Batter, Bytes, and Sequin with Eric Goldman

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to From the Ground Up, the podcast where we delve into the inspiring stories of entrepreneurs and their journey to build successful startups. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and in each episode I'll sit down with the founders to learn about their experiences, the challenges they face, lessons they've learned, and the insights they gain as they turn their dreams into reality. Today we'll explore the story of Eric Goldman, who co-founded Sequin, and how he and his best friend Anthony Accomazzo turned a simple idea into a thriving business. Eric and Anthony applied their experiences to create Sequin, a company that helps developers build integrations faster. Their journey from waffle vendors to co-founders of a successful tech startup is a testament to the power of friendship, resilience, and entrepreneurial spirit. Stay with us while we discuss the challenges and triumphs he faced while building the company, the lessons he's learned along the way, and his vision for the future of Sequin. You won't want to miss this insightful conversation with a truly inspiring entrepreneur.

Here we are in our next episode of From the Ground Up, the story of a founder's journey. We're here with Eric, who is going to walk us through his background and what he's done in terms of his career, where he's at today, but also more importantly the startup he's working on today. And uh before we kind of dive right in, let me just give you a little background of Eric and then we'll kind of get into the heart of what we're going to be discussing in his journey today. So Eric attended the University of Southern California on an academic scholarship in Economics, thought he was going to be a lawyer, but instead followed his curiosity into new media and online startups. And from there it led to Tel Aviv and his experiences there. I will let him dive into that as we go. But what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit more about you before we start diving in here Eric. And um, let's talk a little bit about you in your early years from say 5, 10, 15, your first job that you had and, and what that experience was like as you grew.

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so I mean growing up my father always had me doing work around the house to kind of earn a couple bucks. And my first real job came when I wanted to buy a car. Uh my family wasn't just kind of like giving me a car, and I wanted one. And so I always loved technology and working in uh just stereo equipment, cameras, this was before the year of the iPhone. So I just went and uh I got a job at Best Buy, and that was my first ever job to, to make money to buy a car. And I really quickly kind of grew the ranks at Best Buy. I was, I was like 15, 16 years old, and I was in the department that sold cell phones and digital cameras. And I quickly became one of the managers that was like scheduling people twice my age and kind of setting up the department to sell all of these different phones and digital devices. And I just kind of followed my passion. I found like, if I was selling something I enjoyed using and I liked working with, like I could persuade other people to buy it. And it was a fantastic experience.

Um and so I've been working ever since then. I worked in kitchens, I worked uh I, I washed dishes and found myself like cooking on a chef's line. I went and started working as soon as I went to university. I started working at the admissions department at USC, so I started selling people on coming to the college. And, and I also met my co-founder at USC. That's kind of where Anthony and I met, and we just started selling waffles. We started all these little businesses. Uh and I think just building something and doing something that created a service for someone else, I've been doing that my entire life, really. It's something I learned from my father and it's been a value of my, my family for a long time, that you kind of need to do good work and you need to help other people. And that's always just kind of been ingrained in me since I was young.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Now I know that Geek Squad at some point was part of Best Buy, I believe. Were you part of that or were you before that acquisition happened?

Eric Goldman: So I was at Best Buy as Geek Squad was getting kind of built into the, into the service. So you could begin to sell a digital camera and sell a Geek Squad um kind of support plan with it. Uh and I'll never forget the actual, the actual... there's an acronym at Best Buy called CARE Plus, which is their, their methodology for selling. Which means like you go up and you Make Contact, you Ask the customer about what they want, you Recommend a product for them, and then you Engage with them on why it's going to solve their problem. And then the Plus is you add your own detail to it. But that was such a formative experience um selling cameras, and this is also the year when the iPhone had just come out. So we were selling iPhones every day all day. And Best Buy was just being approved to actually sell those devices. So uh it was just a wild first job, and, and really got me into the process of selling uh, selling products really.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know as a startup founder myself and understanding that you know you have to sell things that people need and want, I think it always comes down to understanding your customer. More importantly, you are kind of selling in any part of your experience as a startup, whether it's to clients or to your internal employees, whatnot, and also to your founder on your, co-founder as well, it's a lot of discussions that happen there. Now, you talked a little bit about Anthony, your co-founder. And you're now in college, let's dive a little bit deeper into that. I know it's hard to find co-founders and, and, and how exactly did you meet?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so Anthony and I got another classic co-founder story. We met the first day of university. He lived across the hall from me. We met the very first day. And um we became really fast friends. We have very similar interests and we were both just super nerdy about computers. Anthony was constantly like building and rebuilding his desktop computer. He was like one of the only guys at university that actually brought a desktop computer with them. And I was just super curious about what you could do with computers. I think one of the big things for me when I got to college was just being exposed to you know, really rapid high-speed internet, the ability to watch any movie or piece of content I wanted to online. And so Anthony and I just instantly started hacking and building projects together. And we just became really, really fast friends.

And so over time we just kept working on different projects. And one of the things that Anthony did is he got one of the first ever Square card readers from Jack Dorsey when Square first came out, I think we got one of the first 100. And um we didn't know what to do with it. We first got that Square card reader because we thought it would help us settle our debts between one another, that I'd be able to like take my credit card out and pay him for the burger we got for lunch. But then we learned about you know like a 2.3 percent fee and the 30 cent charge and it just like wasn't gonna work out. So we realized we needed to do something with it.

So for my junior year of university, I actually went to the London School of Economics and Anthony came to visit me. And they were selling, there were all these street vendors selling waffles or crepes or just sweet you know baked goods. You could smell them from miles away, you didn't really need to market them, they marketed themselves. And they could command a pretty good price. So we just convinced ourselves, "You know this is what we can do with a Square card reader. We can go make waffles and we can go sell them to students at USC." Because at night especially, around the USC campus there aren't that many restaurants, you're kind of in the middle of South Central. There's not like a lot of restaurants. All of the vendors that are open, all the food trucks, none of them would take credit card. And it's USC, so it's a ton of kids walking around with their parents' credit cards but nothing to buy. So we just started selling waffles with this Square card reader.

And it immediately like, we were just selling as much batter as we could produce every night. The real reality was how much batter could we make and carry with us, and how long could we run the waffle makers before they blew a fuse at like a fraternity house. And so it was a really, really fun business. And I think what I learned in that is Anthony and I could be good co-founders to one another, we could... we were really good friends but we really just had a shared, we just loved doing something and building something, and the game of like "could we do it better, could we do it faster, could we figure out how to sell more waffles?" And I think from that moment on we just realized we cannot only be really good friends, but we liked kind of working together.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, yeah. Was that during the time where you could set up shop, send out a Twitter, and see people come to wherever you were selling your waffles, or was it more "yeah a fraternity house is having a party and we're gonna just set up shop here and sell a bunch of waffles to a bunch of fun partying fraternity people"?

Eric Goldman: Exactly. No, it was a little bit of both. It was we first started kind of selling in front of other people's parties. But it was the year of like the um the Kogi food truck. Twitter was a good way to just begin to like share where you were. And so we began just kind of setting up the table just not even just on the way to uh like the fraternity row, or just around the campus. And uh people would just find us and come buy the waffles if, if we had batter left over. And we were starting to build a pretty good... I mean we had you know a pretty good lineup at the end. We had... we moved from electric waffle makers to butane gas waffle makers so we could make the waffle like three times as fast and we weren't reliant on an electrical plug. We added a chicken waffle which was a pretty high-priced eight dollar waffle sandwich. Um and we were making pretty good money on top of it. We started having our friends work with us and we'd pay and split out the tips and everything. And yeah, and because it was just a checkout on a phone, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the Square card reader to work! It took Anthony as long to swipe and get the card reader to work as it was for me to make the waffle! So it was just a fun business because it's very tangible, you could feel what you were making, you could understand the actual inputs and outputs of the business. And uh but it was a lot of work. Food, food services is hard work and um and it was something we didn't want to do for the rest of our lives.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no that's great. I, you know you look at businesses in general, that just sounds like a great experience, not just from understanding there's a market for your product, but then actually having to figure out "what are the raw materials I need to procure, how long can we you know ship them before they go bad, and then actually going out and selling through your inventory." Which, you know it's almost like an MBA in school as you're making money paying for whatever you need to pay for in college, at the same time coming out with a real good foundation of a, of a founder. Now you went from that into technology, or maybe let me take a step back... why don't you walk me through how you went from that, graduated school, you're now in London, that, graduated, came back and then got into technology. How did that happen? Walk me through that.

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so um I went to school studying economics, politics and law. I really did think I was going to be a lawyer. And in the process of going to USC, I think something really stood up to me: one, USC's top program is film, and film is a pure entrepreneurial job. Right, if you're going to be a producer, if you're going to make a movie, everyone studying film is a raw entrepreneur. Every project starts from zero. And so I was just surrounded by a lot of people that were going after their dreams of making movies, and it's a really entrepreneurial endeavor. And then the second thing that was really happening at that time was YouTube was actually just coming out. Um YouTube and online video. I didn't have like, growing up, didn't have... I had broadband internet but it wasn't not, it was nothing like what I got at USC. So I got to USC, I could have been going to class, but I was spending a lot of time just watching YouTube videos. And I was just enamored with this idea that you could watch any content you wanted, whenever you wanted, on demand. And then being at the top film school in the nation, watching all the professors, everyone talked about like "this is really going to change everything." I really quickly realized I just wanted to go work in that industry. I wanted to be a part of any company that was doing online video and was actively disrupting it.

And so um through my uncle I actually got connected to Jerusalem Venture Partners which is based out of Israel. And they had a portfolio of companies that was completely focused on new media startups that were just going to work on online video, new applications for creating online video, for advertising. And I just knew I wanted to be a part of that industry. I was interested in it, I had a personal passion in it, and if there's one thing I learned from making waffles it's: the business itself is fun. It's actually really, really fun to do something that people enjoy and you can build a passion around that. But when you also really enjoy what you're working on, you will go twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as far, you'll just push further because your own curiosity just keeps pulling you along. So I just knew I wanted to be in digital video. And through Jerusalem Venture Partners I found this company, Klipso, and I just took whatever position they would give me as a college graduate with virtually no skills. I knew a little bit of computer programming. I knew how to do social media because we used social media to sell our waffles. Um but I didn't have many other skills. And they gave me a seat as just like an analyst. And what I really quickly realized was my spot on the team was growth, sales, and product. Like those were things that I could do really well. And it was an amazing... being in Israel was also really great because they also just have a really direct culture. They give you really direct feedback. There's no mincing words. And the teams are very tight. Um they call Israel "the startup nation" because it's a small country with a very affluent population that speak this very ancient language, and they can all just... it's an incubator for new ideas. And so it was just an amazing experience to be in Israel and build that company.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I know a little bit about Israel myself. My very first startup I worked for was founded by uh a gentleman out of Israel that came to Silicon Valley. And I had no experience selling or doing anything, I just graduated from college myself. And he took me on as you know a sales rep. And ended up forming a lifetime relationship, as well as going and visiting and staying with his family for a couple of weeks on a long travel. And just ultimately what I found out was um, smart, aggressive, willing to take chances, and you know, go for the dream. And that's I think you see a lot of that um in the startup world. And specifically in Israel, a lot of technology innovation comes out of there, so cool to know that you got that experience. Um what were some of the lessons that you learned at that startup, at that company, that really you remember and you kind of take with you now?

Eric Goldman: Yeah I mean as my first startup experience I think the beauty of it (and still at the root of my, my career, as I haven't really been exposed to anything but startups), going into that little startup I think what really stuck with me was how important it is that you really test the biggest risk of the business all the time. And so with this one, as a new media startup, customer facing, uh it was all about iterating on the product, really trying to get to product-market fit, talking with users, and really balancing what you know what users would tell you they wanted with what you believed the problem to be. Um and that's all to say I think with that first startup, it just felt mostly like chaos to me. I had no idea exactly like how we were going to grow as a business, the fundamentals of what it meant to grow a technology business weren't clear to me. Um and we were having a lot of trouble finding product market [fit]. And the other big challenge for the company was um this was the frontier of a very undefined media landscape. We didn't know what rules applied to us, whether we could put the content on the internet, whether we couldn't, it was very unclear who owned it and what we had to do about who, who, who owned it. Um so it was just kind of getting comfortable with the fact that like so much of a startup is uncertainty, so much of it is chaos, but you needed to find something to do every day to make it better. And I just fell in love with that process. Like that chaos and that process of really taking a lot of talented people and putting them on a problem that's really hard and difficult and realizing that you're going to make a lot of mistakes on the way of solving a big problem. I think that's kind of my big takeaway with it. And I just kind of fell in love with that process. I knew that I just wanted to be a part of companies that had that energy. Everybody was so committed to building a great product, I just wanted to be at a company where everyone cared that much. And that's kind of why I got really sucked into startups.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no that's great. I think you mentioned a really good point: when you're at a startup and you're having to find out product market fit and do a lot of testing, you have to be real comfortable in that ambiguous feeling of you're not really sure what's going to work, what's not going to work. But you have to continue to look, seek, and test things until you find out what, what the need is that you're serving. So that's great. Um from Israel, back to the US, Movieclips was your next experience. And as a traffic acquisition ninja, what exactly were you doing and what was the outcome of Movieclips?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so coming out of that startup in Israel, you know, the future of the company was kind of hard to gauge. I had an amazing experience and it was clear that that specific startup was going to need to merge and kind of go through a couple different transformations to kind of find its fit. And I also learned that I kind of wanted to be back in the United States. And the biggest observation I had is I wanted to be at a company that was going to license the content. The risk of like... there's different types of risks that businesses need to take, but I think there's some risks in terms of like what's moral and what you ought to do as a business that you just kind of got to hold, hold true to. And so I basically wanted to find a business that was doing what that Israeli company was doing, but was US-based and was licensing the content. And that was Movieclips.

And so I just basically emailed uh Tae Lee the CEO and the founders of that company until they just gave me a time of day to, when I walked into their office until they just like basically were just like, "okay, we'll give you a job here." And so I took this crazy job, Traffic Acquisition Ninja. So what Movieclips did is they licensed through the major movie studios what were considered these marketing rights to the portfolio of movies that those studios had. And what those marketing rights gave them was the ability to upload these clips, movie clips to the internet, these two minute clips. And they at the time were uploading all that content to their owned and operated website, movieclips.com. Um but they weren't getting that much traffic. And it was a really good idea, they were building this whole genome, but YouTube was just eating their lunch. They knew that they needed to get all of that content onto YouTube.

And so I joined right around the time when they had just struck the deal (Zack and Rich, the founders, had just struck the deal) with YouTube to actually, and the studios, to allow them to put all that content onto YouTube. And it was doing well, but the other big thing that had just changed was YouTube was now allowing you to upload not just two minute clips. It's kind of hard to remember the days when YouTube only allowed you to upload two-minute clips, and they now let you upload four minute clips. And the big insight I had as a traffic acquisition ninja was to basically do whatever it took to increase the number of viewers coming into the Movieclips properties. The insight was basically that nowhere, nowhere on the internet allowed you uh to... you just couldn't find trailers on YouTube. You could find them on Apple, Apple had trailers at the time, Yahoo had trailers, but there were no trailers on YouTube. And so we launched a whole system to upload trailers to YouTube. And then to use those trailers to link back into all of our movie clips. And then to use those movie clips to link back into original content we were creating. And just stay really... we built a whole strategy around how we were going to acquire users through this funnel of content, starting with new movies, then to our, our kind of deep, deep chest of movie clips, and then into kind of new content that we were producing. And it ended up working really, really well. Movieclips over the course of a couple years became the largest movie property on the internet. We had the largest subscription base across almost 30 channels. We were an official partner with YouTube and with the studios. And it was so large that one of the insights we had was, "what, what if we just put a little, a little 'buy ticket now' button on one of the trailers we uploaded?" I think we did it with uh Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, we put a little button to buy tickets, and it ended up driving so many ticket sales to Fandango that Universal Studios, the parent company of Fandango, ended up acquiring that entire division of the company. And um it's still successful. The Movieclips brand is still a big brand within the Fandango portfolio. It continues to do really well and it was my first kind of experience of seeing a product go from something that was very scrappy, really trying to figure it out, to locking in on a strategy that worked, to being incredibly successful as an acquisition. Um so it was an amazing journey.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I probably clicked on a couple of those tickets myself so I, you know, I definitely know that brand. Oh, that's great. Wow. So going through an acquisition, it's you know the hopes and the dreams of most founders and being a part of that, uh you come out of that I'm sure with a lot of not just excitement, but also maybe what the future can be for yourself if you ever did start your own company. And we want, we're going to get to your company, Sequin, that you're, that you've launched. Uh but before we do that, I want to kind of take, down, go down the path a little bit farther here with your experience before that. Um so after you got acquired you moved on to Zefr, and you were there for a number of years. Talk to me about why you joined there and really what the experience was like in that company.

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so Zefr was actually... Zefr was the company that remained after the Movieclips division was sold. And the reason there was already uh Zefr existed was, outside of this Movieclips we had to build a whole other company that helped protect our digital rights. So we represented all of the digital rights for all the movie studios on YouTube in part because we were uploading these clips to YouTube and we were paying the licensing fee for it. And if anyone on the internet, any fan uploaded the same clip (so for example if some other fan really loved a scene from 2 Fast 2 Furious and they uploaded it), that would compete with Movieclips' official licensing of that content. So we built this whole other part of the company around digital rights that found and adjudicated and figured out what to do with all of this content happening in movies.

And so when I joined, when I stayed on basically with Zefr, we had sold Movieclips and I had basically kind of become this like mini GM of that, of that division. But really what I was doing was kind of more product management. And so I moved into product at Zefr and began to launch a new product line at Zefr around advertising. So this was basically kind of like a new zero-to-one startup within the prior company. And over time that advertising product, it basically just built on top of what we did with Movieclips. You know, we put a "buy ticket now" button on a movie, and we were just going to put those same ads all over the YouTube universe. You know, "buy this you know this dress now, buy this toothpaste now" and just do this really contextually aligned advertising product. And so I went really, really deep into advertising. We built a really deep stack of technology around identifying what content was about and you know what products were in it, and then building an entire advertising ecosystem around that.

And that product continued to grow, along with three other product lines: one around digital rights, and the other around influencer marketing. And so I became the VP of Product overseeing all three of those lines. And each one of them did extremely well. We sold the digital rights business to Global. The creator, you know, the influencer marketing division grew and it became its own company. And the advertising business which I originally helped kind of start became the largest part of the company and is now a very like profitable, large um successful company in its own right. And so seeing all three of those divisions grow and seeing so many of them go from zero to one, it was kind of like being at a startup of startups, like almost a portfolio of companies. And it was just this amazing opportunity that Zack and Rich gave me to basically... they put a lot of trust in me and allowed us as a team to just kind of iterate and build these amazing startups all within this one portfolio. And it was such an amazing journey. I felt like it was like my MBA in startups. But I was, I, we were getting to the size, I think we were like 300 people. And after those uh two other um acquisitions, I realized I really wanted to get back to a company where we could just zero-to-one build something again. And it at that exact same time Anthony, who got that Square card reader and I sold waffles with, moved right across the street from me. And that was the time when I never needed to build a startup.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's great. Well you've held multiple roles in companies, all startups it sounds like, from small companies to bigger companies, from growth hacking to product leadership roles. When did the idea come about Sequin, and kind of what was the beginning of that?

Eric Goldman: Yeah. So when I left Zefr and started you know started building Sequin with Anthony, we didn't have a clear idea of exactly what problem we were going to solve. We really... I think there's kind of two approaches to co-, to kind of founding a business. So one is really identifying a problem that, that you have and like really going after it and solving it. Anthony and I were aware of a ton of problems we wanted to solve. But what we knew about ourselves was to start a business we needed to have good co-founders. Like I needed Anthony and Anthony needed me. And we wanted to make sure we were a good founding partnership. Because if you really look at startups, especially ones that are co-founded, the founding relationship is one of the number one reasons they fail. Um if the founders don't get along, they don't communicate well, if they don't push each other, if they don't create a clear ownership of responsibility (who's the CEO, who's going to run the day-to-day). That's the reason so many startups fail is the co-founders don't work out. And so we mostly wanted to make sure that we were really great co-founders. So we actually consulted together for a while just to work on projects and make sure we worked really well together after 10 years of being apart on the, not working day-to-day. And that went incredibly well.

It was actually in that process of consulting that we kind of had the moment where Sequin was born. We were doing these consultancies where we were just helping other startups get to product-market fit. Anthony is an engineer by trade and is incredibly just brilliant as a developer and, and engineering architect. And I kind of come from more of that product background. So we used our two skills to go and consult with different startups. And we just kept running into the same problem. Every time we needed to integrate with some sort of third-party company to, to help that startup get the data they needed or to integrate in the ecosystem, and those integrations just sucked up so much of our consulting budget. It took Anthony a long time to build them, they became incredibly important to the overarching business, and the process of building those integrations was just incredibly slow.

And Anthony had a unique exposure to those integrations because he was the director of platform at this company called If This Then That (uh you might have heard of it, IFTTT). And he oversaw hundreds of API integrations. So he had this unique exposure to what it actually looked like to build integrations at scale across hundreds of different APIs. And he had all the battle wounds of knowing how difficult APIs actually are to work with. HTTP APIs are just slow, they're hard to work with, and they are cumbersome. Meanwhile, I had this experience at Zefr where we were actually... as a result of being such a huge partner with YouTube, we were YouTube's largest API consumer. We had about 8 billion API calls that we could make every single day, by and large the largest integration partner they ever had. And that API integration was costing Zefr a ton of money, it was costing YouTube a ton of money, and something like 80, 90% of all the data we were getting through that API was completely replicated, not new, redundant, duplicated data. It was incredibly inefficient.

And then when GDPR and CCPA came out, these kind of data governance and protection laws, the API became even more problematic right. Google had to know who had which data when, and through an API it was very hard for them to know where that data had gone and what was included with it. And you can kind of imagine you know just, there's recent examples of APIs really failing in that regard, for example like Facebook's API around the elections, etc. So what we ended up doing at Zefr with Google was Google took us from using a free API. So they basically told us, a Google Cloud BigQuery instance with all the data in it, they just gave us the data in a database. And it worked incredibly well! It solved all of our problems, it solved all the governance problems, it made it much more efficient for us to get our data. And so that was my experience with integrations. But also as a product leader I saw firsthand how tens, you know 10, 20, 30% of our capacity as an engineering and product organization were going to creating these integrations, maintaining them.

So all of those insights came together between Anthony's exposure at IFTTT, our experience doing these integrations as consultants, and my experience at Zefr. We felt like we were observing this kind of secret in plain sight, which was that integrations were painful, but the solution wasn't more APIs, it was actually to get rid of the API! It was to try to make a better interface that developers could use to just get this done. And it was right in front of us, it was what Google gave us. It was a Google Cloud database. And if every API provider could just give their developer a database with all the data they needed in it, they would do it! But no one API provider, it's not their job to give you a database. They're there to you know create YouTube, build Shopify, build Stripe. It's not their job to give developers a database. So that was kind of the opportunity we saw was there's this huge problem in developer space every day, and it's not just going to fix itself, so we're going to go fix it for them.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's incredible. So you're really taking what is today API integrations to utilize a lot of third-party applications, and saying "hey, we can do this differently, we can do it with the type of language you know as a developer, SQL or whatever the, whatever you use, and then allow them, without having to learn anything new, to be able to manage those integrations and do it in a lot less time and a lot easier way." Uh that really isn't, hasn't been around, or if it has it hasn't really been presented the way you guys are doing it. Which to me sounds amazing. If you take that and you say "okay, I've got this idea now and I want to bring it to market," you then have to go get funding. Tell me about your experience of getting funding and who actually funded you.

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so when we first had this idea, it, you know, it was still pretty blurry. We had a general sense of the problem we wanted to solve. We knew these integrations were challenging. And we knew that we, we weren't going to build this company by doing it as a side project as we consulted. We wanted to go all in on building a company. And we didn't just want to build a company that would make us you know, be successful and soon right, we wanted to build something that just changed the industry. We really have this vision of really changing how all integrations work and completely making this a problem of the past. So we knew to go all in we needed to raise money.

So the first round we did a pre-seed round that David Sacks at Craft Ventures led. And we went around with a deck and an idea and our credentials and a very early prototype that we built. And we were able to kind of close that pre-seed round of funding literally the day the uh COVID-19 pandemic started is when we raised that round of money. And we were incredibly lucky that over the course of consulting, which we did for about a year, we just fostered really good relationships with other startup founders. And through those startup founders, their investors. And through those investors we met um probably the person that's most impacted the success of our company, this guy Josh Diamond who runs a small venture back... it's small now I hope it grows um, Walkabout Ventures. And he helped introduce us to Craft Ventures and that's how we raised that round of money.

And we've really carried that same ethos forward. So we, we used that pre-seed round of funding to pull together a small team and to really lock into the idea of Sequin. And how we describe Sequin today is: our customer is developers, and the problem we solve for developers is those third-party integrations. And the way we solve it is... you know, a developer complains about those integrations every day. They complain about API documentation. They complain about API authentication. They complain about uh API version changes. They'll complain about API rate limits and how they can query it. It's all of these pretty big, frustrating things that a developer has to deal with every day. And it's not just a couple developers, it's literally everyone building software faces these integration problems. And they have to learn completely bespoke languages to integrate with APIs. They have to have a new way to query the data, they have to learn a new way to integrate with it. And then as soon as they get even a little bit bigger, then the API starts falling over. They start getting all these rate limit controls, and then an API integration goes from something that's simple to something that takes weeks to implement. It takes a long time to set up these systems that will cache and sync the data, and it takes forever. And if you look at the way online software is being built, it's now all being built in the cloud. So why are we using these APIs to move data between the same data center? It's all living right there!

So the innovation we've come up with is we just put all that data right into the developer's database and we, we handle the sync. They don't have to touch the API. They don't have to touch any of the documentation. They just get to use the frameworks and programming languages they know to work with the data as if it was their own. And we think that's the way the future of integrations will work. You won't reach for an API, you'll reach for your database or you'll reach for a Kafka stream and you'll just get all the data you want. And then this saves those developers tons of time.

And so with our pre-seed funding we were able to get to the story I just described to you. We learned what the problem was, we learned how we thought we were going to solve it. And it took a ton of work. We talked to hundreds of developers. We built prototypes that failed completely. We focused on different parts of the problem. Maybe we thought it was all about the authentication, so we built an effort and did an experiment around solving API authentication. Then we thought maybe it had to do more with just the client side, so like the actual application or React side of the problem. That didn't turn out to be it. And then we settled in on finding out that it actually had to do with these syncing problems. And we used the pre-seed money and the commitment of Craft Ventures uh and, and Josh Diamond to do all that research and development to get to a good idea.

And once we had a lot of that figured out, and we had another product, and we had paying customers, then we raised our seed round from Kleiner Perkins. And this, we raised the seed round from Kleiner Perkins building off the same momentum we used to raise the pre-seed, which was through relationships. We got to know all the really good founders in the space. If you meet other really good founders and get to know them and they buy into your product... and founders, especially ones that are in your industry, they're much more critical of "is there a problem here, can it work?" And then if that person introduces you to Bucky, that's Kleiner Perkins. Um when you come into that conversation with so much more credibility. Because you have no credibility as a startup founder. Um it kind of takes kind of building that reputation with other people and, and, and building confidence in your problem space and in your solution so that when you do finally meet someone like Bucky Moore at Kleiner Perkins, he's ready to really kind of hear your story.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no, that's, that's really good to hear your journey there. Um we've actually worked with other startups that we know Bucky third-party, but sounds like an amazing guy and sounds like the right one to be working with and talking to. Um that's great. So for you taking Sequin down that path, raising capital, finding a market where there's a need and also then building out what that product can do to serve that need... what, what really was the breakthrough moment for you when you felt like "you know what, we've got something here"?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so the moment that really, that really I think saved us, is when Anthony and I really knew that we had commented on the right problem. Since I was mentioning we were trying all these different prototypes to build Sequin, we were focusing on different parts of the API problem and really trying to find our specific niche where we were really going to solve a really big problem. And so after one of our experiments was, was just not going super well, we'd constantly sit down as founders and really evaluate like, "is this working? Are we, are we swimming upstream or is the tide kind of at our back on this?" It was pretty clear that we were not, we were really fighting the, the tide on most of our kind of early experiments. So we just sat down and kind of relayed out what bets we wanted to make, what, what we understood what the problem is, but how are we going to solve it. And so we sat down and, and we said "okay well let's just try syncing an API. What API should we work with? Like it's, if we do think the API is the problem and it doesn't seem to be the authentication is the thing that people want, and it doesn't seem to be like building React components is what people want, like what, what might it be?" And so they were just like "Well what if we just replace these APIs with databases?"

So we were trying to pick an API and we were actually on the side (this was during the depths of the COVID pandemic), we were working with a volunteer organization and just trying to contribute to, to their efforts and they used this platform called Airtable. And so on the side of our startup, on nights and weekends, we would be building this software on Airtable. And the Airtable API was just so hard to work with. It was again just this other experience of "this API sucks, it's hard to work with, it's slowing us down." So we just decided to take the Airtable API and turn it into, and sync it to a database. And we built that. Anthony went heads down for three weeks and built it. I went heads down for three weeks and reached out to everyone in the Airtable community that would talk to us. And we launched it on Reddit on like that Tuesday, and I think the next day Vimeo signed up and just started using it. And ever since then that was the moment where for the first time we felt like we had some wind at our backs. A huge company that we respected that had clearly the problem we were solving, signed up and started using it and talked to us all in the same day. And that was the moment that we were, that we realized that we had come into the right problem and we had come into a solution that just might work. And I think that was the moment that we all, you know we were just like "Okay, we finally got out of the wilderness, then found it, and found a problem and solution that might work together."

Jake Aaron Villarreal: And what a great company to fight it with too. Vimeo is a great company, we actually use them, and just um to, to get a client that you can also talk to about your experience with them just helps you market your product better, knowing you've got a great company behind um using your, your technology. Um where does Sequin go from here?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, so we are still in the beginning uh from you know. Today we're... and with your help Jake like, we're now a team uh seven, and almost all engineers because it's a very technical problem. This is a classic computer science problem around syncing and cache invalidation. And we only support four sources today, we only support Postgres today, uh but we have a ton of traction, we have you know over 140 customers. And they're asking for more and more sources. They want us to support more and more databases. They want us to go beyond databases and support things like event streams. And so we are just in a really heads down growth phase where we're just continuing to build out the platform to support more sources, more databases, and just create an amazing developer experience.

Our goal is I want a developer signs up, that in the first two minutes they have an amazing experience and they get up and running, which is an unparalleled speed of integration compared to that API. And then that we provide them tools and capabilities that just make them incredibly successful at their job. That they get all the logging, monitoring, and all the observability and all the dev tools they need to just build amazing products. And so we're still building out that product. But we would really love to see a world exist in the future where when any company is at, is considering an integration, Sequin is top of mind. And when you talk to any developer, they really have this opportunity to just go to that source they're integrating with, whether it's Salesforce or GitHub or SendGrid or any of the thousands of APIs that exist out there, and when they go to that, that service, they see a little Sequin button. And instead of reading the documentation, they can just click that button and spin up a sync. That's kind of our vision.

We'd love to live in a world where the same way we look at Amazon Web Services today, and when you go and talk to an engineer you're like, "Do you want to set up your own server and rack and stack these pieces of hardware and get them connected to the internet?" They look at you with the same kind of baffled face and they're just like, "No, I just want to click a button on AWS to spin up my computer." Um we kind of hope that's what happens with APIs. Where today we look at engineers, development teams, we say, "Do you really just want to go and read all that documentation and piece by piece build this integration so that you get the data into your database and I can go set it up into an event stream to trigger emails on your web app, or do you just want to click this button and move on to helping your customers?" Uh that's kind of what we want to create in the world.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: An incredible way of describing that. What could you share with others in today's market that might want to strike out on their own as a startup founder, knowing what you've gone through and you know the struggles but also the successes in the process?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, uh I think there's two things in that I'd really encourage. One is just really bet on yourself. I think there's a lot of ideas out there, you know maybe trying to start a startup on the side or do it as a side hustle and see if it gains momentum. My encouragement for a lot of people going into the startup journey is that so much of the reward... as much as we want it to be you know, I love for Sequin to be this amazing billion dollar exit, I, I want it to be successful for all of our team members financially... but so much of the reward is in the growth you experience just going all in and committing yourself to building something that you care about. And when you do that, you'll surprise yourself with your own ability to adapt to problems, to find new skills, to teach yourself something, to motivate others. It's in that path of really committing to yourself and really like taking that, like really investing in yourself first. So I'd really encourage you to just go all in on, on the idea that you care about. Don't, don't try to de-risk it. It is risky, but it's that risk that really kind of makes it so rewarding.

And I think the second thing is find other great founders to work with. All around you are other founders that are already in the journey, they've already started, they are just one or two steps ahead of you. And I have yet to find or come across a founder (myself included) that's not willing to cheer you on and give you some encouragement to take that risk because they're already beginning to feel the reward of it. And it comes with a lot of hardship too, you know like, there's real days where you just completely do uh, it feels like you've done a terrible job for your company. Um but if you reach out and find those founders and you put yourself on a path of really taking a risk and betting on yourself, you'll come out the other side a better person either way, I think.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, there's been a lot of studies that show that it's not always about the destination in your journey that gives you happiness, but the journey itself. And I like to call that progress. And you look at the progress that you have in whatever experience you have, oftentimes is what makes you feel happy. What progress have you seen as a founder that you feel has been very fulfilling in your current journey?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, for me personally, and a ritual that Anthony and I have gotten into, is we do take these breaks from the company and we completely step out of it. And we learned this first from Phil Knight's book uh Shoe Dog, right? He and his kind of founding team would you know take a weekend and just kind of go somewhere, completely step out of the business and just ask yourself like "what's going on, how's it going, what's happened these past several months?" And taking those moments to really introspect, "how have I grown, what have I worked on?" Every time I do it I find that myself and Anthony, we have grown in so many ways. We've done things that we never thought we would have to do or be able to do, we've learned new capabilities, and we have measurably improved the company. And it fills you with such a sense of accomplishment and just gratitude for being able to do it, that you have more than enough fuel in the tank to do another two quarters of really, really hard work or, or just go out there and do something else that you've never done before. And so taking those moments to just like actually track the journey has been so valuable. And uh and there's no better way to learn something new than to just, to just put yourself in a new situation. So that's been the best part of this journey by far. That, and I get to work with my best friend every day, Anthony, and we just get to build something that we really care about in a way that we care about it. That, that ownership is... I might not be employable again! I might just always have to just be on my own path.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well, really cool story. You know life is about stories and you know Eric, I'd like to thank you here today for telling your story, taking us through your journey, and talking about your current company, Sequin. If people want to know about you and find out about your company, where should they go?

Eric Goldman: Yeah, please uh check us out on our website sequin, sequin.io. And we have a ton of content about what we're building, how you can build it yourself. If you don't, if you don't want to buy Sequin, we'll tell you exactly how hard it is to build it. And um and please just, just reach out if you have any questions or feel free to just email me personally eric@sequin.io. I'd love to hear from you if I can be helpful in getting you started on your, your founder journey.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Perfect. Well Eric, thanks for joining us here today on this episode and we will keep plugging away. You can find links below this episode where to find Sequin. And we'll keep talking about startups and founders in the future. Talk to you next time.

Eric Goldman: Thanks so much Jake, really appreciate the opportunity.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that are joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care. This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.  

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