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The Digital Executive
Deleting Meeting Madness: Erik Braund’s Mission to Rebuild Human Connection at Work | Ep 1149
00:26:05
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Eric Braand. Eric Braand is the founder and CEO of Katmai, the virtual office platform built for one singular mission, to delete your effing meetings before launching a war on back to back calendar chaos. Eric spent years running a music and video production company and playing in Alaska's most grungy of underground grunge bands, Del Nak, a band whose name is permanently tattooed on no less than three fans bodies. Eric and the team built Kat and I to bring back the spontaneity, speed and actual humanity of working together. Got a full calendar of nonsense. He'll shred it while you pretend not to enjoy it. Well, good afternoon Eric. Welcome to the show.
- [01:08]
B
Hey, thanks for having me Brian. I appreciate being here.
- [01:11]
A
Absolutely my friend. I really appreciate it. You're in New York, I'm in Kansas City. We're just an hour apart time zone wise. So I appreciate you making the time today. And and Eric, I'm jumping right into your first question. Your past in music and video production seems quite far from software engineering. How did your experience running production projects and working in creative media inform the founding of Katmai? And were there lessons from that early life like touring, producing creativity under constraints that translate directly into the startup life?
- [01:45]
B
That's a great question. I don't think I'd ever thought about it just like that. But I love it from a young age. I was a tinkerer. I was building computers when I was 10 and 12. May have installed a CPU wrong once and burned that thing up and had to buy a new one. Hard lesson learned there as a youngster shoveling driveways to make money. But I learned enough programming. It started with HTML to make a website and then would just tinker over the years. And then I went to grad school for kind of this interactive telecommunications program at nyu. Learned some processing, got to make hardware and software talk to each other. Dropped out of that program because as I was distracted with other things. But I did learn an appreciation for what goes into software development and code and kind of it's not so simple as like you gotta really think through what the end result is. And I learned a good appreciation for it and I learned that I know just enough to be dangerous, just enough to know that I didn't want to be a software engineer professionally or even as a hobbyist moving forward in my life, I've always been really attracted to hardware. And so this is actually a really interesting result where we wound up with Katmai because the journey was I was in audio video production. I toured in bands, spent a lot of time in studios that evolved video production and broadcast. So kind of like I'd say 2010 through 2020 were mostly spent doing video productions. And that was anything from music to large scale productions for multinational companies, whether they're banks or food Network, New York Times, just lots of interesting dynamic projects. So what that was was a big mix of people, tight timelines, lots of hardware, lots of lighting. And then Post production is 100% in software. So it was like a hardware start and a software finish kind of, if you will, for those types of projects. And that came to a grinding halt during COVID and I found myself in a position of oh boy, what are we going to do? These clients that I work with have a new challenge. They can't be together anymore. Whew, what are we going to do? And it turned to things like we're using now. There's tools like zoom teams. I remember telling a bank, hey, have you ever heard of a tool called zoom? And I was like, well no, we've never heard of zoom. And isn't that crazy, Brian, that there was a time where zoom wasn't normal? Do you remember that time?
- [04:08]
A
Oh, absolutely.
- [04:09]
B
I mean it kept the world moving, thank God. And so did teams and meet and WebEx and every video conferencing tool as we know it kept the global economy moving. I was in a unique position where I'm now have left New York City, living upstate with my, my wife and children and dogs and cats and all these things and trying to figure out what's next because we thought, oh boy, probably going to be a while till we're in closed rooms doing audio video productions together again. And I, I wound up connecting with some really brilliant individuals just over the Internet. Software engineer, graphics folks, film directors, just kind of like, like minded people looking for something to do. And this concept came together of we could be together in a virtual space. Now listen, that's a video game. People have been doing that for 20, 30 years. However, we decided that you could take your video camera and map it to your avatar. And now you are you in a virtual space. You're not an avatar, you're not a cartoon representation, you're not building a character. You're not trying to make a 3D model look like yourself. It's not facial recognition. It's like so simple. It's a forehead slapper. Like, ah, it's so obvious, it's right there. Why hasn't this been done? Well, it turns out it was really hard to do, Brian. It took us years and tens of millions of dollars to build it and have it work really well and make sure it could work on billions of devices that exist. So that was a very long winded way of saying, I think the dynamic start and stop, push and pull, immediate problems to solve on the fly lifestyle of audio, video production, music, touring, all of those things. I think it actually kind of poised me pretty well to be now at the helm of a software company because at the end of the day, what we're delivering is a better human experience. We are delivering a better interaction with people. Not with robots, not with AI, not with avatars. Our goal is to have a more enriched connection with people that are on the other side of the screen or the WI fi connection or the tablet or whatever it is. So it's a very people forward business and we're solving this kind of connection problem with software. And Brian, it's pretty damn cool.
- [06:31]
A
I love that, really do, because there's. I know we had to adapt, right, and innovate really quickly during the pandemic, as you talked about that challenge. But now we've got some more time and things have evolved. People like you creating platforms like Catmai are making a world of difference. And of course, I loved your backstory. A lot of people start out in tech in some way. You had that curiosity, that desire initially in the software, but then flipped it to hardware and the rest was history. So I appreciate that. And Eric, Kat and I was born during the pandemic, as you mentioned, out of frustration with existing tools for remote work. What was the prototype or spark that made you think this could actually be something better than Zoom plus meetings. What were the early technical or product decisions that set Katmai apart?
- [07:17]
B
Yeah, so the early technical days, if you fired up a Katmai on a $5,000 computer, your fan would kick on after about 10 seconds, your computer would be real sluggish, your frame rate would drop and you'd be like, boy, what a cool experience. If we could ever make this work, this will really be special. Literally, one of our board members, I had to buy him a new laptop. I remember the first time meeting him in person, we put Katmai up on his MacBook Pro. Now, granted, it was an older MacBook Pro, but I'd say within about five minutes of being on a meeting, his laptop heated up in my memory. It probably levitated off the table and then it turned black and it wouldn't turn back on. So these are the early days of software development, research and development, creating something new, marrying audio and video and a high frame rate, high quality 3D environment in a way that just isn't the norm. Hasn't been done. And what's spectacular about it is we're actually rendering it on your machine. We're not doing it in the cloud, thank God, because we'd be competing with OpenAI and everyone else for GPU space. So good decision we made 5 years ago. But also it made us work really damn hard to optimize, optimize, optimize. To make sure it could work and look incredible on a desktop computer with a dedicated graphics card, but also be highly functional for an $800hp corporate issued average laptop. Right? So to get to that point, from where I melted a board member's laptop to where I now have enterprise customers using it on average hardware. That was a long road. And we were, I liken it to working in a virtual garage because our entire company was built on cadmine. We've never had a physical office. We only use our office, our software, our everything to communicate with each other. And so we learned the byproduct of by spending so much time together in this virtual platform for on demand conversations in a place together, but with features that make it feel like a physical space, doors that close, sound zones, privacy, visibility, all of these things. We were able to build Katmai in Katmai, which is a really incredible thing. I've now spent five years inside of Cat My, which is kind of a crazy statistic. I don't know if I have been in Cat My more or out of Katmai more in the last five years, but I think to bring it back to the technical hurdles and choices we had to make, one of which was we could render in the cloud. It'd be more expensive, it'd be a different thing. We could be pixel streaming down to the back of your computer like some gaming does. Where we could render on your machine, we chose the harder path render on your machine. We also said there was a path of do we build this on the back of Unity or unreal and some third party 3D engine, do we use something like a Twilio to process all of our audio and video streams off the shelf and pay them again, we chose the much harder route, which was no, let's Build our own. So we have, we call it the Cat My engine and we really have built it from the ground up. Granted, there's open source stuff involved too, but we built this thing from the ground up. So we are able to really be in control of what we deliver and how we deliver it. That probably took us an extra year or two to really master that. I suppose so. There was a heavy investment of time and money and R and D up front. But on that same token, we've invented something new. We have over 50 patents on this technology at this point. And now we're in the very, very exciting phase of our company go to market, we have customers we're no longer building in the dark with what we think people want. Our entire product roadmap now is customer driven. And that's just a really fantastic place to be.
- [11:05]
A
That's awesome. Thank you for unpacking all that. A lot went into R and D obviously, and you gave some examples of some of the failures. But again, failures is what creates success in the long term. I appreciate that you're out of that now and you're in the go to market Sage. I think that's pretty amazing. And Eric, how do you articulate Katmai's value versus established tools? We talked about Zoom, team, Slack, et cetera. What's your positioning strategy in a crowded or remote work virtual office space?
- [11:33]
B
Yeah, great question. I get this one all the time. And now we actually have user data to back this up and tell a whole new story, which is pretty exciting. So let's take one step back and say we all used to go to the office at agreed upon time, Monday through Friday 9 to 5. There was no cameras on, cameras off. We were just together. Occasionally the New York office and the LA office would do a conference call or something, or New York and London had to get on some sort of video conference. The point of being in the office together was because you could work when an idea strikes, you could follow that through. Conversations just begin in real time. Not every 30 and 60 minute window of available time is booked for a meeting with someone anywhere in the world. So in a way, like infinite access of Zoom and teams has totally just clogged our calendars because there's this kind of demand whether you're in the office or not. Now in a post Covid world, you're still on video calls all day long. So the magic of like the physical office was you're just there together. Culture is built through osmosis, literally by being in the same room. Relationships form by hallway interactions and running into someone and the hey, can I bug you? Do you have two minutes? That is the value of the office being across the hall from a colleague. That is ultimately the collaborative value, right? On the other end of the spectrum, what happened was the entire world shifted to a meeting by appointment culture. 30 minutes or 60 minutes or some companies are 25 minutes and 55 minutes. But still your entire life now is in these 30 and 60 minute blocks, right? And it's like, okay, we have to have a conversation. You know what? Geography is agnostic. What does that mean? Oh, God. Now we have 10 hours of time zones we may have to cover. So it became very normal to straddle a lot of time zones and to fill up calendars. And before you know it, your entire calendar is just full. Before you haven't even had time to work. You're just in meetings. So what Katmai is, is it's a virtual place to log in and be around people. Now, some of our. There are still some scheduled meetings in Katmai, right? But most of what happens is spontaneity. And we have a statistic that says, so our customers spend an average of 24 hours per week in Katmai. What does that mean? They've got their home set up, they're at the office, whatever. They fire up a browser window and they have their virtual office open and they're parked in a sound zone of room that is theirs.
- [14:04]
A
And.
- [14:05]
B
And they're now available to their team. By being available to your team, we have found that 90% of the meetings that happen in Katmai are spontaneous. 10% are scheduled. So we've like unfurled ourselves from the scheduled meeting. Next thing that happens is the average meeting length in Katmai is 14 minutes. So by being available, you can have a shorter meeting. You know, the average meeting length on Zoom is 54 minutes. The average meeting length on Teams is 45 minutes. We have shrunk that down to 14 minutes. Also, the average time a Zoom company spends in Zoom meetings, like a company that uses Zoom spends in Zoom meetings per week, 17 hours a week are on a Zoom meeting teams, 12 hours a week on teams, meetings, Katmai. By being available, we shrink that 17 hours to 2.3 hours. So what we find is by being available, by being virtually across the hall from your colleague in this like open floor plan thing, you can have a quicker conversation and you can have more frequent, shorter meetings. But the statistic that really drives it home for me is the average number of meeting Participants. So when a conversation strikes and you have a meeting in Katmai, two and a half people is the average. Obviously it's not a half a person, it's somewhere between two and three. Let's say zoom and teams both clock in at seven people. So if you take a big step back, if you know you're, you're looking at productivity and collaboration and these sorts of things. A Zoom company spends 17 hours a week with an average of seven people in meetings. That is an expensive meeting schedule. Very expensive meeting schedule. Cat my companies, two and a half people, 2.3 hours a week. So it's frequency, it's collaboration, it's like you can have the face to face conversation when, when it sparks. And so that's just like statistics. Let's get to something that's a little harder to track. It's culture and it's feel. It's like, how do people feel and what effect is remote work and these tools having on our culture? And so the feeling thing is really interesting when we log on to another zoom meeting or teams meeting or whatever. Just let's call it traditional video conferencing. I'm not singling out zoom or teams. It's like when we log on to another video call as we know it, we're looking at the Brady Bunch squares. Couple people are cameras off, someone's on their phone, half the people are distracted, someone's doing other else, you know, something else. It's like there's not a lot of like face to face feeling here. It's just like a very utilitarian. Yes, we're connected technically, but are we connected? No, we're not. It just doesn't happen. Everyone is burned out and tired of the squares and the faces and the schedules. So we've found by providing a foreground, a background, a scene, whether it's like a mountain range or the city that you're in branding that matches the company's look and feel, whether it's a bright orange thing or a bright yellow thing or some subtle tones, but it like, oh, this feels like our company's physical office feels, oh, we have some identity here. So we get this feedback a lot that I don't remember my zoom and teams meetings, but I remember my cat, my conversations. And the conversation word is really interesting because most of our environments are built around like nice round tables and the meetings happen around the table and there's something about like the table as this central thing. Yeah, we have cool screen shares and lots of bells and whistles and all the chat features that you could need. But there's something about seeing your colleagues live on video around a table, grounded to the same environment, this kind of place that sets a tone for the conversation. It's just more relaxed, it's more natural. Those are words that we get from customers. Feels more relaxed. Conversation feels more natural. To the point where this one really sums it up. Katmai turns next week's meeting into 30. Sorry. Katmye turns next week's 30 minute meeting into today's five minute conversation. And that's so powerful because next week you got to schedule it. 30 minutes long time meeting. Oh God. Today is now. Let's go. Five minutes conversation. Wouldn't it be great to have conversations with each other again instead of endless meetings? And so it's just like this totally different paradigm. So that was a real long winded way to say, like, what's different In Katmai, you kind of start your work together, you start your day together and you're available. And it isn't just like a meetings by appointment thing. You have access to your team, but you can be anywhere because you're in a shared space. And what we've lost with video conferencing is any concept of shared space. But we are all physical beings sitting in places or standing or walking in places. We need place. And I'll button it up with even Zoom and the CEO of Zoom call everyone back to the office. In a leaked memo that said, you can't have company. I'm paraphrasing. You can't have collaboration and culture on remote video conferencing. Everybody back to the office. And that was my moment of like, boy, oh boy, do I disagree. Do I know it? Do we know it? And now our customers know it. And so that's really a so. So we are if. If the physical office is one end of the spectrum and video conferencing as we've known it for the last 20 years, because it really hasn't evolved much since Skype. Honestly, that's the other end of the spectrum, Katmai. We're going to occupy the 95% in between. That's what we're trying to do.
- [19:38]
A
Thank you. I appreciate that. Lots of impact there. But you are putting that people connection back into the workday. Even virtually. It is a virtual place to log in and be around people. What I really liked was the stats. 90% of Katmai's meetings are spontaneous, 10% are scheduled and an average 14 minutes on a catnight call. It's just Amazing, because we're bogged down in literally five, six, seven meetings per day that are an hour long, which is crazy. And the last question, Eric, if you could. It's a lightning question. Briefly share. As remote hybrid work evolve, what do you see changing in how we think about collaboration tools, presence and meetings themselves? Do you see these meetings being phased out? Maybe what features or tech systems like AI, maybe virtual reality, do you believe will shift the paradigm further? Are you preparing for that?
- [20:27]
B
Yeah, great question. I can hit that in a lot of ways. So here's an interesting one. A year ago when we were in our beta phase, we got the question a lot of can we record the meetings in Cat my. And the answer was no. We hadn't built a meeting recording feature at the time. And we had leaned pretty heavily into, we're not storing your audio and video, they're not stored in the cloud. This is real time communication and it's gone when the conversation's over. Right. Part of that is we have an early customer base in Europe and the approach to data and privacy in Europe is very different than America. In Europe, it's, I'm going to really summarize here, but it's, don't keep track of anything about me ever. And in America, we are the product and every company knows everything about us. And we've all accepted that. I'm being a little crass here, but, like, that's the generalization we could make. So we leaned into, okay, we're not going to store things as an early stage thing. We recently dusted off the like, hey, should we pick up this video recording project on our roadmap? And we realized something. Oh, no one has requested that in like nine months. We, we went into, we got into the market officially in February of this year. No one has requested, can I have video meetings maybe once or twice? Why is that? The widespread adoption of basic AI tools. And when I say basic AI, I mean meeting, summarization, meeting, notes, meeting. Everybody in their. And their brother and sister has some sort of tool at this point. Whether it's OTTER on their phone or GPT or whatever they're doing, everyone's got a tool to summarize meeting notes. And so now the request has been, and we don't need a recording of the meeting. Can we get a transcript and a summary of the meeting notes? And it's like, God, what a thing. In one year's time, the artifact went from being, I need a real time audio video record of the meeting, which to me, I don't Know, Brian, if you've ever had to like rewatch a meeting you missed is painful, I'll do it on like 2 or 3x. It's a tough task to have to do that entire paradigm has shifted to, oh no, we just need like an AI generated transcript. It doesn't have to be perfect. And a summary and we're good. That was only in one year's time, so it's pretty wild how, how, you know, how fast patterns and habits can shift that way. That's not to say we won't build the video recording for specific things, but just very interesting. As we're still a startup, we have to prioritize all the things and what's the most important. Is it a feature or is it a security request from a massive company or all these things. That's to say. So to step back one more time, you haven't. For people that have never seen Catmine, it's browser based. It works on billions of devices that you all already own. And that was what we set out to do. When I started this thing, it just so happened, six or 12 months later, Facebook turned into Meta. Mark Zuckerberg said they were going to spend $20 billion per year to strap this monstrosity to everyone's face. It was going to be the future of work. Metaverse was the thing. You're going to be a cartoon of you, I'm going to be a cartoon of me. But somehow we're going to spend all day in these devices. And I thought that was a dystopian hellscape and said, no way. A let's embrace this notion of face to face. The thing that we agree on, the underpinning a virtual world, a virtual space that has foregrounds, backgrounds, rooms, vistas, the things we agree on that. I always thought the headset for work was really a solution, chasing a problem. I'm not sure if you've had headset experience. I've bought all of them. I get motion sick. I can't do it for more than 20 or 30 minutes, even as a game. But I'll be damned if that was ever going to be the norm for remote work. And collaboration like that just felt crazy to me. Not to mention the only statistic I could find was Meta Horizons at its peak, had a thousand people a day. And maybe that's wrong. That's just what I found on the Internet. But you're like, wow, at this point they must have spent 40 or 50 billion dollars on this whole thing. It didn't take off. We wanted to solve a very different problem. We wanted to connect people in the most like life and human way with the least technological barriers to entry. And that's what Catma is special. It works on your device and it provides a whole new experience that you have never had on your device. And so that's just super exciting. I actually logged into our office on the Apple Vision Pro. I did the 3D scan of my face and I logged in and didn't tell anyone. And I went walking around the office and people were like, I think that's Eric but this feels creepy. I don't like it. And sure, I took a side by side photo of the real me in Katmai and the virtual me in Katmai. It was just so off and all it did was reinforce people first. What is important to make the human connection and the collaboration more lifelike, more honest, more sincere, more, more just natural. And so that's, that's at the end of the day, that's everything we're trying to do. It just so happens that we have a customer and one of the guys is in Finland and the team is in Germany and he told us the other day we're only across the hall from each other like maybe once or twice a year. I've been across the hall from these guys five days a week now. Like that's, that's amazing. Wow.
- [25:31]
A
That's it. That is amazing. I appreciate Eric, you sharing all your insights and, and how things are going to transform. But at the end of the day you're making it right. You're getting people back together. You are the people connector and, and my eyes using your technology. So I really appreciate that. And Eric, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [25:52]
B
Hey Brian, really appreciate the opportunity and the thoughtful questions. Thank you very much.
- [25:56]
A
Bye for now.