Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, and the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today the CEO of Voxel AI, Vernon. Welcome to the show.
Vernon O'Donnell: Thank you so much for having me, Jake. Really appreciate it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, excited to have you here. Um, I know that we've known each other a little bit from prior experiences and helping you fill some roles in other organizations. Voxel AI, great company. We like what you're doing. Um, what was it that led you to Voxel?
When I started this podcast, I had this vision to go behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder in Silicon Valley, where I'm born and raised. And weekly, we dive deep in the trenches to find the wins, the losses, and the lessons learned with the hopes that it helps you run a better startup. But here's the thing. If you've gotten any value out of these conversations or been inspired at all, hit the subscribe button. And I get it. Your podcast feed's probably overflowing. But to stay up to date what's going on in Silicon Valley, stick with us because at the end of the day, we're all just trying to build something that matters. And we're better when we do it together. So hit that subscribe button and follow us wherever you find your podcasts. Now, let's get back to the show.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, there were a couple of things that brought me to Voxel. Um, not being the founder, but having a lot of passion for the space. The the team had built great tech and they were looking to scale up. And so they wanted to have somebody who had experience scaling organizations, which luckily I do in my background. Um someone who understands the supply chain ecosystem, you know, a lot of work in that area. And then conveniently I also have background in computer vision. I used to do that in the sports tech space as well. So it was a great alignment of business need where it was about how to build a product strategy and go to market strategy to to scale the phenomenal tech doing it with somebody who's got experience in supply chain and computer vision. Um, and then lastly, I had, you know, when I took the job, one of the big draws for me was just the personal connection to the mission and who we are and what we're doing as a company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Well, you know, oftentimes where you're at today stems from what happened in the past, whether it's how you were brought up or what, you know, experiences you had that shaped who you are today. Let's go back a little bit to you. Where did you... were you from originally? And what were some of the experience that really shaped you into becoming a leader of companies?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah. Yeah. I am a Hoosier in Indiana kind of through and through connections across the state. Was born South Bend area in the north and then when I was really young my parents moved to Bloomington and then subsequently to Indianapolis, and so I spent my entire childhood in Indiana. And we'll come back to this, I'm sure, very um family that worked heavily in industrial and agriculture backgrounds right, you know, manufacturing, agriculture jobs, logistics jobs. Um you know people who actually physically do a lot of really important work.
Um I joined the army when I was 17, helped pay for college, so went away to to do that and and um you know, went to college. I was in the reserves, went to college for a couple of years and then I was deployed to Iraq in 2003. And I think the most important part of that is one, it was a very formative experience for a 23-year-old to serve in combat certainly, but I had the good fortune of showing some competence at a pretty young age at a pretty young rank. Um and so got exposure to some really impressive leaders, right? It was a, you know, a two-star general named Raymond Odierno, ended up becoming the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, right, the the single highest position in the US military. And um I was on his broader kind of team.
And so had exposure to real leaders and real situations and that was very formative for me. And you know, I think that that'd be like the first thing I'd point to is having grown up in a very grounded family and a very grounded ecosystem, then getting exposure to people who are truly like some of the best and greatest leaders in American history um at a very young age is what really set me up for the career that laid in front of me.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Any other leaders that come to mind because we're shaped by many different people as we grow up that might make sense to share?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously the military experience was formative, but I worked for a guy who's an amazing CFO and you know, of all people, the CFO of the company told me this. You got to find something that gets you motivated beyond just kind of the economic impact, right? Like that's great, but doing something that you're passionate about that gives you energy, whether it's the problem you're solving or the space.
And that was one of the other big draws for me coming to Voxel. I have, I mentioned my roots and you know my family was pretty significantly impacted. I had a cousin who you know slipped into a grain auger. He lived, but he suffered significant injuries to his leg, lost part of his foot and spent months in the hospital. And it wasn't just that first injury. It was all the residual years of physical therapy and you know everything that comes after. And it was entirely preventable, right? And so like, like that was a big thing when I was thinking about taking this role and coming to this company is it's a mission that also matters, that helps a very underserved part but vital part of our economy. So that's a big draw for me too.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really cool. Well, there's a lot of great people and teams that come out of Indiana. You know, got the Fever as well, which is pretty incredible and you know, all sorts of legends. So, you know, you're currently based now in, is it Chicago or...
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, I spend a lot of time um and we could go back and talk about all the great teams like the Fever and the Pacers. I've maintained my Indiana roots deeply from a fandom perspective. We're big Caitlin Clark fans in the house, but even bigger Pacers fans. So, but I do, we do live in Chicago, my my family and I. Um that said, I spend a majority of my work time in San Francisco. In fact, I've got a small apartment there and Voxel's based there. We're right right kind of downtown in the SoMa neighborhood. And um so I spend as much time as possible being very hands-on with the team. So a lot of back and forth between the two cities.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. Cool. Yeah. It's I was just watching the Pacers game with my little boy and you know we don't really have a team in the playoffs right now cuz we're Warrior fans, but it was, we're rooting for the Pacers. Incredible last game.
Vernon O'Donnell: I would, I don't know when this podcast drops, but just so everybody knows what Jake's talking about, we're talking about game one of the Eastern Conference Finals, which was a top 10 sporting moment of my 40 plus years as a fan. So pretty, it was pretty, pretty fantastic for sure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it was, it got our adrenaline going. It was a lot of fun.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um, well, let's talk a little bit about Voxel. So it's an AI company, an AI-driven safety monitoring company for workplace hazard detection. Um, it's... you're leading it today and you also have extensive experience in product go-to-market strategy and M&A and in your current role um, with leading the team, aligning the market needs, corporate strategy, really taking the company through its next growth stage. So excited to kind of dive into what Voxel is all about. Why don't we take a moment there, tell us about um the problem that you're solving in the market today.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah. So, there's fundamentally a few different problems that that we're addressing, but at its core, workplace injuries are still a significant problem. Um, and not just in kind of second and third world sorts of countries, but right here in the US as well. So, there's hundreds of billions of dollars literally um lost in workman's comp claims every year. And I say lost because it's, that's all related to injuries that certainly no one wants to go through, but also the company has to manage from a bottom line perspective. Um significant amount of hours lost and days lost due to injuries and due to workplace accidents, many of which are preventable.
And I think most significantly is just the loss of life, right? There's still, you know, hundreds of people who die every year on the job here in the US. I think that's overlooked so frequently, right? Is it's not one of those things where it's a big splashy news story, but the human impact is really significant. And so what we're focused on is how do we actually use AI in a way that's demonstrably good, right? It helps companies save costs by by mitigating their bottom line hit from a workman's comp or OSHA fine perspective. But it's also helping employees and actual frontline workers stay healthier, stay safer, stay on the job, make more income by working more hours, you know, losing less time to injury and loss of, you know, loss of work, and then frankly sending people home safely to their families. Um, I think it's just really a frequently overlooked thing how dangerous some of these jobs can be that are just taken as commonplace and taken for granted from a day-to-day perspective.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because AI is really helping automate a lot of processes within a company, but that's digital. This is really physical.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, you're in the world and AI is helping you in your physical locations. Talk to us a little bit about that because you know, if you're a company, a big organization and maybe you're, you know, manufacturing or building things and there's a lot of people moving parts around and you know, on vehicles and whatnot, like how does the technology, how is it implemented and then how does it actually help?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, it's a great question Jake, we, I frequently talk about it through a couple different lenses right. So the type of AI we're building is applied AI, right? It's AI that has, to your point, and you nailed it, connection to the physical space. It isn't about um, and I say this somewhat glibly, but it isn't about helping a college student write a paper better. It's not about trying to synthesize notes into an outline. Um that's a useful form of AI in its own right, but it's a totally different thing than actually using this to drive physical outcomes and drive industrial outcomes.
And so the way we work is we leverage existing cameras. So we're very agnostic in terms of the types of cameras that are out there. The good news is most every industrial site has cameras in place for a variety of reasons. We connect into those and then we've built an entirely set of AI models that we then run all in the cloud. So pull that video stream, we run our models. We're searching for a variety of different types of issues. Ergonomics problems, people overreaching, improper bending, vehicle safety, speeding, no stops, near misses, collisions, um protective gear, people wearing their hard hats and safety vests. So, not only are they wearing them, are they wearing them when and where they're supposed to be wearing them? And, you know, are doors properly secured? Are spills detected? A whole host of different problems.
And it's not just enough to see it. Um, that's useful and to some extent, but the most important thing is how do we then surface that back to those end customers, to those end users, so they can then actually take action, right? Is it a matter of putting a new highly visible stop sign in? Is it painting a clear demarcation on the floor for a no pedestrian zone? Is it actually in in near real time going out and securing something that was unsecure? Right? And so I think that's the beautiful part of this is it's about augmenting what's happening and making better what's happening. It's not about replacement. Um it's not about automation from a perspective of taking a bunch of data and building an agentic model. It is truly about I am a shift supervisor. I'm trying to manage throughput. I'm trying to hit my customer targets and revenue targets. Um, but I know it's important to keep the team safe. And so if I can surface things quickly and readily and help them do that, it's really powerful.
And then the last thing I just say, and I know I get passionate here, Jake, so sorry for that, about see... it's the ubiquitous coverage, right? Like today, safety is so predicated on someone walking the floor or an insurance claim filed or some sort of loss running out, all lagging and it's all anecdotal because it's just you're constrained. You can't have eyes everywhere all the time providing context. And so what we find is so frequently the problems we're seeing and the risks we're seeing are occurring to a degree that is shocking to our end customers, but it's also happening, you know, in the middle of the night when there's not a manager there or, you know, on a shift change when there's a significant crossover of workers in a constrained space. And we can parse all that out and help them in those sorts of really like high-touch, high-risk moments of time without it being someone standing there with a clipboard just writing out observations.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, is it capturing video that you can then run through like an LLM or something and then it can tell you based on what we're seeing here's a risk you want to take a look at, or is there you know any other technologies within computer vision that's mapping things a different way or what's kind of... what is the, what's the user experience like?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, so the, I'll answer the last question first. So the end user, they have an application, either a mobile app on their phone, you know, a web app on their laptop, but it's also mobile responsive, and we're surfacing trends. We're not just surfacing trends in terms of the types of incidents or the types of risks. We're helping them actually like locate them in a facility. So we have heat maps that say here's the likelihood of it occurring, how often it's occurring, when it's occurring, and so that way they can get really specific into we have a problem with, or you know improper bending at this specific dock door. We need to change our workflow pattern to to solve for that. So we see the problem, we surface the clips of those problems back to the customer, we provide trend lines, we provide heat maps, and we provide recommendations all within the product. And then there's also a collaboration ecosystem. And so if a regional VP sees an issue or sees a trend going the wrong way, they can share it down to their distribution center manager or their plant manager who can then share it down to the shift supervisor with recommended actions. And so you can provide that closed loop.
And I think that's so often what people forget when you're dealing with enterprise customers. AI is powerful as a tool to see a thing or understand a thing, but they actually need to close that loop off and get something done with it. Right? And I think that's where we're really focused on is taking the really powerful models that we built. And we have a set of proprietary models that are focused on really discrete problems like ergonomics or body posing or PPE. And then we have larger models that we, again proprietary, that we built focus on industrial environments and the types of facilities. And the marriage of those two things is really the secret sauce for why the AI works as well as it does to the issues we're identifying.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's the biggest surprise you've seen that your technologies captured that you didn't really think would be an issue of safety that you're bringing to your customers' attention?
Vernon O'Donnell: Two answers to this. The first is we see some shocking things and it's fascinating how often they're identified, right? Like we'll see a problem where there's a bunch of er, a spike in ergonomics risk in the middle of the night and in a weird part of the facility and you're like, "What? Why are a bunch of overreaching incidents occurring?" Right? And then you actually go... and this is the beautiful part about having a visual product. You can then go into the heat map and see the examples and the representative clips that the AI's identified. And what we found in this particular scenario is that a couple um you know industrious workers on the overnight shift were a little bit unwilling to follow the normal flow. And so one of them was just pushing heavy containers through the railings on the scaffolding and the other gentleman was below him just catching them with a full arm extension. So, you know, we saw it as an ergonomics issue, but there's a much bigger problem there, some pretty severe injuries, something goes around. And we've got dozens of those examples.
I I do another one that was fascinating where we had a major customer where they saw again a lot of obstructions, obstructed exits, obstructed floor, a lot of ergonomics issues tied to that, some vehicle safety issues tied to that. And what became clear was actually that their standardized load/unload process um was actually not being followed. And what that was doing was creating a lot of clutter on the floor. The clutter on the floor was then creating vehicle safety issues as people were maneuvering around those, which then in turn created ergonomics issues because people are adjusting to kind of like forklifts whipping through. And so you see all of these through a safety and risk problem, but it goes back to a systemic process issue not being followed, right? And so that's, we see these sorts of examples all the time where we're helping to focus on the environmental health, safety, and risk management, but it's just so intrinsically tied to operational success.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I mean, if I'm a leading a company and you've got, you know, hundreds or thousands of employees, and you know, we're getting insurance claims all the time because someone got hit by something or their back went out on the job or whatever it is. Like, how do I mitigate that risk? So, if you're going to a company and you're presenting or pitching your product and how it can help solve those problems, who are you selling to in the company?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, you're selling... it's a couple different personas, right? Um, and one other thing I'd say that last point before we move past, I think we're still in a labor constrained labor market, right? Particularly sorts of like warehouses and manufacturing sites. Like they they have a hard time maintaining and sustaining fully staffed um teams, right? And then turnover is really high. We have some customers that are north of 100% annualized turnover, but I think typically you can assume 40, 50%. So there's just so much employee turnover, so much employee thrash, and there's also such constrained employee resources. Keeping trained workers healthy and on the job is critical. Like that is a thing that is just really fundamentally true um that our customers understand. But I think even more than just our customers is what their actual end workers understand too.
But to go back to your question, Jake, on who's buying, it's typically one of two major groups, you know, health, safety or or risk, right? Um, and sometimes that's tied to loss prevention and asset protection. It depends on where risk and health and safety sit in an organization. But ultimately the people responsible for helping to ensure that they have low recordable incidents, they have a great safety record, they're not losing trained workers to injuries, where that responsibility sits, which typically in large companies is that risk and safety team um, or operations itself, right. And we find, I was pleasantly surprised when I came into the business how many of our end users and how many of our buyers are actually on the ops side of the house. They're responsible for the P&L and they're respons... so that means, you know, if they have a bunch of claims, if they have a bunch of fines from OSHA and a bunch of recordable incidents, it's going to hit that that ops team. And so they have a vested interest to to drive down basically wasted cost um that isn't driving business outcomes, that isn't going to the team members. And at the same time they're responsible for productivity. And so we see about 70% of our users, buyers sit in the ops side: supply chain, VP of ops, RVP of ops, presidents for small business, and about 30 to 35% in health, safety and risk.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: How big is this market?
Vernon O'Donnell: It's massive. Just in the US alone, workman's comp claims by the last reported information was $175 billion. Um so that's just US, just workman's comp claims. And you start thinking about the significant risk from an OSHA fine perspective. Um some of the general liability insurance risks, the slips, trips and falls in retail stores and parking lots, and it ends up being a hundreds of billions of dollars problem and just you know, admittedly the largest economy in the world, but in just one one market over the globe it's over a trillion dollar problem that we're helping to solve. So it's a significant... So if you think about it from that angle, and then if you think about it from the bottoms up, every manufacturing site, every distribution center, every warehouse, every regional fulfillment center has these sorts of problems. These are not new or novel issues. And that's in the order of hundreds of thousands of sites in just the US and north of a million sites globally. So both ways you're talking about, you know, really significant market opportunity.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I like the fact that you don't have to go in and pull out security cameras. You can just reuse what they've already installed and there's not a lot of hardware manufacturing. It's really just your software, right? That's great.
Vernon O'Donnell: That's right. Not requiring capex, not requiring somebody to physically go install cameras, not having to deal with a third party integrator plus a camera manufacturer. The simplicity of it, of coming in and be able to say, "Hey, you have cameras. Great. We can deploy our models." And then even on day one, we're starting to return some insights. But by day seven, we're typically at pretty pretty close to full maturity and we really understand the layout of their facility. And the AI just continuously learns at a facility level, and so it just gets better and better.
Um, I would just share really quickly. I love sharing this one. One of our customers has one of their facilities that has analog cameras. We were even able to digitize the analog video and then run our models on converted analog. And so, so it's great to be able to tell a customer, "Hey, if you have analog, fine. We can still help you. Like, you don't have to go out and spend tons of money to upgrade to a cloud camera or connected camera system. You can still make your workforce safer right now with what you have."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Talk about some of the companies you've worked with or you're working with that we would know, that the listeners would know about because I think that's important to know what's the buy-in been like and who are some of the bigger brands that are actually seeing some value out of your product.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, absolutely. So today we, you know, I'll get to some of the specific brands here in a second, but we have 13 Fortune 500 companies um that are customers today. Four of which are in the Fortune 50. So some really big customers. Um as every one of my fellow CEOs and heads of marketing that listen to your podcast can empathize with, some of them are very protective about us naming them, which is frustrating. You'd think they would actually understand that it benefits the entire ecosystem to be able to talk about that, but so be it.
Um, but some of our customers today, we have Albertsons, the grocery chain is a big customer. We're in multiple distribution centers and working with them on expanding that footprint. Dick's Sporting Goods is a customer. Um, you know, same thing. We work with all the major cold storage, Americold, US Cold, um, we're in multiple manufacturing facilities, Berry Global, um, is a great example, a lot of tier one auto suppliers, um, Carlex Glass, a variety of others. And so you know we see a lot of big enterprises. Um we definitely find that cold storage is an area we started with, so we have a lot of density there, but really even this, the kind of entire US industrial ecosystem um is center mass for us. One of our biggest customers Nippon Sheet Glass, as you can imagine from the name, Japanese company. They're our first global customer. So we're live with sites with them in Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, kicking off sites in Italy and Germany as well. So we're starting to take this abroad, but the beautiful thing is it was our customers pulling us there versus us trying to go out and create that motion ourself.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Wow. You know, I'm a huge fan of sports and we talked a little about that up front, and I've got a couple little kids, and you know, we go to Dick's all the time to buy products and um you know, Dick's Sporting Goods is a great company and I think just, they just acquired a company I think too. Um fairly known brand for sure. Um from your... like what problem specifically are you solving for them? Is it kind of the same thing?
Vernon O'Donnell: Same core, right? And um you know I'm with you. I have four sons and so and we love sports and there's a lot of sports in the family. And so we are probably at Dick's 10, 12, 15 times a year. I mean every season there's new shoes and new cleats and new whatever, and you know, you got to get all the gear and everything. And they run a pretty great operation. So I was excited to get that win. Um but you know, they're not dissimilar to the same problems you see in other distribution centers, right? It's ergonomics problems creating musculoskeletal injuries. It's vehicle safety challenges, making sure people are operating forklifts, driving at the right speed, coming to full stops, avoiding near misses. It's PPE, making sure that people wearing their hard hats when they're supposed to, you know.
And the, and one thing I would say about them particularly, but just a lot of our customers in general, we see some that come to us and they have big problems, right? They have a lot of risk, they have a lot of injuries, they have a lot of recordables, and so they have an acute pain they're trying to solve. Um, but we also have a lot of customers that have great safety records and for them it's about, "Hey, we actually put an incredible premium on our team member experience and so how do we make one of our most important assets, our human resource, even more effective?" And so it's been fascinating to see because I would have assumed you'd be a lot more people who have a lot of risk are the primary buyers, but we see kind of a barbell effect: really safe companies buy, and then you know companies with a lot of risk buy as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I could see the human resource side of that being really interested in it. Um, you know, as a company, you guys are growing. You've raised, you know, a significant amount of funding. You are now, um, you know, growing and scaling. And, you know, hiring is a critical part of any company. Um, what are some of the lessons that you've learned in your career or even at this organization that have been something you could share with others that are, you know, at a scale up, that are growing, that are hiring, that are needing to make the right choices, but also have a process that seems to be working for you?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah. Yeah. I've had the benefit to work in a variety of different kind of arenas for all like really great people. I worked large public companies early in my career at Grainger and Apollo Education Group and then um went to private equity backed software companies at STATS Perform who was owned by Vista and then venture capital at project44 and who worked at great venture firms like Goldman and Thoma Bravo and Insight etc. So, I've been able to see things from a few different angles, right? Early stage venture, growth, private equity, kind of more um majority recap, and then even public companies. And the reason I say that is there's a few things that are true across all of that.
Can never compromise on talent. It's really important. And you will get pressure, and I get immense pressure all the time. "Hire faster," right? "You got, we're scaling. We're going 150, 160% year-over-year right now." Um so, we're definitely growing and we're growing rapidly. People want to hire and they want to fill in the teams and, and what you'll see is when you push to hire too fast, you compromise two things. The bar lowers, right? You bring in B talent, the B talent then hire C talent. Um and you lose culture, right? Because you're hiring so many people so fast, they haven't had a time to amalgamate and understand the culture. And so I am adamant that I don't care if it's slow, we're hiring, right? And I know that can frustrate people, but I've been a part of businesses that hired too fast in too many different directions and it tipped the culture over in a really negative way.
And then two, incredible transparency about the culture that you're building and the company you want to run, and making sure you're hiring people that fit that. Because you may hire great people, but if they're a culture mismatch for any sub, subset of reasons, they're not going to stick. They're not going to sustain. Um, and so being really specific about that has been something I've learned kind of both through trial and error and mistakes throughout my career.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. It's critical. I mean, it's good to have a vision, a product, but nothing happens and grows well if you have the wrong team or you bring in the wrong people. So yeah, we're a big fan of making sure that when we're working with companies that they have a process. And we work with hundreds of companies, so we see like the patterns of what the really successful companies have done consistently to get the right candidates. And it's a few little things. It's not a lot, but it's a big difference in in how that company grows versus the one that just doesn't have it figured out. So um yeah, really cool to kind of hear that from you.
Vernon O'Donnell: I'd actually be curious. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too, Jake. I'm the guest today, but I'm a big believer... I'm sure we all have experiences of interviewing places and they're selling you, and so they, and then you get in and it doesn't match with the what you were sold. I am very transparent and frank in the recruiting process because I want people to come in eyes open about the fact that if any company was perfect, they wouldn't be hiring more. They would just be kind of, you know, seamlessly and frictionlessly scaling. So, I always like to be open like, "Hey, I'll use Voxel as an example: major market opportunity, awesome tech, we're growing really quick, we have really good customers, but we've got some challenges, right? Our go to market motion before was rocky. We're starting to get that figured out, which is great. Um there's certainly work we need to be able to do more at scale from a um pipeline generation perspective." And so I always like to be open with people about that. Like we have awesome tech, awesome customers, growth rate is good, but there there are problems we're solving. And I want people to know that so when they come in they're helping to solve the problem. They're not losing like 30 days of productivity to be like "I was told something different and now I have to adjust."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I know we, I think it's important to first and foremost have a good story to tell about who you are, what you do, why it'd be great to work for the company. But the transparency is... I mean you're going to vet out the right people too. Like if you share something that's a challenge and they think that's a risk, then that might be too high of a risk for them to join and maybe they have another opportunity. Um, but you're also, you want that, you want to be able to get the right people that are up for the challenge and not just you're going to have to always manage them and make them happy and over, you know, protect. It's like "here's who we are, here's what we're doing, does this work for you because we like your background." And that transparency I think shaves off mistakes down the road.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yep. That's great.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So that's a great process to go through um as a company today. And you talked a little bit about your go to market motion or sales strategy. Is that the biggest challenge today or what's, if you look at the company and the operation and kind of where you're headed? What's, where's the chokehold?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, I think we're... I mean look, every company's better go to market, always and forever. I think, I don't think I've ever talked to a CEO, like if they're being genuine with you, who loves every part of it. That said, I think our head of sales has done an awesome job getting the go to market into a really good spot. The thing that gives me both a sense of dread and a sense of excitement is we're at that inflection point where we've done our first million-dollar deal. We have a couple more million-dollar deals in the pipeline this quarter. Um, we've got two Fortune 10 companies that are late stage in the pipeline. And so the thing that I'm stressed about is how do we deploy 10x the pace and 10x the scale that we're deploying today, right? Because that's really the name of the game. I don't... it's like, sure, we're going 150% on a but on a small number. Um good, we're at a good number. But you know, we're not 200 million of revenue. How do we maintain scale? How do we maintain execution excellence with 10 times the revenue and 10 times the, which is what we're looking at in the pipeline right now. Which is really exciting, but just kind of also at the same time you've got to have a sense of dread of like "are we doing all the right things to be ready for that?"
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know one, one pattern we've seen is that with in particular in AI companies is they are hiring much quicker and much larger with go-to-market teams than traditional startups. So, um, I don't know if it's they see a path and a market they're trying to carve out, so they just have to run as fast as they can to get there and more manpower on the sales team will help them get there. Um or if it's just they, you know, they've got the funding and they want to execute that maybe sometimes even before they have the product built, which is interesting too. So, it's an interesting situation that we're seeing.
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah. I I'll give you, look, I think a lot of this is column B and C, which is I think people are well-funded and they assume funding just goes equal hire fast. I I think that's a flawed mindset. Product market fit first, right? Making sure that you have the right product tuned to the growth and you've done that work, and then you scale regardless of your funding situation. I also think a lot of those companies are going to um... they're not in the same sort of heavy applied AI industrial space that we're in, and the switching costs are going to be really low, and so those people are probably waking thinking "I don't have a hugely differentiated product. I'm probably just some sort of... I'm leveraging an open source model or I'm built on top of another um you know kind of very publicly available or sublicensed LLM. And so the key here is go take as much market share as fast as possible because I know that I'm not inherently selling a differentiated product." And I know that that's my view from the outside and I see it a lot. And you see a lot of these companies they can raise a seed round or a series A round and go hire and then you... crickets, right? Because they don't get the actual revenue traction or the market traction in a sustainable way. Um, at least that's, look, that's probably a more negative slant on it. I just, I think in general, the best way: be sure you have a clear product market fit. Be sure you have a clear grasp of the buyer persona. Then spend the money. Spend it fast and scale, but do those first two things because then your sellers are productive and you're not just kind of throwing bodies at a problem and hoping that you can break down the wall by throwing enough resource at it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes sense. As you continue to build your company, do you have sort of technology patents or a moat around what you're building so that you're able to maintain your position in the market, or what's that look like?
Vernon O'Donnell: We got a couple patents pending. Um, so we're working through that process now. Um, we definitely feel like we have a pretty strong technical moat. I alluded to it before so I won't unpack it too much, but because we obviously have patents pending, not completed, but the kind of two-tiered proprietary model um that we've built, and being really discrete on the problem but also focused on the environment, has proven out that our precision rates are significantly higher than what you would typically see. When we've had independent parties look at the models, and customers and buyers and investors, um it comes back that word "upper decile" even regardless of size in terms of our accuracy and our precision, our recall and how we're thinking about those things. So that's a technical moat that we are invested in, and then we're building kind of the patent ecosystem and the patent moat around, around that approach.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes sense. Well, it seems like there's a ton of opportunities out there for multiple players in the space whether you have a moat or not, with the numbers you were talking about a trillion globally. Um, what are you excited about as you continue to press forward in 2025 with the product and the company?
Vernon O'Donnell: Yeah, we definitely see competitors, which is good, and the good news is we're seeing some pretty large logos announce products in our space. And I was telling the team, they were nervous about that. I'm like, "No, that's a great thing." Like there's a... it's a great thing to see a major software company announce a product in your environment because one, they're going to generate more RFPs and RFIs market demand. And we, if we have conviction and belief that our product is superior, that's going to help us win in the long term. So definitely seeing that, definitely seeing the market pick up.
Where are we focused on in the kind of future um from a near-term perspective? As I mentioned, globalization is key. We're seeing that happen more and more frequently. Um and the, that, that desire to pull us into new geographies and new spaces. We're really focused on scaling the team up. I know I cautioned on that earlier, but we're I think we're past that point. We've established a pretty clear sense of product market fit. So we're looking to 2x or more of the sales team here in the next few months. And then the ecosystem around sales. And then we're also in the process of bringing in some more senior engineers. Um we have a great team. We have a really sharp team. And we're at that point where we need to start bringing in some folks who want to scale, right? And not just solving the problems, but have been through that arc of, you know, 10 million to 100 million sort of revenue and 70 customers to a thousand customers.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Got it. Well, that's exciting. I love what you're creating. I mean, you're talking about products that are easy to implement, that are saving companies millions of dollars from safety objectives, and ultimately, you know, it's AI-driven. So, you've got technology that's doing the work that people can't always do when they're sleeping or watching a monitor, and being able to help the company, you know, stay protected as it grows, too. So really exciting to see where things... Vernon, I want to thank you for your time here today, and it's been great listening to your story and hearing where things are headed, and can't wait to catch up with you, you know, as things continue to progress. And to the listeners for listening, always appreciate your time and spending it with us. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. I can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, Vernon, the world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. Follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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