That kind of takes us to, gosh, early 2020. I was like, man, business was normally really, really, really busy. It's January. Why is nothing confirming or booking? This is strange.
Tyler Rachal
Uh oh, yikes yikes.
Erik Braund
I was in a big in-person business in studios and making videos and records and podcasts and anything under the sun, audio and video. And always grew up an absolute nerd, building computers, learning enough programming to realize I don't really want to be a programmer, but I like to know how it works. And there was a new problem in March of 2020. There was just a new problem, which is like, we can't be together anymore.
Tyler Rachal
Something happened. Yep.
Erik Braund
And squares of videos on Zoom and Teams, while they completely saved the world and kept the global economy moving and let us all go be safe at home for the most part, right? They also lack any emotion and they lack any spontaneity and they lack feeling and they lack those things that we kind of want out of being with other people please
Tyler Rachal
Can I interject for a second? How often do you hear this - Zoom fatigue? I find myself very commonly saying, man, I've got Zoom fatigue. I just can't do another one of these meetings where you're just kind of staring at each other and you do eight of those and you're pretty tired.
Erik Braund
You know, we'll get into this later, but you brought Zoom up. The CEO of Zoom had a thing that was leaked a year or two ago that was, they called everyone back to the office because the CEO of Zoom said you can't run a company on video conferencing. You lose…
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's probably something he shouldn't have said. Shareholders were like, hold on.
Erik Braund
Yeah, wait a second. It's a loss of culture, a loss of transparency and visibility and all these things. And I actually would tend to agree that running a company on what I would call traditional video conferencing platform is hard, but we'll get into that later. So we built something we call immersive video technology, and this is really born out of a couple of problems, one of which is I'm out of work. This is strange. I've now left Manhattan, moved to upstate New York with my young family and we're trying to figure out my clients at the time had needs that were like, hey, we've got to do it all hands. We were supposed to be a thousand of us in a big performing arts center. And now we're remote. So I had figure out how to be a video broadcast company quickly.
And I remember, we sent a camera person to the backyard of the president of a multinational company with the longest telephoto lens you've ever seen, the longest microphone arm that ever has been assembled, this is like early pandemic stuff. In retrospect, it reminds me of an eighties movie montage with just like synths and big drums. And I'm just like on phones and video cameras and webcams and trying to figure out what on earth is going on.
Tyler Rachal
You're hacking it together. Yeah and it's playing some great song like, Take it to the Limit.
Erik Braund
Absolutely. And I had more hair and it was brighter, you know.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. Exactly. By the way, we're very linked on this. Hireframe took our first paying customer, if you can believe it, December 2019. So we had a couple of customers. Come March, 2020, we essentially got, not all on the same day, but if it was a movie, they probably make it seem like it was all in the same day, but we got the same phone call, the same email, all of our customers said, I think we're going to have to cancel hang tight. We'll let you know, we might have to cancel immediately. World's ending, et cetera, et cetera. And then a month later opposite, because we're in the business of remote staffing. So we are a pandemic. We're kind of born out of the pandemic, if you will, not intentionally. I did not start the company then, but I benefited from it.
Erik Braund
Totally, totally relate. My anecdote is I used to shuffle around like 20,000 pounds of equipment in Pelican cases into skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan to make videos. Now I just get to walk around with a laptop. It's great.
Tyler Rachal
Totally. 100%. And by the way, a funny, dystopian, weird memory, not my own, but I'm going to steal it from my sister. My sister during peak pandemic did a Salesforce testimonial for an upcoming conference or something like that. And she told me the way that they recorded it and it just sounded like something from Blade Runner. Basically like a van showed up and essentially a robot wheeled out of the van and she talked to the robot. And there was some guy in the van who was effectively doing some stuff. But her and the human never got within whatever that safe COVID distance is. So, pretty crazy.
Erik Braund
We were mailing laptops and ring lights and all sorts of stuff. I there's really something.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, wild times. Your kids will be like, what? You did what?
Erik Braund
Basically, I mean, it's an interesting story. I was solving problems for big companies in any way I knew how. And then I was looking at other what other solutions were out there and I got flipped a Twitter link that was in Dutch. And when you clicked it, it loaded up this 3D thing that almost melted your computer and there was no one there. It was just like, I don't really know what this is. And I reached out to the gentleman and I had a meeting and discussed what the idea was and I had some ideas of my own. And long story short is I wound up starting Katmai and getting him to come to Katmai and be the first person at Katmai. We didn't meet for two years. I built a team of just, I mean this in the absolute best way as a music reference too, we built a motley crew of just like folk that I met over the internet when no one could leave the house.
Tyler Rachal
Rag tag. Yep, that's awesome though.
Erik Braund
And I'm happy to say five years later, a lot of them are still at Katmai and we're still working together. And this company was funded out of my checking account and then my savings account, and then my wallet, and then the pennies under my sofa. My last business was audio video production. I never raised money. I didn't have investors. I didn't have any of that stuff. It was just me, right?
Tyler Rachal
I want to put a bookmark in that, because we will come back to that. But how you funded the company, I've got a lot more questions than that, but I want to let you get into what exactly Katmai is.
Erik Braund
Yeah, so what is Katmai? Katmai is a technology, we call it immersive video technology. And we built our own engine. And so with the click of a link, you can load a really high quality 3D environment on your phone, your tablet, your desktop, your laptop. And instead of being a cartoon avatar that moves around, it's you. And it's not a 3D model of you or some AI version of you.
It's actually a really simple and novel idea where it takes your webcam, it layers that onto an avatar of a disc, and there's your head, there's your face, and your voice in a 3D environment. And what was interesting is we used the technology to have meetings with each other and build the technology. Because we thought, man, okay, now we're just in the game. Like this is pretty damn cool.
Tyler Rachal
That is cool.
Erik Braund
We're in the game. What can we do with this? And I knew from the first second I ever saw this, I had like a massive vision. Because this for Erik, video game nerd, audio nerd, video nerd, hardware nerd, software nerd. This was like all of the things kind of colliding into one for me. And I was just like, oh, this is the next, probably five to ten years of my life, working on this thing. If we can make it work, because the first versions of Katmai would basically melt your desktop computer in about five minutes.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. We’re recording this on Riverside, and even just when I fire up Riverside, inevitably, if I have a bunch of applications going, and this is just the two of us on video. But yeah, I can totally see how early versions it would be really hard to have everybody running their own video feed, right? That takes up a lot of bandwidth, I assume. And all that jazz plus everything else.
Erik Braund
What Katmai's software is asking your computer to do is run a 3D game, upload lots of video, download lots of video, keep it all in sync, update the permissions, oh and by the way, leave enough system resources for you to do everything else you wanna do, right? So that was like literally years of work to make that work well and so much testing.
In the early days, I never even stopped to think about what have other people done in this space. It was like, oh no, man, I have so many ideas for what we're going to do with this. Because what we're effectively doing, we're making people feel connected in a way that the boxes of video on a scheduled meeting just can't. And we built our product that we have now, honestly, accidentally, because it was like, hey, this is a pretty clever way to hang out and work with each other. And then we just kind of started building some features and testing some things. And it was like, I think we're onto something here.
And it really became, we've got this technology, we've done a number of things with it, but the product today that's in the market is a virtual office. It's a virtual headquarters. And we're marketing it and saying it's for businesses and it's for teams. What's funny, we thought it was gonna be for fully remote teams. We thought like the tip of the spear is the fully remote, digital forward technology startup, that's got the new MacBook Pro, that's used to just being on the bleeding edge of tech and trying new things and moving fast. And while that is true, we do have those customers. We also have an interest from large enterprises that I truly was not expecting, especially at this stage of being in the market.
And that's been a lot of like, boy, we need to grow up real fast. We're in contract right now with one of the largest companies in the world. And it took weeks to get through the security compliance stuff, just figure out are we even compliant? And if we're not, how do we become compliant? Thankfully we are because we've been at this for a while and we have a lot of best practices and we've had some opportunities where we had to meet them quickly. But the requirements for a fully remote company of six people or a company that's 30 years old that has hundreds of thousands of employees. Very different, right?
Tyler Rachal
Without a doubt, you're talking to someone who has a background in call centers, really for lack of a better description. I worked in traditional BPO before I started Hireframe. Hireframe is a remote staffing company. So I deal with the compliance now, today with my business. But what anyone who works in BPO will tell you is that the compliance thing is so funky because you're working with all these different companies, all of which have major compliance requirements, but effectively every single individual team is basically like you're starting a new business. So you could say we've achieved XYZ compliance, but it's like for this specific office versus now you're over in this other one and you're in an office in Dublin. So I totally get it.
I was going to ask, you said largest company in the world, organizations. You said really it's virtual offices, right? Why not schools? And I say that as someone who, my father it’s funny enough, he's extremely passionate. He has a teaching background, but also he was an entrepreneur, he worked in business. And he's been so passionate about the future, specifically of universities, and colleges. And a lot of what he's talked to me about his ideas are around applying today's technology to these things. So I don't know when I, when I, when you gave me the demo, my immediate thought is what companies does this work really well for. But I also think about scenarios, like I just saw a headline about a school in Texas where there's no teachers. The kids are being taught a hundred percent by AI tutors.
Erik Braund
Whoa.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. Whoa is right. And I also have another friend who's working, who's working in a nonprofit here in Los Angeles. And what they're doing is they're basically using AI and machine learning to identify essentially the brightest future, call it engineers and inventors of tomorrow at seven, eight years old, which is crazy. Anyway, so when I hear about that, I think about these kids all sort of spread out across the country. But you said self proclaimed nerd, think about myself in middle school, you're like, am I the only one? And a lot of times these kids form relationships over the internet. So my point is I'm thinking about an entire school over the internet in your environment. Has anyone ever approached you? Have you ever thought about that?
Erik Braund
We've absolutely thought about it. One of my challenges just as kind of the guy leading the charge here is to keep us focused and we've had lots of distractions, right?
Tyler Rachal
Totally, yeah, that makes total sense. Yes, sorry.
Erik Braund
No, no. And listen, we've forayed into consumer things. We've launched things for Starbucks to their consumer audiences for millions of people, generated some revenue, proved our scale, security, all those things.
Schools are definitely something we see in our, not in our even our distant future, in our near future. We're actually building right now a large scale digital twin for a university on the East coast to help with their virtual tours. Because they have a program that attracts global talent and global enrollees, right? We actually have had a couple of small organizations find us themselves and run school-related activities themselves, which I thought was fantastic. It's also just from a sales cycle, candidly from a sales cycle thing, to get introduced to the right person at a school to figure out how we get into a budget in a year or two. As a startup, it's great to follow up on some of those, but if I put all my eggs in that basket, we'd run out of money.
Tyler Rachal
I know what you mean. I mentioned that first customer that we took December of 2019, they were a startup in New York called Thankview and they did funding, like donor relations for universities and that sort of stuff. And anyway, I would talk to them a lot of times about their sales cycle and it's very hard. They're so rigid, they don't buy things flippantly. It's like, budget comes up for review in this time of year. This is how we do approvals. These are our maxes, our limits. It's a whole thing.
Erik Braund
We're there with enterprise companies too. It's just like slightly different, because academia is more nonprofit ish.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, 100%. No, that makes sense. So what you're telling me, the subtext here is you need to make revenue. It's really what you're focused on, which is smart. You're not indulging in every entrepreneur's fever dream, which I get it. As another founder, it's a focus, right?
Erik Braund
We've got a lot of ideas that could just potentially get us lots of users. But in what I have witnessed in my exposure to the investor market that I know, so I only know a very small piece of the global investment market, just what I've encountered, there has been in my five years of doing this, shying away from get a bunch of users and monetize later. Especially because this technology was very expensive to build and we have a lot of robust IP around it and patents and there was so much, there's literally years of testing to make this work well. I have a closet with like 40 computers, four zero. I almost have more computers than I do guitars actually. And that is around testing devices for years and years and years of like, okay, we can't just have software that works with a great 16 gigabyte dedicated video card. It also needs to work on this piece of garbage $700 laptop. Like it has to.
Tyler Rachal
Without a doubt. And remote work and we'll, we'll get more into this, is obviously so ubiquitous now. And in my business with Hireframe, we're staffing people out of the Philippines and Mexico. So you're also talking about, it's the $700 computer. It's the Chromebook, it's that sort of thing, but it's also in an environment where we're not talking about what you're plugged into, which is the ethernet, right? It's not that it's going to be slower internet speeds, brownouts, all that sort of stuff. So I can only imagine what all you have to plan for.
I do want to take this moment and sort of jump into something you self funded this. And you said you're limited, understanding of investors. That's probably an obvious question you always get. Why didn't you go out and raise money? Have you raised money to this point and what are your thoughts around raising money?
Erik Braund
I grew up at least the fourth generation of the patriarch of the family that started his own business. So it was great grandpa, grandpa, dad, and me. And that's just like the world I grew up around, which is like, well, yeah, you don't go get a job somewhere. You start your own business, obviously, and you do it yourself and you invest in yourself. That was just all I knew. I grew up in Alaska pre-internet. You just know what you're around.
Tyler Rachal
What were the businesses like? I'm picturing a fish cannery or something like that.
Erik Braund
You're not far off. My great grandfather immigrated from Norway to Alaska and he had a business where the deep water boats would come into Nome, Alaska, and he had the shallow water boats that would ferry people and goods from the mainland back to the deep water boat.
Tyler Rachal
I love this already, very cool. Like water taxi type deal
Erik Braund
Exactly, lighterage, they call it. This is Einer Klebel Dietrich Elsinus Johansen from Norway.
Tyler Rachal
Wow, there you go. Sounds like a great composer, hockey player, all the above.
Erik Braund
All of it and Viking. And then we had Mel Braund, who ran Braund Inc, who was my grandfather and it was a construction company. After World War II, he came back to Alaska and he built homes and a high school in Anchorage, Alaska. And then my father, Steve, he is an anthropologist and he's been in business for 50 years and he's got a remarkable business in Alaska and a highly specialized scientific brain. And I grew up, my first job was at a guitar store. I got to raise from six to six 25 an hour, I remember. And then it was kind of like, I think I'm just going to go into music production and then I'm going to go into computers and I'm going to go into audio and video. And I just kind of built a business from there.
And so I hit this thing with Katmai. It's March of 2020, we've left Manhattan. have some money in the bank. I had a lucrative business and I’m not too frivolous with it and doing well, honestly. And I'm not really afraid to say it, I worked my ass off and we were doing okay. And this whole thing happened and I was kind of like, I don't know what my end game is here. I don't have a business plan, but I know I'm on to something. I know this is really, really clever, if we can make this work. So I'm willing to start draining our personal finances here. And this is with the belief of my wife, who thank God I'm still with today. So we've survived. We've survived spending all of our money on Katmai.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, her first name is?
Erik Braund
Chase.
Tyler Rachal
Chase, shout out Chase.We like to shout out people here on What Worked. Chase, you are a real one, as the kids say.
Erik Braund
You know, I appreciate that. Hell yeah, she is. We have both realized through Katmai, we both have a very high tolerance for risk, it turns out. Thank God. So basically, I spend two years self-funding. We had a team of about 10 people. My other business slowly just went out of business for the most part because contracts just dried up and things changed and focus shifted.
And I remember it hit a point where it was like, okay, it's time to turn this technology from an alpha to a beta, from a technology to think about a product. Let's think about doing something with this. Now, mind you, let's go to 2022. Facebook has now said we're called Meta. They've now said we're allocating 20 billion dollars a year to putting this headset on your face so we can all remove ourselves from reality and interact with cartoons of each other. And I think that still is totally insane and dystopian and inhuman and not what we all actually want personally. So I said, okay, we need to patent this stuff because this is pretty interesting technology. And at the end of the day, it's like, who are we going to go up against? The biggest companies in the world. That's a big idea for a guy sitting in his corner office, in his basement, basically. Not corner office, I mean, like small corner of a home.
Tyler Rachal
Corner of the room. Yeah, I get it. I got what you're saying. Hey, think big. In the virtual world is a corner office.
Erik Braund
Actually, we do say that every office in Katmai is a corner office.
Tyler Rachal
There you go.
Erik Braund
So we went down the path to say, hey, while this company is saying we all need to look like cartoons and wear headsets on our face, I was kind of like, I think we need to figure out how to protect this idea and then raise money and do something with this. And I knew I could see ahead like I'm going to reach the end of my financial wherewithal here pretty quickly. Sorry, my Pomeranians are barking.
Tyler Rachal
Mm-hmm. And for anybody listening, that is Gonzo.
Erik Braund
That was Gonzo and Batman, two Pomeranians.
Tyler Rachal
And Batman.
Erik Braund
Yeah, so we're hitting this point of like, okay, the money's winding down. I think I need to figure out what it means to raise money. And I put together the advisors that I had access to in my life, and put together a story, and put together a business plan, and tried to figure out how to tell my story and my vision and what I wanted to do with this and how I got here. And we wound up raising a round of outside capital in 2022. We raised a lot of money and it was a different world too. I valuations were insane and like
Tyler Rachal
Sure. That was still the ZIRP era.
Erik Braund
It was in the throes of like the metaverse at that time was like what AI is now and in the investment market. And I actually shied away from the word metaverse because I feel like Facebook/Meta attached to their own stuff with that concept. And so we never use that concept.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, and there was famously during that time, I'm trying to remember the name of the company, but there was that virtual conference company that went bananas. They kind of started out of the pandemic and they, I don't know when exactly started, but they went huge valuation raised a bunch of money, then…
Erik Braund
Oh, Hopin?
Tyler Rachal
Hopin. That's the one. And I think they had to do like a little bit of a pivot or something.
Erik Braund
I mean, all the events centric companies blew up and then literally blew up like.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, it's hard.
Erik Braund
And so we raised outside capital and I figured out, listen, some things went well, some things didn't. But in retrospect, what did it do? It set us up to say, OK, this is more than just a bootstrap technology idea. This is an investor backed company that we're going to try and take this technology, turn it into products that scale to the world and make profit and be successful and sustain ourselves. If I'm being totally candid, I had to swallow a lot of tough pills related to I have to give up what to who for why? I don't understand. My small time sole proprietor entrepreneur brain from Anchorage, Alaska had a really hard time doing that.
Tyler Rachal
Right, yeah. This ain't the litterage business. I understand that, I empathize with that. It's this thing you're building it. And no matter what the percentage is, you're giving it to somebody and you're giving it to them for forever. Hireframe is bootstraped. And we have no definitive plans. We’ll probably stay this way as long as long as it suits us. But there's something that I'm very aware of is, cause I watch a lot of friends who raise money and our clients raise money, you're letting more people into the hen house. And then it's like, if you need to make critical decisions, strategic decisions about the direction of the company, you are really, you are really hoping and praying that your investor partners are very, you know, they're exactly that the partners. So it's super tricky.
Erik Braund
I'm really grateful for where we wound up in our series A fundraise and the level of partnership that those investors have and like who is in the hen house, so to speak. Right. And then we raised money, we hired people, we set some goals, we continue to build the technology, we pivoted a few times. We make the best choice as we can with the information we have and we get new information, we make new choices.
Tyler Rachal
Also 22 to 25 is a huge changing period, right? The VC market is fundamentally changed.
Erik Braund
Oh my God, I mean, it just like it dried up.
Tyler Rachal
Dried up the AI thing now everybody's an AI company now so I'm fully expecting Katmai.aim you're probably sitting on that I assume that domain.
Erik Braund
Well, it's actually a K-A-T-M dot A-I and I finally did buy it, but...
Tyler Rachal
There you go. But yeah, as expected, right? As you should. So much has changed, but it sounds like you've lived kind 10 lifetimes as a founder, is that fair to say?
Erik Braund
Yeah, it really is. And I'd say the investment market changed a lot as we were figuring out, like, what are our metrics and milestones for this company to come out of stealth mode, to become a product, to generate revenue, what's going to be important in that story? Right. And what I've learned now is if you just introduce Erik to a traditional VC, they're going to be like, I don't know, he spent too much money compared to how much money he makes today. I've been told that a hundred times. And you can tell me that another hundred times till you're blue in the face. I'm still going to disagree because well, we invented something. The proof of that is we've got over 50 patents globally on novel and unique technology that your computer can now do that it couldn't do before.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, totally.
Erik Braund
And then we spent 2024 in beta with this virtual office. So we had customers, we had a lot of free users, had paid users, all sorts of different things and different relationships, just getting that user feedback. It's finally like, okay, we're over the hump. We need to know how people feel about this, not us. We are not the user, we are not the customer. I still say this to the company, we still have to remind ourselves of this. We're a team, but we're all power users. We're all totally jaded at this point. We got a lot of great feedback and tons of terrible feedback and everything in between and like, it's the good, the bad and the ugly. I want to know the ugly first. I want to know all the ugly and then tell me the bad. The good, I don't even give a shit about it at this point. It's like we all believe in the good, but where isn't this working for you? Why wouldn't you adopt? Why can't you adopt? Why don't you want to invite someone in? And we spent 2024 fixing that, easing the entry into this new idea, because we kind of found two things - I’d show it to someone and they get it right away or they just wouldn't get it at all or it'd be intimidating and like nothing in between.
Tyler Rachal
I can imagine it's dramatically different when it goes from department to department. Are you seeing anything early in terms of do certain departments adopt it really easily and quickly and see the value and other departments maybe don't see it as much?
Erik Braund
There's departments and there's also geographies, which is really interesting. We've had very early success in Scandinavia. Part of that is I previously worked a lot in Scandinavia and I knew the culture to be very honest, blunt, unforgiving. I mean all these in a very positive way. But for a beta testing audience, go to Norway and get users in Norway. And have them tell you what they think because they'll tell you what they think. On the flip side, some of our best trials that require absolutely no handholding or outreach from us have been from the Scandinavian regions too. Like there's just something around digital adoption and way of work that's slightly different over there. And in America, a lot of us are full of shit and a lot of us will just tell you what you want to hear and platitudes, I don't know, I worked in New York and L.A. long enough to kind of like, yeah, yeah, it's really wonderful. Can't wait to work together. And then you're just ghosted, right?
Tyler Rachal
Without a doubt. I mean, I'll tell you from my own experience, there was a period of time where Hireframe, we had this specific solution and we'd run a lot of free trials for it. And the free trials would kill me because people would say, Oh, this person's doing so great. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And then you get to the end of the month and you'd be like, okay, so here's the contract. Are you willing to sign and what's the payment situation? The person's time is over, if we don't do this and they're like, Oh, we've talked it over and we decided that, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they never say what it really is,
Erik Braund
You'll never get the real reason.
Tyler Rachal
Which is we don't see value in this, not enough to pay you for it. And that's something that you gotta ask the question. You gotta ask people to actually pay you. That's my lesson from that.
Erik Braund
There was a time when we wrangled everybody that was a free trial. There used to be a sales team at Katmai. Also, I did a lot of things that didn't scale and you have to. You want you want to know the sales team at Katmai now? You're looking at it.
Tyler Rachal
I'm looking at founder led sales. get it. Yep.
Erik Braund
That's it because, there's nothing against the people that want that would be helpful to sell Katmai and at some point maybe we will again, but like it's a $15 a month product. If we can't figure out how to show the value of it and deliver it via a computer without an entire dedicated sales team, then I have royally screwed something up, right? Like at the end of the day, because there's all sorts of different value props. Like we have a customer that got rid of their office lease and we saved them like $55,000 a year or whatever. I can't remember the exact number. It was like, yeah, save $50,000 a year. And now we only pay $100 a month to have this whole incredible virtual headquarters and access to each other. And now we can hire in all these different markets. We don't have to go to Manhattan anymore. And so now we're really figuring out what is it in that free trial that delivers value immediately? How are we emailing you and what videos and what engagement and how are we gamifying and all that stuff? So that's really where we're at today.
Tyler Rachal
No, it makes complete sense. Now I do want to not shift gears, kind of double click into something that you and I have talked about, and I'm very passionate about, which is, you've made the statement to me that you feel like remote work today is broken. I would love to hear, what do you mean by that? And loaded question you probably get frequently, but what do you see as what is the future?
Erik Braund
I mean, there's a couple angles to look at it through. But one of them is you've got executives that say you got to come back to the office. Culture is dead, I don't know what my people are doing, nobody's getting anything done. Where is everybody? And to me, that's kind of like leadership that falls flat a little bit. It's like, so how are you measuring people getting done? How are you measuring who's available? Hhow are you measuring all these things? Or do you just have a massive lease that you can't get out of? Or do you just need to feel like you can look at everybody all?
Tyler Rachal
It's that one. It's that one, by the way. It's that one more often than not. It's the insecurity of the executive where it's like, if I don't see people working somehow, you know, yeah, but anyway.
Erik Braund
Yeah. So that's the like top down overlording thing. And that's the Zoom Hey, everybody, come back to the office. You can't run an office on Zoom. So that's like a cultural leadership problem that some companies have and some companies don't. I mean I read an article today where the Nvidia CEO is like, I don't have a problem with it. People are getting work done. I don't care. They're the first or second biggest company in the world right now, I know that changes all the time. And then you've got JP Morgan, who's like you'll never grow in your career as a junior person coming into the workforce unless you're back in the office five days a week. And I kind of call bullshit to that too, because the remote work, is it broken conversation, assumes two things. It assumes option one is we're in the office and option two is we're at home on Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet, or WebEx if you're a law firm. It assumes those are the only things.
And I say, I agree that those are two ends of a spectrum and one is in person, like I would rather be doing this with you in person. I think that would be a better conversation and be more fluid. We'd connect a little bit differently, but the opportunity cost isn't there. I barely made this at a remote meeting schedule wise and same with you. And the other end of the spectrum is we could schedule a Zoom or Teams meeting next week to talk about what we needed to talk about yesterday. And we at Katmai have said there's a big space in between that we occupy. We can take the best of both worlds and combine them. So remote work is broken as we know it today, as we've been described it today. And we're saying we have the tool that fixes it. I know it's a big statement, but like we do.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. You got to. Yeah, for sure.
Erik Braund
We just do. And so you've got a culture problem, which is to me, it's like bad leadership that thinks that they have to just have to be laser-eyed of Sauron on everyone to validate that they're working or not. It's like, well, is the work getting done? Are people happy? Are people quitting? Is it turnover? Do people have two jobs? Like all those things. And then I also understand, I've got the staff of my own at Katmai, right? If I could only look at a little green dot or yellow dot to see if someone's at a computer, I would feel disconnected. But on the flip side, if people are generally available or the work is getting done, we're moving steps forward. There's lots of ways to balance that.
So I think visibility is a two-way thing. So visibility, as we just talked about, it's like, where is my team? I need access to people. But from that mentorship and leadership sense, it's like, look at that. There's someone new at the company. Let's go grab them to sit in on this meeting. That happened with our software.
Tyler Rachal
I'm extremely passionate about this. And I do get very excited about your product for that very reason. We have another, What Worked special episode. I had a mentee, someone that interned at Hireframe last summer, reached out to me to be his mentor for the semester. It's a school related requirement or whatever it was. And, this is something that I've talked a lot with him about. The big challenge that I see, the big downside to remote work as it is today, is that I definitely think that the young new generation entering the workforce is not getting that development and exposure that we got. Now, you have to acknowledge that things have definitely changed. also come from your 40, I'm 40. We come from the time when it was the school of hard knocks a little bit. When you were a, you know, entry level person, you got treated a certain way in the workforce that they just really isn't okay today. That's for certain.
But I do just think that there is so much that I gained in experience from just being quote unquote in the room. And that's what I would constantly say to this mentee is I'm like, I really encourage you as you look at, as you evaluate opportunities, you're going to be tempted. The common early career mistake is that you're going to think, is this company cool? Am I getting paid the most that I can get paid? And I totally get those two things, but I'm like the part that, if I could go back and talk to my younger self, I would heavily emphasize the importance of a place that's going to allow you to be in as many rooms as possible. When things are happening, you're going to learn so much when you see people, the way in which they make decisions, the way in which they think, the way in which they communicate, you're going to gravitate towards other people at the company that you do not work with that you can learn so much from that person.
And so when I see your product, I get excited because I think that's an opportunity to do that in a remote way, literally, for the What Worked listener, just to visualize it, you can actually kind of see into rooms, you can see who's meeting. So I think a good example there is like, if I see the CTO and the VP of engineering are meeting, and I have an interest in anything technical, or maybe I want to be a product manager, knock, knock, knock, I'd love to come in on this meeting.
Erik Braund
And for a manager or someone, it’s like, hey, so and so's newish here, or I know they've expressed an interest in this. This isn't some highly confidential conversation. They can be around, hey, pop in on this convo. And then by the way, I'm going to steal part of what you said, get into a company where you can be in as many rooms as possible. That's an interesting thing.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, steal it. I hope to see it on the homepage.
Erik Braund
Totally. My college internship was at a major record label and I got treated like garbage and I had to do all the tasks you could imagine. However, I got to sit in one room where one major record executive bought and sold songs that would become top 40 hits the next year. And just being in my early 20s being like, man, this is how it works, cool.
Tyler Rachal
We have so much to share in that I interned for a subset of Columbia Records before I went to college. And the room they sat me in, now by the way, shout out ATO Records, still around, they treated me very well. So I was not treated like garbage at all.
Erik Braund
You'll notice I didn't say who I interned for before I insulted them.
Tyler Rachal
I get it and yeah, it was a totally different experience. I was out in Charlottesville, Virginia. You were probably in, I assume New York or something like that.
Erik Braund
6th Avenue, Midtown Manhattan, but hey, you know.
Tyler Rachal
And yeah, in an environment like that, totally, I think that comes with the office lease, right? they're like, here's sign the lease. And by the way, you have to treat people like garbage. That's a requirement of the building, please don't violate this. and here's your tenant improvement allotment budget.
But anyway, they sat me in this room where it was literally the kitchen. They didn't have any office space for me. And so I was seated in the kitchen where everybody would come for lunch, but I would sit there and I'd literally have, I actually gained probably like 20 pounds because I just, they had the stocked fridge and I was not getting paid anything. So I was just eating my salary essentially. Right. But every time someone who interested me came into the room and they were eating lunch, I would have lunch.
And I remember I got to eat lunch with a guy who, literally he was like, yeah, I found Nirvana and I was like, okay, let's talk about that. You know, and it was so cool. So yes, I was in the room, the room having to the kitchen.
You mentioned the way companies are building, and here's what I'm seeing, because I mostly work with startups. Hireframe works with a bunch of different companies, but a large part of our portfolio is B2B technology companies. And most of them are probably, I would say, seed to series C around there, maybe the occasional beyond that.
Erik Braund
Okay, so Katmai, you work with Katmai.
Tyler Rachal
I work with you. Not yet, but we'll see. But what I'm seeing though is I see two directions. I'm seeing your return to true office culture, the companies that are grabbing a big space, maybe they have some that Andreessen money, they're grabbing a big office lease in San Francisco, or they're grabbing one in New York, and everybody works in the office. But what I see very commonly is I see a lot of companies are remote from the jump, I think the remote plus regular off-sites is a very good combination. And I've seen these companies, what I've been impressed with is as we've grown with them, I've been very impressed to see their culture has become something and it scales. I think that's a good mark of the times. I don't know if that's what you see too.
Erik Braund
I totally do. And we've found and this is a thing we haven't been able to quantify yet, but it's feedback we get. We don't get Zoom fatigue on Katmai. And I don't know, I'm paraphrasing customer things here, but it's like and culture is back. It's like for a remote company, we have culture and it's almost as simple as like, how do you build culture at a remote company? Like little inconsequential conversations is how you start, honestly. It's like banter about something for five minutes before or after the meeting that you can't do on Zoom because it's super weird to do on regular video conferencing. It's really forced.
Tyler Rachal
Totally, 100%, yes.
Erik Braund
And so like one of my things, we recently were at a trade show in Oslo, Norway, and we called our booth and our talk. We called it Delete Your Fucking Meetings. Sorry if you have to bleep me there, but they let us do it.
Tyler Rachal
No, no, What Worked, we let it fly on What Worked. No kids listening yet
Erik Braund
Yeah, okay. And you know what, it was the best thing we'd ever done to describe how Katmai works, because we're at what I didn't get to. I talked to remote work is broken because of the visibility, all that stuff. The other reason remote work is broken because everyone's calendar is full of video call meetings all day long and there's no time to work or think or do anything else in person. You go to companies offices, I go meet investors at their offices, their people are just all on Zoom and Teams all day long.
Tyler Rachal
100%. They finished the in person meeting with you and they're like, I'm sorry, I have to go step into a video call real quick.
Erik Braund
There's no flexibility in schedule anymore. Everything's rigid. So what we do, so I have at my company for me personally, my style, I have zero standing meetings. I do not have a standing meeting at Katmai. But that's not to say I don't have them. I just have tons of conversations. I don't have to have them. It's like I meet with one guy, our chief product officer. We probably talk 20 times a day for 30 seconds to 30 minutes. I don't like meetings for the sake of meetings. It'll still happen at our company. When I see it happen, it drives me nuts because it's just like, what are we doing here?
Tyler Rachal
You've got kids. I've got a one year old and a three and a half year old. My three and a half year old commonly says now, she'll mimic us and she'll set up kind of a workstation with toys and something's supposed to be a computer. And her phrase that she says, which terrifies me, she goes I'm working to work. And I’m like, oh God, there's like some deeper meaning there. So when you say the standing meeting, I think of you're doing work for work. It's like you, you do prep. So those meetings don't suck as much versus asking the obvious question, which is, should we have them?
Erik Braund
Well and a lot of times the meetings that people have are for stuff that needed to be done last week or you don't remember or something's changed.
Tyler Rachal
It's aged.
Erik Braund
And someone hasn't read the doc or isn't read in and it's just like, it's no way to live, Tyler. It's no way to work and no way to live. So one of our customers says it perfectly, sorry. It's Katmai turns next week's 30 minute meeting into today's five minute conversation. That is our value problem. is what our software does. It truly does. I could get the like, is it big brother? Do you have to have your camera all the time? Is it just so I can be looked at all the time? It's like, well, hold on, wait a second. If you go back to the office in person, you're sitting in your chair, people could see you, they can smell you, you're right there. You're there even there in all five senses, right? So what you're sitting at home and a webcam is on,, you're to be in a meeting or not. Usually we hear that when I get the naysaying of like, I don't get it. Do I have to be on camera all the time? It's like, well, yeah, what's the problem? But the other side is like, we also give companies the tools for them to implement however the hell they want to. So that is a culture dependent decision.
Tyler Rachal
Totally. The basic thing is I see some people are really great, I'm an offender on the opposite side, some are really great about setting their Slack status well. In a meeting, I know you can do the in a meeting thing automatically, but they'll do like in a meeting available, not available. And it's that simple. It's like, Hey, I'm not available to be on camera right now. And it's another muscle. You just get used to doing it.
Erik Braund
You get used to it. I turn my camera off all the time. People, even in Katmai, we are a video first Katmai headquarters first company. But like when I gave you a demo earlier, there was still five or six people whose cameras were off, but I could pop in and be like, hey, you there.
Another part of why remote work gets broken is something we're starting to call the camera. It's the 1 % or the 2 % rule, but it's like we have witnessed. We've got our synchronous comms, which are all on Katmai and our asynchronous comms are all on Slack. Like that's our software stack. And then you got other companies that also email. We have a pretty hard and fast, no internal email rule unless it's something very contract related or rigid, email is for memorializing something at Katmai. Slack is for like, we're discussing something asynchronously because we have 10 hours of time zones. But when I start to see Slack, even at our company, occasionally it's like, you know what? We are, five of us are one to one and a half degrees out of sync. In one hour, we're going to be five degrees out of sync. And by tomorrow, we're going to be totally screwed on this topic. And we even have to remind ourselves sometimes, why don't we just talk about this in Katmai? And then one of our customers gave me a, we have a rule at our company. We don't email. We try not to Slack. And when I see Slack getting off the rails, we say, this is a Katmai conversation. And I've had to even learn that to be like, hold on a second, we have Katmai, we should just use that.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's cool. I love that.
Erik Braund
So we're actually launching an integration with Slack soon. And it's going to be really simple. When you enter your virtual headquarters, it just changes your status to, I'm in Katmai, I'm in the headquarters. And it's like a nudge to like, just go talk to them. How many times when you tried to write something to someone, did it go wrong? And when you talk to them, you're like, I should have just talked to them.
Tyler Rachal
I love that notion. When I think of almost any sort of dust up that we've ever had at Hireframe, it's almost always because of digital communication that was misinterpreted. You kind of read this subtext into people's slacks or emails, that sort of stuff.
Erik Braund
This week I just had a Slack one where I'm like, man, this whole problem was because it was just Slacked about.
Tyler Rachal
Yes. No, hundred percent. When you say this is a Katmai conversation, my team loves Slack huddles. So that would be like the equivalent there. When all message and I'll be like, Hey, what's going on? I just got a note from this customer. What's going on here? Let's talk about XYZ. And they're like, do you have a second to huddle about it? So that's very cool.
I will ask you're on a roll here. I always like to ask people to do kind of an infomercial. You don't have to do infomercial voice, but if you were to speak to someone who might feel like their work culture is broken. Who are they talk to them? Why should they use Katmai?
Erik Braund
Yeah, okay, let me think this one for a second.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, no worries.
Erik Braund
I think it's like, hey there, is your work culture broken?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's it.
Erik Braund
Oh, I didn't see you there.
Tyler Rachal
Yes, exactly.
Erik Braund
Infomercial, okay, let's do an infomercial. I think it's something along the lines of like are you frustrated with remote work and you love remote work? Are you sick of going back to the office, but you need to go back to the office? Do you just need to have quick access to people and you're sick of your massively over-scheduled calendar? Katmai solves every single one of those problems. Whether you work at a five-person company or a 500,000 person company, we work with both types and we solve very similar problems for both. And we enable you to be in the office from anywhere.
Tyler Rachal
Love it. That is killer. And I'll add one thing to your infomercial. Personally, I'm sick of lame backgrounds. I see people with the lame virtual background. I'm just like I get that that that could still be part of you know, Katmai. But when I was touring your thing, I was like, this is nice, it's a simple thing. If you put the circle around their face and their face only because it's like the whole like, hi, and they're in one of the Google default ones. It's like a nice Scandinavian coffee shop or Scandinavian summer house.
Cool. Well, that's Gonzo and Batman telling us wrap this, wrap this pot up dudes. But just out of curiosity, you mentioned you're doing founder led sales. If someone is listening to this episode and they say I got to check out Katmai, how do you prefer they get in touch with you?
Erik Braund
Katmaitech.com. And you're like, what is Katmaitech? How do I spell that? I'm from Alaska. Katmai National Park is a beautiful place in Alaska. And it was just kind of a nod to home. It's Katmaitech.com. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter and Instagram and all this stuff. Erik Braund, E-R-I-K, B-R-A-U-N-D. If you stumble on the guy whose picture is a Pomeranian and he's a redhead with glasses that looks like Conan, that's me. I like talking to everybody. My favorite thing to do is to invite someone into our virtual headquarters. Like I'll bring anyone in.
Tyler Rachal
So even if you're out in Alaska, you can meet with Erik or wherever you are in the world. You guys can still meet, grab a virtual coffee. One last thing, cause you got a humor me cause I'm music obsessed. You're growing up in Alaska. You're working at a guitar store and we're the same age. So I'm curious, what were you listening to when you first got mesmerized by music and what do you listen to now?
Erik Braund
You say we're like it's changed. It's just Nirvana still.
Tyler Rachal
Okay, that's killer. No, that's awesome. Yeah. What did you listen to when you were sort of growing up? I mean, nowadays, I don't know if you listen to anything new. I just love hearing this.
Erik Braund
I do, yeah, it was Kurt Cobain that got me into the guitar. And it was Dave Grohl that got me into the drums. And I'm a guitarist and a drummer, and I'm like, I only know how to play loud rock and roll. I'm very bad at any other genre. I still played a band in Alaska. I played a grunge band back home. We get to play, if we're lucky, whatever the summer concert is, we get to open for that artist still. So I'll work my way back. I think it was last summer we got to open for Limp Bizkit. Before that it was Jimmy Eat World. It was Puddle of Mud, it was Everclear. It's like grunge bands. And it's so much fun. Right now I'm listening to a band called Superheaven. And it's pretty heavy drop D, sludgy but melodic, you know? And I actually went down and saw them at a hardcore show I went to in Brooklyn a week or two ago. And I was so pumped because there was thousands of people, a lot of teenagers. I wasn't expecting it, a loud rock and roll show, no laptops on stage, just guitars, bass, and drums, and people just like rocking. I love Turnstile also, that's a band that I've gotten into.
Tyler Rachal
Okay. That's so funny that you say that because YouTube, I think has one of the best algorithms and they are, they've been trying to get me to listen to Turnstile for forever.
Erik Braund
Do it. Dude, Blow On is a killer record and they have a new record, think, coming up today, actually. But I still go back.
Tyler Rachal
Anyway, we could talk a lot about music.
Erik Braund
forget Katmai. Just go check out my grunge band. It's Delmag. D-E-L-M-A-G. And we're on Spotify.
Tyler Rachal
Delmag, check out Delmag. Cool. Love it. Yeah. We'll forget about Katmai. No, we won't. But, anyway, this has been another awesome episode of What Worked. Erik, thank you so much for joining me and humoring me about all this music talk amongst, honestly, two things I'm extremely passionate about music and remote work. So if you do want to get in touch with Erik, if you're finding that you're probably like any company out there, this ain't it, whatever our work setup is. Erik, like you said, it's very low stakes. You can just meet them in one of his virtual offices and get a quick tour and see if it's something you want to invest in. But, yeah, thanks Erik. We appreciate it. And a shout out, I will ask to you, Erik, and then also anyone else who's listening. Erik actually DMed me at off of one of our, we got linked. You heard who's episode was it?
Erik Braund
Phil Kean.
Tyler Rachal
Phil Kean, so you knew Phil Kean. So this is just a quick infomercial for What Worked is that we always are looking for super interesting guests like Erik. So Erik, will ask you that, if you do think of anyone that you think would be a great guest, please give us a shout and then same request goes to anyone who's listening. Thank you everybody.
Erik Braund
That guy, Phil Kean, great guy, you should listen to his episode, I did. That guy texted me…
Tyler Rachal
Phil Kean's the man.
Erik Braund
He's the man, he texted me a couple weeks ago, because we live in a similar area, hey, do you want to go for a hike on Sunday morning? I'm like, you know, sure. And then Saturday night, I'm actually out seeing a Doors tribute band with the perfect Jim Morrison. These guys are called The Crystal Ship and they're phenomenal. And he sends me a destination for like an hour into the woods at 6am on Sunday. I was like, what is this?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. You're like, you were like beer in hand. You're like, wait a second. Yeah, Phil for anyone who hasn’t listened to that episode. It was an awesome one. Phil is like, he somehow mixes in, in the same conversation, being on private jets with sheikhs, managing $2.5 billion in funds with also, managing the budgets for his local fire department, which he works at.
Erik Braund
So I've never been on a private jet, but I'm going to one up him and his private jets with his sheikhs and all the billions. I think it was 10 or 15 years ago, I played drums for Jay Z at the Superbowl. There we go. Now I didn't write a private jet though.
Tyler Rachal
I gotta exit out of this before I just keep talking about music. And Gonzo and Batman pulled the cord on us a long time ago, so we gotta let them do their thing. But Erik, thank you. Again, this has been What Worked. We'll catch you guys on the next one.
Erik Braund
Peace out. Thanks, Tyler.
Tyler Rachal
Thank you.
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