Inspired Campervan Traveler launches a $130M funded AI Startup

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, the products they build as they look to transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today Matt Darrow, co-founder and CEO of Vivun. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Darrow: Hey Jake, thanks. Thanks for having me today.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, glad to have you on. I know you've been on a road show and you've been out traveling and we'll dive into that a little bit. But before we do, I want to give the audience a little background of yourself. You are the co-founder and CEO of the company leading the organization which provides technical sales solutions, including the world's first AI sales engineer. Matt holds a master's degree in engineering and is an alumni of Deloitte, Oracle, and Zuora. After a decade building and running technical sales teams, Matt started Vivun to unlock the power of pre-sales for every B2B company. They currently support enterprise clients including ADP, Coupa, Dayforce, DocuSign, Seismic, and Snowflake to name a few. Uh, I guess before we jump in here, Matt, where are you, where are you joining us from today?

Matt Darrow: Well, that was a great introduction. I'm, I'm dialing in from my home in Truckee, California. I was a Bay Area resident for a long, long time in San Francisco, but uh I've got a 5-year-old daughter. I grew up on the East Coast. I love the four seasons, and Truckee gets, you know, some of the most snow that we have in the, in the, in North America. So, it's a, it's a great place to be. We're 100% remote. We make it work.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Hundreds of AI startups are launching every month, battling to build their founding teams. As a leader, your job is to get results. When it comes to hiring, that's where it gets tough. So, you go out and you try a recruitment firm, but they don't understand your story. They're off target. And when they send you candidates, it's a waste of time. We believe you should never have your time wasted. That's why we launch Match Relevant. Because your story is more than just an open role. It's your founder's journey, the problem you're solving, the product you're building, and why it matters. When we work with companies, we make sure we understand your whole story. So, we go out and do a search. We're on target. It's worth their time. They're interested. And more importantly, it's worth yours. And when it comes to hiring engineers, we work to make sure we get it right by deploying a team of seasoned CTOs that have built some of Silicon Valley's best companies. They can collaborate with you in the technical interviewing process. They can be a sounding board or they can run it for you. When it comes to building teams, there's no time to waste. Let's make it count. If you have a role that needs to be filled, book a time with a hiring guide at matchrelevant.com and learn how we do it.

I love it. Yeah. I grew up skiing and going from San Jose to Tahoe and Truckee was, you know, a place we used to stop a lot and enjoy the wilderness, the food, just the people. So, you, you got a good spot you're in there. You know, we'll dive a little bit into your background before we jump into your company. Give us a little sneak peek of your origin story. How did you become an entrepreneur, get into technology, end up where you're at today? Just give us the, the, the overview.

Matt Darrow: Well, even, even though I live in Truckee, California, I mentioned growing up on the East Coast, I'm a, I'm a Midwestern guy by heart. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. And I think my whole childhood, you could kind of sum it up as "moved around a lot." Uh my dad and parents weren't in the military, but they worked at a variety of other pretty large companies running parts of their sales organizations, which is why, you know, our family moved. And I think a lot of that taught me to love to learn new things, be super adaptable, be super curious. And ultimately those are great traits for entrepreneurs to have.

So after growing up in Cleveland, I moved to Japan. I was there for a few years when I was 9 years old. I was fluent in Japanese. I don't remember anything anymore, unfortunately. But it was a blast when I opened up the Tokyo office for my time at Zuora, which was everything that came full circle where I watched sort of my parents do business in Japan and then I had an opportunity to do it myself. From there I moved to Pennsylvania. I was in a really, really small town called York, just above the border from Baltimore. And then from there I moved to Berkeley and I've been in California ever since. I did my engineering at Berkeley and masters at UCLA. And then from that point in time, really that was my foray into enterprise software and technology.

So, a lot of my childhood was moving to different places, learning new things, adapting to really different cultures, whether or not it was rural America, a foreign country, uh a really different uh type of city and opportunity in the Bay Area, and studied engineering along the way. In my second grade yearbook, I remember writing down the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And it was a, it was an engineer because I love the concept of how do you bring things to life that have never before existed? And I've been doing that with physical and software uh products since probably I've been about seven years old.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's amazing. Well, that's a good intro. And I know that you are in a space right now which we're all in, which is around the transformation of technology and AI in particular, and what that's meaning to different parts of the industry, whether it's sales or HR or engineering and many other areas. I want to go a little bit deeper on the origin story. You know, when we were talking about companies and starting companies, you know, it's, there's always an inspiration that comes from somewhere. You shared a little story about, you know, taking some time off and traveling to, to New Zealand and there you were inspired and kind of led you to, you know, where you're at today. Walk us through what that experience was like and what was the inspiration behind that, that travel that kind of led you to where you're at today.

Matt Darrow: Yeah, I mean then that's a great sort of founder origin story as opposed to just sort of my, my life origin story. I, I think ever since I can remember I always had some next goal or some next milestone or some next feat that I was working toward. And around 2018, I was previously at Zuora at the time, the subscription billing company. We were going through our IPO journey. And when the IPO happened, it was time to take some time off. It was the first time I think in my entire life I, I tried to truly unplug. And I love the outdoors. I, I love hiking, trekking, snowboarding, all these things. So, I found myself ended up in New Zealand in a very, very small, very, very tiny, cramped camper van. I'm six foot four, so I could barely like stand up in this thing. And I was there for months just intentionally being bored.

And I, I'm so thankful for the time and what we did at Zuora that gave me that opportunity because I could start to ideate what are ideas that truly meant something to me. Uh that I knew that I wanted to come back to the States to ultimately start a company, start a business, start a sort of a um sort of a, an innovative product set. And that gave me the freedom to do it. So, I was sitting around Lake Wānaka one morning, you know, after sort of eating breakfast, and I, I created this list of like 10 concepts and ideas. And strangely enough, my wife, who's also my co-founder, who came on this trip with me, she was at Google at the time for about eight years. She said, "Well, tell me more about this one." And uh that ultimately turned into Vivun and we haven't looked back after raising 130 million in funding to do something really special.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Well, that's amazing. I've spent some time in New Zealand myself and traveled around quite a bit and you just never know where the ideas are going to come from, the inspiration. And ultimately sometimes it takes you to go away to actually come back to find the answers that you really are looking to, to, to grow, build, and hopefully live by. Talk a little bit about the problem you're solving with Vivun. You got this concept, you started the company. Understand there was some pivots. AI is coming. You got to make some changes. Walk us through that process.

Matt Darrow: Well, we, we're you know, we're an enterprise software provider in the GTM space. So, in the go-to-market space. So, like a lot of vendors and folks out there, our problem is pretty simple, which is we help companies close more business and do it faster and more efficiently than they ever had before. I think while that's sort of a general problem statement, what I get fired up about, what's so unique to Vivun is our approach to that problem is really, really different. And if you are a company that has a technical product, so this is if you're a high-tech company, if you're a telco, if you are in automotive manufacturing, 70% of your sales process is spent on technical validation. And that was a huge untapped opportunity that nobody was really paying attention to.

So that's where we focused at Vivun, which was to say, if we could make you great at doing the technical part of the sale, you're going to get leverage like you've never seen before. And that's actually, strangely enough, where the name Vivun comes from. So Vivun is a Finnish word for lever. And I, I use that because when I started the business, one, I needed a domain name. So you could write off the whole English language. You're just never going to find something available. So I came up with these different synonyms and analogies and "lever" was this great motif on a small input and change could have this massive output of your business. And that's how sort of I, I, I feel about the technical selling organization and the rest was history after some brief late nights doing Google Translate and figuring out what domains are available and then Vivun came to life.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I like the name. That's really cool. Lever. Walk through the problem it helps solve in terms of accelerating the sales cycle from a technical perspective, and walk through the product if you can just so visually we can understand what you're getting into when you open up the app or open up your desktop to start using it. How does it work?

Matt Darrow: Well, if there's, if there's uh sales folks that are listening out there, they're probably familiar with the notion that every deal kind of has three legs. The tripod. There's the political, the commercial, and the technical side of the deal. Commercials happen in negotiations. Political is just all about who you know, how you get in. And the technical is the 70% of the cycle, which is: do I have a product that solves a problem that you have, and how does it do it? That's where we focus.

So for us at Vivun, we've built two core products that our customers leverage. The first is Vivun One. This is what we started with 5 years ago when we started the company and it's all about making the sales engineering org really, really strategic in ways that companies haven't been able to do before, and that's across three different realms. The first is we intake all conversations and feedback that are happening across prospects and customers to help our sales organizations figure out what does the product team need to prioritize to help them unblock revenue. That's a, that's a huge advantage for individuals that are trying to figure out where do they place roadmap bets? How do they beat competitors? How are they going to unblock deals? And it's a treasure trove of information that's got normally locked up in spreadsheets or people's heads. So, so one way to imagine that happening is that well, when you use Vivun, all this passive information comes into our system so we can help you make better decisions on what to build that's going to increase your total addressable market and, and kick your competitors' butts.

The second thing that we focus on is the technical selling team. For a lot of folks, it's kind of like the dark side of the moon. It, it's all this stuff happens that you really don't understand or you don't know about and it has massive implications to how you work and you win deals. So, the other big thing that we focus on at Vivun is just make the sales teams a whole lot smarter on what team members to put on deals, how do they pursue them, what sales process is going to work the best, how do they get to the technical win more efficiently. And that happens because we are the workflow. So all of our sales engineering users come into Vivun every single day to manage every single part of their world and every customer and prospect interaction. That gives us a whole new set of enterprise data that nobody's ever had before that helps you uncover, well, what actually happens on the dark side of the moon? What, what do we get to technical win?

Now, while that's our core product that we started with, you know, 5 years ago, what we've brought to life just even in the last year is our AI sales engineer, a truly agentic team member that can do the work that your sales engineers do. And now you're in a motion where every seller can have the capacity and the expertise and the support of your best domain expert 24/7, 365. And that's been a game changer for so many of our clients.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So when you talk about an agent, and we hear a lot about co-pilots and agents, and there's this blended notion that one does more than the other or one doesn't do anything at all. Like what, what, what's your definition of an agent and what does it do differently than you know just an assistant or kind of gathering info for you?

Matt Darrow: Yeah. Well, it's, and even Marc Benioff's had some nice colorful postings on this uh recently where he took the, the "No SaaS" moniker that we're all, you know, familiar with, or "No Software," excuse me, and, and uh and used it to say "No Co-pilots." And, and I sort of, I subscribe to that viewpoint because the way that I think about a co-pilot is it's AI that's embedded in a SaaS application. That's the sort of how even Microsoft has approached that in a big way. And that's not what we're doing.

When I think about an agent, you're truly working to personify a role and to do the work that, that role does. And that is very different. It's unlike anything you've ever experienced or worked with before because it's not like working with a SaaS application that is just a little bit smarter. It is like working with your best teammate that is all knowing, with a great expertise, that's always available. So when we say an AI sales engineer and we talk about an agent uh for a sales engineer uh that's what really we're talking about what we've built, which is I look at the true manifestation of what is the job that, that, that, that human team member does and how can AI do that soup to nuts end to end, not just be a bolt-on like a co-pilot in a SaaS application.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Okay, great. So, it supports the sales engineer, doesn't replace the sales engineer.

Matt Darrow: Correct. Well, well, fantastic question there. I think when we, when we, when we see customers use this, there's a variety of, there's like four use cases that always sort of bubbled at the top here. One is just giving sellers way more independence than they've ever had. We'll work with companies that have for every five sales reps, they have one sales engineer. There's just not enough bandwidth to go around. So they can go and give more independence directly to the sales rep and they love that.

Now on the flip side, it doesn't mean that all sales engineers are going away. It's just what they do and the work that they focus on is going to radically change. So what happens for the sales engineer is that well they have now the ability to take 30, 40, 50% of their work off their plate. That's going to increase the quality of their work. It's going to help them out. It's going to help them win more. That's going to help them do the things that they want to do that AI really isn't great at culturally right now, like sitting with a customer face to face, right, going on an event, like doing the things that is going to help them drive their business forward. And those are big areas too that, that we see folks gravitate toward.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I spent time at Oracle and the sales side, enterprise sales. And we had you know big deals always had to bring sales engineers on the pre-sales side to show the product and do a demo and answer questions and talk to engineers. And you know, it was always a resource allocation issue of, you know, "I want to get the right guy. I want to get the best guy, the one I know, come out with me on the sales call." But some of those questions that were being asked were stuff that I knew too. And if I just had the confidence back then... this is a long time ago... but it would have been nice to have that extra support in the process, whether you had that sales engineer with you or not. But the fact is is that, you know, there's a lot of travel that goes on as well. And so for a sales engineer, you're thinking about how much traveling do I got to do this quarter and where do I want to spend my time where you know with the biggest deals, not with every little deal, but the small deals still count. So I could see where there's a real value for this. And I haven't heard of a lot of competition in that space as of yet. Maybe it's there, we haven't seen it. You're the first company we're talking to that actually is bringing that to market. Who benefits the most for this product if you succeed and execute your strategy?

Matt Darrow: A CRO hands down. So the Chief Revenue Officer, right? So the individual that ultimately, you know, shoulders the weight of the quota for the company and the revenue number for the company. This is who Vivun is for. And while we have lots of different, you know, champions and proponents and individuals within an account, like a sales engineering leader or an individual sales rep or an individual sales engineer, um, all of the value bubbles up to ultimately the guy or the gal that owns the number, that's trying to figure out "how do I give my team uh the ability to run faster with expertise, to do the best work, to outflank the competitors in ways that um, they've never been able to have access to before." And that's what they're searching for, which is, "I want my sales team to have way more capacity, way more coverage, do everything faster with a higher quality and bar of work." And uh and that's a big area that we, that we, that we uh can benefit them in.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, AI has made so many companies take a look at their own business and make changes and, you know, really see some good improvement al- also some growth areas, but some also finding out they're in a market they probably aren't going to succeed in. What is a big change that AI's forced you to make?

Matt Darrow: Well, good question here. So, so one big change was we had to sunset some products actually, and I, I think like 12 months ago we had a demo automation offering. And, and that's a, sort of an emerging space and category on G2 and Gartner and these other areas where it's all about, well how do you automate your storytelling? And, and there's, there's a myriad of vendors out there doing it in different ways, but it basically boils down to recording a video, letting somebody watch that asynchronously, and sort of get the content that they want. And, and while we were going and growing and, and driving that product line forward, as soon as AI advancements hit some critical level of capability, it no longer made sense that that even is a product or a space in the future.

And what I mean by that is, there just is no future reality in sales where people are sort of recording videos that are immediately out of date with the next product release, or there's no future in sales where team members are deciding what they need to send and why. The future is, well, a prospect and a customer is just going to interface directly with my agent who will be able to create any scenario on demand on the fly for any circumstance in any situation completely ad hoc. And this was one of the things that even 6 months ago, if you asked me if that was even possible, um a lot of the tools and the technologies weren't ready to do that. Uh but they are now. Uh so what we did at team Vivun was we had to go back to our customers and we went back to our internal team and we said that this, the approach that we were taking, it's just not even going to be a, a real thing in 12 months. So we completely shut it down and then, and then we changed courses pretty dramatically on the product side just because of how fast this tech is moving and what you can do with it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's amazing. What, what do you think people in your space or companies in your space, space rather, are getting wrong about AI?

Matt Darrow: I think that I think honestly they, they think it's moving slower than it really is. And I just came back off this five-city road show event for our own conference uh that we held about technical sales. And what we wanted to show was certain things that you think might be possible 5 years from now are actually things that we can deliver yesterday. And, and, and sort of to bring this point home in your Oracle story is, you know, you're meeting with customers, you're needing to show them your products and services, you need to answer questions, you do all this. And what we're able to show is an agent can not only go and, and join your call, um, but it can cook up a presentation that never existed, configure a demo that never existed, deliver it with its own voice and speech, and answer questions.

And, and I think that the, the, the, what's, what's this interesting friction point is when will culture catch up, because people aren't ready for that. Like if I gave that to you tomorrow, you're not going to change your whole GTM tomorrow to say "everybody pack it up and go home, customers and prospects only talk to agents now." But I think that that's not five years away, right? What's going to happen is over this next 12 months, people are going to start hiring their very, very first AI teammates. And this is all going to accelerate wildly quickly. And that I think that's what they're kind of maybe getting wrong is the time horizons that they're anticipating are just too long.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. Wow. Lots of changes coming and it's coming fast. So, we're hearing it from all over the map. Different companies, startups, large companies, medium-sized companies. What's the biggest breakthrough you've had so far as a company?

Matt Darrow: Well, well, well, I'll go to the, the tech breakthrough. Where even when, even when, so if I rewind five years ago to when, when I started Vivun, we always had... I'll, I'll put AI in quotes because it wasn't Gen AI AI, but we were always doing things on the, on sort of the, the ML and the AI front to make our systems smarter and better and more capable. But, but ever since like 18 months ago when GPT really came on the scene in somewhat of a useful way, we had this little question that our engineering team sort of wrote on their whiteboards over their shoulder, which was, "Well, could we just use AI to do the work that sales engineers do every day?" And for the longest period of time, honestly, the answer to that question was still no. So we would revisit it every month or two as these foundational models changed. And about six months ago some big things changed. It was right around that time of the 4o release of GPT, where a lot of these foundational models started to get uh a lot more capable in terms of like vision interpretation and image interpretation.

And that coupled with a variety of the ecosystem players. I think about like what LangSmith and LangChain is doing, the emergence of sort of really useful graph databases and knowledge graph structures, right? All of this confluence of things started to happen about six months ago where you could take that question and instead of a "no", it turned into a "maybe", to a "yes", to a "holy cow, we just scared ourselves really, really fast." And I think that was the biggest breakthrough was instead of a, you know, AI, which is kind of Clippy 2.0, which is this sort of annoying team member that kind of you ask it questions and it doesn't really know what to do, what we've been able to prove is that you could actually do the full role soup to nuts. And that's why, you know, in the next 12 months, over half of the work that do is just going to be able to be done by AI. And that was a big breakthrough, is that the tools are now available to make that reality happen.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Exciting times here. As you grow your company, you've raised $130 million. What's the biggest challenge you're facing right now?

Matt Darrow: So, one of the biggest challenges is kind of educating the market. And again, I think the perception that we normally walk into is folks are starting to dabble more with AI. They're starting to start to understand that this isn't a hype cycle. It's something that's going to change the way that they work. And it's just a matter of them understanding this isn't something that maybe is going to be applicable five years from now, but it's something that they can be doing right now and they don't know because it's moving so fast. Even at the beginning of this podcast, Jake, you were mentioning, "Hey, you know, AI sales engineers, we haven't really heard much about them." I think that if you look to what Marc Benioff was talking about at Dreamforce, which was, you know, re- rebranded appropriately Agentforce, he was talking about the bookends. And that's kind of where people focus today, which is one, one end of the bookend is sales development reps. So people that can bring somebody interested to my doorstep. And then the other end of the bookend is a support rep. Someone that's going to close a, a trouble ticket for me.

And that's really where a lot of the, the awareness and the focus has been drawn. But so much more is possible. Not even just in our space, but agents that are helping do what lawyers do and product marketers uh and then creative writers, movie producers, right? And our focus has been between the bookends, which is where revenue happens. And I think that's a big thing that we're focused on right now is AI is definitely a little bit of a, you know, a word that people shy away from because they're tired of hearing about it. But honestly, it is transformative in a way that we've never seen before. And helping people understand what it can do for them when a lot of folks still have trouble spelling LLM. Right. This is a, this is a challenge to overcome.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. You know, you brought up Salesforce if I recall. Are, are they part of your, the team that's invested in your company?

Matt Darrow: Yeah, so Salesforce Ventures, they led our Series C. And that was a follow on after they, they were part of our Series B as well too. So you were close with Salesforce on the venture side, and even for myself personally before at, at Zuora and then BigMachines, I've always been sort of close to that, that ecosystem on the Salesforce side too.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, when you go out and raise capital, you always look for strategic vendors, or partners rather, that can help you with your strategy as you grow with technology, whatever it might be. Has there been any investment team as part of your organization that's supporting you, helped navigate the path with you or for you or giving you insights on kind of how to continue to build and grow?

Matt Darrow: Well, from a, from a founder's chair, I've been very intentional on like what investors do you want to partner with? Because there's one part which is: do you have a shared vision? And then there's another part is: well, how can different parties be helpful? And, and they're all helpful in different ways. Even going back to, you know, our seed round was led by Unusual Ventures and that's John Vrionis's team over there. And I think they are phenomenal at like getting in the trenches with you when you have nothing. Um just world class.

And then at Accel who led our Series A, it was really important to bring on a board member that used to be me, which was a prior CEO. And, and that they have a very different point of view and perspective. And then when Menlo Ventures led our Series B, this was more of your sort of traditional but very, very well-versed, broad landscape perspective on industry in general to bring lots of sort of insights to the table on how different companies and industries and markets are performing. And then when Salesforce came in for our Series C, they're very, very different too because they're like a bridge to the broader Salesforce company, which is this incredible access to everything from how they do pricing and packaging to digital events to field marketing to product roadmap. And, and you put all that together and you've got this incredible team that you can build your business around. So for, if any entrepreneurs or founders that are listening out there, I think it's, it's super important to, you know, not just take a check from an investor that has sort of the best media reputation out there, but everybody brings something different to the party. And honestly, starting the company even over the last five years, we've had so many challenges. I mean, we went through COVID, we went through, you know, Russia invading Ukraine, and why, have engineers in Ukraine, right? We went through Silicon Valley Banking, all the money's gone. And we were banking with Silicon Valley, right? We went through all these different things and everybody brings something different to the table, which is, which is awesome. What you want.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. God, you've got the trifecta of all the big things that hit, hit you guys. You, you know they say that resilience is the difference between a winner and a loser. The ones that get hit down, you know, they fall down, they get back up, and they keep getting up. So, it sounds like you got some of that in your blood. You know, as you look to 2025, you've got a lot of growth in, in the company and, and some really good ideas about supporting your customer base as AI continues to get more engaged. What, what are you excited about as you turn the corner?

Matt Darrow: I'm, I'm excited to see, I will say like, the vision behind Vivun actually start to come to life. And what I mean by that is while the problem that we solve is helping companies you know sort of do more deals, and our focus has been this, this mission-centric view on the technical selling part of the world. This all stemmed from a very deep desire to just say B2B selling's got to change. And, and honestly, when I, you know, when I was at Zuora and I was at Oracle before then too...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.

Matt Darrow: You know, I came from a lot of background of your traditional MEDDIC-based, B2B-based selling teams, and they're great, right? They're effective, but at the same time, right, it's not great for customers, it's not great for prospects. And, and there's just... when we, when we started the company 5 years ago, there was this notion that "Well, couldn't B2B selling be different where it didn't feel like the vendor held, had all the power, or that customers were continuously frustrated with what they thought that they bought and the value that they were getting?" And, and I, I honestly think that what's happening with AI is that we're not just taking the same sort of workflows and making them smarter. We're reinventing brand new workflows that's going to make this whole sort of buying and selling and customer and vendor experience just so much better. Because you're going to be in a world where prospects and customers can do things very, very differently, directly interface with these agents that can help them in ways that they never before imagined.

So that's what fires me up the most, is that as our customers are onboarding and seeing success like working with digital team members, it, it will change everything. It's not just changing a form factor where they were used to working on their desktop, now it's mobile, or they were used to working with perpetual, you know, servers and software and now it's cloud. It's uh every part of their workflow is, is being upended in a good way. And I think that's going to dramatically change. You know, the winners are going to figure out how to make the whole selling process radically different. And that's what we're really excited to see happen. That's, that's one of the big things that gets me out of bed every day for Feb.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. I want to ask you one more question here. You know, you started the company, you co-founded it with your wife. What's something you know now that you wish you would have known before you started the company as partners in marriage and partners in business?

Matt Darrow: Well, I'll, I'll really make you fall out of your chair, Jake, because actually we're, we're a four founding member team with two married couples, if you can believe that, strangely enough. And while there's like, which was a little bit of a hard thing to get through when we were fundraising. People were like, "How is this gonna work?" And, and honestly, I couldn't imagine any other way because of how "in it" you have to be every day to, to make it work. And, and while you know, my wife was ex-Google and, and when we started the company, she was taking of all the customers and that was her specialty over there. And then one of my, you know, best friends and a guy that I worked with at Zuora, he's sort of the engineering counterpart to my product brain. He was a longtime SE leader too, right? He came on board to run all the engineers. And then his wife just happened to be legal counsel and HR for a billion-dollar business.

So we had this amazing consortium at the beginning of these two married couples that had sort of the full kitchen sink skill set of everything you need to run a company, from HR and people and legal to engineering and product and, and customer and sales. And, and, and that was our setup. And where I go from this is what I, I think what someone, I wish I would have told me is, is, is how important the founding team is. And, and maybe that's, that, that's a little bit of a, of you know, "Hey Matt, come up with something better, because isn't that just obvious?" But we've been through so much together from boom times to difficult times, to all those challenges I mentioned around pandemic and war and, and the banking collapse, is that, that foundation is what allowed us to, to sort of keep moving forward.

And I think one thing that I will say is a lot of folks that are founders, you build your companies through your networks and, and that's just where your first like hundred folks are going to come from. It's either you know someone or, or someone you hire knows somebody. And I think a difficult thing even for me because I'm such a people person is those, those sort of employee relationships, you know, won't last. You'll have somebody that you've been really close to that changes and moves on to a new opportunity. You're going to have to make a hard decision and let somebody go that is a personal friend of yours. And those times are really, really difficult. And I think taking my rosy glasses off, you know, you just can't assume that the people that you bring in will be with you forever. And if you, as long as you do the right thing and acknowledge that up front and you always sort of take the high ground and, and, and treat everybody amicably along the way, right? Business changes, roles change, people change. And, and it's a small community, a small world out there. That's a, that's a big learning that I didn't think that I would expect to, to go through as, as often as I had.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, incredible story. Wow. Two founding marriage couples raised 130 plus million and are building an incredible AI company. I want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, and for all the listeners that are listening, I'm sure you're going to get some value out of this one. That's for sure. I want to thank my team for putting this together. And you know, excited to keep following up with how things go for you in the future, the next 6, 12, 18 months. If anyone wants to find Vivun, where do they go?

Matt Darrow: Just go to www.vivun.com. V-I-V-U-N, and you can see us there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Perfect. Well, thanks so much for joining here. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. I can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

‍