A (4:35)

At this point, Right before we talk about Wave, I have a few other questions.

B (4:38)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

A (4:40)

But very excited to hear more about what you're doing now. So you said that in high school, you started on ebay. Were you selling Beanie Babies?

B (4:47)

I was outside Beanie Babies. I was selling anything I get my hands on. So 97, it was mini disc recorders, those little Sony guys that you could get rather easily in New York City, but not easily in other parts of the country. So I found a small little arbitrage there, but it was more Just learning how to do it, how to put HTML in the listings, how to ship things and all sorts of stuff like that.

A (5:12)

Because by the time I met you, you were really already in my mind. You were this operator, but I hadn't thought of you as a founder. But it sounds like you had a lot of these founder inclinations, starting pretty young.

B (5:25)

Yeah. So you have to remember, when I joined Uber, it looked just like every other little startup. Who knows what this is, is going to be a small group of folks trying to do something. So it wasn't like all of a sudden I'm working at a big thing. It was. I was always kind of entrepreneurial, wanted to sort of do something. Selling things online is the most basic way. Not able to write software myself. But yeah, I was sort of a founder originally. I guess I definitely wasn't thinking about it in terms of equity or VC funding. It was more like in college. I didn't get the memo when the banks were hiring. I didn't know they were like interview day on campus. Just wasn't aware of it. And I also think I just naturally don't fit into sort of environments like that, but I bring skills that one might take to a bank or work in the financial industry or whatever. I wasn't really interested in that. So it was always sort of like, what can I do on my own? And eventually found my way to IAC to do a marketing role there. So, yeah, I definitely wouldn't consider myself a founder. I'm not. Well, we can get to that after. But yeah, no, I mean, I'm just. Me.

A (6:32)

I love it. Okay, so tell me more of the framing of the problem you're trying to solve here with wave.

B (6:39)

Sure.

A (6:40)

What's missing in the market? And you and I had a discussion about this recently, and what I loved about your articulation of it was it was really about simplicity. There's a lot of complexity out there with AI and you're trying to maybe take a step back and say something basic for everyone.

B (6:56)

What were the insights that kind of led me to think that this was even worth spending time on? You know, I'm technical in that I'm really good at computers. Right. I am the grandson, I'm the son, I'm the nephew, I'm the son law, who you call when your computer's broken just to sort of set the stage. So obviously I've been very interested in all the developments. It seemed like they've been coming every day for the last 18 months or so. But I noticed a few Things about them. One sort of the obvious one. It's very much in the AI bubble. If you are a normal, you're notionally aware that something is happening, but probably not following the day to day advances. Many of these demonstrations would be on the web, web first or maybe even terminal or have some crazy thing you have to do. You have to launch your server and then do the client and just all this stuff. Clearly demonstrations of technology and not yet really useful applications. So that was number one. And because of that I think engineers and tech folks often build things for themselves. And so there are probably a bajillion ways to record your zoom, which is great, definitely want to do that sometimes. But hardly any ways to record a conversation on the telephone or a conversation with your partner or spouse or friends or anyone in real life who you're sitting in a space with.

A (8:17)

Because these are very simplistic principles. But I feel like with AI we're talking about such leaps and sometimes you just can't record on your phone.

B (8:27)

Yeah, sometimes it's just those very basic things are hard to do. So that was the first thing. It's like there's all this good AI stuff and some of it is sort of out there in your Google Apps there. All of a sudden it's in Gmail and all of a sudden it's in your Google Photos and all this stuff. And and also AI generally has been around for a long time. Face recognition is a form of AI that's been around for a while. So there just really weren't, I don't think, great examples of this out in the wild. Insight number two, also extremely simple and one, I came to really appreciate it Uber and again, very simple, but the world is very big. And what I mean by that is to be successful, let's say I need to find 10,000 people who agree with me and will pay me money for that agreement. That is a drop in the bucket of the world or of the US and so I'm not necessarily trying to put a dent in the universe. I'm trying to make a useful app for a lot of people, for as many as I can. But because the goal is not, I'm going to change the way a billion people record audio. That is not my goal. My goal is to change how 100,000 or 10,000 people record audio that is doable almost regardless of what else is going on in the world that is doable just because the world is big. Not everyone is aware of everything. That was insight two, insight number three and then that'll be the end of the insights is that I think really good tech creates this magic moment really right away. And so for Uber is very obvious that it's the push a button and a car shows up. And if you didn't grow up with that, if you're over the age of 30 or maybe 35, you at some point probably had that experience for the first time. And it's pretty crazy if you've never had that before. You do this thing on your phone and a car shows up. And I've experienced a bunch of different magic like that at different startups. I think if you're wearing a cgm, a glucose monitor, that was the focus of the startup I worked at most recently. The first time you eat a bagel and see a number on your phone start to, in real time, go up, that is a magic moment. And it's amazing. And it starts to feel normal after that. But that first time is really, really awesome. Similarly, the first time you see a computer summarized text, that is a magic moment. And we're all super used to it now because it's been 18 months and we're all in tech and we listen to this podcast and we're in the bubble and we are experts on it. But like to most people in the world or in the United States, that has not yet landed that you can now give a computer a bunch of texts and it will give you new text. That is a summary of that on the fly. That's a big development if you really take a step back and think about it. So the idea is, okay, the transcription piece which OpenAI had it then just put out there for open source. It works in every language. It's really just like what people will call an API wrapper, but if delivered in the right way, at the right place, at the right time in a mobile app, not in a web browser, in a mobile app. And there's a key difference there in terms of how long you can record in background recording and the different APIs on the phone that you can access that way. And then all of a sudden that audio becomes a paragraph. The majority of Americans find that to be a magic moment and are really excited about it. And it's a really a wonderful feeling to have strangers tell you in the chat in the app, which I of course respond to, they're just, oh, my God, this is insane. How does this happen? That is lovely. And I think most people still feel that way or will feel that way when properly exposed to AI.

A (11:58)

So I started playing around with wave and Then I was pretty surprised to learn the structure of your company, which is.

B (12:04)

Yeah, there's no structure, just me.

A (12:07)

Rather streamlined, shall we say. So how do you manage? I mean, that I feel like that's a lot to do. So your customer service and your product and your go to market, how are you managing?

B (12:19)

Yeah, so at levels where I worked most recently, it was the first company I've been part of that was really Async first, remote first, not because it had to be, but because it wanted to be. And it had a strong ethos and feeling about how that should all work. And I think a lot of that got in my head just about how to build a product, how to increment, how to move the ball forward in the most basic and small way, and then just do that every day until you get somewhere. The lessons I think I got there. While the Uber experience was much grander and special for me, I think I just got a lot of the nuts and bolts of how to do this now from that experience. So React Native, the language and framework that I use to build this, that's what they use there. And so when engineers couldn't do the thing for me, they'd be like, but here's how you could do it. And so I'd be like, well, all right, I guess I'll just try. So I got a few reps on it there and then basically it was like the very first version. So right around this time a year ago, April 2023, it was like, hey, ChatGPT, let's say I wanted to record audio, transcribe it to whisper at this endpoint, like through this API here, the docs. And then I want to summarize it and hear the docs for that do for me, the most very basic version of that one Screen app records, holds the audio on the phone, transcribes from the phone, summarizes from the phone, rate V0. I give it out to some people. Whoa. I was using your app to record the first draft of a eulogy from my grandma, and it lost the audio. It's one of my dear friends, and hopefully she's listening right now. I'm really sorry about that, Rachel. But anyway, you get a lot of feedback like that. It's like, okay, well, it turns out there's this concept of a server, and that's when you let not the phone do all the work. You have another computer that does all the work, so you just kind of get the key information to that other place and it'll do the thing and It'll send it back. And it was a little bit just like running into brick walls, like, oh well, someone's phone might crap out in the five minutes where it's transcribing and summarizing. And if that happens, it's lost in the ether. Well that's stupid, I shouldn't do it that way. And it was really just like a year of having these problems and I was like, oh man, this is a showstopper. And then just banging my head against the wall with AI and ChatGPT. So not so bad. And all the while over this last year, the tools are getting better, the foundational LLMs are getting better, the way that software integrates with them is getting better. So now I write the app and there's a little AI on the side who's able to read all the stuff. And I can say, oh, how do I do that? The very trivial things, the basic stuff, like Fizzbuzz is the sort of classic computer science test question. Very basic, you know, you say like count to 50 and even numbers say, I'm forgetting exactly what it is, it's gonna drive everyone crazy. But just the sort of very basic mowing the lawn type things that you'd write in code, that's all such a layup for AI. So it really has me more conducting the orchestra rather than writing every line of code. And I hope that was coherent. I'm not sure it was, but that is essentially how it got one step forward, one step forward, one step forward. And not just about code, but about process. I think what non engineers don't appreciate, and that I've really learned, is that there's learning to code, understanding the underlying logic and data structures and algorithms, that's kind of one thing, but that's not actually the main thing. The main thing is making all the parts fit together that already exist. Like you want to do an iPhone app, I forget about code. Getting a simulator to load on your computer, getting something to compile, getting all the libraries, all the open source stuff that you'd use just to get to hello world, just to get to that first screen that says I've turned on. That's hard and specific and very time oriented. And what I mean by that is it's very specific to the right now. So an LLM that was set up a year ago might not know about Expo 50, which is the main thing I use to sort of run all the react native stuff that I do that didn't exist, so the models don't have that. So there's a community of people, very kind, open source types who write all this amazing stuff on which really everything I did is built. You don't really realize that when you're sitting on the outside. I didn't realize that. And so, so much of it is just sort of the DevOps I think they'd say, getting just all the pieces to fit together, if that makes sense. There's so much of that. And so it's almost like the logic, the underlying record the thing and do the thing, that's sort of one piece of it. But just making all the pieces fit together is really, that's the real challenge.

A (17:10)

Yeah, well, it's interesting because what I originally thought was a challenge, which was you being a one man show, maybe that is the opportunity. Right. Is that you can go at the pace that you're comfortable with, you can learn as you go, you can iterate and you don't have all this infrastructure to bog you down. So I love this paradigm of how AI companies potentially are getting built, which is just an extreme version of Lean, which I think is cool.

B (17:36)

A hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent.

A (17:40)

So taking kind of a step back, what's the vision for Wave and what does it mean to succeed in this? What do you want your customer experience to be long term? And where do you see this going?

B (17:52)

Yeah, the App Store is really an amazing place. Everyone is a click away from my software. Take a step back. That's rather novel and they take a big cut for that. And you really almost could argue that they deserve it just because it's so helpful. I mean, I don't know how this would work without the App Store and built in purchasing and the trust that they lend to their developers. So no one is, I'm going to buy this, but it might be fraud. No one ever thinks that when they buy an app. And that's so helpful, especially for a new entrant. But you asked, what is the goal? Well, so I worked at Uber, that was very successful and my mom's impression is that now I am a retiree. And so I like to get explicit about the progress that I've made because I think absent that, it's kind of euphemistic. It's like, oh, you know, is this real? At this wedding I was at over the weekend, someone in my family thought that the revenue charts that I tend to put up on LinkedIn, she thought it was investor dollars raised, she hadn't actually gotten it. And I have to be even more explicit. But anyway, I have about 2,000 paid subscribers at this point, which I'm really proud of. And I think. And that is something like 40k. Mrr. This data is all sort of out there, so I don't feel like it's weird to share it. But I do want people, particularly my mom, to understand that this is a real thing. And so I had socialized to friends at the beginning of the year when it was at 3K, Mr. I was like, I'm gonna get to a hundred. Getting to a hundred, that would be like, it's rather arbitrary. I'm not gonna stop when I get there. And when I said it, I didn't think I would ever get there. I thought it was a reach goal. And so the aspiration and the goal is starting to shift. The goalposts, as they say, are being moved. And so I'm starting to work with other people. I have a design firm in the mix now, redrawing everything, which is very helpful. I'm quite bad at that. And I'm talking to some potential engineer hires on a freelance basis, probably somewhere far, far away. But I can use the help. I think I typically shy away, or I have until now shied away from that in fear that I wouldn't have enough for that person to do. And also because I really have enjoyed the surprise on everyone's face when I say I did all the coding, like what I got from you essentially last weekend at the beginning of this podcast. I like that. That is not getting old. But it is now, I think in the last month, for the first time, actually holding me back a little bit. There's three humans worth of work, really that should be done. And the stuff that I get pulled into is not necessarily the most important. It's like, hey, I was a standard subscriber and now I'm a pro subscriber because I liked it so much. But it's not. That subscription upgrade is not flowing through properly. That's a bug I just squashed. It's painful because those are your most excited people and you're kind of messing with them. So I get pulled into these things right away. So having some backup is starting to become clearly needed. And I think the goal is to just keep going until this doesn't work anymore, until the growth stops. I think. I don't imagine that it'll look exactly like this in five years. I think I'm going to continue to iterate and make it better. But simplicity really has been the key here, particularly among the demographic that likes the app. So I'm going to try to Just be focused about it and just have it work. Super well polished, works every time. No eulogies lost or anything like that.

A (21:23)

Yeah, one of the things, I mean, I already mentioned it, but you really are going against the grain. Not building out a team and raising capital, you're doing this all differently. You've also worked at venture backed companies. You've been a pretty prolific investor yourself. So how do you see growth and scale without necessarily raising capital? It's a really different type of process, I guess.

B (21:46)

Yeah, I think at its most basic level, because of the Uber win, I'm very lucky that I can afford to do this for free for myself for now, the better part of a year and have made zero. I mean there's profit, but it's been reinvested right away into other things. So there has been no Josh salary on this yet and probably won't be for the balance of this year. And so I'm lucky that I'm able to do that. And so if you can't do that, you're raising money. And really probably the primary reason I haven't had to is because of that. And so that isn't available to everybody. And I'm, you know, I'm not kidding.

A (22:22)

I would just. Yes, you're being modest and nice, but the truth is a lot of people raise money that have means and they do it for a whole host of reasons. One, that they believe that that can help them grow faster and two, they're just like to be part of the system. And you're kind of opting out of the system.

B (22:39)

I'm a little bit opt out of the system. I mean, look, I have been around Venture a bunch of. After Uber, I convinced myself that the thing you do after you make the hit record is you produce new records and went to become a vc. That's sort of the analogy that I think of. And I went and did that in a few different ways. Sure. That it was those things and not me that was the misfit and it wasn't. I'm just actually not at all a fit to be an investor. I'm too impatient. I don't like talking to people, I don't like caring about their thing. I'm talking about my thing. And I am bad at a whole host of the things you have to be good at. And I think I saw people, including yourself, who truly relished the opportunity to do venture and see how much they like it and realized that I feel none of those things. So I had to run away. So that's what I did. But I think in terms of opting out, I think it's not that I don't think VC can be extremely useful rocket fuel in the right situations. I think it certainly is. I think we'll have to look back in a few decades and really think about whether VC got too big, supply became too high of capital. And so it went towards companies that maybe are just businesses. They're not necessarily going for billions of scale, they're just businesses. And I think if I go out and I raise for this, it's going to be a whatever million dollar valuation. I think it's hard for me to imagine how I would be a home run for that investor. Like they're not doing this for a dividend, they're doing it to do the next Uber. And so I think I just sort of know from being on the other side of this that while I'm sure there are apps with the same end state that Wave will probably have, raising money as if it's something different, I just, I don't really want to do that. But the real reason, the bottom line is that the more people, the more investor dollars and right now we're at just me and zero. Basically the higher the bar for successes. What I have done so far is a VC failure and yet it's one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my life. And so you have to put those two things on the table.

A (24:50)

That's the part. Yeah.

B (24:52)

I'm Josh. I grew Uber from 0 to 3 billion in the city with a lot of people who worked as hard or harder than me. But we did that and that was amazing and that was a blessing. But I don't ever have to do that again. I could just make something that a small group of people think is interesting and if you even sort of game out, you can make a million dollars. Wouldn't it be better to make $500 million? Sure. But also the most almost guaranteed outcome of that second path is making $0. And so I just feel like being more modest about my expectations and where I truly think this can go, I'm not doing that. And by the way, I think the promise of the Internet is that something that small things can break out, we tend to all circle around big companies. But I think the promise of the Internet is more artisanship and being able to make something and finding a specific audience for it. And Wave is super generic by design. Like what do people record? And I could say I was hoping it would be xyzabc. It turns out it's meetings, but it's meetings IRL in real life. And it's just so funny what a blind spot that is for so many people when it is actually still the dominant mode for communicating and meeting people is in person. All I gotta say is life's most important moments happen away from your desk.

A (26:11)

All right, I wanna ask about you personally. You have obviously a lot of talents, you've had a lot of experience, but if you had to distill it down to one superpower that you think that you do this better than others, what would that be?

B (26:24)

You know, I think the technical appreciation and know how has been the common thread of nearly everything I've done. So when I started selling stuff on ebay, it wasn't that my access to inventory was good. It most certainly wasn't. It was that I figured out how to take nice pictures in a technical way. I figured out how to edit the colors, I figured out how to do some HTML to make the title bigger. In the description of the listing, this is 1998. And then that would sort of evolve to, I'm at IAC and we're selling funny T shirts. And I have a couple engineers who are. I'm working with to rebuild a website. And I have at least some demonstrable understanding of what they're doing. And that tends to lead to a more fruitful relationship. Many of my closest friends from over the years are from the engineering side, I think, because I've always showed that respect. I think it's where the action is, it's what I want to be doing. That's how I would present at that time, because it was true. And so I think it was being that story I told in the beginning about what I probably would have ended up more of an engineer if I had just paid attention in that class. And I've been thinking about that ever since. So I probably present that way. So that's a little bit of a superpower. I think there's a lot of examples of great engineers who learn the business side and do something like what I'm doing. And if you think about this as a bit the opposite, it's like I'm much more known for my work on the business side, but I've figured out the engineering stuff and now have this business. And so I'm sure that'll there'll be a lot of folks like that, but I think at this moment there's probably not a ton of examples like that.

A (27:58)

Got it. You've had some great successes. Uber and the like running a startup, I think you need a lot of resilience because it took you a year to get where you are. And it was. I remember you texting me like, you should check this out. It takes a while to get people excited. So tell me about where you feel like you get that resilient gene from and how you've kind of had to flex over the last year.

B (28:23)

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not because I'm a deeply fulfilled and happy person. I mean, I'm in many ways am. But I think anyone who does something big, and I'm not saying that this is big, but to start Uber or start Airbnb or really any of these big ones, and even the non successful, probably even more so than non successful ones, there's something not quite right with founders in those situations. And I'm not thinking about anyone in particular. I'm just thinking the relentlessness, the stick to it. Iveness, as a friend of mine likes to say, there's certainly something there. So all the, like, jobs I've had, I have approached with a. I think obsessive is sort of a technical word, but that's maybe the right. Just really aggressive pursuit. And maybe it's. I'm a dad of two young kids and my life is rather fixed to New York where everyone else in my family is. And so I'm limited in my freedom and flexibility. So I gotta have a project. But it really is more than that. It's just. I don't know, I don't know, it's like a chip on my shoulder or something. I've kind of made it work with sort of everything else, but I have really always felt I never did the zero to one thing. I never did it. I came into Uber. Uber was tiny when I joined, but it was not zero to one. It was very much one. And I was the one to end guy. And I've always been the one to end guy and I've really never been the zero to one guy. I really would like to do that. And I didn't think it would look like this. I thought it'd be much more modest, but I'm really enjoying it. And then so that the last point on that is, and I'm so sorry to my wife, I've always been like, okay, the kids are asleep. I'm going back in for a little more. I've always been that way. And I don't know, it's like it's a screw loose. It's maybe neurodivergent or whatever. But I just get passionate about things I'm doing. And what's really nice is that now it's doing it for me and it's not for someone else. Even though it's really the same kind of rigor and the same effort. And then just. Sorry, just one sort of little apostrophe on that is I don't have to spend any time at all demonstrating my value to anybody. I don't have to tell anyone what I've. What have you been working on? Because if you don't socialize your achievements, they will not be appreciated in the company. And I'm saying that with a mocking tone, but really it doesn't deserve that. That actually is a part of working with people or for someone and anyone out there who's listening. And you're at a startup, demonstrate your value. Not too much, but make sure you're properly illustrating, especially if you're remote, the fruits of your labor. Because if they're not appreciated, then they won't be appreciated. Good things done that no one know about are not as valuable. And so the absence of that, the only people that I care what they think is my mom. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Is the customers. Is the people that pay the money and are either happy or not happy. And I'm happy to tell you that they're getting less unhappy as it goes. Like, hey, you lost this very important grandma's eulogy. That doesn't happen anymore. And so the only people I have to please are the customers. I said somewhere else except for Apple. There's no one between me and them anymore. And that is a very good feeling. There's nothing I can do. There's no tweet I can send or weird joke I can make that can take that away. Well, that's also not true. But. But you get what I'm saying. It's just. It is me and the customers, if they like the deal and they like what I'm doing and it works for them and it adds value to their life in some way, then I win. And that's the whole game. And all the other stuff is gone.

A (31:47)

You can just be you, Josh. I love it. All right, so we are going to end this great discussion with our speed round. Okay, Speed round. These are just quick answers. What's a book or a podcast you're enjoying right now?

B (31:59)

I like the Making Sense podcast with Matt Harris. I like Smartless, which is a top 10 podcast. It's an interview show with funny people that I think are really Funny. I like all in. I'm a basic tech guy. I'm not afraid to say that I think I'm liking the host less and less over time. Except for Jason. I love him forever, but I still listen every week.

A (32:22)

If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

B (32:26)

Santa Monica or Tel Aviv? Next.

A (32:29)

Okay, what's your favorite productivity hack?

B (32:32)

Text messaging myself.

A (32:35)

Okay. I like it.

B (32:36)

I'm serious. It's not a good one, but that's it. That's all I got. I don't know.

A (32:39)

Okay, well, maybe Wave.

B (32:41)

Can I use Wave? Yeah. That's my hack. Yeah.

A (32:44)

All right, final question. Where can listeners find you and Wave?

B (32:48)

You could find Wave at Wave Co or in the App Store if you search for Wave AI. Or just call me and I'll send you a link or something. I don't know. Send me a text. My number is Wave company Too much.

A (33:02)

Josh, you're hilarious. This was so fun and thank you for joining us.

B (33:08)

Absolutely, My pleasure. Thank you for having me and putting up with me.

A (33:11)

You're the best.

B (33:12)

Thank you. Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about everyware. We're a first check pre seed fund that does exactly that. Invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everyware VC on LinkedIn and through our regular founder Spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.