Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:24
What was Taylor’s first milestone from a customer perspective within Ravenna, from when you first started, like a first customer milestone?
Taylor Halliday 17:37
Someone who said.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:38
How did you get your first? How did you get your first customer?
Taylor Halliday 17:42
Someone who said they would actually first work with us. That’s a big milestone. Yeah, it’s funny, I kind of have this thing where I think in terms of logarithmically how to actually go ahead and, you know, build for scale. A lot of times people are like, hey, you know, we have to do x, y, z thing. From the engineering standpoint. We might have a million users one day. And I don’t know, the thing I kind of preach to the company is like, look, guys, nothing matters until we have that first customer. Then high fives from zero. Anything that matters is getting to ten customers and then to 100, then to 1000. So that’s kind of the scale I look at.
So anyways, back to your first question. The first customer being home based. Shout out to John Waldman and the crew there. You know, it’s every customer. You know, I think like, especially like your first one is just like in the early stages, like, oh, man, you actually went out on a limb. Do you believe me? You kind of see the vision here, you know, and it’s, you know, every startup is an ugly duckling, so to speak. And we’re on our path to try to get prettier along the way. And, and part of that, first, several customers are always going to be the folks who acknowledge kind of like the warts, if you will, on the way things are. But they can see.
They can see basically the vision. They align, they agree with you on kind of your vision of the future, and they’re willing to take a leap of faith. So anyways, back to your question. I think, like what was the what was kind of the first milestone there it was. Yeah, it was just getting. I’d say a big thing here is trust . I always think about customers and, and faith in you. And it really comes to me in terms of trust. So we’ve already covered it. Ravenna, if you work with us, we’re going to be inside what is effectively the front door to your organization. Okay. So think about your HR operations manager okay.
The best folks in this , like in these operations roles, think about their job not as just being IT or HR. They think about their job as just delivering great, great service to their colleagues. And I think, you know, from being on the other side of the fence there and always requesting service. I never thought about it like that. But I’m telling you, the pros that we deal with here are obsessed with making sure that they deliver great service to their colleagues, and so they use us because they think that we can deliver, help them deliver an outstanding experience.
Okay. And so I guess what I’m trying to say is that like when we actually go ahead and get deployed into one of these channels, I’ve there’s a lot of weight. I feel like I, you know, I think it’s not just one person. It’s like the entire group is taking a chance and making sure that Ravenna is going to go ahead and be able to help them provide such an up level experience from what they have. And so anyways, the first milestone, I’ll just say it. Yeah, it’s the front door. It’s being that front door inside of an air operations channel. You know, that’s a leap of faith in so many ways. And we it’s not lost upon us. And we, you know, work extremely hard to make sure that we, you know, maintain that trust with our customers.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:35
I love to hear, Taylor, some valuable feedback you got along the way that changed the product. You know, early on, customers gave you feedback that changed and maybe features or things like that. I mean, I think that’s an advantage I find when I’m working with a company you mentioned, like the warts or just the beginning stages, but like, what’s cool about that, from my experience, is I can make suggestions and they’ll actually implement them. I remember early on I was using Acuity Scheduling, Gavin Zuchlinski and I mentioned, you know, hey, it’d be cool if you had this feature. And like the next day he’s like, oh, we added that feature and they eventually sold Squarespace.
But it was just cool to get, you know, have that feedback. And they took it and they implemented not saying like obviously people have priority lists and that doesn’t always happen. But I’m curious for you, what are some essential feedback you got? Because you guys, from what I’ve researched are very customer centric and you really pay attention to I mean, I’ve heard you and Kevin both say this like you pay close attention, even on the initial discovery calls, to hear what people are saying from, you know, what problems they’re experiencing, to see how you can that helps your product. So I’d love to hear some of the early feedback or even feedback lately that you’ve incorporated.
Taylor Halliday 21:59
I can go through the channels right now and find the minutia stuff. I’ll try to think of some big, big rocks things. Maybe. Maybe I’ll preface this by saying that, like as a principal, I always kind of think about when you think about, you know, customer focus here. I kind of joke, I always say, like, none of us are as smart as we think we are.
And I try to hold that like, value, like pretty closely, especially when we’re talking about building products. Like I have an inkling of an idea. I think, to be clear, you know, I’ve actually had a decent amount of confidence a lot of times, like my, you know, own product decisions, what have you. But like, you always have to have humility in the face of customers, right? Like whatever they say is truly basically like the Golden path.
And if you subscribe to that, it’s very illuminating. And frankly, it makes life a little easier. So anyways, going back to your actual question, here were some big, big rocks things in the early days. In the early days, one of the things that I didn’t expect was trying to draw like a good one here. How about this? I didn’t appreciate the sheer importance of reporting, analytics and insights for operations roles at large IT HR.
And let me explain that a bit here. So the way that you basically, you know you know get budget you know performance, you know, review what have you basically the way you perform, you know, translate, communicate progress of, you know, your job as, you know, an IT, HR or whatever professional is to give great insight into the critical work that you are doing and the value that you provide to the organization. Okay, so while you’re going through this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 23:32
I’m just looking, I figured I’d pull up the features because like, I’m sure all of these came from someone suggesting something or asking for something at some point, right?
Taylor Halliday 23:41
Oh, I didn’t come up with a triage mechanism by myself. Yeah, 100%. Like every, every single one of these was like fleshed out via a lot of feedback. But second one I said before on, you know, analytics and insights, I would just say that there’s been a lot of feedback into like, look, if you were going to propose that we’re going to, you know, put some software into these channels, it needs to actually, if you guys want to win, make it extremely easy for us to tell a story about the value that we’re providing with your software. And the way you do that is you execute extremely well on just easy, beautiful, out of the box insights and analytics.
So that was kind of a big one that it turned into a pretty large feature set that we have been just trying to make bulletproof, and it hasn’t been released yet, but we have a revamp of the system. And, you know, we just did our internal demo day on Friday, where everyone is showing some of the work that we’ve done. And a bunch of people were joking that, you know, we’ve built a world class analytics suite that has some ticket ticket product features as well. Anyways, it’s pretty cool. And so that’s, I think, a big thing, just an area of investment that has just been drilled into us by a lot of feedback and we’ve taken it extremely seriously. And it’s a big component of what we do here.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 24:50
Yeah. I mean, it’s true. It’s like how one company starts is never how they end up. So who knows? Like through customer feedback, you may be the world class, you know, analytics platform or something, you know, ten years from now based on whatever customers are asking from you, right. So who knows where it’s headed?
Taylor Halliday 25:11
Who knows? Like I said, in a sense, it almost makes life easier when you subscribe to just kind of really being obsessed with what your customers are telling you. And, you know, fighting that I think is, is a trail of tears and embracing that is very illuminating. But I’m telling you, it’s a lot of work to once, once to your point around like the feedback that you gave to I remember which company mentioned like a calendar app, what have you. Yeah yeah, yeah. It’s cool because I think people are like, oh, sweet, I can just request anything from these folks. So you get a mountain of feedback, which is great.
And I think that part of it, you know, another thing you mentioned too, is that you thought it was really cool that they came out with that feature quickly, right? Other than many like, you know, I don’t know the many things that you got, you got to kind of do. I feel like as a startup you gotta, you gotta play down, you gotta, you gotta play up. Basically that’s what you were talking about. And so more specifically, what I mean is like, you have to just give someone just an incredible feeling of like they’re getting great service out of you because like, if you’re a startup, you think about us versus an incumbent.
An incumbent has all the advantages in the world. You know, distribution, money, you know, all all these different things that we just don’t have. Right. Every other startup doesn’t have one. And so what do you have? Right. One of the things that like, you know, you just you just they will never have effectively the incumbents is effectively just speed. Right. And that’s speed for product development. That’s speed for getting back to customers. And like you know I’ll give you an example.
One of the one of our stakeholders at Zapier was just like, look, part of the reason we love working with you is that, like the amount of service that you are giving us in terms of just, you know, responding to our issues, hopping on everything we talk about, like that’s like an absolute, you know, premium premium pack, you know, enterprise package, right.
Whereas like, funny enough between us, I know it’s about on a podcast. I would pay them for that feedback. Right. They’re talking about how they would pay me for that service. I’m like, it’s so. So, you know, it’s very much a thing that you embrace it. It’s very, very important to them. It’s also extremely important to me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:15
I do one of the things I wrote down here, Taylor, which I love you said is just whatever the customers say is the golden path. So I love that. You know what you said there. I want to go back in time a bit to Y Combinator and what you learn there. Because I think there were a lot of learnings that you and Kevin took from your experience at Y Combinator.
Taylor Halliday 27:42
Yep. I think I just said one, which is that none of us are as smart as we think we are. Went into that, you know, very much thinking that kind of had the world figured out, had the best idea for a product. Shout out to actually, Kevin Hale was one of our group partners, and I’m sure he doesn’t remember this, but I remember this extremely well because I was just an engineer, you know, didn’t know it was kind of like doing a SaaS business. I remember he was talking.
It might have been the first day. It was just talking to me like, hey, what are you guys building? And we were building a customer data platform. Told him that. And he was like, cool. Like, you know, who’s your customer? I was like, everybody. And he was like, wrong answer. You know, like, I was like, what? Anyways.
And so that was a good wake up call for just calling it like SaaS fundamentals and business metrics. And I don’t think we’re alone. I think more often than not, a lot of the I can’t really comment now, but I think back then, especially Y Combinator kind of erred on the side of like, hey, we think these folks are reasonably technical smart, and they might not know squat about SaaS businesses. I do remember actually the first day or second day they were like, hey, what does it stand for? You know, and people are taking notes actually.
Right? And so myself included. But you know, it’s Trial by Fire, which is super fun. And so I don’t know that that was Narrowing down and actually having a very, very, very like disciplined focus about who you’re building for. Now, I think I will just tell that story. I think it’s one of my kind of core learnings from there among a lot of other things. But yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:15
The next and, you know, obviously you took that to heart and you both really focused on a specific focus, a specific niche and a need for that particular niche. There was also a pivotal point with staples. You want to talk about that?
Taylor Halliday 29:35
Sure. And the ashes of what was our YC company. We tried to find the next step. And it happens many times. Folks get in the way and think they have the world figured out, like us. And it turns out you don’t. We decided early on that we just kind of have different perspectives on this. We just decided that, like, it wasn’t so much thrown in the towel that that the company, the CDP that we were building was just a wrong call.
Founder Market Fit and I think we coined that term or not, but just didn’t feel like we should be building this thing. As I took Kevin’s advice to heart, I started learning about the buyer who’s customer success. I was never a customer success manager, didn’t know anything about these people’s wants and needs or anything. So that’s when we were like, you know what? Let’s find something else. In the ashes of that, Kevin and I turned around and tried to figure out the next product. We ended up deciding to consult for a little bit to try to figure out the next problem set.
And, you know, we struck it lucky right out of the gate, met the folks who run technology and innovation at staples, and, skipping a couple steps, decided that it would be a good idea to hire Kevin and I to build a team independently to help them execute on turning what as known as the easy button, which is like a piece of brand marketing that should plastic buttons, turning that into a full blown Amazon Alexa competitor chipset board like everything I and all this type of stuff. And so yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:00
If anyone saw the old school commercials for staples. There’s like literally a big easy button and someone wants something and they just kind of hit the easy button. I don’t remember the full commercial, but like staples then shows up with it right away or whatever.
Taylor Halliday 31:13
That was easy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:14
Yeah, exactly. And they want you to create the internal easy button, I guess. Or an internal easy button, but an external easy button inside their platform.
Taylor Halliday 31:24
Yep. It was great fun, for many different reasons. Very stressful to be on the line for a pretty big delivery. That was announced as the keynote at the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas by the CEO of IBM. And we’re on the clock to get this thing out.
So we had to build a team. You know, I would say it’s a crash course, a lot of AI, a lot of the kind of fundamentals we’re drawing on today, frankly, a lot of natural language processing. This is pre transformers. We’re doing a lot of other tricks of the trade so to speak, and just trying to execute on a really great natural language system to help folks build order via staples from a full blown mechanical easy button.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 32:06
So how did you meet staples?
Taylor Halliday 32:09
It was a connection from Kevin, to be frank with you. You know, life has different funny ways. And it was the innovation officer there. And, you know, I think timing’s everything we kind of casually meet. I thought about something else entirely and then just really kicked it off. And he was like, look, you know, I wasn’t going to bring this up with you guys, but had this other initiative. I thought we were meeting for this reason. Luxo has it that I am really trying to find a group of just, innovative folks to help us execute on this big initiative we have. Would you be interested in watching? And that’s how the trail started.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 32:43
I just found, you know, Taylor in life and business. Yeah, you could say you struck it lucky somewhat, but I think of it like all the relationships in the end, you know, it’s connections and relationships. And like, you had relationships in you and Kevin with Zapier and Amazon and you went through Y Combinator and we just accumulate these amazing relationships that then you just never know where it’s going to lead or opportunities it’s going to bring. So obviously, whatever definition of luck, opportunity meets hard work and skill and all those things kind of came together at that point.
Taylor Halliday 33:20
Yeah, I’m a fan of that definition for what it’s worth as well. You know, I don’t know. I also think you can’t be very prescriptive about it. That’s kind of the fun thing about luck at the end of the day, is that you get a bunch of chances to do these kinds of fun things, and the pieces might come together in these really fun, interesting, odd ways that, frankly, you never would expect. But I guess that’s kind of the journey and that’s kind of the fun in it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:41
So, yeah, I don’t know who said that, whose quote it was, but it’s like, would you rather be good or lucky? And, you know, like I’d rather be lucky. And even Bill Gates talks about how he attributes his success to luck also, you know.
Taylor Halliday 33:55
Yeah, there’s a fair amount of chance and everything, and I subscribe to that as well. Is that at the end of the day, you do what you can and you try to you try to you try to set up the stage for the context, if you will, that there’s a handful quotes I’m forgetting. But effectively, yeah, you try to set the stage, try to set yourself up to get lucky effectively. You know, if it doesn’t happen, life is still fine. It’s great. But yeah, you try to kind of set the pieces in play for chance.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:22
So it goes from like Y Combinator staples. You have this opportunity and you both really capitalize on it and build something cool there. Then how do you get to Ravenna from there?
Taylor Halliday 34:36
Sure. You know, Kevin and I ended up running that consultancy that we worked with staples on for quite a while and ended up shutting it down around 2020. At that time, I was trying to figure out the next startup I wanted to work on. Kevin decided he wanted to go to AWS to learn the basics of the cloud. And I was in between. And I came across the Zapier founders, I believe, through the YC connection, ended up talking to Mike Knoop and who’s one of the founders of Zapier, about helping them come in to building the first, second product.
Originally, I had my heart set on going back to try to start another company. The only problem was I had no clue what that was. So talking to Mike, it started to sound like a pretty good, you know, thing. Like, hey, Zach is a great company coming for a couple of months, do some contracting. And so I was for it.
And to be honest with you, it’s kind of funny because I came to Zapier and one week later the pandemic hit. So like, oh my gosh, it’s actually really great being associated and having the privilege to work for such an incredible company. And just a quick side note here. You know, Zapier, Zapier is just such a cool place for a founder. For anyone who is interested in AI, I, it’s a very, very, very, you know, innovative, supportive company.
And I just couldn’t think of a better place to be, especially retrospectively for someone who, you know, has kind of wants to go ahead and build new products. And so but coincidentally, that’s what ended up carving out a role for myself there to do. I built that first product and then built another one, and another one built the engineering teams up, what have you. And yeah, basically got to a spot where I ran what’s called new product development over there. So build these products up, get the engineering teams all set up, you know, from the product standpoint as well, and hopefully graduate them to the rest of the org.
And then more recently, Zapier. Zapier, just like a lot of other companies, is trying to figure out what to make of some of the recent, you know, recent at the time release of ChatGPT rocked them in a couple of interesting ways, just like a lot of other folks. And so I repurposed my role to run AI engineering for Zapier.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 36:50
And so when do you and Kevin reunite? Was that a hard thing because you guys had worked together for a long time, Y Combinator and then this consultancy, and then I’m not saying it’s like a breakup, but it’s like, okay, we’re going to go our separate ways for a little bit. Like, what’s that conversation like?
Taylor Halliday 37:10
I’ve always thought about it as just kind of getting some more perspective, frankly. I never really knew.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:15
You always would come back together at some point, or you thought that at the time.
Taylor Halliday 37:18
I thought that at the time. I mean, you know, Kevin’s not here. If he listens to this, I’m about to throw a bunch of compliments his way. But, you know, you do think pretty long and hard about, like, hey, the experiences I’ve had building companies, what went well, what not and stuff. And I’ve met a lot of other folks along the way and trying to figure out what I want to work with. And frankly, there’s just a lot of qualities about Kevin that made me decide that, like, he was basically an excellent person to build a company with temperament Drive. I can go on and on. But anyways, I think just pretty much you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:51
Can go on a little bit. I’m actually kind of curious because what you look for in a fellow co-founder is a bit instructive for other people as they’re thinking through these things because like, you’re actually enunciating it, but maybe some people, like I think they just have that feeling. So what were some attributes you said you drive? There’s temperament. What else? You’re like, I want to build a company with this person.
Taylor Halliday 38:17
Trying to think of an eloquent way to put this and not borrow a term here. But, you know, you got to have a wherewithal that, you know, this person is going to be able to chew on glass for an unreasonable amount of time and make it out the other side with you. It’s a very difficult thing to know if someone is a little bit of chicken and egg here, to know if someone has the ability to do that without having gone through that previously with them. I think, frankly speaking, that’s one of just like it’s one of the realities, you know, and I have been through that with Kevin. Wright.
And I have very much had, you know, businesses with him that have had great times and we’ve had heart wrenching, just like everything is going to blow up, right? And that’s where I came in with the word temperament. I guess it was knowing that you can rely on someone to not get caught up in some of those, you know, difficult times and help lock arms with you and execute on what you know needs to be done right. It’s a pretty high bar, frankly. So, you know, I don’t know if it’s a chicken and egg thing in terms of I just it’s a very it’s a very difficult thing to kind of emulate, if you will.
You know, I knew he could do that. So I knew I lucked out working with him the first time. And so, yeah, I think that that was one of the main drivers, like, I’ve seen this guy go through thick and thin with me and then throw some other things out there, too. Yes. You have to have someone who can, you know, think on their feet who’s smart work ethic has to be there. It’s a crazy, crazy gig in many ways. What it demands on you, your family, all these types of different things. And yeah, I’ve just seen it, you know, with him for so long that it’s a very I think it’s a very high bar to overcome for anyone else.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 40:01
How did you get back together? You’re at Zapier. He’s at Amazon AWS.
Taylor Halliday 40:09
Kind of a little a little not serendipitously. It basically came down to the fact that, like, I, you know, I got the itch again to go build something and luckily, you know, luck has it that he felt the same way. We were going back and forth on what we would want to poke at here. And, you know, and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t like we didn’t get together and just say, like, we were absolutely certain we’re going to leave and our great jobs. Again, I’ve just said it a few times. Zapier is such an awesome place to be. So like, yes, I wanted to go do my next thing, but at the same time, like, that’s a cool company and privilege if you have is privileged to work at it. But yeah, coming back to Ravenna, frankly speaking, he went through some bad ideas, as you typically do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 40:50
What was one of those bad ideas? Do you remember any of them?
Taylor Halliday 40:55
Okay, I said they were bad ideas, but who knows? Because it could have been good, actually. Maybe it just wasn’t bad.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 41:02
Ones you chose not to pursue. I guess you could say.
Taylor Halliday 41:05
I don’t know, there’s some cool stuff around, you know, leveraging AI to do, like static server generated pages for, for mass go to market. Frankly, I don’t have to go too much into it. I don’t know what Wade’s conversation with you was on his podcast, but Zapier had a playbook back in the day where they just really good at making SEO driven pages, and that was a manual thing back then, you know, and you can think about how you can use AI to accelerate a lot of that engine nowadays. So something around that neck of the woods was definitely one of the things we’re circling on. But anyway, so, you know what did we get back together on?
Or why did we get back together? From the Zapier standpoint, I spent a good amount of time with Wade and Mike and the founders kind of talking to a lot of just contacts they had and mid market enterprise around, hey, this AI things here, if you could wave a magic wand kind of what’s, what’s what’s your version of like the Promised Land. Now it’s a very open aperture type of like you know a suggestion and heard a lot of stuff. One of the hallmarks I think of, like the consistent themes I heard was that like feedback around like, wow, I really wish or hope or think I if I embrace this thing, this kind of nebulous thing, I it depends on who you’re talking to, that this thing has the ability to help me create like a more efficient organization. And so I saw that through, you know, automations with Zapier insights.
So, hey, you know, a lot of times executives are like, you know, I know what my marketing team’s doing. I guess at a high level. Do I really know what these folks are doing when we have a couple hundred people. It’s hard for me to top down efficiency. I kind of saw basically the understanding of I or their hope or their promise of it as something where you can kind of bottoms up this. Like if we give people more of the tools to make themselves more efficient, perhaps this is kind of unlocked here. And that is what I just heard over and over. I didn’t hear a ton of external use cases. It was just internal. And so I kind of heard that drum getting beat so many times.
I had like my ears perked up for an internal focus operations product, frankly speaking. And yeah, Kevin came up to me and was like, hey, look, I’ve been at AWS now for a handful of years, and there’s this homegrown tool called Simple Issue Manager, which is effectively going back to the beginning of our conversation in the ITSM tool that Amazon homegrown. And he was like, look, this thing is just like I said before, the grease and the enterprise cogs, if this thing were to grind to a halt, AWS would just literally grind to a halt, just, you know, would just be an absolute showstopper. This is a critical backbone for how we do things here. And that’s where we started being like, okay, what’s the larger market?
Realize that there is quite a bit of a larger market. I was trying to understand what the market was. You know, ServiceNow is the greatest version. There’s a lot of big companies downstream. And that’s really what tipped us off. And then the story comes back to kind of where you and I started just before we started writing code, getting folks on the phone when I worked at Zapier, when he was at AWS, folks in tech, folks in the Midwest, folks like basically like just even kind of more broad, I think, than we normally would have. And just trying to get a lot of it, HR folks on the phone, it’s like, cool, you’re a user of this software, you know it well, what are the pain points, all these types of things. And that’s how we started really developing some of the original thesis behind what is now Ravenna Killer.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 44:28
I’m curious, from what I understand, you and Kevin are married with kids. And what’s that conversation look like with the family at the time to be like, okay, I’m at Zapier. This is great because we know from a hard work chewing on glass perspective going to a startup.
Taylor Halliday 44:50
Yep.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 44:50
Was there that conversation? What did that look like?
Taylor Halliday 44:54
If there wasn’t that conversation, I most likely would be divorced right now. It’s tricky. Like, I’ll be honest with you, like it’s okay. A couple thoughts here. I get asked about this quite a bit by folks who are thinking about starting their own company, and it’s tough because I’m lucky in the sense that my wife is one of the most supportive, you know, people on the planet.
It’s not just that, it’s that she was with me during the first kind of foray of this whole thing, back when Kevin and I first did this. And she’s seen, you know what the deal is, right? She knows the drill. And so when it came time to do this, you know, it was another contrast to back when Kevin and I weren’t working originally or weren’t started working originally on our first company. I mean, that was the ramen diet diet status. Right? Like, if it didn’t work, like, you know, less ramen or something, it was fine, you know, like, it’s not really that big of a deal. But now I have two kids. And it’s definitely a deal and it’s a conversation. And you know, I think I’m speaking for her.
You know, she my wife at least, you know, knows that it’s a passion of mine that this is really what things that I think I have a lot of faith in and excitement are my personal, you know, excitement in. And I think that, you know, you know, potentially could turn out to a great outcome, but most likely not, you know, beaten by the numbers. Who knows. It’s one of those things you got to kind of like take that, take a real kind of hard look at like what the actual chances are of doing this, but I don’t know. Then you have to dive. And it was a conversation. And I’ll just say that I’m blessed to be with my wife, and I know Kevin has similar conversations with his. And I, you know, I think that we’re lucky to be supported by such great folks in our lives.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:38
And what? No thanks for that. I know you know, it’s not just the founders chewing glass sometimes, right? It’s the spouses and family times, too. When do you decide to fundraise?
Taylor Halliday 46:49
I don’t think so. So Kevin and I were working on this, and we decided that we heard a lot of feedback and we had kind of a prototype and tried to figure out, okay, like, at what point do you raise money? This is kind of mid this is summer 2024. And we decided that it would be best to ask some investors that we knew in Seattle their advice. It was legitimately a conversation seeking advice. That conversation ended in a term sheet. And we didn’t have a pitch deck or anything. And that’s how it all started. And skipping a couple steps, I had a heart attack when they let us know that they were going to fund it. I just didn’t expect it. I kind of thought, yeah, we would do something, maybe.
But I wasn’t thinking about the next six months or nine months, I don’t know, definitely not at that juncture. And that’s what kicked off effectively a larger raise. It’s got a lot of feedback from, you know, friends, ex CEOs, current CEOs that, hey, you didn’t think you were fundraising, but you now are because you have a term sheet and you don’t have a pitch deck and you got to move as lightning quick and you just go try to figure out, you know, are those the right folks to work with? Is that the right amount? And skipping a couple beats, we ended up working with them. Ginsburg. Kristeva. Basically the first folks who even had, you know, took a leap of faith to actually have some faith in Kevin and I. And we could not be luckier to be working with them along with our other investors.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 48:18
Taylor, first, thanks. Thanks for sharing the journey. It’s a crazy ride. So I appreciate you sharing. And people can check out and learn more at Ravenna.ai, as we showed on the screen there.
I’m just curious, from your standpoint, what organizations out there would be good to use? Ravenna. Maybe it’s ones. It could be ones you’re in conversation with, ones maybe you’re not in conversation with. Just as you’re thinking through the perfect, you know, companies to utilize what you have.
Taylor Halliday 48:49
Totally. So one of the fun things about this market is that the need for the software, for internal operations software, it’s actually purely a function of headcount. And that inflection point, like when you need the software changes, it could be 100 or 300. It depends on the verticals. And I’m not going to go too much into that.
But after a certain point you need this kind of software, right? We’re starting with what we think of the big tech forward companies, the folks who are really excited to use the latest and greatest in tech. And so, to answer your question directly, over a couple hundred employees call, you know, new age tech, either VC backed and or just working on some interesting kind of tech products. That’s the area we are focusing on now. And after, like I said, 300, 500 people, you’re going to have an IT group, you’re going to have an HR group.
Okay. And that’s really just kind of basically the crosshairs for us at this point. And that’s where we’re starting. But that all said, pretty excited to actually see where this can go. Like I mentioned a second ago, it’s purely a function of headcount. So we’re excited to know, probably, you know, 2026 start poking around different other verticals outside of tech really and just try to see are there any more interesting kinds of niches, what have you that we can kind of really hone in on?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 49:54
Taylor, thank you everyone. Check out Ravenna.ai to learn more. Check out more podcast episodes and we’ll see everyone next time. Taylor, thanks so much.
Taylor Halliday 50:03
Thanks so much, Jeremy.
