Siddhartha Ahluwalia 0:36

Hi, this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia, your host at Neon Show and managing partner of Neon Fund, a fund that has invested at pre-seed stages in some of the best enterprise AI companies that started out of India and building for the globe like Atomic Work, SpotDraft, CloudSEK. Today, I have with me Palash Soni. Palash, welcome to the Neon Show.

Palash Soni 0:55

Hey, Sid.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 0:56

So excited to have you here.

Palash Soni 0:57

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 0:58

You built Goldcast, right? Goldcast started as an events platform and then you built a full-stack everything video site, right? Congratulations on the exit, right? Goldcast got acquired for $300 million by Cvent. You come from a tier-two city in India, Bhopal, right? You went to IIT Kanpur, then worked in ITC, worked in InMobi, came to HBS, didn’t complete your HBS. Right? And when you came out, you raised your first round in 21, 22?

Palash Soni 1:28

2020.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:29

2020. COVID had just hit and the category was super crowded, right? Hopin was there, which had raised like potentially like hundreds of millions or a billion dollars.

Palash Soni 1:40

Yeah, ended up raising a billion total.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:42

Yeah. So super crowded category, right? And I think you are the only one in that category that pivoted to a very successful and gave a very successful outcome to all the stakeholders. So maybe you can tell us about the journey, where did this entrepreneurial gene come from?

Palash Soni 2:02

Okay. Yes. So I was born and brought up in, not even in Bhopal, actually. There’s a small town called Sagar in MP. I cannot even ascribe a tier to it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 2:14

Is it tier 3 or tier 4?

Palash Soni 2:15

Tier 4, right? So I was there till 16 and then came to Bhopal by happenstance and that’s when I got to know about IIT and everything else. So got into IITK. But I think the entrepreneurial bug sort of comes from my mom because my mom, while she was in Sagar, she tried a bunch of things. We used to have a cow at our home. She tried selling milk. She tried doing like a snacks business. A lot of things to sort of supplement the income of the family. And now in hindsight, I can say those are not good markets. And so nothing succeeded. Sagar itself was like a very poor city in some ways. But seeing her in action kind of inspired me and sort of put that bug in me. So yeah, when I was in IITK, I was interested in startup from that time itself. When startups was not a thing. I think the only startup people knew of at that time was Flipkart in India. So I was always interested in startups. I kept in pace with what was happening in the world. And after that, I joined ITC. I spent 3 years there. And the main reason for joining ITC versus some other options that I had was it’s a hands-on job. So it’s technical, it’s managerial, but also you’re doing things and seeing the results of it. It had people management as well. So I spent 3 years there. And then I actually attempted a startup after that for about 9 months.

So I was full time for 4 months. Then I was at InMobi for 5 months overlapped. And in those 9 months, it became clear to me that I don’t know anything about starting up. So I had put down my papers actually at InMobi at that time. And I took them back and they were gracious enough to let me continue again. But that experience taught me that maybe I’m not ready and I need to learn a lot of stuff. So fortunately, InMobi was a great place to learn that. Because for the first 2 years, I was in… I was what you would call a customer success kind of role. So I ended up managing a large team of customer success managers. And I was very involved in the B2B sales marketing side. So I knew of the event space, the whole marketing automation space from that time. And then the next 2 years, I was a PM. And in this whole time, the startup bug kind of was continuing to bite me. And so I came close to pulling the trigger a bunch of times but could never. And so this plus the whole PM experience sort of taught me that, hey, maybe to build an actual software startup, you need to be in the US. Because as we were just chatting about it, there were no examples to follow at that time. SaaS, I think only Freshworks was probably the one…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:51

That all happened very late.

Palash Soni 4:53

Very late, right? Freshworks was still a small company at the time. So this was like about 2018-ish. So I wanted to come here and do a startup. But then when you were like 6 years out of school, the MS ship has sailed.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 5:06

Nobody will give you an admission.

Palash Soni 5:09

Exactly. And there’s no natural way for someone to come here if you don’t have family here. So B school was the only admission possible. And so I applied to some B schools. And fortunately, Naveen, who’s the CEO of InMobi, he’s also a great person, early inspiration for me. He’s an HBS alum. So he wrote my recommendation for HBS, which helped me get in. So yeah, I came here and I wrote in my essay that I want to start up. And some people said, hey, why are you writing that in the essay? Because that’s kind of counterproductive for MBA. But I don’t believe so. MBA is a great place to start up and we can chat more about that.

I came in with the intent of starting up. So I gravitated towards people like that, which is where I met Kishore, who was my co-founder. And he came from the Indian cohort of HBS. And then Ashish, who was my CTO, he’s an Indian American, but he was in my section. That’s how we met. So the three of us met.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 6:09

And Ashish was also part of HBS?

Palash Soni 6:11

Yes. So he was part of HBS, but he was an engineer before. So he was doing this MS plus MBA degree at HBS. And he was an early engineer at Jet.com. So he used the Jet.com exit money for MBA, which even he thinks it was not a great idea, but he did that. And so the three of us bonded together on this common desire. We explored a host of ideas in HBS. And finally, when COVID was coming around, full lockdowns had not happened at the time, but it was clear that there’s impediment to travel. You cannot really shake people’s hands. And I knew of the event space because I had done a lot of conferences at InMobi. So we decided to look at this space of virtual events. And at the time, I think a lot of founders doing it now will resonate. At the time when we thought of the idea, there were maybe just three startups at the time. Amin was one of them. Run the World was a startup that started here in GSB. And Hopin was there. And they had some kind of like a beta product at the time. So very early, so we thought, we can get in into this space. From the time we said we’ll get in to the time our first year ended and we could actually go and jump in. This space had become extremely crowded. Things moved so fast because COVID lockdown happened. Everyone wanted to do it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 7:29

Which month and year did your first year end?

Palash Soni 7:31

This was 2019 to 2020. So the timeframe I’m talking about right now is April 2020. So by mid-April, sorry, early May 2020, things were super crowded. And there were like five startups. Each had raised 10, 15, 25 million. So that forced us to make some decisions, which I’m glad we made. And again, there’s always an aspect of serendipity in this. So Serendipitously, one of our professors at HBS, he was on the board of another event tech company in the past. And he had written a case on why that company failed. So we reached out to him and that company that he wrote the case about that got acquired by Cvent eventually. It wasn’t a good acquisition. But the insight he gave us is that, hey, events is not a horizontal business. Every type of event is different. So you guys should focus on one vertical. And so we decided to focus on B2B at the time.

We thought it’s not possible to now fight as a latent trend, a horizontal game. And B2B is something we knew. So yeah, we started with this positioning of B2B virtual events platform. And then went in the market to raise money.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 8:47

Tell us about how tough or easy it was to raise the first round.

Palash Soni 8:49

Oh man, that fundraiser has never been easy for low-cost. But when we had this thesis, our goal was that we’ll work on this predominantly. But because there was no natural way to work full-time in the US, we’ll raise a small round and then go and build it in the second year. When we graduate, we’ll do it full-time. But things were moving so fast. When we went to investors, there were lots of questions. The space is so crowded. And then what will you do differently? And is there really a need for a verticalized focus solution? All of that, which I’m sure will resonate with lots of founders starting right now. But the main beef that investors had is that, hey, if you want to compete with these people, you need to raise at least a million plus. And if you raise a million plus, you cannot be a student. Because then what if you take a job? And then what will happen to our money? But we had no way to go full-time because we were on an F1 visa. So in this whole desperation, I called one of my friends here who was a founder of IITK Batch Mint.

And I asked him like, hey, this is the problem I’m in. And he said, oh, have you heard of O1 Visa? I was like, no. So he connected me to a law firm who told me that you have… Essentially, you can get an O1 Visa, but you have to raise money and get all of this before 15th of August when the fee was due for HBS second year. So that created an extreme clock for us. And then we started going and talking to investors again. But then no one was willing to again take a bet because they were like, hey, we don’t know what O1 Visa is. What if you don’t get it? I’ll give you… still have to give you money. So I remember… I distinctly remember a time when Kishore and I were walking around Charles River. It’s a beautiful area if you have seen that. And we were so sad because no one was willing to give us money. We were in this like chicken and egg problem. And we explicitly decided that let’s try for one more week. Otherwise, we’ll have to give up this company. It’s not possible to build it. So another serendipity happened at that time. I had met another founder of this company called Rapid SOS. It’s a unicorn. SOS. Okay. It’s a unicorn right now. And the final founder, Michael Martin, is also on HBS. So we had come for recruiting once.

And I just crashed that recruiting event to get to know him. So I messaged him on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I’m really desperate. Let’s chat. So he was gracious enough to give me a call. We chatted for five minutes. And he made four connections. And one of those connections actually knew Gaurav from Affore. So he was like, Hey, this is not the right round for me. But Gaurav might be interested.

And so he made an intro to Gaurav. And Affore guys is similar to you guys. They move super fast.

We spoke with them on Tuesday. Got the term sheet on Thursday.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 11:31

Wow, within two days?

Palash Soni 11:32

Within two days.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 11:33

So did you ask Gaurav what he saw to move so fast?

Palash Soni 11:35

He said the team, but at that time, I didn’t see it. Yeah, they are extremely fast. That’s their MO. And I think that’s their advantage as well in the market. So within two days, they gave us a term sheet and then wired the money by next week, actually. It was so fast.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 11:52

So that was from the second fund of 75 million or something like that, right?

Palash Soni 11:56

Yes, correct. Right, right, right, right. So that happened. And then we ran to get our own visa. Finally got our own visa and then quit HBS.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:05

Wow, that’s an amazing story.

Palash Soni 12:07

Yeah, very complicated.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:05

But how much did you raise in the first round?

Palash Soni 12:11

So we ended up bringing another institutional investor and then a bunch of angels to end up raising about slightly south of 1.5 million at a 5 million valuation.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:22

But as a first time founder, I always advise first time founders, right? Obviously, second time, you will build multiple companies in your lifetime, but make sure first time you survive. If you don’t survive, then you cannot optimize valuation. Zero into zero is zero.

Palash Soni 12:38

Yeah, that’s a very fair point.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:41

So you raised 1.5 at 5. Then what happened after that?

Palash Soni 12:44

So, we raised 1.5 on 5 and immediately hired four engineers, basically.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:51

In Boston?

Palash Soni 12:52

In Bangalore, actually. Not even Bangalore. It was remote at the time because this was peak COVID. Most of them were IIT Kanpur grads, either recent grads or fast grads. So we rushed to build a product. And we actually built a first version within two months, which was insane in those times. And virtual events is sort of complicated. It was very high stakes online. Things cannot go wrong. So we did our first event as a pilot in HBS.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 13:20

And HBS became the first client.

Palash Soni 13:22

Even though they were not at ICP.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 13:23

Two stories to share to you. So recently, we bagged an entrepreneur called Prashant Jalan.

Palash Soni 13:29

Yeah, I know him very well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 13:31

From Gikli, IIT Kanpur, 2015 back. And one year ago, we bagged Anuthi Kumar from HBS.

Palash Soni 13:38

I know both of them very well. Amazing. That’s great. Yeah, those are fantastic entrepreneurs.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 13:44

And for us, it’s mostly, though the founder has to be top 1%, they’ll figure out what to build. Anyway, the world is changing so far. Even the bigger companies don’t know what to do.

Palash Soni 13:55

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I was exactly having that conversation with Prashant yesterday. So great pick. You guys definitely know how to pick your founders. But HBS became our first customer. And that event was, I think it was attended by like 1000 current students and incoming students. And the platform like crashed and burned in that event. So hard that like 2 of our engineers had joined just 2 weeks back. And they were like, damn, where did I end up? Am I in the right place? Yeah, this company doesn’t work. Should I quit? So I had to do a lot of damage control along with my co-founders at the time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 14:32

And you were still in Boston?

Palash Soni 14:34

I was still in Boston. In fact, all of us were in Boston.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 14:37

And all 3 of you got O1 or only you?

Palash Soni 14:39

So the 2 of us. One of them was an American, so he was fine. So we have our O1, we have our first failure.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 14:47

And that’s what I also tell founders that don’t look for success in your first few customers. Yeah. Try to… It’s all Hillside, right? In Hillside 2020. Try to fail as hard as possible. Yes. Because the first few cars together as a team will join you very hard.

Palash Soni 15:04

Yes. Right. And I think that commitment I had underestimated because 3 of those people ended up staying till the acquisition. And it’s still there, actually. And turned out to be like amazing, brilliant engineers. So they stayed and we kept on trying to sell. And so we were… Because we were here new, right? We didn’t know anyone. We didn’t have a good network. So we were mostly doing cold outreaches.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 15:30

And who was your first paid customer?

Palash Soni 15:33

Yeah. So first paid customer was this company called Axonius.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 15:36

After how many months of raising this round?

Palash Soni 15:38

This was 4 months after.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 15:40

Wow. And at that point of time, the pace was moving so fast. Yeah. You might be wondering what the wrong I’m doing. Because I remember we invested in Airmeet in the same time, February 2020. Right. And by I think December or something, they were at 10 million ARRs.

Palash Soni 15:56

And we used to hear all of this, right? So if you imagine, we have made this insane decision, right? And to add complexity to this, I had a… At the time I quit HBS, I had a 5-month-old kid.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:06

So… So you were married. You had a 5-month-old kid.

Palash Soni 16:08

So… Yes. My wife is not working.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:10

People would be asking you if something’s wrong with you.

Palash Soni 16:13

Yeah. My parents were… They didn’t question it as much. But they thought that I was…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:17

And you had some backing, financial backing to sustain in Boston?

Palash Soni 16:20

No.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:21

The round was your financial backing?

Palash Soni 16:22

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:21

And you were paying yourself what? 5 or 10K max?

Palash Soni 16:26

Yeah. At that time, it was honestly the first 6 months we didn’t take any income. I had some money left over from my scholarship from first year. That’s what I was using to survive for the first 5-6 months. So it was pretty intense, pretty insane. And we were hearing all of these things, right? AMA is scaling this much. Hubilo had raised 100 million by then.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:44

Hubilo had crossed 30-40 back then. Yeah. People were just pouring money. They’re pouring in models back in Hubilo. That’s right. Other stories that I tell founders, don’t worry what your competition raise. If VCs ask you, Anthropic will kill you. Don’t talk to those VCs. Because ultimately, your customers will decide your future. And if you’re not delivering to your customer, no matter how much did you raise 50 or 60 million, it’s not going to help you. Like Hop is the classic case. Raise 1 billion and burn through that.

Palash Soni 17:17

Yeah. Seriously. And they had raised about 125 by then. So it was already very… It was de-stressing, right? Because we had zero revenue, zero customers. And then everyone is doing tens of millions of revenue. And so Exani as the CMO, he was Boston-based, very great guy. He took a bet on us saying, Hey, okay, we have an annual event. I’ll pay you for that. Let’s test it. And so we did that event that went successfully. But we were not getting as much traction as we wanted.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:47

How much did your first customer pay?

Palash Soni 17:48

So Exani has paid us $5,000 for that event. That’s it. And it wasn’t a recurring contract. It was just that event.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:57

I see all the logos on your website. Uber, Airbnb, OpenAI, Anthropic.

Palash Soni 18:05

That was a long journey from there.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:08

Going back to…

Palash Soni 18:10

Yes. So Exani’s experience taught us something that… I think B2B customers generally had a different need. And some of them we had anticipated. So I was very focused on integrations and analytics because they want all of that. So Marketo, HubSpot, things like that. And then the other thing that we learned in this process is that B2B marketers are already doing webinars. And the webinar space was completely stale. There was nothing there. So we wanted to build a product that could do big annual conferences online, but also webinars. So that helped drive the product direction at the time. But one thing we missed is the look and feel of the product. Because after Exani, yes, we were not getting as much traction as we expected. And when I passed through all of the customer conversations, I realized everyone was saying, Hey, your product looks ugly. People were telling it to us on our face. And I think I was probably a bit stubborn at the time to believe it. But then we said, Okay, maybe it’s time to change. So we had a contractor as a designer at that time. We asked her to work overtime. She turned around a new design in 2 weeks. And we turned around the platform in 2 weeks, which was insane in those times, you can imagine. So we worked day and night. And by the end of December, we had a new look and feel, new UI. And in that process, we built a bunch of very cool things. And the moment we showed it to customers, we could see that their eyes lit up. They want to use it, really use it. So then, within quick succession, we got like 2 or 3 more customers. One of them was Turing. The other one was BloomReach. So these are all people from some kind of IIT, HBS network. So we got those. And then an amazing thing happened at that time that changed the trajectory of the company. Our preceding investor, Underscore, which was the other fund, they were hosting their events on Goldcast. And the founder of Drift, David Cancel, he was a speaker on one of those events. So he was like, wow, this looks very cool. And he mentioned it in passing to Underscore that this platform is great. And so we got to know of it.

So Kishore, who was running sales, my co-founder, he hounded David Cancel, I think sent maybe 10 emails. Finally, he delented. He said, okay, I’ll introduce you to my team. And Drift became our first, I would say, big customer.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:27

And how big is Drift?

Palash Soni 20:28

Drift at the time, as a company, I think was a unicorn or close to being a unicorn.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:33

David Cancel is a legend. But if you can tell us about our audience.

Palash Soni 20:37

Yes. So Drift was the first, I would say, website chatbot. They kind of invented the concept of the website chatbot and very focused on the B2B marketer persona. So there were support things in that area, intercom, etc. But they were marketing focused. And David Cancel was the second time founder had already exited to HubSpot before. Legendary guy. So he built Drift. At the time, I think there were about like 400-500 employees, almost a billion in valuation. And so Drift became our customer. And what happened is that because Drift sold to marketers, about 1,200 marketers ended up attending that event. And it went very well, went flawless. And that sort of skyrocketed our pipeline. So from that, like sub 100 million, sub 100K in revenue.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:26

What was your sub 100K ARR?

Palash Soni 21:28

Sub 100K ARR, yeah. Because Drift was 50 and then everything was just like 5, 10, 15 here and there. We went from there to a million ARR within 4-5 months because we just got a flurry of inbound.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:42

And then did you raise your next round then?

Palash Soni 21:45

Yeah. So the moment this started happening, we could see that trajectory. So we said, okay, it’s a good time to raise. We went to raise another round. And the short story there also is that we were actually thinking, but while we were thinking, we were approached by 2 very blue-chip funds. And I can’t name them because of confidentiality. But they sort of pushed us into fundraisers. And this is something that I tell founders that you should never get pushed into fundraisers. Because if you’re not prepared and those things don’t convert, then you are caught unawares. And that’s exactly what happened. Those 2 funds were… We went to the partner meeting. So we were like, okay, we are all set. We are going to get money from this fund. And it will look great on TechCrunch and everything. And then suddenly news came out that Harpin had raised 250 million round, which in those times was insane.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:28

Yeah, it’s almost like Anthropic raving right now. 10 billion dollars.

Palash Soni 22:31

Yes, exactly. It’s kind of like that moment in those days of SaaS. So those 2 funds pulled back. They were like, I don’t think…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:39

They gave a term sheet?

Palash Soni 22:40

They didn’t give a term sheet, but we were almost discussing terms at the time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:43

Okay. There was almost a verbal…

Palash Soni 22:45

Yes, there was almost a verbal commitment. And we were doing partner meetings.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:49

And they were blue-chip in the US.

Palash Soni 22:51

Super blue-chip funds. And I think both of them have invested in Anthropic as well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:57

Okay.

Palash Soni 22:58

Talked about it. So they pulled back and then we were like, okay, damn, everyone knows in the market that they are looking at us. And they have pulled back and we are not prepared. We don’t have a proper presentation. So we then sort of were in this midst of a bad situation. So we went and then talked to a lot of funds. People are obviously scared of competition. Yeah. But then again, we got a break and Unusual Ventures came in at the time. So the partner at Unusual Ventures, Sandhya Hegre, she was an exec at Amplitude before. Very super legit person.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 23:34

She was based in SF?

Palash Soni 23:35

She’s based here in Bay area. And she also ran marketing for Amplitude in their pre-IPO days. So she knew this space. And she was like, yeah, you guys are doing something right. I’ll write you a check.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 23:49

That’s quite a lot of conviction when the market is going some other direction. Yeah. Betting your… And how big was the fund?

Palash Soni 23:57

Unusual, I think was about a $400 million fund.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:00

And how much did they put?

Palash Soni 24:01

They put $7.5 million in that round.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:04

At what post money?

Palash Soni 24:05

At $38 million post money.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:07

And you raised a total of $10 million.

Palash Soni 24:08

In that round, we raised about $10 million. So they put in $7.5 million. Then our Prorata investors put in some money. We brought in a bunch of angels in that round. And those were like very high-profile angels like Scott Belsky, Lenny Raczynski, Shaan Puri, all of those people. And then HubSpot also came in.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:26

How do you bring in such high-profile angels?

Palash Soni 24:28

So these were all intros from some of our existing angels. But by this time, we had enough trajectory.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:38

You were at $1 million ARR, which is…

Palash Soni 24:40

Not even one, honestly. When we raised the round, we were at $300,000, $400,000. But it went from like $0 to $300,000, $400,000 in a couple of months, which in those days was incredible. I think now it’s…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:49

What would be your story or advice to the founders? Because what happened to you back then exactly happened to founders right now, but at a much larger scale. Everybody’s asking founders, Hey, if Enthropic comes in your domain, what will happen to you? It’s already in your domain. Back then, Hopin was a giant in your domain. There are so many others from a smaller giant. So every VC would be asking you, every angel would be asking you, how would you compete with Hopin?

Palash Soni 25:14

Yeah, that’s a very great question. Honestly, I think the answer was kind of simple that B2B marketers have a specific set of needs. We will build a specific set of things for them that Hopin will not focus on because their major customers are big conferences. So they’ll always get pulled into that. And then we’ll build enough social proof to be able to get that flywheel on. And we had already won a bunch of deals against Hopin. So I think it is always important to show some wins against a big competitor. But the challenge that everyone is having right now, and people had at the time was that fault lines were not clear. Like, why should there be a B2B virtual events platform wasn’t clear to people, which is why we had to talk to like 50-60 funds at the time. And then finally…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:59

How much time did it take to talk?

Palash Soni 26:02

So because we were hot by then, we got a lot of inbound. So all of this happened, I think, in two months.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:07

How do you become hot?

Palash Soni 26:09

We became hot because of Drift, honestly. I think Drift and then so many customers coming in.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:14

Customer signal has to be had. It is learning for founders to become hot in the VC market.

Palash Soni 26:19

Yeah, customer signaling is super important. So the space was hot, right? It was clear that there’s a lot happening in this space. And people were looking for horses to back, right? And we had some good logos, some good wins against Hopin and everyone else.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:32

Wow. And then after leading the round, what was the trajectory of the company then?

Palash Soni 26:35

Yeah. So then we raised this 10 million round. So then we went on a hiring spree. We hired a VP of Marketing, VP of Sales and everything else. And then we ended that year at about 2.2 million.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:50

This is which year?

Palash Soni 26:51

2021.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:52

Okay.

Palash Soni 26:53

2021.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:54

So 0 to 2.3 million in the first year. How many months were there between raising the 1.5 and the 10 million?

Palash Soni 27:02

About a year.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:03

Okay. Yeah. For 2020…

Palash Soni 27:05

Actually, less than a year. I would say three and a half quarters.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:09

Okay. And so right now, you have raised 10 million by 2021. And then you’re at 2.5 million. What happened after?

Palash Soni 27:15

2.5 million by the end of the first year. And then this was the end of 2021, which you can imagine was a time of change. Like COVID was receding, markets were crashing. And so markets had started crashing, but it wasn’t like a full-fledged crash. And at that time, we were discussing that, hey, should we go and raise another round? Because we’ve had a good year. We got GitHub as a customer, which was about 150k DM. GitHub was still a customer. GitHub was still a customer, one of our biggest customers. So things were going well. And I think the advice we got from everyone was that, hey, you should maybe raise after three or four months because you can show more retention and things like that. But something in my gut told me that maybe that’s not the right answer. And in this time, I was also stuck in India. So I hadn’t gone back to India since I came to the US. And I had a small kid. I wanted my parents to meet him. So we went to India and got stuck because we didn’t have a stamp on our O1. So then I had to desperately fight to get that stamp somehow. And then I came alone to Boston because my family couldn’t just come trivially. And I stayed in a hotel for two months in a very sad hotel, raising this round, second round. And this was a very challenging time because markets had started full-fledged crashing. So you would remember that all the SPACs were gone. And people just didn’t want to invest.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 28:35

That was the worst time.

Palash Soni 28:36

That was the worst time. So I had a lot of inbound before that. So many VCs were reaching out to us all the time. And then they all vanished when I wanted to talk to them. So this round was also brutal. We, I think, ended up speaking with, again, 60-70 funds, but without inbounds. So I had to corral a lot of intros from investors, early-stage investors. And finally, again, one of our earliest customers was Turing. The founder of Turing, Jonathan Siddarth. He’s a great guy. We had built a good rapport.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:08

We are recording a podcast with him in the next couple of days. We recorded with Vijay the day before yesterday.

Palash Soni 29:12

Okay. Amazing. Yeah, those are great guys. Great founders. Very helpful. So again, in desperation, reach out to other founders. I reached out to Jonathan. He connected us to Westbridge. And Westbridge then ended up leading.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:23

How much did Westbridge put in and at what value?

Palash Soni 29:25

So Westbridge, that was a 28 million round. And Westbridge invested 23 at 118. And then 5 was Unusual’s ProData.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:34

Okay. Amazing.

Palash Soni 29:36

So we raised 28. And I think that was the last big round in all of B2B MarTech in that year. Honestly, there was no other… I think after that…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:45

This was what? Early 2022?

Palash Soni 29:47

This was the first, second quarter of 2022, that time. And I think the biggest… It was so bad for MarTech for the next two years that… I think the biggest round after that or noteworthy round after that was was Clay, honestly. I think Clay when it started raising is when MarTech sort of thought a little bit.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:04

What is your biggest advice on the fundraise? So let’s say as a founder, where are your strengths? Are your strengths storytelling? Is your strength data? Is your strength execution? Like what do you lead with in a fundraise?

Palash Soni 30:16

Great question. I wish I have a great answer to that, but I realize I’m not, I’m a good storyteller, but I’m not like Adam Neumann good. I cannot sell.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:25

Nobody should be Adam Neumann.

Palash Soni 30:27

Yeah, exactly.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:31

For example, if you remember from your earliest pitches, imagine that I’m a VC and this is for learning for the founder. But how would you in 30 seconds or one minute pitch Goldcast to me back then if you’re pitching?

Palash Soni 30:45

Back then?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:46

Yeah.

Palash Soni 30:46

At the time we were saying we were calling ourselves a B2B digital events platform that marketers can use to engage their audience through virtual events and webinars and use the engagement data to drive sales activity. So that was how we positioned it. And it was a very simple pitch, but no one was talking about it at the time. And the implicit challenge that we were having is that all these companies that were touted as competition before they were crashing and publicly crashing layoffs and companies getting shut and everything else. So people were questioning now, okay, should this space even exist? And our answer to that was that, if there’s one corner of the world where this space could exist, that’s B2B, because B2B companies have big marketing budgets. They have so many things that are happening always. They need to talk to their audience and what better way to engage them in cost effective manner than virtual events and webinars. And people are like, yeah, I don’t know. So it was a decent point. And I think we kind of proved it. But at the time, no one wanted to really believe it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 31:48

And what was the part of, this is a simple pitch, right? What was the part of your story that stuck with investors the most or they remember the most?

Palash Soni 31:56

It was that we were B2B focused. Because events industry, in the events industry, like B2B hosted events, like events hosted by companies.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 32:06

Companies for companies.

Palash Soni 32:07

Yeah, for companies for companies. That’s a very small percentage of it. The big industry, big part of this industry is trade shows. Trade shows actually, industry trade shows. So people were finding it hard to believe that this could be like a big, big market. But anyway, we found a backer who was willing to believe in that story. And we raised 28 million round. And then we did what everyone does after raising such a lot. We started burning money, scaling the team. And then our sales was working. So we went from 2.3 to about 4.3 million.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 32:45

By the end of that year too?

Palash Soni 32:46

By end of the year. So, 2.2 to 4.4. So roughly about 100% growth. And then we were collecting good logos. And I think in this whole time, we were proving that yes, we can consistently win good logos and our churn was not as high as all the other competitors. In this market, people were churning about 5% a month at the time. Our retention was still bad, I would say, but it was still in the 70s, gross retention.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 33:15

Because the industry was churning, it was no point for the product.

Palash Soni 33:17

Yes, exactly. Industry was churning, marketing teams were getting cut, budgets were getting cut. So when we got to 5, if you look from outside, in those times, if you say, hey, I went from like 2.x to 4.x, it will look great. But we could see that there’s something not working here. And I think our conclusion was that the market size is not big enough, which wasn’t a novel conclusion. Everyone had concluded that. But what everyone did in response was that, hey, we were doing virtual events, that market is shrinking, let’s do in-person events, which I think was the fatal mistake that a lot of companies made in this market. Because in-person events requires… It’s a different animal. It requires a lot of product to be built and the…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 33:57

So this is services business, not a product business.

Palash Soni 33:59

It’s actually a very intense product business. Honestly, there’s a lot of services as well there. But in-person events requires a lot of complicated registration, ticketing, integration with hotels, there’s infrastructure in-person, the iPads and everything else. So it’s a complicated business. And then again, more high stake than virtual events. So people are not willing to change as easily. And Cvent was the big person in that game. So we realized we can’t fight It’s actually. And if you just wind back to that time, 2022 end, ChatGPT had come in. So the narrative immediately shifted to AI. Everyone was talking about AI. And it wasn’t clear, what can this space do with AI? We can use AI to make virtual events creation easy. But because the question is whether virtual events themselves are valuable.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:50

They are needed or not. Because people wanted to meet in-person as much as possible.

Palash Soni 34:55

Correct. Exactly.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:56

So nobody wanted to meet each other virtually because it was 2 years of all virtual meetings.

Palash Soni 34:59

2 years of all insights. So 2 changes started happening. And this time we started focusing on webinars a lot more. And that was a very good decision.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 35:08

What’s the difference between an online B2B event and a webinar?

Palash Soni 35:11

Honestly, there is now that you look at it, there isn’t a big difference. But that time, if you look at B2B digital conferences, those were lots of bells and whistles. So it will take a bunch of time to set them up, branding, the complex registration, and then you’ll have sponsored area, all of that. Versus webinars, let’s quickly create, I’m doing something every week, I have a speaker, I’m just talking to them, very quick registration, integration into market or HubSpot. It’s like a set workflow. So it’s a lot easier, like a brittle down version. And people were, because they had not thought of this before, a lot of competitors were building a different product for webinar because needed a simpler product. Fortunately, we had made that call from the get go. So we were able to focus on that very easily without changing the product. And then the second thing that we did at the time was, we went and spoke with a bunch of our existing customers who were very successful, who were renewing with us. And one of them happened to be Zuora. And so Zuora was the crown jewel in the Googlecast logo pantheon, which wasn’t much at the time. And the insight we got from them and a bunch of other customers was that they were successful because they didn’t treat digital events and webinars as events. They were treating it as a content strategy. So the webinar itself is only part of the value, but everything that happens after that, you take that content, use it to fuel LinkedIn and Block and everything else that’s generating a lot of value. And that’s how they see it. So that was a light bulb moment for us. And this product build was being led by Ashish, my co-founder. So he was not focusing on the core business.

He was focusing on creating AI solutions. And what he built as a prototype was taking a video, a giant one hour video of a webinar, and then generating derivative assets from it using AI. So video clips was one. PDF or sorry, a blog was another. So we had some of this. We showed it to customers. And the GTM of this was being led by Kishore, my co-founder. So they were both involved in this. And I was focusing on the main business. And they came to the conclusion that, yes, this is the right thing to do. We should invest more resources on this. I further then, again, repurposed my VP of product, Lauren, who’s our CPO, into a PM on this product. So these three very important executives were focusing on this product.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:30

How big was the team of back then?

Palash Soni 37:32

At that time, we were, I would say about 100 people. And from the time we made this decision to the end of the year, we were about 140-150 people. So we were scaling rapidly. We had not really decided to cut the burn. And in that year also, we grew from 4.4 to about 8 million, which wasn’t a lot of growth. Insane growth.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:55

By the end of 2023.

Palash Soni 37:56

By the end of 2023, right. But we could see the cracks. The churn was improving, but it wasn’t coming down.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 38:01

Because of the new AI features.

Palash Soni 38:03

No, those AI features were still in infancy at the time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 38:06

It was just a pure event business.

Palash Soni 38:08

It was a pure event business with an AI add-on, which is half-baked right now. And then churn continued to happen. It improved because we were just improving the business, but it didn’t improve because of the product characteristics. And so we could see the writing on the wall that this cannot continue forever. We’ll hit a wall, we’ll die. So that was the time when we decided that, hey, we have to take this AI thing seriously because we’ll not survive. And so it’s a do or die. We cannot half-ass it. And what that really meant is that we had to commit to that product. So what that means is that, A, that product has to be a standalone product.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 38:45

Can you repeat what was this product?

Palash Soni 38:47

Yes. So the second product was essentially a video clipping product. You have a big video that was coming out of Goldcast. You could feed it into that product and it will find the key moments that you can post on social media, on LinkedIn.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 38:59

But so many people were doing it so this was a large prozoom business?

Palash Soni 39:02

Yes. So at that time, there were not many people because it was still very early. This was within the first year of ChatGPT launch. So there were a bunch of prosumer people who were doing it. The products were kind of half-baked at the time. No one was there in enterprise or in bigger companies. And so we committed to that product and building that product as a standalone PLG self-serve product, which we had never done in life. And the reason was that we wanted to lead with that product, show it, have people use it, and then arrive at the moment that this is the only company which is doing the creation of the product video as well. The webinar and virtual events, they account for about 60-70% of the content that’s created in B2B. So it has to flow from there into this product. And we were already doing it. Otherwise, you have to download a 5 gigabyte video. It’s painful. So we committed to that. And the natural conclusion after that was we had to cut the burn. Because this not only was a product change, but also a repositioning of the company. Because we could no longer say we are just a webinar platform or a digital events platform. So we did that soul searching of positioning, rebranding, etc. And we had to do a layoff to increase our runway.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 40:14

From 100 people, how big the team became?

Palash Soni 40:17

So by the time when we decided to commit to this fully, we were about 150 people. And so around 2024, like end of first quarter, we made a decision to lay off about 20-25 people. That will give us additional runway and give us time to reposition the business, build all of this stuff. Because at that time, we were also clear that it’s not just webinar and clipping product. But it’s webinar, we have to build something like a Zancaster or Riverside so that we can also capture that content. And then we have to build a distribution side also, which was something like a Vistia or a Vimeo to host the video. So we complete the full cycle. And hence, we started calling ourselves an AI-first video content platform. It was a nice story that we helped marketers run video, which is an engaging format. And we are the only platform to do that. So we had to prove this thesis. And we had half-baked stuff at the time. So we decided to let go of some people so that we can have some runway. And that was a painful exercise, which was made extremely painful. Because at the same time, my dad got diagnosed with cancer in that same week when I was doing my layoffs. So it was a very hard week. I did that. I did what I had to do. And I think that drove one emotional change in me. And I love my co-founders for supporting me on that. And the change was that we said, hey, we don’t want to play small here. If I’m not investing time in the family, then I want to create something really meaningful and big from this. So we were like, let’s commit to this. Let’s give it this year. Let’s grow slow, make sure this is done well. But next year, we are going all in. We are either going big or going home. So in that year, we did all of these changes. And we grew only from 8 million to about 11.5 million.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:08

By the end of 2024?

Palash Soni 42:10

End of 2024. But we could see changes inside our company itself. Like our win rates were improving. Our CAC had gone down. A lot of metrics were improving in ways which was clear. It was because of the product and the positioning. So at the start of 2025, we had about 15 million left. 1.5.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:26

And how much were you burning per month?

Palash Soni 42:28

We were burning… At this time, we were burning about 500k a month.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:35

Okay.

Palash Soni 42:36

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:36

So you had like 30 months of runway.

Palash Soni 42:38

Yeah, we had a lot of runway, but we wanted to go big. So we said, hey, let’s increase our burn this year. Let’s make sure we have just like five quarters of runway so that we can show great momentum for this year. And then raise money with enough…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:51

40-50 million kind of around.

Palash Soni 42:51

Right, right. So our goal was to go from 11 million that year to 21 million by the end of this year, which we thought was a great growth, which I’ll talk about how that turned out. But we then started accelerating and investing back in go-to-market. So we went back to 150 people. And in that time, we won a set of great logos. OpenAI came on.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 43:15

How did you win OpenAI?

Palash Soni 43:16

Oh, yeah. This is, I think, a good GTM for customers. So because we knew that our big game is always going to be enterprises, even though we didn’t have much penetration at that time, we started doing these field dinners in and around SF, New York, etc. And then we did a dinner in SF in which the marketing ops leader of Box came in. And so he evaluated us for Box. The deal didn’t go anywhere, but we kept in touch with him. We kept sending him emails and all the good vibes. He ended up being the head of marketing ops at OpenAI. So we didn’t even target OpenAI. We got an inbound from him saying, hey, we are looking for a solution. And that’s how OpenAI happened.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 43:58

That’s a great lesson for founders that, hey, don’t treat it as leads, treat it as a relationship.

Palash Soni 44:04

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you have ACVs of 20,000 or more, relationships is all that matters, actually. That’s how Anthropic also came in because Anthropic was an ex-customer, I think, maybe from Zora or one of those companies. And she went to Anthropic, became the leader of their digital events, and then brought us in.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 44:24

So not only your product has to be A+, but your relationship also has to be A+.

Palash Soni 44:29

Right. Exactly. And that’s a big lesson that I always take on. We had and still have very good relationships with our customers.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 44:38

It’s still a journey beyond that now.

Palash Soni 44:40

Yes. So 24, we are… Sorry, 25 starting. We have started pushing the pedal. We are growing fast. And we went from 11-ish million to 16.5 million within six months. So we’re like, okay, we are on track. We’ll get to 21. We have a great story, AI video content platform. It was truly differentiated even today. I don’t think there’s any product which does the whole thing, even today. So we said, okay, let’s go and raise money in July. And while we were preparing for fund raise, we got an inbound from Cvent at the time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 45:09

It was a complete inbound.

Palash Soni 45:10

The complete inbound, out of the blue. So actually, Nitin was the leader of CogDev. He replied on an email we had exchanged back in 2020 when we were just starting. And so I saw it. I said, okay, that’s great. We had no idea at that time. We were not looking to sell. So I went on a call with them. And I think the key of that conversation was that I explained to them that, hey, we are not a webinar platform. We are a full video content platform. If you’re looking to make a bet in this space, I would love to chat. You should know what you’re getting into. And you should value it appropriately. And I think they are a very, very sophisticated acquirer. So they knew everything. They had spoken with our customers. They had done the classic GLG research and everything. And they knew the landscape of the market. And they told us that they had…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 45:58

Also, yeah, another interesting story. The ex-MD for APAC for GLG, Ramad Vikram. He’s an LP in Neon.

Palash Soni 46:06

Oh, okay. That’s great.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 46:08

We were able to open a lot of doors for our portfolio.

Palash Soni 46:12

The GLG mafia is really strong. They have one more fund called Teamwork Ventures, which… Teamworthy, sorry. Teamworthy, which was also one of the potential investors for our past. Anyway, so these guys had done their research. They had identified two players in that space. So now I think…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 46:30

XXX Who was the second one?

Palash Soni 46:33

It’s part of the story. I’ll come to that. But I think the story or the only learning I can take from this is that we did two things right to get us to this moment. One was that we made this AI change. And it was very counterintuitive for everyone at that time. Because video AI is a whole different animal. It’s a whole different animal. And especially when there’s so much complication involved with the PLG motion and everything else. And going multi-product with such a small scale, which now I think is cool. But at that time, it was very… Everyone was telling us that, hey, going multi-product at 8-9 million era is insane. But we made that call because we were trying to follow the market. Tailwinds are the most important factor in winning. And second is we survived. We survived when everyone in this space was kind of dead or almost dead. Which is why Cvent probably looked at everyone and they’re like, these are the only people surviving. They’re doing something cool. They’re a good brand. And so we started engaging in the conversation with Cvent. And in parallel, we also kicked off a fundraise. So we were chatting with Cvent in that spate of conversations in the next two months, it became clear that this could be an amazing fit for all the reasons. But big reason is that Cvent already is an undisputed leader in the in-person events. And so their goal was to create a holistic, total events platform. And we were an amazing fit for them. They had incredible penetration in enterprises, which is where our growth would have come from. So all in all, a great story. And while we were going through this process, we had another company which got interested in us to look at the acquisition. So that created what I would call like a small bidding war between the two companies. And this time we had the classic choice that all the founders face that should we continue raising money? Which, in all honesty, was not easy. So as I said, Goldcast never had an easy fundraise. This fundraise was also equally hard. We were… I think in this fundraise, I talked to the most funds, about 80-85 funds. And again, we got interest because we had all these logos.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 48:45

16 million ARR is no mean feat.

Palash Soni 48:48

Right, right, right. But then people were looking at a growth rate, and then just the growth rate expectation had flipped. So people wanted to back companies only that were going from 11 to 30 or 40, which is easier said than done.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:03

Impossible, right?

Palash Soni 49:04

It’s very hard.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:05

It’s very very hard, right?

Palash Soni 49:06

Yeah. And I realized that, see, if that is the expectation, if it’s that ubiquitous, this market would not support it. I knew that. And we would have been able to raise if we continued, we would have found a backer. But we thought that maybe, okay, this is the time to make the decision. And then through this process, we also got a value which made a lot of sense, right? We knew that everyone will make money and be very happy from this outcome. But most importantly, it was a great outcome for our employees as well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:37

And how much at that point in time, the percentage of company was with a founder and team and how much was with investors? Oh, yeah.

Palash Soni 49:45

So as founders, we own 30% total. 60% was investors and 10% was employees.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:53

Understood. You are very fair for the team, right? Even after so much dilution, you had 10%.

Palash Soni 49:57

Yeah. Yeah, we had 10%. And I think a lot of that was also unvested options. So as I said, Cvent is a very sophisticated and great acquirer. So a lot of those unvested options were also in some ways honored, not directly honored, because there’s some complications, although they were honored, which gave a great incentive for the team to stay and continue contributing.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:18

Understood. Great. And I assume with the other player coming in, it’s okay if you don’t want to name it.

Palash Soni 50:24

Oh, yeah.

So that player is actually On24. So Cvent, On24 is a public company in this space, actually, about 150 million.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:31

So they offered you acquisition?

Palash Soni 50:33

Oh, no, sorry. That, oh, no, that other company I cannot.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:37

Sure.

Palash Soni 50:37

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:39

So another company offered came in and that was also an inbound?

Palash Soni 50:43

That was not a pure inbound. That was an intro from Westbridge.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:47

Okay. Got it. Having good investors from the cap table.

Palash Soni 50:50

Yeah, good investors who back you and believe in you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:55

Because the space was slow, Cvent initially, because they’re a PE backed company, right? They don’t pay high multiples. So initial multiple that they would have agreed to would have been like 10x of revenue or 12x of revenue.

Palash Soni 51:10

You know, it was surprisingly good because I think people realize that this is an interesting moment and for companies to make a bet in AI like quick enough with, you know, everything.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 51:23

You would have sold for 500 million because AI is everything.

Palash Soni 51:28

Yeah. Honestly, honestly, I don’t know because SaaS multiples are completely crashing right now.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 51:35

But your AI revenue also matters, right?

Palash Soni 51:37

Yes. AI revenue matters a lot. The other complication we had was that because we were selling the full platform, we were never able to say this is AI, this is non AI. But I think like everyone knew we had lots of usage on that product. You could actually go and scroll on GitHub’s page or Atlassian’s page and see that there’s content there. So there are lots of proof points. But I think the whole AI thing was the differentiator. Like we were truly a differentiated product by then, which we were never actually before as differentiated.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 52:06

So with the other player coming in the mix, how much did it influence the price going up? Let’s say, was it influenced by 20%, 50%?

Palash Soni 52:16

I think the price in that probably put it up by another 25%. Which at that scale matters a lot.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 52:23

Yeah, that still matters a lot.

Palash Soni 52:24

Matters a lot. But I think what it did more than that was it made the terms much more better.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 52:32

Because the other player was offering more friendly terms.

Palash Soni 52:34

Exactly. So it made the terms very friendly. And it also made sure that the deal got them. Because deals fall through all the time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 52:43

They know that they are the only one that they can drag it. And probably sometimes it’s also like a raider. Like kill the company by making it dry.

Palash Soni 52:53

That could always happen. And CWIN has an amazing track record. And they are great people and everything else. But who knows? And also, I think that that was a blessing in disguise because our deal closed on 8th of December. And about 15th of January, you would know SaaS rocks like no side, right? And Opus 4.6 came out. So it was great timing. And that whole thing pushed the urgency to create closer.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 53:18

And what was the revenue on 8th of December?

Palash Soni 53:20

About 19 million.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 53:23

So you had scaled pretty quickly.

Palash Soni 53:26

Yeah.

This year, last year, we scaled pretty well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 53:29

What a ride. I’ll say congrats again.

Palash Soni 53:31

Thank you. Thanks, man.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 53:34

If you had to change one thing during that journey, one decision, a few decisions, what would you change during the last five-year journey?

Palash Soni 53:43

Yeah, great question. So I think if I were to change one thing, I would have done that layoff a lot sooner and gone harder on AI a lot sooner. We built a good product, but I think we could have moved a lot faster.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 53:58

Yeah. And some of the things like a couple of things or three, four things that you think you did right that generated such a large outcome for everyone?

Palash Soni 54:10

Yeah. I think one thing that we did right was just focusing on one particular vertical, which was a natural decision at the time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 54:21

Being only B2B.

Palash Soni 54:22

B2B. Right. And I think there’s a natural advantage to doing that because you build enough, you build concentrated social proof. So similar customers, when they look at your logos, they get comfort. And you’re able to build those last mile things that really matter to the customer to make their life great, which was a great decision. And something that we sort of underestimated in the early days. I think it worked in our favor. The second good decision for us was raising that Series A. Because honestly, when we were raising that Series A…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 54:51

The $10 million.

Palash Soni 54:52

The $28 million actually. That A, I sort of unilaterally pushed the timing back, which really helped us close. Otherwise, we would not have been able to close that round. Also, the foundation was kind of shaky at the time. You’re raising for a virtual events company when COVID is going down. So I’m glad that we found backers. But if we had not, then we would not have been able to maneuver anything in this whole journey. The third thing that we got right was just the bet on AI in the right direction. Because everyone was and has to bet on AI. It’s not new. But betting in that direction of building the video platform instead of building an events platform was the right decision. Very counterintuitive at that time. But ultimately, we were listening to our customers in doing that. And it just paid off well. I think the fourth decision that in hindsight, I think we got right or I would say set of decisions or policies is that we were very team friendly in many ways. For instance, a lot of early employees, about 100, 10, 120, we gave them a 10-year resting or 10-year exercise period. So a lot of folks who had either been let go during the layoffs or had left the company before, they also ended up making a good amount of money in this because they didn’t have to buy their options and all of that. We were generally very good with severances and everything else, even when we were suffering financially. And so all of this created a great team spirit in the team. And we were able to fight through many hard times successfully and come out stronger. So we had many quarters where the retention was going up and up and then it died. It was very demoralizing for the company, but then the team got together, figured it out and ended it well. The fifth thing, and I’ll stop after this, that we did well, but again, one of those things that I could have done earlier is just defining and operationalizing company values. So we had done some company values work very early on. And that was done by the whole executive team together alongside the founders. And that just became a document which had 10 things listed. No one talked about it. It was not useful. And around this time of layoffs, I realized that the culture of the company is breaking despite our best efforts because it’s becoming bigger. 100 people, 100 plus is a lot.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 57:20

You stopped knowing people were first.

Palash Soni 57:22

Yeah, exactly. I stopped knowing everyone well and all that. And so we defined company values this time. And I said, hey, it’s just the founders who are going to define it. It’s not going to be a discussion because a company is kind of built in the image of the founders. So we defined the company values with what we want to see. So we had 5 things. One was called Go Mainstage, which was like very high ownership and showing that urgency that you don’t have when you are Mainstage. Second was called Go Backstage, which is like we want everyone to get their hands dirty. So we don’t want pure managers or like the leader should not be like, hey, this is beyond me. Everyone has to do stuff. And the third is which I think, and I’ll stop after this on the values. Third is what we call ACE communication, approachable, clear, and empathetic. So we wanted everyone to be direct with each other because we were remote. It’s very hard to read everyone’s facial feature. So we wanted everyone to be very clear, but also be empathetic and approachable in that time. So you’re not prickly and bad news is traveling fast and everything else. So that’s what ACE. And that ACE became these 3 values going backstage, Mainstage and ACE. They became like sort of watchwords in the company buzzwords because we operationalize them. We had emojis for them in Slack. We gave awards and everything else that worked really well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 58:45

And if you have to summarize, what was the thing that worked really well in your go to market?

Palash Soni 58:51

In a GTM? So I think one thing that worked amazingly well in a GTM is that we something we did actually after the customers were closing. So we had an unusually large post sales team. So we had a very healthy ratio of CSMs to customers. We had a support team. We had an implementation team, professional services and all of that. And we could have always argued to having a smaller team. But what that did was that customers felt supported a lot at every point of time. We also measured NPS like a religion, really. So we had an incredible word of mouth, honestly, at every point when we did our analysis of where we are getting pipeline from about 50% or more of that pipeline came from word of mouth. And those were not referrals where the customer is making an introduction. But we used to ask people like, Hey, how did you know about Goldcast? And they would say, Hey, so and so your customer told me about you when I was on the treadmill with them or something. So that I think we got really well. And something I take with me, keeping your customers happy is the best go to market strategy.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 59:52

Yeah. So just doubling down on your process. What was the process of post sales? And what are the team post sales that made you successful?

Palash Soni 1:00:00

Yeah, so the team process, it evolved a lot. And a lot of that was, again, feedback from NPS. We used to measure and look at every, I still, till my last day last week, I used to look at every NPS response and what it said qualitatively. But our process was that after a customer is closed, we’ll have a kickoff call with them, then we’ll implement them for two to six weeks, depending on the complexity of the customer. Then after implementation, they would go to a CSM. And the CSM’s job was to be like a subject matter expert. So they’ll tell you, hey, you should do things this way, that way, or you should do a poll to create engagement, those kinds of things, being the qualitative expert. And then we had a support team, about like 15 people in India, they were doing support. And then we had a services team. So in cases where there are big events, or teams are running out of bandwidth to do things, our services team would come in, like do things for them. Those were the five things. Then we even added an AM layer in the to do renewals and expansions. So it was kind of complicated, like a lot of stakeholders at the time. But we streamlined it to a way where customers always felt supported at every point, and they were never left hanging.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:01:08

You evaluated the entire world in the entire MarTech space. Would MarTech be the right category?

Palash Soni 1:01:15

Yes.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:01:16

Marketing tech. So how has this marketing space evolved? Today, if you have to define it, how would you define it?

Palash Soni 1:01:23

The MarTech space… Yeah, MarTech space is challenging for a variety of reasons. But I think the biggest reason is that there are only few things in MarTechh that are truly must-haves. And then the marketing teams themselves are a huge ups and downs. The company has raised money, you need to accelerate, big marketing expenditure. Then when things cool down, marketing is the first to go. So the retention in MarTechh is always subpar. That is a well-known fact, which creates challenges in fundraisers and everything else. I think what happened in MarTechh is because during COVID, when everyone had a lot of money to invest, and CAGs were through the roof and no one cared, there was so much noise and so many point solutions in marketing across everything, which ended up maybe hurting the customers, because customers were confused. They didn’t know how to make X from Y. Everyone looked the same, said the same, everyone is going to increase your pipeline. So it wasn’t really good for customers. And this was also one of the things that we always felt, which is why we wanted to build this one product, even if it meant committing to a massively multi-product strategy very early on. Because we thought that’s the right thing to do for customers. Otherwise, they’re so confused and so drawn down by so many tools. So right now, I think it’s moving towards consolidation, definitely. And with Claude and everything else, it is going to get consolidated more and more.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:02:42

So which would be the top 10 players in MarTechh, if you had to name today?

Palash Soni 1:02:45

Top 10 players? Oh, I think the undisputed king of my tech is always HubSpot and Adobe. They are the big ones. Then I would say Salesforce is there. Then right now, I think the big sort of startups that are to watch for Clay is definitely one. They’re absolutely crushing it. There is a Unified GTM, which is a BDR outreach platform. There’s HockeyStack, which is again, a customer of Goldcast. We are their customers too. And it’s in the attribution space, but they’re expanding. So I think those 3 startups are something to watch for, for sure. And then there are some existing SaaS incumbents like Sixth Sense. It’s become a must have in that stack. Gong is another one, which straddles the boundary of both sales and market. So I think those are the key players.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:03:37

Any upcoming startups that you really see in this domain?

Palash Soni 1:03:42

In my tech?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:03:43

Yeah.

Palash Soni 1:03:46

Weird question. I have honestly, because I have spent so much time in my tech, I am deciding to consciously not start in my tech again. But I think there are a bunch of video editing companies that are doing very well. So Mosaic ML, Mosaic is one of them out of India, doing video editing. That’s interesting. I think Unified GTM is a very interesting company for sure. What else? There’s a company called Default, which is building the end-to-end stack for inbound marketing. I think that is very, very cool. Then there’s a whole host of AI-first CRMs. I think that can be game changing. So something like Rocks is there. And they are taking different light field. And there’s Monaco. I think those can be very, very interesting because they can help crunch the stack.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:04:37

Yeah. And is acquisition the only path for a martech company? Because we have seen what happened to HubSpot share price.

Palash Soni 1:04:43

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that’s a great point. And that was something that we also knew, that we knew that IPO is not possible in this market. So acquisition is unfortunately, only a credible big exit path in MarTech. And there can be different types of acquirers. There can be strategic, there can be PE and everything else, but it has to be an acquisition.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:05:04

So how many $1 billion revenue companies, certain agency or are in MarTech that can really acquire a company or startup for $300 to $500?

Palash Soni 1:05:15

So that’s a great question. And that was also something that we looked at at the time to evaluate our options fully. So honestly, $1 billion plus revenue companies in the whole MarTech space, there are just a handful. There is Cvent at the lowest end of that. And then there’s the public companies, HubSpot, Salesforce, and maybe some bit of Microsoft Oracle as well. They play in that space too. But and Adobe, I think those are the big players. But the challenge is, and this is where founders can probably draw parallels to their markets also. Every market’s acquisition characteristics are determined by the players in that market and who are the players in those. So for instance, for what we understood is that in the likes of Adobe, Microsoft, those companies, those 2, they don’t move as much until it’s like a billion in enterprise value, because it’s just too small for them. So players like us are not attractive to them in general. And then there’s some private players like Cvent here, there’s Gong and Sixth Sense, etc. But Cvent is more of an exception here. Honestly, most companies would not have as much liquidity and as much scale and profitability as Cvent has. And then there are some peripheral players in this market like Zoom, Salesforce, etc. that could be acquirers. But there are not many, honestly. Beyond, I think, 3-400 million, you sort of start running into this problem that, maybe there’s nothing from here till a billion or 2 billion in enterprise value.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:06:47

So if you have to start again, and you would agree like a second-time founder now, that markets dominate the kind of exits that you have.

Palash Soni 1:06:57

Perfectly. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:06:58

So which are the markets that you think about that you might start in?

Palash Soni 1:07:02

Oh, yeah. Great questions. So I have been looking at a bunch of markets right now. But I think some things that interest me are healthcare services in the US. It’s a big trillion-dollar market and very broken. And I think my sense there is that I’m looking at AI roll-ups in those spaces, because it is also hard to sell into healthcare. So you rather own the asset and capture that. So healthcare is one. The second is real estate. Real estate is a massive services market. So a lot of scope to bring efficiency using AI. So those are 2 where I’m spending the most time. Other things that are interesting to me are things that involve design. Because NanoBanana is so powerful, you can have a sort of JSON that describes this interior design of a house or anything else, and then render it in NanoBanana. Perfect. It is an amazing tool. So I think it kind of opens up the scope for custom manufacturing or customization and products and things like that. So that’s something also I’m interested in. Yeah, that’s what I’m looking at right now. MarTech, video, all of these things, I’m kind of non-compete in most of those. So I’m not looking at that. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:08:13

And you would not want to double down in the domain that you’re already playing.

Palash Soni 1:08:17

I’m already playing. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, MarTech has that perennial problem of low retention. AI doesn’t change that, really.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:08:27

Yeah. And with a lot of tools now coming in, let’s say because of AI, the plethora of tools can be created overnight to reach out to customers in different ways.

Palash Soni 1:08:39

Right. That is true. And which is also, I think, something that founders have to think. For instance, one thing I tell all the time is I’m very bullish on Seabank because they have their mooring in the physical world. If you go to conferences, there’s a lot of hardware in the conference that’s used. They are into hotels and everything else. So you cannot cloud code your way into replacing Seabank. It’s a must-have. But if it’s a pure play product, just reaching out to customers, etc., there’s always an argument to be made that maybe you can do it in cloud or it can be recreated easily, which is definitely a challenge.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:09:16

Yeah. So you have great logos on your website. Did you very specifically went after certain logos?

Palash Soni 1:09:26

Yeah. Yeah. So we had a very strong go-to-market team, I would say, both marketing and sales. And obviously, Kishore is an incredible go-to-market leader as my co-founder. What we did well, one of the operational things we did well is that we realized that retention for us falls off the cliff at 500 employee mark. So we knew, we dissected the business in three verticals. There’s a SMB, which is less than 500 employees. And we shifted the entire go-to-market operations of that to India. So we had AEs closing those deals in India, actually.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:10:07

How many were those deals?

Palash Soni 1:10:09

So ACV in that segment was about 17-18k. Okay. And we actually said, we don’t want to increase this even in this segment. We just want to focus on retention and make the CAC lower. Then the second segment was mid-market, which was 500-2,000 employees. And employees was a proxy for the size of marketing team also. So there, the ACV was 35,000. And then enterprise is 2,000 plus, which is where we knew we had a lot of runway. And enterprise was about $65-70,000. And what happened is when we made this AI change, we saw the win rates increasing in that order. Enterprise was the highest because they were the ones who felt the pain of disconnected tools the most. Then mid-market, then SMB. So very… And then in every market, in every segment, we had a named account list of about 300-400 accounts that we would go after.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:10:58

So between the 3 founders, how were you splitting responsibilities?

Palash Soni 1:11:02

Yeah. So I was the CEO. I was spending most of my time with product and customer success. And then Ashish was the CTO. So he looked after tech. And Kishore was the CRO or COO. And he used to handle sales and at some point marketing as well.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:11:17

And you also lead the fundraise.

Palash Soni 1:11:19

Yeah. CEO always has to do the fundraise. I think that’s what has to fall with the CEO.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:11:26

So you would say having a holistic founding team was very critical for such a large outcome, right? If one piece was missing in the founding team, it could not have been there.

Palash Soni 1:11:38

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, at least if you look at me and Kishore, we look similar from outside, right? Both HBAs, business guys. But we had very complementary skill sets, interests, and temperaments. So Kishore is very fast-moving and very sales-oriented. So he’s a great storyteller. He’s great with customers, love him, everything else. And I was more patient and more long-term thinking. So we complemented each other very well in many ways.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:12:06

Got it. And let’s say if acquisition, you would not have taken acquisition, what route would you have taken then?

Palash Soni 1:12:15

Yeah. Great question, Sid. So I think I made a bunch of flow charts at that time because I knew that this is not that moment we can just pass by. So if an acquisition did not happen, if let’s say both of those acquirers fell off, then we honestly thought that we’ll spin off the digital events, webinar, product, and business, and we’ll sell it off. And then spin off the video AI product into a separate, much smaller company. Because I think that product standalone, if we had the opportunity, could have been built a lot faster and then sold in more markets, not just B2B. And the technology was moving fast enough to be able to do that. So that was option C for us. I think lately, I’ve been thinking, okay, option D presented itself after the acquisition, which was cloud. So with cloud code and what it can do, we could have built a bunch of things. So for example, it would have been possible to compete in the in-person event space now, because the process of building the product is not a bottleneck anymore, which used to be in the past. So I think we could have probably stayed as a standalone company and then inflected a growth rate by building more products.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:13:24

Which was your highest ACV customer?

Palash Soni 1:13:27

Our highest ACV customer is, I think, Capital Group. So Capital Group is a big asset manager. It’s one of the top 5 asset managers in the world. They own lots of funds and they invest in credit and everything else. It’s like Wellington Management or the Canada Pension Fund.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:13:50

And did that customer reach 7-digit ACV or was it…

Palash Soni 1:13:54

So our highest ACV before the acquisition was about 320-ish K. Then just after the acquisition, we closed another customer in the payroll space, Paychex. Paychex was about, I would say, it was a 3-year deal totaling about 1.2 million in TCV. So 400K. We are just about to close a million-dollar ARR customer. But it will happen in a month.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:14:19

Understood. Yeah. So why I’m asking this is, how do founders move from 6-digit? Because initially, the 6-digit was also…

Palash Soni 1:14:29

Oh yeah.

Initially, even 50K deals were like a godsend for us.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:14:33

How did you as a company navigate from when 50K was impossible to going 100K, then 300K, 500K and now a million?

Palash Soni 1:14:40

I think it’s all a question of sequential social groups. So first, you have to do some black magic to get your first set of customers. There’s no set playbook for it. It’s just hassle and grind. And then just have the logos and just make sure that the first set of logos are supremely happy with you so that they give you a case study. They’re willing to get on camera with you. They’re willing to give you a testimonial and reference and everything else. Then you can use that to get more and more customers. And then at every jump in scale, you have to do that black magic overshots, which in our case, Kishore was doing. He’s an incredible salesperson. So our first true mid-market logo was MailChimp, actually. Before that, we had all the companies which were like 500 or less.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:15:24

And they were paying 5-10K, 5-10K.

Palash Soni 1:15:25

Yeah. 20K ACV, very, very difficult life. So MailChimp came in at like $80,000. And that sort of opened our eyes that, oh, wow, this is amazing. Then we got ThoughtSpot and a bunch of similar companies as customers.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:15:41

And what was the GTM to get MailChimp and HubSpot?

Palash Soni 1:15:44

So MailChimp was honestly like a complete outbound, like Kishore. It’s a complete outbound. But because we had already had a bunch of high-flying startups, even though smaller, it gave us a little bit more warmth to reach out to them. Once you have one or two logos in that space, then you can get more logos. And I think our first big enterprise customer, honestly, GitHub, which came in, fell into a lap by chance early on. But then we used that GitHub thing to get GitLab and bunch of other customers. So every segment requires its own social proof creation. But the main thing to concentrate on was just like a set of 2 or 3 customers, you can just somehow win in that segment, make them super happy, use them to get more customers.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:16:26

Your website is amazing because it looks like a 100-million-dollar company.

Palash Soni 1:16:31

It does. It does. We do a very good job of marketing because we have to market to marketers. We always had to be an extremely…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:16:37

How do you build that culture and that kind of talent in the team that you look like that?

Palash Soni 1:16:43

I think it’s partly because of our ethos as a founding team. We really believe in the value of brand, especially in competitive spaces. Software, we feel good software. Alternatives are not a problem in software. So then what will people anchor on? They’ll anchor on brand because product is commoditized.

So we knew that. And then we had an amazing team, our CMO Kelly is incredible. All of our second-in-command marketing leaders are incredible. We put in a lot of effort to recruit the right team and invest in brands. So we just… In that whole process of repositioning, rebranding, I think we did about 20-30 interviews with leading CMOs to understand how will they describe us and things like that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:17:26

Thank you so much, Palash. It’s been an amazing journey. Probably we’ll want to do another version because time is limited.

Palash Soni 1:17:34

There’s one more question that I thought of an answer about.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:17:37

Sorry about the book. Like what book?

Palash Soni 1:17:40

Because there was one book that I read in about midpoint of the journey that sort of changed my perspective. It’s called The 5 Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni. And it sounds like a very gimmicky title. But it’s an incredible book. Anyone who has crossed the 10 employee threshold, right?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:18:00

How did it change you?

Palash Soni 1:18:01

It changed me because it made it clear like, hey, what is the exact role of the CEO? So for example, just to give you an example, one of the temptations is to get in between executive misalignment and try to solve it or try to manage it. So if 2 executives, let’s say the product leader and engineering leader are arguing over something, then you get into it and micromanage that and try to not have that conflict happen. And I used to do that all the time. I don’t like conflict. If 2 people are fighting, I would try to stop them. But what used to happen is I would just… Because of me, they’ll stop. But the emotions are suppressed. The arguments have not come out. And it will lead to dysfunction in a bigger way. So I stopped doing that. We used to have executive meetings where people are fighting for 30 minutes. But then at some point, I was like, yeah, this is right. They should just get it out and then be done with it. So that’s one big change that I got from this.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:18:51

Any other change?

Palash Soni 1:18:54

I would say this is like one big one. The other change that was there is just holding people accountable. So I think one thing that I always realized is… Or I always thought is that, hey, if someone is not hitting their goals, then I would always try to find reason for like, okay, maybe the market wasn’t good. Maybe they didn’t have things in control. And sometimes it was true. But accountability means accountability. If you’re a sales leader, if you have a number on your head, you have to hit it. You have to get close. Otherwise, you have to be held accountable. So I think I became very good at holding people accountable. Despite the fact that it was probably sometimes not clear whether what factors influenced it. And in the long run, I figured that is the right strategy. Accountability at the top level construct is super important.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:19:40

Any other book that you would recommend besides this?

Palash Soni 1:19:43

Oh, I think one book, which is not like a specific founder type book, but in general, a good book for every business leader to read is this book called The Moral Animal. It was written in the 90s. And it’s about evolutionary psychology, like why humans think the way they think. But it helped me just become a more empathetic human. Now I can like look at some behaviors and say, yeah, this is because how we evolved over the last 300,000 years.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:20:09

No, thank you so much, Palash. This has been amazing hosting you, learning your journey.

Palash Soni 1:20:13

Thanks man.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:20:15

Having this candid discussion.

Palash Soni 1:20:17

Thanks for having me. We had fun.