Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you'd be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Ghalib Suleiman, who is the co-founder and CEO of Polytomic. Ghalib, welcome to the show.
Ghalib Suleiman: Thanks for having me, pleasure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So a little bit about uh Ghalib. He has been working in data and analytics for over a decade. He is currently building Polytomic, the first anywhere ETL platform, which is backed by top investors including Y Combinator, Caffeinated Capital, Elad Gil, Jack Altman from Lattice, and Jeff Queisser from Box. So great background. I love the team that's invested in you. Uh before we kind of dive into your company and talk about what you're solving in the world, where are you calling in from today?
Ghalib Suleiman: Uh right, right now New York. Usually I'm in San Francisco, but today I'm in New York.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Are you originally from SF or New York, or no?
Ghalib Suleiman: No, I'm hardly American, maybe by the sounds of my accent. No, I'm from a country called Oman in the Middle East, uh next door to Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Lots going on out there in terms of growth and innovation. All sorts of companies we're talking to from the Middle East, which is really exciting. Uh exciting times for a lot of companies that have product ideas and can build for sure. Um but your, your, your company, I like uh the problem it's solving and we'll kind of dive into that. Before we do that, give us a little background of your, of your history, really from an adolescent all the way up. Like what was it that shaped you into one day becoming a founder, an entrepreneur?
Ghalib Suleiman: Oh goodness. Well, I don't really have a story that says I'm running lemonade stands since I was seven years old, so there's nothing too romantic about it. Um I never really intended to start a company growing up, even going through college. In college I studied computer science and maths, intending to just get a job. Did a couple of years of grad school, more mathematics. Really realized I liked software engineering, and so I even pondered academia, but ditched that and just got a job working in software. Eventually landed in um machine learning and natural language processing code, research, mathematics, sort of an overlap of all three.
Moved to San Francisco in 2013. I was hoping to start a company with a good friend of mine. One of my best friends growing up was working in San Francisco at the time. We were going to be building the next WhatsApp. Nothing came out of that. There were some really harsh lessons learned from our adventure in 2013, um big one being we just coded for about six months until our bank accounts ran low and then we both got jobs at startups. Uh we never spoke to customers, we never thought about the market. None of the usual discipline. It was completely disciplined-less. Coded. There were no users in the end. That was it.
Um then worked at a startup called PlanGrid. That was quite most formative. PlanGrid, I joined them, goodness, they must have been about 25 people when I joined. They had just raised a VC round from Sequoia. They were a construction app, an app for the construction industry. And it was your classic startup growth story. I left them four years later, they were about 50 employees, so we went from 25 when I joined to about 350. And then they sold for just under a billion to Autodesk about 6 months after I left. That was probably the formative situation that led to me founding a company. I got to realize that founders are human beings just like you and me. Um I'd always assumed there were these otherworldly aliens who knew what to do. But the truth is quite far away from that. Everyone's just sort of trying to figure it out as you're going along, to various degrees right? Some founders more than others. But it was a very humanizing experience just joining so early.
I got to start and then run the data team there. I was sort of the lone data guy, and then I hired people and they hired people and so on. But that was it, if there... I could point to something that led to me founding a company, it was that. It was really four years of me um, you know, we wrote some in-house tooling on the data side, we bought a bunch. And it was really where I developed opinions on something that should exist in the market that did not at the time. You know, having an opinion on something I'd like to use and buy that just didn't exist is what ultimately led me to founding Polytomic. So again, no lemonade stands as a kid. Simply four years of grinding it out and experiencing problems firsthand was probably it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. How about your parents, just curious, were they entrepreneurs?
Ghalib Suleiman: No, doctors. Uh sort of in the Middle East, you know, we do, especially from their generation and even today we do tend to be a bit conservative with jobs. Um but no, just both doctors who have been retired for ages.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well that's great to, to know you've...
Ghalib Suleiman: There was no such... actually didn't really know anyone who started a technology business until I moved to um, where was it? I worked in Boston for a bit. Yeah, it was a little shop there I worked at. And then certainly moving to San Francisco is what opened my eyes that startup founders are just normal people.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, and all over the place. I was just there a few days ago and um yeah, you walk at any corner it's almost you can hear... like we were having a dinner at a, at a great, great place called La Mar. And it was, the table next to us was, they had their own little booth, and you just looked over you could tell it was a startup by the conversation, by the communication. It's like everyone from a different country you know trying to spend a little time together outside of the workplace. And uh you know proximity is great, you know, if you want to build anything in technology San Francisco is a great place to be.
So talk to us about your, your, your... Polytomic, uh being in the, in some ways the data space, but with your background uh in data and uh coming... being inspired by a problem that you were looking to solve with a product that you could buy that wasn't out there. What is it that you're building? What is the product that's serving the market today and, and, and what is it exactly?
Ghalib Suleiman: Sure. So Polytomic is a web app that moves data between systems. That's it. It's a very simple statement. Um the thing that it does that's unique is that the data sync market is and has been fragmented. So if you want to move data from say your CRM or your business systems into Snowflake, you go buy a particular type of vendor product. If you're going from your data warehouse into other systems, there's another pool of vendors to choose from. If you're moving data between your sales system and your finance system, well there's another pool of vendors that don't touch databases, but they move data between business systems. And now there's a cottage industry of startups that do nothing except move data back and forth with spreadsheets. And so you can see how annoying this could be. When I was running a data team, it was actually quite annoying to have to just buy different vendors. I'd always begin with thinking, "I just need to move data, that's it." But the industry is so fragmented, I'd have to think about "well, what systems are involved? What data volumes are involved? How frequent are these things going to be?" And then there's a pool of vendors that do nothing except that. And so we're data syncing, an ETL tool. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load, which really means moving data and then transforming it in a data warehouse uh, or from a data warehouse. But the plain English statement is: we move data regardless of what systems are involved.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: There's a lot of products out there that do movements of data. What makes you different, what's unique uh about your product in the market today?
Ghalib Suleiman: The, the main thing is exactly what I covered, is that we cover all types of systems and all data volumes. It's really a very simple proposition. Often customers go, "Well, why would I buy four different products when I can just buy one?" It's just that simple. There end up being many different technical problems to solve if you're doing what we're doing. So the, the regular user goes, "Well, I'm just moving data, what's the problem?" But the reality is, depending on where the data is going to and from, it's a very different technical problem. But we've just decided to build the one platform so that the user can just stop at their proposition, "Well, I'd like to move data." We can go "End of story. Don't think about anything more, we'll handle it."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And within a company, who is the buyer of your product?
Ghalib Suleiman: It's actually splits goodness, just about half and half. One half are data and analytics team, so really my past self. These are people who are often running a data warehouse, something like a Snowflake or a Google BigQuery or a Databricks. These are people who need to hoover up company uh, sorry, hoover up data from all over the company into their data warehouse. They need to set up pipelines, that's where they bring us in for. And then those same people may be asked to pipe data from the data warehouse, sort of intel and interesting analytics into the business systems, like user engagement stats and so on. Pipe it in for the sales team. Now there tends to be another pool of vendors that serve this use case, but again we can handle it. And so the data team will just use us for that.
The other half tend to be IT people on the business side. These are people who are often Salesforce admins, for example. They're maintaining the systems on the business side. They're often at the receiving end of requests from the business side. Salesperson or marketing person says, "Hey, I need data in my system from the finance system," or "I need data in my system from the engineering systems, various product stats," or whatever it is. And again, both sides simply want to move data, whether it's your business IT person or a data analytics person. But our customer types or personas, if you will, tend to be split between the two depending on use case. It's the same platform regardless.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. What's the challenge uh and the time frame it takes to use your product from, I don't know, subscribing to it or integrating with it uh, however it works, and you could share that if you want, and then you know, you decide to move forward with your platform and use it. How much of an education is there around it? Do I just log in and can I just start directing and connecting, you know, "this data needs to go into that system" and "this system's data needs to go into this system's data"? Like what's the process like?
Ghalib Suleiman: Pretty much that. You log in, you connect us to your systems, you know your database is going to have a username and password, you know type that in so we can connect. Connect us to your sales system, wherever it is. And then you get going within 5 minutes. You know, usually we'll walk you through setting things up, but that's the nice thing. A lot of the vendors out there tend to be enterprise, which obviously is good in some senses, security and so on. But when you have an enterprise user interface, you can take weeks just to get onboarded. And for us it really just comes down to minutes. The biggest obstacle for us with onboarding tends to be something like, "oh someone's on vacation, someone at the customer side is on vacation and they're waiting for this person to come back." But by and large we've invested a lot in keeping things simple.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really great. God, it sounds really great. What's, what's the um... I mean I don't know if it's maybe on your website... is there a certain cost to it based on the volume of data that's shared? What's the, what's the model?
Ghalib Suleiman: It's priced, just to keep things simple, it's priced per connection actually. So it really just depends on the number of systems you connect us to and that's the main driver of the price. There is a volume component but it kicks in quite, quite late. You need to be moving a lot of volume. Obviously if you're moving 10 billion records a month, there is going to be [a] volume component. But by and large, the vast majority simply pay [a] flat fee per connection.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And is there a services component too that someone would need when they buy?
Ghalib Suleiman: Yeah, I mean realize our customers, it's everything from two-person startups to we've got Fortune 500 public companies. And so of course those on the higher end, they just tend to be busy right. They tend to say things like, "Well, yes we could set it up, yes it's easy, but you know what? Just do it for us." And so there can be a services component. It's not mandatory, most people don't need it. The ones who do opt for it tend to be ones who just lack time to even invest those few minutes, so they want us to help set the things and then we just walk away and they take over.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well talk, talk to me about the journey of the idea. So you have the idea, it's a product you wanted, you had to build it yourself. From idea to build, how long did that take and was there an initial thesis that you began with and then had to make some pivots along the way to find the product-market fit?
Ghalib Suleiman: For sure, it was definitely not a straight path. Um because I've worked in this industry for quite a while, in this market in particular, there were really no questions about what we were going to do. However, getting to product-market fit... Initially we built something for customer support teams, uh which... I love customer support teams, but it's a tough crowd to sell to. They're not the richest of departments when it comes to budgets and so on. We targeted their systems and piping data to their systems to help them have visibility on customer support tickets, customer writes in, great, I see the email address and we'd automatically show data regarding their product usage and so on, piped from the engineering systems. Now naively I thought, "Well, few people sell to customer support systems, sure, surely we could get a nice toehold by attacking that." Now this was naive. There's a reason most people don't sell to customer support people and it's because the departments tend to have smaller budgets, we'll say that.
And we ran into a huge issue where people would get on sales calls repeatedly, they'd go "Great, how do I sign on?" We'd go, "Well, before you do, to even use this thing we need access to the engineering database. So can you bring in the engineering team for a call to have them authorize [the] process?" And at this point we'd lose them. Because it's a rare customer support person who can willy-nilly take time from the, from the engineering team. Engineering teams tend to hop to sales, they tend to hop to marketing and finance desires. Customer support tends to be lower on the list. Now I don't judge this, this is a mere fact of the market. And we really struggled to just make sales going down this path. I think we made one, and this was someone we worked with previously who knew us, it was the tie of connections, and even then it was only that person. Um and so we just found out why few people sell to customer support.
And then we ended up just targeting sales uh systems which really helped us take off. We initially, by the way, um coupled with all this, we had built the wrong user interface. It was just a cumbersome one. The, the vision for the company was always consistent. The actual execution of the UI and targeting the wrong team just took us astray. We at some point just reset and rebuilt the whole user interface in a completely different fashion to make things even easier to use and targeted data and analytics teams and um people with sales systems and business IT people. That's what end, ended up with us closing our first few customers and then raising our seed round.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Um you know, oftentimes when companies go out and raise capital, they do it with idea, ideas and they pitch and pitch and pitch and pitch and they don't get the responses they, they want.
Ghalib Suleiman: I was there. Yeah, we were turned down by about 50, goodness, it must have been 50, maybe a bit more even, VCs after YC and we had zero customers and I was pitching the vision. And the consistent piece of feedback was "The vision's great. We're sold. How are you going to get there from this?" you know, pointing at the thing we had. And I'll always just wave it off and go, "Well, you know, we'll figure it out, we'll figure it out." And at some point I realized, "Hang on, I keep saying this and they keep saying 'uh not good enough' you know," in a very polite manner, investors tend to be polite. Um which really just caused me to go, "You know what? Instead of 'we'll figure it out', let's just figure it out now and switch things." Realized in the midst of all this, COVID lockdowns were fresh on everyone's mind. We graduated YC and COVID had hit, in fact two weeks before YC was meant to end. So they actually just ended the batch when COVID lockdowns hit and we were told, "Well, off you go, good luck." People tried to help as much as they could, but again, investors were all freaked out, locked up at home wondering you know, the stock market had briefly crashed before um government's money printer started. But in the meantime it was really, generally uh well an uncertain time filled with uh general doom and gloom. "Well, we're not sure what's going on here" was a common refrain amongst investors.
In the midst of all this, of course, we're trying to raise money over Zoom, locked up in our houses. And I had to just go on pitch after pitch after pitch. People are generally trying to figure out Zoom etiquette too at the time. These are people who really did not use Zoom often. San Francisco before COVID was very local-based. I mean I remember an early Snowflake sales rep visiting me at the office because well, we were all collocated right in San Francisco and that's what you do, you'd visit people's offices to sell to them. And so the whole business of raising money or transacting over Zoom was quite new to us in San Francisco. Um so it was a winding road uh. It absolutely was not straightforward at all. There were a million and one rejections and it really just took setting a hard deadline with me and my co-founder: "Look, we're going to build this new version of the app and target different teams and then close our first customers by" whatever month we designated. And after we closed our first four customers, everyone who said no came begging, begging to invest. Now you know, I think there's probably some sort of conclusion here which you know maybe to other founders going through the struggle and you know, you're really probably never as good as you think you are when times are good and you're probably never as bad as you think you are when times are bad. You know, if you're being rejected a lot, this doesn't mean that you're the worst person or the most incompetent person on the planet. Of course, conversely, it's good to be cautious if everyone's adoring you, you're placed on some sort of pedestal. It's really worth realizing that, "well this is also are probably temporary and you're probably not as good as people claim you are." You know, I've seen both extremes at this point. Maybe I'm on the older side and maybe that helps as well. But you know, it's really best to just shrug and try to be Buddhist as much as you can, you know, so float in some sort of emotionless state. But I've seen it all and it was a very wandering path for us um, with a couple of false starts for sure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I like the fact though that you know, for you the unlock was getting the clients to pay you and then taking that same vision with proof that you've got some product-market fit back to the investors and then the doors open up and you know you're off to the races.
Ghalib Suleiman: For sure, yeah. And investors, at least certainly the Silicon Valley investors, most of them, you know this is sort, it's a common trope but it's true, they never really say "no, go away," you know. They'll always say things like "not the right time," and that's probably the most common one, "you're too early," and so on. And really what they're saying is implicitly "Look, we don't like the current state of, of things, but if the state of things changes, come back to us please. Thanks very much." Right, everyone has invested in or has missed an investment, right. Everyone has made a decision to not invest in some company that's ended up being huge. You know, even the big giants of today, Facebook and so on, all struggled to raise money from certain investors in their early days and so it's always worth bearing that part in mind. You know, I mean I know some founders who are somewhat new to things tend to take rejections personally, but it's really not that, you know. It's everyone's just trying to make an obvious buck, an obvious buck as much as they can. And that's really all the mechanism that's at play is.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great to hear that. I mean you know, this is, the last 24 months has been pretty crazy with raising capital and you know innovating. And the market's changed. And you know the profitability is like line one when you talk to investors. Of you know, they want to see their, the fruits of their, their investing, the startups they invested in, the fruits of that labor you know hit a level that they can actually potentially make some exits and ultimately not burn down the company before they actually can scale and grow. So there's a lot of interesting things we are hearing for all the founders that come on, and some are very established, multiple startups. Um you know there's a, there, there's a guy uh Alex Wu who came on. Uh he's got a, it's called CFO Advisors and it's fractional CFO service, and they're, I think they're using AI now to do things differently. But you know a lot of times it's the, the metrics that they're sharing that they're seeing from founders as well focus on... which the metrics change based on the stage of where the company's at. And he, he was sharing that a lot of times the founders, if they haven't done it before, kind of don't always move with where the metrics should go. And so really fascinating podcast that was on a few weeks ago, worth listening to for anybody, for anybody to kind of learn what is coming from VCs. What, what they're sharing and kind of the, the insights that they're, that he's learned from them. But um, in terms of the, the, the market that's out there, how big of a market is there for your platform?
Ghalib Suleiman: We've run estimates internally, this is actually when we applied to YC. And you know, 100 billion market is not far off the mark, maybe, maybe larger now. At the end of the day, SaaS has exploded and probably continues to explode. Meaning companies have disparate systems whether they like it or not. You know, in the olden days you would have you know, one mainframe computer sitting in a room that contained all the company's data, and that was it. Now you do have things like "well, engineering people have their own data stores, um sales people have their own data stores, finance, marketing, customer success." And then now the data analysts have their own data stores as well. And so it's an extremely large market. People just need data moved. And companies beyond a certain size find it just unavoidable, you know, multiple systems sprout up, people need information from other systems in their home system.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: How many systems on average do companies log into when it comes to, you know, you've got your CRM, you've got your...
Ghalib Suleiman: Yeah, the funny thing is that there's you know, there's always this pendulum that swings in software between... I don't know if you've heard this um, again maybe another trope... but uh probably true... swings between bundling and unbundling, right? So you occasionally within a particular area of the market you have this explosion of disparate apps and each one does one thing really well. At some point people get sick of this and then some app comes out, you know like ours perhaps, that bundles a bunch of functionality because everyone's sick of, some, crossing some threshold in terms of multiple apps. So we actually see this swinging back and forth. In terms of an average number of apps within a company, I think it really just depends on the size of the company. But if you take your... if we talk about startups and we're talking about I don't know, let's say a 200 employee startup, I think something like 60 different apps is not so far off the mark.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Ghalib Suleiman: They don't all need to talk to one another, but they do all exist. This number is contracting with the new fundraising environment right, with less money being available and companies' budgets have shrunk. Uh before you could make any sort of point solution, you know some targeting some tiny use case, and "well you know there's money, it's cheap, zero interest rates and all that, some department would buy your stuff." And we've seen a lot of this actually collapse and shrink just in terms of the number of vendors. I think we're probably not done yet in terms of people canceling subscriptions, you know really asking "do we need this?"
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really looking at the bottom line for sure. What um you know if you look at today's market with a lot of these disparate systems and the tools out there that are helping move data around, why do you think there hasn't been one solution yet that's kind of done it all? Like what you're talking about sounds like the Holy Grail. Like it seems...
Ghalib Suleiman: I thought about this a lot when we were starting the company. I kept wondering whether I was overlooking something. I have a best guess. A best guess being: one, markets are really large. Even if you target one vertical, you'll still do okay. Your VCs will still pat you on the back for a job well done and so on, and so that's one. If you target a large market, there may not be an external forcing function that well, forces you to do more beyond this one market. Um the second I think is, well, companies reflect their founders. And founders tend to have certain experiences, often again in one vertical. It just so happens that for me in particular, I can only speak about myself, I've just spent again over a decade in this stuff, and I've done everything from you know write code for complex data pipelines to sitting next to the finance person watching them download and upload CSVs from one system to another. And so it ends up being a really difficult technical problem, but in this case, at least in our case, it's simply fueled by my past experience and desires. So markets are large enough you don't have to do this. In our case, "well I've been a buyer of these systems and it's a very personal quest."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, as you look to get into new customers, what's the sales process like for your company? I mean everybody's trying to get into different markets, enterprise B2B is one area. What's some insights that you can share that's worked for you?
Ghalib Suleiman: There's no sort of magic spell one can just cast and have things happen. But for us, we are B2B. There's no reason why we're not B2C, we just haven't focused on that segment yet. Um I think we have some B2C customers, but they're by and large B2B. Really for us it's a classic B2B sales motion. Um people hop onto a call, we run a demo for them and then we go from there. Uh sometimes there's more people to wrangle for a bigger demo with decision makers and so on. Very classic B2B stuff. And sometimes there's a pilot, especially if it's you know a big public company, we may do a paid pilot with them. And then there's a contract and terms and then signatures and we're off to the races. So nothing shocking there as far as the sales motion, very typical.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Just picking up the phones, sending out the emails, driving the pipeline, building the funnel, working the process, closing the deals.
Ghalib Suleiman: Exactly that. Yeah, I can't claim any spice or uh particular excitements, yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: No I, I think the lesson that we continue to hear is you know, for many founders that we've talked to at various stages obviously, but you know picking up the phone is some of the biggest responses we get. You know, it's "you know, what's your secret sauce?" "The secret sauce was advice I got from you know the VC firm that invested in us basically said 'Cold outreach. Hit LinkedIn. Pick up the phone. You got to make your own luck. Get after it, see what happens.'"
Ghalib Suleiman: So yeah, the, the big thing... that stuff tends to be pretty prescribed. The big thing of course is having a product worth buying right. Especially today, people are way more you know, again I've been in this stuff in startups for a while, people are way more budget conscious today. And you're asking someone to justify going to their head of finance, asking for a budget allocation, which means they'll have to say no to other tools if they buy yours. This was way less true during the um zero interest rate phase, the few years of that, especially during COVID. But again the go to market stuff tends to be pretty prescribed. The product that can stand out tends to be the major um weapon one can wield to close deals.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Cool. As you look into 2024, what's on the road map? What are you excited about?
Ghalib Suleiman: Uh you mean for us or you mean the general market?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: For you.
Ghalib Suleiman: Um well all sorts of product stuff I can't talk about unfortunately. As I could, but I won't. Um but you know for us again our mission is "make data accessible" and well, there's a lot that falls under that beyond just moving data between systems. So we've got a lot of stuff that I won't talk about just yet um coming down the pipe and it's really, is simply all about saving people headaches of dealing with multiple vendors.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know AI is integrating into every area, seems like almost every system. Can you talk about AI and is it any part of your future?
Ghalib Suleiman: Probably yes. Um we do have a product that will be using it. However, one curious thing I've noticed about companies plugging AI into everything is I'm not sure about the success rates of those products. And so there's, I think, for some things like writing code, we use this internally, and we use AI assistants to write code, they're very helpful. Code is a very prescribed domain, it's a very well-specified one. But certainly for other areas like, "oh here's AI to help you write a document," for example. Maybe you're sharing something internally or publishing something on your website, I think all that's done is just drive a lot of junk to be generated. And well, I'm not sure we want to be associated with that. And so I think the jury's out on how much of a killer app is AI per se. I think AI applied to very specific verticals? Yes. Maybe the legal industry, certainly writing code. So no, we're not just rushing to embrace AI per se. There are a couple of very specific use cases that are technical which we'll be having AI for.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it, makes sense. Yeah, it's uh, the jury is still out. We're seeing a lot of use cases for it, but you know, end of the day is it... what problem is it really solving and...
Ghalib Suleiman: Exactly. Yeah, I think the VCs are certainly going crazy over it. But then again you know, you've seen this record play a million times over, there's always some trend everyone's chasing. And I do wonder again, there's a lot of the AI stuff makes for really great demos. But the problem is if you have some sort of error rate in there right. So you'll show the ideal case in your demo, but then your user 10%, 15%, maybe 20% of the time gets junk outputs or output that's obviously wrong. These are probabilistic systems. It's worth asking the question you know, what CIO or what business is okay with that sort of error rate? You know, not many. And this is I think a dirty secret that's, is waiting to be unfurled after the hype dies down. It takes a lot of effort to make something called AI that's completely trustworthy as well in a generic sense. So this is something I think we're just very cautious about, hence being targeted.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, looking forward to catching up with you as uh you get into the new year and the next couple years to see the progress of what's happening with your product. Sounds like you got some exciting things coming, which I'm sure you'll be able to share more of uh in the near term. Um, let's switch gears a little bit. Uh I'm gonna just personally ask you a couple of questions, two, three questions um that we'll you know, share a little bit more about you with the audience. So for you, what's, what's a lesson... not necessarily lesson, maybe some advice you got from another founder that you felt priceless, that's helped you, that's worth sharing with, with the listeners?
Ghalib Suleiman: You know, I wish I had an answer here. I actually don't think I do. I think maybe the best advice is probably given by YC, which again it sounds so trite. But um they do have a slogan called um, or titled "Make Something People Want", which is such a simply stated slogan, and they keep repeating it. And you go, "Well this is so obvious," but the reason they do is because so many people just get this part wrong. Many people build something sort of like I did back in 2013, you know we're hoping to build the next WhatsApp, but really we didn't speak to any users, we built something we thought people wanted rather than something people actually wanted. It ends up being pretty difficult to build something people want and will pay money for. And that's the slogan that's worth drilling into one's head if I had to pick one.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I always thought it was "build something people need."
Ghalib Suleiman: Yes, I think that's probably more to the point. I think for B2B that's probably the slogan. I think B2C right, people you know individuals have their wants and desires and fashions and so on, but for B2B I would endorse your rephrase.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um, where do you go when you need to innovate, think creatively, you know, come up with big ideas? Where, where do you go physically to, to make that happen? For some it's jumping in the shower, for others it's something different. What's worked for you?
Ghalib Suleiman: I wish I had a set place I could go to that would result in idea generation. I think it's probably again, probably in the shower or the gym really. Places where one is completely isolated from interruptions. I think sitting at one's desk on a screen, especially if you're a founder, I mean you know the day is just an endless stream of emails and messages and requests for interruption and disasters and so on. So certainly shower thoughts have been actually um big source of ideas for sure, yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Being isolated produces... we've heard that. We've heard that a lot. We've heard that a lot about the shower, some it's about running, some it's about physically moving. Um and so my thought is, well if you can get your best ideas in the areas or the place that you go to, whether it's a shower or running, why not run five times a day or take five showers a day? Maybe get the answers that you need. But uh I don't know if it works like that.
Ghalib Suleiman: Well yeah, I'm quite sure... because uh at the end of the day you still need to do work as well right. This actually, and this is perhaps a bit of a serious response, you do need to just somehow balance your time between actually executing and producing work, and thinking as well. Um I mean, five showers a day may also result in you looking like a prune on whatever Zoom call you're on. Maybe that's ill-advised for that reason. But um there is the more solemn response, I think it's just also tricky to figure out one's time. I still don't have a good recipe to follow regarding splitting my time between thinking and producing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. So you know, how do you uh stay positive or keep the perspective in the up and down journey of running a startup?
Ghalib Suleiman: One is simply acknowledging that these things take a long time. Uh there's really no such thing as "well building a startup and everything's grand and big and huge within a year." Once in a while it happens, but usually not. So just assume you're in it for a slog. Uh acknowledging this upfront really helps deal with any tough times. And then more saliently um, for those dealing with any tough days, my best advice is just talk to your customers. If you're going through a tough time, it's really validating to realize that "hang on, people do rely on you." If you go out of business, you will be messing up some people's lives. It's sort of like parents know this by default, you know, if they screw something up, well their kids rely on them, and once you're a parent well tough luck, you're serving this kid whether you like it or not, whether it's a bad day or a good day, this is it, this is your life. And so it goes for being a founder at least professionally, uh your professional life. I mean simply talk to your customers if you're having a bad day. Just get a customer on a call and ask them "why are they using you?" It's really amazing what sort of psychological effect that has, just a reminder that the stuff you're doing matters can mean a lot.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, yeah and business is a psychological game as much as it is you know a fiscal game where you're trying to generate capital. We've heard other founders talk about you know the responses they get from their customers that send them an email. And then they take all the positive emails they get from their customers and they save it in a file. And when they get in those sort of down moments just go and look at all the great things that you know have been said about their product or about them and kind of gives you a little bit of a psychological boost in those moments that we all have you know building companies for sure.
Ghalib Suleiman: I think there must be some sort of common human tendency here. It's the same way if I text my mom for a call randomly, you know her day is made. That's, she just needs no more from the day, it's done. I, her son texted her, she's good to go. I think there's something similar again, I think everyone wants to feel relevant and it's worth... if you have customers, well you are, and you're easily, it's easy to remind yourself of this fact by just talking to them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. Well on that note, really appreciate your time and, and spending with us today. And, and for all of our listeners for listening, it worlds, means the world to me. Um Ghalib, if, if someone wants to get ahold of you or find your company, where do they go?
Ghalib Suleiman: Uh you can go to our website www.polytomic.com or check out our LinkedIn page if you'd like to contact us through that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's perfect. Well there you have it. Great. Uh look forward to catching up with you in the future as things continue to grow and prosp- uh prospect within your company. Uh and really excited to see the new innovations that are coming about within the organization. Um my name is Jake Aaron Villarreal. I'm signing off for now, but until the next episode can't wait to catch up with you all then. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have 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. We 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. Us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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