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- [00:00]
A
You obviously went through a crazy story here. What's the closest you came to running out of money?
- [00:04]
B
We were less than two months of the runaway. Some people were drafted to the army. There was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our RD stays. So we were panicking. The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders like enables your built in mechanism of survival. Because you know that okay, they may have no salary in two months, but we do not have it already today.
- [00:30]
A
You'Re doing about 6 million bucks of revenue. If someone came and offered you a forex multiple today, so $24 million, all cash upfront to sell the business, do you take the deal 100%?
- [00:39]
B
Not exactly. Worth way more than that.
- [00:42]
A
Hey folks, my guest today is Vlad malonen. He's an MD, PhD and is a surgeon turned AI scientist and CTO co founder of Speed Size Today which is an award winning startup Transforming media optimization. Think metadata for 200 plus global brands. He blends tech, neuroscience and real world impact together and is a Forbes Technology Council member shaping the future of AI. Vlad, you ready to take us to the top?
- [01:06]
B
Yeah.
- [01:07]
A
All right, so give me a sense or two what Speed Size does.
- [01:12]
B
So Speed size basically does something that is in one or two sentence. We do AI media compression. Even one sentence?
- [01:24]
A
Yeah, AI media compression guys, to translate that. For those of you that are not neuroscientists, we all visit websites with e commerce brands. More, more now than ever. These e commerce brands are not using just still images. They're using rotating, you know, you know, animated graphics for products or things that change colors when people scroll or things like that. It appears Vlad is helping make sure those pages continue to load fast. Vlad, is that accurate?
- [01:48]
B
Yeah, it is. Because the more we live, the bigger data becomes. Especially the modern rich media websites with a lot of videos and as you mentioned, all those 360 animations here, videos, product videos, all that. And it's not only about the fact of using that kind of media per se. It's also the fact that you need to maintain the quality and brands care.
- [02:12]
A
About that a lot in terms of compression. Let's jump into a real example here. You have some really big brands listed on your website. Everyone knows sort of hookah running shoes or let's do Crocs. Everybody knows Crocs before we dive into the Crocs website so you can show us sort of how they use you. How many customers are you working with today? Just total count?
- [02:31]
B
Yeah, we have around 200 customers and most of them, as you can imagine, they're fashion brands, clothing, apparel, this kind of industry, however, not limited. We also work with travel industry, work with jewelry, we work with marketplaces. So all that kind of, I would say general e commerce with a focus on fashion brands mostly.
- [02:57]
A
Okay, so let's go to Crocs. Now. Where can I go on the Crocs website to see the thing that you're powering.
- [03:04]
B
So Crocs. Crocs specifically we don't work with their main location. So we with CROC specifically we work with the Israel subdivision, their official retailer, We Shoes. And We Shoes is the biggest shoes retailer.
- [03:20]
A
Can you spell it?
- [03:21]
B
Just We Shoes co Al. Yeah, it should be like this. Yeah, this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest websites that sell shoes and they use us pretty much across everything. So you picked a great.
- [03:42]
A
So is this you right here? Is this you?
- [03:44]
B
Yeah, this is oas.
- [03:46]
A
Okay, so let's dive into this example here. Like are they controlling all this metadata through your platform or just the image over here on the right?
- [03:53]
B
No, so they control only the image data. So we do not work with the business data like the description, although we can possibly, and it might be a pivot in the future. So the idea is that we do the AI image analysis so we know exactly what's on the image. And this is a part of our technology because we need to know, we need to emulate the human brain and how it perceives the visual information on the screen.
- [04:23]
A
Tell me more about your team. You come from a deep technology background. How many people are full time today and how many are engineers?
- [04:30]
B
Yeah, so we had. I would say that it's not the standard yet natural for me especially way to handle the team. So two years ago we used to be 50 people and we decided to focus and make a leaner team. So now we are around 20, 25 people and a couple of contractors. And the tech subdivision out of that is around 70%. So we are mostly tech people right now. And before that when we used to have 50, it was less than 50% of technical people.
- [05:11]
A
All right, so 25 on the team today. About 16, 17 of them are engineers writing real code. Explain to us how customers pay you. Right. You guys have a lot of engineers. I'm sure you have some business and marketing folks. What does your pricing look like today?
- [05:25]
B
Yeah, so we do not work with SMBs. So our main audience is the mid markets and small enterprises and ideally big enterprises. So we do have some big brands yet. Not that Fortune 100. Well, besides Philip Morris International I guess that's lies into that category. But other than that, Google's of the world are not yet working with us. So the pricing works very simple. We have two units. One is the amount of data that you need to transfer in gigabytes and the amount of assets, original assets, not all that hidden charges with transformations and all the other words that people do not understand. Just the amount of SKUs that you have on your products. You can estimate how much you need to use. That's it. The average customer pays us lower end five figures a year. It's annual contracts. So as simple as that.
- [06:35]
A
So just to be when you say low five figures, is it fair to say an average contract price might be $50,000 per year a little bit lower.
- [06:44]
B
So 50,000 is like lower tier mid market like to general ones. So those which are closer to the SMB category they pay around probably 10 to 20k a year and mid market is probably 50 to 100k. And small enterprises is 67 figures pretty much.
- [07:07]
A
And don't name the obvious, obviously don't name the customer. But what does the largest customer pay you today per year?
- [07:13]
B
So that's the seven figures and lower end of seven figures. And that's our biggest values that we have.
- [07:22]
A
Okay, so it's fair to say you have one customer paying you more than $100,000 per year today?
- [07:27]
B
No, we have several, several customers paying more than that.
- [07:31]
A
When will you have your first million dollar per year customer?
- [07:34]
B
So we do. So the thing is that work is we rely to land and expense strategy and customers are generally growing. And the beauty of speed size is that once they start using speed size they open the doors for using richer media. So we have plenty of cases. Wishes is by the way one of them, the one that we reviewed earlier, they started using video and you could see when you open the website you could see that they using videos. They couldn't afford this their general Shopify.
- [08:07]
A
Wait wait, wait, hold on. Let me get a visual up while you tell this story. Sorry, I don't see. Tell me where to go to see the video. Like you're talking about this up here at the top.
- [08:15]
B
Yeah, you have this one. Apparently they have also product videos. I cannot name like exact products where they have right now. But they started using videos. Well you can see some reviews, whatever. And before that they didn't have anything. And we have plenty of brands that use video widely on the website. So almost every PDP product detail page has a video like this.
- [08:40]
A
So you make this happen?
- [08:42]
B
Yes, so what they had, and this is a general problem of Shopify specifically, Shopify limits your videos to full hd. You cannot have a video which is high resolution than that. Also they kill the quality. They don't have the adaptive delivery and just the overall performance is just terrible. So when you want to have like this kind of experience with full screen blowing away videos, you cannot do anything with Shopify at all. So with Speed Size, this is the moment where you can actually start using videos like this. That's pretty much the bottleneck that we solve for such customers. They have no other options. They cannot solve this with Shopify or any.
- [09:30]
A
Okay, so tell me, you're mostly engineers, but you're selling expensive, you know, on average $30,000 ACV kind of contracts. How is your sales team structured? What do you set their quota at?
- [09:42]
B
So we made a pivot and we decided instead of heavily relying on direct sales, we decided to go focused on partnerships. So we are fully based in AWS and we are premium partner of AWS and aws. Since they do not have native image and video compression, AWS offers Speedsize as a solution for image and video compression as well. And we have a variety of partnerships. We have the agencies which are promoting Speed size and we really quick, sorry.
- [10:24]
A
On aws, I brought it up, but it looks like you don't have any reviews here, which signals to me that very few people are using it. Is this the right page for the partnership?
- [10:32]
B
Yeah, it's the right page and it's very natural for AWS marketplace because this is just the generic requirements to become a partner. And in this case you cannot buy us like this. You cannot just go to the marketplace and bias. There is no like real way to buy this. So it will still redirect you.
- [10:55]
A
Okay, Are there any other top growth channels besides Shopify and aws?
- [11:01]
B
Yes. So we are right now being adopted by IBM Cloud as well. And it's early in the process as IBM also is restructuring their cloud services. They're changing their CDN and they want to become big because they kind of lost the race early in the days even though they're huge company. So it also looks promising. And our idea is that we want to be in the places in the cloud suppliers who lack the native image and video compression and delivery. So think of aws of course, Google Clouds, Microsoft Azure, because other suppliers like cloudflare, Akamai, they already have the built in one which is not great, but for most of the customers that works.
- [11:58]
A
Now Vlad, you mentioned earlier a $30,000 average price point. And you mentioned 200 customers. Can I multiply those together? That would put you about $6 million of revenue today.
- [12:10]
B
Yeah. For the contract, it's roughly that I cannot give you the exact numbers. So roughly around that numbers.
- [12:17]
A
Okay. And if you're roughly around 6 million of ARR today, what were you exactly one year ago in 2024?
- [12:23]
B
So we started our sales in 2022, early 2022, and we were doubling the ARR since then. We had one year when we did a lot of major stuff that we decided to do. Not easy decisions because these are decisions which are red flags for the VCs. However, we decided not to deal with VCs at that point. And in 2024 we only had like 10% ARR growth. However, what we did is that we cut all our expenses twice and the customer acquisition cost as well in half. And we optimized everything and we decided that we do not want to raise money from VCs. And that's because company is doing really, really well. Technology is great and we are really good with the cash flow. Customers love us. We have a very low churn rate. And we also have a lot of growth within the customers because customers grow with us and we also open them the possibilities to use more of speed, size.
- [13:40]
A
My audience will have. My audience might have some troubles trying to follow percentages.
- [13:43]
B
It's just.
- [13:43]
A
That's just hard. Can you give us the real number? Your first, you launched in 2022. What was your total first year sales? Do you remember?
- [13:50]
B
Yeah. So first year sales were around like 400k from what I remember. And we were growing at around 3 mil. We were stalling. And that year it's from 2023 to 2024. And we also decided to optimize everything because. Well, I'm originally Ukrainian, My co founder is Israeli. You can imagine the war started in 2022 in Ukraine, then in 2023 in Israel. So that was the annoyingly tragicomical, I would say.
- [14:29]
A
Mm. You know, and I hope everyone's okay. Obviously, power team. I mean, I work with a lot of Ukrainian founders who are just crushing it. Same thing with ex IDF folks from Israel. Just incredible genes and incredible blood. Incredible vision, Incredible founders. So to round out that story, first year sales in 2022, worse was $400,000. And you said you doubled in 2023 to 800,000 of ARR.
- [14:55]
B
A little bit different. So we in 2023 we were around 1.5 million or something like this because we started the sales somewhere late 2021. Early 2022. Right. Right before the war started in Ukraine. So we technically had some sales in 2021. So.
- [15:13]
A
Interesting. But.00 to $1.5 million of ARR in about 18 months is obviously still impressive growth. So the war starts. You're having to manage multiple priorities at this time. So in 2023 is 1.5 million and then 2024 you said was 3 million.
- [15:31]
B
Something around that. Yeah.
- [15:32]
A
And you've about doubled this year at around 6 million now today, as we're recording.
- [15:37]
B
Yeah, something around that. In that, in that.
- [15:39]
A
And you've done all this and have you bootstrapped or raised money?
- [15:44]
B
We did raise money, so we raised less what we have in error right now and so we are still very effective. So me and my co founder, we have more than 70% of the equity, so we are technically pre Series A and we didn't know whether we want to raise the Series A. Mm.
- [16:09]
A
So I guess. How much, how much total have you raised between pre seed, seed, etc.
- [16:14]
B
So around 5 mil.
- [16:16]
A
Around 5 million. And what year did you raise that money?
- [16:19]
B
So the last big round was 2023, I guess.
- [16:26]
A
And how much was that one?
- [16:28]
B
So in 2023, I guess we raised around 2 mil. And in 2022 we raised around 3 mil. And the rest like all the minor investments were before that.
- [16:41]
A
Do you regret raising $5 million?
- [16:45]
B
I wouldn't say that I regret maybe in a way. In a way that I regret in. In the decisions which were forced with that kind of fundraising. So, you know, we, we got the regular VC fever the way how they force you to spend more money and just to chase the growth, which is reasonable. However, it's very easy to make mistakes. And what we learned the hard way is that VCs are always less active in our case based on our experience than they claim to be. And in the end of the day, they care less about money that they spend on you and they care more about the potential profits. And even if you have hard times like wartime, whatever, they're not the first people who will come to help you.
- [17:40]
A
Well, it sounds like you're in a very sustainable place today. 6 million of ARR with 25 on the team is very, very healthy revenue per employee. And did I hear you correctly earlier, Vlad? You said your cash flow positive today.
- [17:53]
B
Well, technically we flown that so not to be truly positive in this case, but technically, yeah. So it's our decision when we want to be profitable or not. I would, I would put it that way.
- [18:07]
A
So I mean Let me decode that. Are you spending money on variable expenses right now, like paid advertising, which you could shut off at any time to be profitable? Is that what you're saying?
- [18:16]
B
Yeah, pretty much that.
- [18:17]
A
Okay. How much are you spending on paid ads right now across all channels?
- [18:22]
B
I. I don't have this information in front of me, to be honest, so.
- [18:25]
A
Okay. Is it meaningful? More than five grand a month?
- [18:29]
B
I. I guess so, yeah. I don't really know, to be honest. So we mostly focus on the other channels. So I. I would say that's the biggest. The biggest profits that were brought by partnerships. So this one is the biggest ones that we did.
- [18:50]
A
So. Tell me more about that. The reason I'm going to dig here is because, you know, I interview thousands of founders and I plot all the growth tactics they give me here on my screen. And one of them that they bring up, obviously, are app exchanges and partnerships. But many of them wait until they have scale because partnerships usually take more time and they're very. They can be expensive to execute if you're doing custom integrations. You actually chose to do this, though. Scaling early on, it was one of the first growth tactics you used. Tell me more about what those partnership agreements look like and why you decided to go after those first.
- [19:18]
B
So partnerships agreements are usually actually not that easy to do, especially with big organizations like aws. There's a lot of bureaucracy, there is a lot of limitation, and there is a lot of frustration. So when you hear. And that marketplace is one of them, so you cannot be a premium partner unless you have the marketplace entity. However, nobody, because we do not work with SMBs like this, and they simply do not buy the product like this on the marketplace. It's intended to be, for the SMBs, an enterprise. They couldn't care less about the marketplaces. They want the fine, tailored deals. They are very aggressive in terms of the negotiations and all that, but it pays off. It pays off 100%. It took us almost two years to fully enroll the proper partnerships with AWS.
- [20:19]
A
Let's talk a little bit about AI before we wrap up. We've got about a minute and a half, two minutes left here. You're obviously very technology forward, right? Deep technological roots, great engineer. So just to be clear, people still have to input some kind of image into your system, and then you're making it better, I guess. Why do you think that's the future? Won't people just create images from scratch using nanobanana and other technologies?
- [20:42]
B
We're not making images better. The thing is that every Other solution makes them worse. The idea of speed size is not to enhance the images. The idea is to make sure that the original colors, details, their original clarity and quality of the images remains the same as the original one. So most of our customers, they have beautiful photoshoot quality so that's not an issue. But all the rest of the competitors that lose the colors, they lose the details, images become blurry and everything and it's not something that it looks on the screen of the website visitors understood.
- [21:20]
A
Vlad, as we as we wrap up here, excited to see what you do with the business going forward. You're in control though. You said you and your co founder own 70%. You're doing about 6 million bucks of revenue. If someone came and offered you a forex multiple today, so $24 million, all cash up front to sell the business.
- [21:35]
B
Do you take the deal 100% not. And not because it's a bad deal. And just like, just like an advice for that kind of technologist, this is like a very poor multiplier even today. But also that we see the potential, we see how the traction goes, how we grow the customers and everything. So is definitely worth way more than that.
- [22:01]
A
And let's, let's ask a negative question then before we wrap. You obviously went through a crazy story here. What's the closest you came to running out of money?
- [22:10]
B
I think the closest one when we were less than two months of the runaway.
- [22:17]
A
What year was that and why was cash so low? What happened?
- [22:20]
B
That was the year 2023 and that's after the war started in Israel and we were panicking because we actually had an investment that year to grow the sales team in Israel. And sales team in Israel, it takes high salaries in a way closer to the gas salaries, not the European ones. And some people were drafted to the army and there was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our R and D stays. So we were panicking in a way but eventually everything went well.
- [22:56]
A
And how. So just to confirm how low did your cash get?
- [23:01]
B
So that's probably less than $300,000.
- [23:06]
A
And what were you feeling at the time? Did you know you were going to come out of it? Were you actually nervous? Were you having conversations about shutting business down?
- [23:12]
B
The first decision we made is even before that happens we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders. I know that's nothing with given our salaries we're very modest and I had the salary lower than our developers actually. But this is the first action and that kind of, you know, it like enables your built in mechanism of survival because you know that. Okay, they may have no salary in two months, but we do not have it already today. So it's time to act.
- [23:44]
A
Yep. Well, hey, incredible story, Vlad. We are obviously rooting for you. Just wrapping up here with a couple of questions. How old are you?
- [23:50]
B
I'm 35.
- [23:52]
A
35 and situation. Married, single, Kids?
- [23:55]
B
Yeah, I'm married. I have two beautiful kids. Six and seven years old, son and the daughter.
- [24:00]
A
And where are you based today? Where are you personally building the company?
- [24:03]
B
In New York. In New York.
- [24:06]
A
All right.
- [24:06]
B
Odessa, Ukraine. Beautiful sea on the, on the seashore of the Black Sea. And right now I'm pursing my future in New York.
- [24:14]
A
All right, well, very good, Vlad. As we wrap up here, if people want to find you online, where's the best place for them to look?
- [24:20]
B
I'm doing the detox from the social network. So the best one is the boring LinkedIn. Other than that on the speedsize.com with the blog where I occasionally do some articles.
- [24:32]
A
Guys, there you have it. Vlad launched Speedsize.com in 2022. Did $400,000 of sales his first year. More than tripled that to 1.5 million in 2023. Today in 2025 he's doing $6 million of revenue with 25 full time employees. And he's done it in a very capital efficient way. Just $5 million raised to grow million of ARR. That's capital efficient. Now he's gone through some hard times. Cash balance got as low as two months of Runway. That was $300,000 in the bank. As the Ukraine war started, him and his co founder still managed to get through it. Today they still retain 70% of the business as they look to scale, helping D2C brands keep their image quality extremely high on their website with fast loading times and even going deeper, enabling them to put sophisticated product videos together to increase conversion rates and increase revenue. That's why he's got 200 paying customers, many of which pay more than $100,000 per year. Vlad, thank you for taking us to the top.
- [25:25]
B
Thank you. Well, a pleasure.