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'll be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal, and excited to have with us today Surbhi Rathore, founder of Symbl.ai, which has raised $24 million in funding, and we'll walk through exactly what it is. But before we do that, Surbhi, thanks for joining.
Surbhi Rathore: Thanks Jake for having me here. So excited.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, there's a lot of buzz around AI, and you know just from my perspective, you know we don't think a lot about AI, how it's influencing us, how it's helping us. There's a lot of benefits, pros, cons, and so hopefully we'll learn some of that here on this uh podcast. But I just want to share the day in the life of me and how AI influences my life. So wake up in the morning, I prompt Google, "Hey Google, what time is it?" It gives me the time of day. I get up, I go in and I get my kids out of bed. "Hey Google, what's the temperature today?" It gives me the temperature. I decide what I'm going to put my, what clothes I'm gonna put on my kids and I take them to school. I get home, I log in, I start going to work. We're in the recruitment business. We're using applications that help us screen through resumes fairly quickly, optimizes how we approach our business, that saves us time. Then we get into international conversations, we use Google Translate. The kids come home, we start dinner. "Hey Alexa, uh can you put on some music?", and it's recommending music that it knows I like because it's listened to the music I've played. Then we get into the evening, put the kids to bed, go to Netflix, stream some videos, and it's recommending to me what it believes I'd like based on what it knows I've seen.
So having said that, I look at AI as a real benefit in terms of the tool and the applications, and it also is something that's like a shadow in our lives that we don't necessarily know and pinpoint, but it's helping us in a lot of ways. So having said that, we're going to talk about your application and AI, when you started it, how you started it. But let's go a little bit farther back uh to you, before we dive in (and we're going to really cover your application as well as we get into this). So talk to us about where you're from originally.
Surbhi Rathore: I'm from India. Born and brought up there. My dad was in the Armed Forces, so traveled all across the country. Don't ask me where I'm exactly from in India because I also don't know! I got an opportunity to really be thrown into a new group of friends every two years, and I think that is the something that I carry with me even now. Uh, yeah. So did my schooling there, engineering there. Uh, started working in a startup in India, it was a network security organization, built software products there. Moved to a big telco organization Amdocs, did a long time there. Uh, and then during my tenure at Amdocs kept moving out, out and about India in order to build products, projects, implementations for customers. Very exciting, touched different cultures all along. And now I'm based in California, San Francisco right opposite Salesforce Tower.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I know that tower. It's big and it definitely shouts at you when you drive by. Yeah that's great. So uh, when, when did you come to California, how old were you when you came to the US?
Surbhi Rathore: I came here really to start Symbl. Uh I had not moved here before that. I had moved to Sydney, Australia and uh my journey to start Symbl led me here. So yeah, I have not studied here, I didn't go to school here. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty much for Symbl.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's inspiring just because the fact that you know people grow up in America where there's opportunities to do whatever you want to do if you have the ideas, the courage, and really step up and try and make something happen, innovate, create. So to not be from here, to come here always, I love the story because what the opportunities are people go to and if they execute well they can make it happen. So you're in San Francisco today, tell us a little bit about how you got inspired with the idea of what you've created so far.
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah. I got an opportunity to work on early chatbot implementations, and as part of my old organization for telcos, and you know amount of conversations that happens in big telcos, call centers and customer experience and self-service. And that opportunity led us, both me and my co-founder, to really dig into the nuances of human conversations that persist not just when you implement automation (which is replacing humans by bots), but also when people talk with each other. And we were extremely fascinated by the intelligence that can support humans in real-time and kind of create an augmented intelligence for them, almost like a co-pilot for everyone. So that's how we started our journey and this is back in 2018. Uh and yeah, it's amazing, it's been five years, and to finally see uh the space that we were building all along in, to just accelerate at a speed that no one could ever imagine is uh insane, yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well is this your first startup?
Surbhi Rathore: It is, yes. I was a software developer all along, so uh yeah uh starting my journey from a software developer working with customers as an engineer and then landed into building Symbl. So yes, very much first.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Now having not built a company before, and trying to build a startup and bring it to market, did you have any guidance, any support? Did you go through an accelerator? What was your sort of...
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah absolutely. Uh I took over as much support as I could, honestly. Uh not hesitant to ask for help whenever we need one. And I think it's important to acknowledge blind spots, so we've been pretty self-aware through our journey, which I've loved the most. We got into Techstars Seattle 2019, and that's how we moved to Seattle. My co-founder was in the Bay Area, but with Techstars we moved to Seattle and actually were there for the last four years. I just recently moved back to the Bay, and he's still there. Uh Techstars was amazing. Put us in the right kind of circle, the right kind of network. Investors, customer discoveries, just processes of building an organization which wasn't very matured of when you start as a first-time founder. So yeah, it was an amazing experience, highly recommended for anyone building a new company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So for those that haven't been through an accelerator, whether it's Y Combinator or Techstars, it sounds like it gives you almost an MBA about how to start and really scale or run a business. All the, the processes, the milestones, the patterns you might see, how to get funding. Why did you choose Techstars versus something else? And I know about Techstars, but maybe for the audience that doesn't, what, what was that led to Techstars?
Surbhi Rathore: I loved our MDs. Uh the conversations that we had with them were amazing. And you end up working with your MDs of the program for the majority of the part. Also I think Techstars focuses on taking much lesser companies in a single batch, which creates a higher focus on those organizations and much tighter bond. I'm always the person that prefers like quality over quantity. So with that in mind I was like, "Oh, there are like nine founders building companies from different parts of the world coming together uh, and a lot of immigrants also there." So it just felt like home away from home, and so we decided to choose Techstars.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, and, and that brought you to Seattle.
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, that's right.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. And uh, in that process um, what's the process to apply? Because it's always uh you know these are great places to go to, but what are the odds to get in and what's the process like to actually try and get in?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, I think I was uh... I built out profiles on AngelList and F6S. I think those are the two portfolios uh, two websites which has most of the accelerated programs. Applied to Techstars from there, um and got a call back from them uh through the application process. So yeah, it's fairly simple and online if you just know about it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know about it, so that's really good. And when you graduate through there, is there a guarantee you're going to get funding or is it part of the program that you have a shot to get funding?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, so they actually invest 150k into the companies as part of the Techstars program. And uh post that it's definitely, there's no guarantee. You're exposed to a bunch of investors within the network itself and you have the opportunity to sit down with them and talk and discuss. And if it works out, it works out. And so it did work out for us, yeah. Yeah, we raised our pre-seed round of around 1.8 million back then in 2019, which was led by Flying Fish. They're a Seattle-based AI focused fund. And we had the opportunity to work with Harris there who was a founding partner. Uh he had spent a long time in Bing speech and NLP in Microsoft and uh uh still on our board actually, uh and has been excited to work with him for the last four years.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. When you go through uh Techstars and you get into building your company, and they're still part of your foundation team, or at least giving you guidance, what are the services they help you with? I mean when you start a company the first thing you don't think about is "I gotta hire a Chief People Officer, I gotta hire a CFO, I gotta think about operations." You just, you have a product, you have an idea, you try and build it, create it, bring it to market. You know you innovate, and you market. So those are like kind of two areas I think you want to keep a focus on. But as you get out of Techstars, or out of an accelerator, how far down do they continue to provide service options to you or just guidance in your, in your growth?
Surbhi Rathore: Now... even now, actually. For all our fundraising, they are my first point of contact uh for getting introductions to any Techstars company, they are my first point of contact. Now Techstars' network is pretty solid and they make sure that they bridge the gaps in connecting founders with each other. But to answer your previous question, I think their program structure is pretty interesting. Uh the first one month they really hone in on your idea and validating your idea with the market. They give you the opportunity to speak to like, I don't know, 30, 40 mentors uh, like almost like a speed dating sort of a concept. They call it "Mentor Madness" (I don't know if they're still doing it, but that's super interesting) because you get to speak like 30, 30 minutes with the people that you're most interested in to talk to. And to set up meetings with those people it would take you a lot of time. So they kind of like crunch that entire thing into a short period of two weeks and give you access to all these people that would eventually do discovery and feedback from right there. And then within the one month, the first one month, you actually validate your idea and, and kind of like put a stamp on the ground and say, "Okay, this is what I'm going to be building, and now I gotta start building and finding early customers and do customer discovery, figure out what's the value here and all of that stuff." So that's the first one month. I think second month is more about execution. So they kind of like help you frame your mind around how to identify the core KPIs of the business, how do you... at every stage, doesn't matter the stage... and how do you on a weekly basis get aggressive about it and continue to execute on it repeatedly? Test it, get feedback. And the whole group is there to support and give feedback to the rest of the founders also. So that's really awesome. I still remember we used to love doing our KPIs, highs and lows, on Fridays with South wines and cocktails, and depending upon the food of the company... [it] could go on right! So yeah, and other people are having wine and chilling. So it was very interesting and it became like a small family. Uh, third month I loved it because I think that's the one that truly shaped me as a founder and has given me my roots, is the art of storytelling.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yes.
Surbhi Rathore: Which is so critical. And I did not know how critical that is until I really get got through Techstars and saw the benefits of that, and not just the fundraise after it, but future fundraisers, hiring people, telling the story of the business. And I don't know, what, 20,000 different ways depending upon who you're speaking to, because their interest level changes drastically. Um so we spent a lot of time in actually talking about the business and telling the story of the business in different ways and forms. And I think that's the part that I just did not like and loved at the same time.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, as it was brutal.
Surbhi Rathore: Like we would come up with a new story every three days, I'd go back and get beaten up on and go back again. And, and now that I think about it, it's like thank God I did it! Okay uh, but it was, but at that time it was so, it was so exhausting.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, yeah, but it was great, that's great. Yeah, storytelling is such an important part of our culture, our society in everything we do. And you just don't think about it, but you know it's storytelling helps influence people, it helps give you you know ideas, it inspires you. You buy things when you hear a story. I mean it's, I think it's essential to just about any part of a business. It's... we look at recruitment ourselves and that's what we do is storytelling. We understand the company, the problem they solve, why they'd want to you know... how, why do you want to join? And then we talk to candidates to understand their story. What have they done, why are they great to work for a certain company? We kind of match them together. So we've always believed that storytelling is vital for growing a business. And I'm glad that they, they spent a lot of time making sure that you really hone in and understand what your story is and what it could be, and also the changes that come up that you need to change your story to, to adapt to. When you first got there and you brought the idea and the product um to market, or building it to market, did you change from hearing feedback at Techstars or just "this is our idea and we're moving forward?"
Surbhi Rathore: No, we did not. I think you're, we are one of the few companies (and there were other companies too in the batch that did the same thing) that were pretty hell-bent on, on what they were building. We were a little further along actually when we got into Techstars, we already had uh I think two customers by then, one of them already did a POC with us, implemented it. So we had gotten a little bit of like you know, proof of concept out there, validation of the idea like, all that kind of stuff. I remember at that time I was pitching "API for your meeting notes", uh basically. "So integrate an API into any of your communication platform and get automated meeting notes, summarization, action items, follow-ups, all of that stuff", which seems like so many people are doing now. And imagine we're building that like in 2018! Seems bizarre, really ahead of the curve. So yeah, uh that was uh that was the time when we got into Techstars. And some other companies were still kind of like experimenting with the idea. For us to focus more on "really validate what we have already customers for", and "do we feel that there is going to be a stronger market opportunity, or what is the, how is the distribution, how are we going to unpack sales efficiency and repeatability in this?" So like, our thinking process was a little different. And I really wish like we had gone a little earlier into Techstars to have the luxury to you know, just go wild and figure out an idea. We didn't do that, we went with an idea. So we didn't truly enjoy the flexibility of being in an accelerator program like... but it was great. It turned out to be great.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I'm going to read a little bit about what I understand about your product, only based on what I've read online and so that's coming from you and probably coming from others in your team. And then after that I want to hear your perspective of how it's changed. Maybe it's changed from what's written down and what you're doing today, and ultimately what's the use cases that the listeners are going to understand truly what it is your product does. Because AI has got so many different flavors and so many areas of focus that it's kind of a blanket statement, but where is it really serving and who it's serving?
So let me just kind of walk through what I've read and understand it to be. So Symbl is a machine learning platform that enables access to cutting-edge conversation understanding models for developers. Secure, scalable, and explainable AI for human-to-human conversations. It's used in various industries and applications including customer support, call centers, collaboration platforms, voice assistants, market research, and more. Its goal is to empower developers and organizations to create conversational AI solutions that enhance communication, understanding, and efficiency. Now, out of all of that, there's a lot of words in there. Does it make sense? It probably does to you. But for those that don't know AI, talk to me about in your words what it is you really bring to the table.
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, let's unpack and simplify that a little bit. Uh I think uh we've always been very obsessed by the notion of using AI to support humans in the way that they speak, communicate, generate information from their communications and simplify all of that so that they can focus on doing the more creative tasks. And the AI can take away all the mundane activity and generate information from them as needed. We also believe that human-to-human conversations (which is really the kind of conversation that we are having right now) is not completely unlocked yet. Because a lot of tools and models out there kind of don't look at human conversations as a separate form of data. It's very much looked at "oh let's do some sentiment analysis on these documents and by the way there are 10 transcripts in these documents too, all right." So we've been since the very beginning trying to create an opinion that conversation data is unique, and until we build specialized AI models and systems to understand and generate information from these conversation data (specialized to human conversations), we won't be able to truly unpack it.
So that's what Symbl has been doing uh is to you know, ingest real-time conversations like what we are doing right now uh, in just like telephony or conversations on a phone call or even recordings. Process it in real-time and give back information that could help as assisting humans or do more post-call journey analytics, summarization, follow-ups, and all of that stuff. Um the beauty of the platform is one, that it's, every, all the models are custom built for conversations. So they are architected and trained in a certain way which is different from document understanding tools out there. And second is that it's all programmable. Because we also believe that the system of engagements for different organizations is very different, and moving from one system of engagement to the other becomes pretty difficult. So we want to natively enable existing workflows or existing solutions out there that can become intelligent uh without having to adopt another tool uh for your stack. So that's why we took that API first approach for the platform. So I think the specificity in conversations, being able to understand the context of conversations in relationship to your business, and getting the API first approach to this to make it super easy to program and customize, that has been the core foundations of the company. Um our key use cases very much apply to high-value human conversations. And a lot of that happens when you talk to a customer. So all the way from first touch point of lead generation or marketing conversations to sales calls and follow-up customer success calls and support calls. So the entire customer life cycle is what we focus on. So I'll take advance there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Thanks for sharing that. So let's give a specific use case. I'm in sales. I'm in a call center. I've got my script, I'm making phone calls. I'm recording the calls. I'm getting insights of that, but I really don't want to go back after 8 hours of making calls to listen to all my recordings. What worked, what didn't work? What was the part that actually was a hesitation from the client side? Or maybe there was an opportunity to sell something and I actually made a big sale on that specific call, but I'm still not going to go back and listen to it all. And then I also want to go ahead and follow up with the ones that were really looking to move forward and get them an email, give them a call, schedule another time to chat with them to follow up and close the deal. Is your technology helping me do that based on recording and listening, and then recommending or automating how I can do my job more efficiently?
Surbhi Rathore: Yes. Okay. Yes. And actually this is very timely because just yesterday we announced Programmable Sales Intelligence uh experiences. Uh so the ability to support uh reps and salespeople with real-time guidance. The ability to score the conversations immediately after the call on certain parameters which are critical. And with generative AI really unpack like why the score was low? Why was your communication low, or what parts indicated that you did not follow a sales process or there was no forward motion in this conversation? And that, following that up with summarizing the call so that the right data can be inputted in CRM Salesforce, which is the source of truth for doing a lot of deal forecasting. So we've built these components and actually announced it just yesterday!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh wow.
Surbhi Rathore: For any businesses to adopt it, yeah, because it's very timely. Yeah, and conversations are pretty much at the center of all, all of this. So yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. So when it comes to helping the salesperson, it's not just helping them, it's also potentially helping their managers too, right? To understand the trends, why, you know out of our 100 sales reps, these top 10 are always doing well, let's look at the data and understand what it's telling us. Those insights.
Surbhi Rathore: Yep, absolutely. Uh uh a lot of the sales managers today they use Gong or tools like sales intelligence tools like Gong in order to go back, listen to the recording, identify certain parts. We also feel there with generative AI there's a new way of doing it that we announced yesterday. We feel that all this data should, can live in your Salesforce. So while you definitely need access to call recordings to be able to see more information, you would not have time to go and listen to all call recordings. So in order to empower your team to self-coach themselves so that you don't have to communicate the coaching moments, some aspects of the coaching needs to be present in the CRM or Salesforce itself as soon as the call is over. And that's also the goal scoring that we are actually bringing within the CRM itself.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, you mentioned generative AI, and I want you to talk a little bit about that. Because when OpenAI came out, Open AI came out and ChatGPT really hit the market, and now there's been tons of you know interest around what exactly it does and how it's integrated into applications. How is generative AI integrated into your application, and was it something that you were already building or starting with in 2018?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah. We didn't start with generative AI models in 2018. We built our first model for summarization in 2021. Uh that's when we announced it. So yeah, we started building up on it, onto an, in 2020 after we raised our second round of financing, but we only launched it in September 2021. That was a summarization API. So it would take the conversation, the full conversation, and generate an almost like a meeting brief or a summary of the conversation for you which is generated uh out of understanding of that content. Um and yeah, we had massive growth in 2021, 2022 also attributed to that API. Along with another one that we launched with that, which is called Bookmarks. And bookmarks enable you, it's very interesting because we created an API that can integrate into your real-time communication products, like the one that we are talking on right now. If you find an interesting moment in this conversation and you want to capture it, you could just with a click of the button you could create a clip, and then have a summary and verbatim for like a testimonial associated to it all together. So that's another one that we launched in 2022. And this was much before GPT. But thank God for OpenAI and ChatGPT because the understanding of these technologies accelerated at the scale that no matter how much money we would have poured into marketing it would not have happened. So it's, it's really awesome to see the awareness that they were able to create, and the relatability to every single human irrespective of their knowledge of AI that they were able to build with their experiences. And of course we, we ride on that wave. And given that we already had a generative AI model that was doing summarization very custom built for business conversations, uh we got acceleration out of it. So yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. I love that story. Yeah, this application we're using for this podcast is Riverside. And when they came out with the ability to look at transcripts right after you did the call, it was a, a, a, a major time saver for us. Because we can, you know, I can take that transcript, I could copy it, consent it [send it] to a podcast producer, he could you know go through it, take out things that you know we don't want, and also um create content marketing around it. So it's incredibly useful. Um and I don't know if they created it or they partner with companies like yours to embed into their application, but they came out with it pretty quick after OpenAI had been in the market and provided the transcript functionality from, from what I recall. So that's really great. Yeah, you're riding a great wave right now and it's not just now, I think the future is you know, it seems like everything's going to be integrated at some capacity with AI.
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah. And we believe that you know transcription has always been like the first step. But with generative AI and language models it's really possible now to create net new knowledge uh out of uh the conversation and recordings like these. Uh so why stop at transcription when you can create different forms of content out of it, right? When you can auto create clip notes, you can create a blog post, you can create different forms of content that it really is going to amplify the value of this one hour that we invest, and the follow-up hours that you will invest and your team will invest. So that is absolutely phenomenal.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, we've talked really about one use case in sales. And you know, that's just because something that I think a lot of companies can relate to. What are the, what's like your biggest use case that maybe we're not talking about that you want to share? Or something that you know is coming that should be really interesting to know about?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah. No, I mean sales, I think that sales and go-to-market is one of our primary use cases which stitches the whole customer experience loop. Uh we also believe that sales data and the information generated in sales calls is not limited to sales and it can really help the entire life cycle of the business. Uh and support with product discoveries and you know product roadmaps and changing some processes in your business uh, and help the exec teams get more visibility into specific deals which could be strategic for the business. So it's truly like unpacking customer conversations in totality and looking at it with different lens based on the persona that you are in. And yeah, so we, the call score API that I was talking about which we are launching in the next two weeks, enables you to actually create those criterias that you are really obsessed about to measure after each call. So like for instance, like I am an exec, and after each call I want to know that what is the strategic importance of this deal? I could create a programmable score around it and configure it so that every time I just need to filter the calls and say "which are the most strategic deals that my team's doing in this quarter and I want to participate and help in closing it?" Right? So it just, if you know more about these blind spots it just completely changes your way of running the business and it almost creates a backlog for the exec team.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no, it's that, those, those are the type of backlogs executives like. We um, I worked at Oracle for seven years, and I was in New York City. And one of the meetings we had to do is every couple weeks we'd sit down with the VP, area VP of sales. And they wanted to go around the horn for all, you know, 50 sales reps in New York City and understand your deal flow, the forecast, what's closest to the money, what's the problem not getting it done. And so each sales rep had to create a summary about each account, and you know it was 45 minutes with each person. And long story short, if there was a technology like this, then I mean the executive team could come to the table knowing about where the conversations were, where the opportunities were, where the forecast was real. Because you're a public company, they're on the line to forecast accurately. So I think it ties into really big enterprises in a big way, that's where you probably have a big opportunity, and then even the smaller mid-sized companies have you know a lot of opportunity to use something like this. So really, really cool. I didn't know that that was really your main focus before this call, which is something I think a lot of companies could take advantage of. Do you need to have Salesforce, do you have to have a CRM? Can you work off of spreadsheets? Like how does your technology integrate?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah. Uh we took the API first approach with building Symbl, which is for the exact same reason that conversation data lives in very different systems. It's not, there is no central like data warehouse for conversations that exist today (I'm sure Snowflake is extending to it and other data warehouses). But um it's distributed in form of recordings in maybe S3 buckets, Google Drives, uh maybe on your Zoom calls or something like that. And how to put all this data from different places and really processes and keep it centralized. So yeah, we have our APIs are extensible from an integration perspective and we can pull data from any of these places and push it also. In any of the programmable... through a programmable interface, that can be pushed to any different locations. So you can push it on your favorite BI tool that you're using probably to create all this dashboarding or create a report, put it in Google Drive.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it, very cool. Okay great. Well you've been building this for five years now. When you started building this platform and you started to hire, walk me through the first 10 roles that you hired for the company.
Surbhi Rathore: Hmm. So uh given that we were building an AI infrastructure, uh uh which we still do, a majority of our initial team was pretty technical and machine learning heavy. And uh I think uh out of the first 10 people, I would say our first eight people were really product builders. And uh me and one more person who I was very fortunate to get on board. Uh she was at that time our HR, Operations, Finance, kind of like all-in-one Operations plus. And uh it's amazing because she's still with the company and she oversees now Global Finance, HR, and Operations for the business. Uh so she's been kind of like my left hand since then, and I am a left-handed person! It's very compatible, yeah. So uh yeah, I think I, I did most of the marketing, I did, I did most of the customer discovery, I took up that role. My co-founder did a lot of the technical, and we both collaborated on product together. Very first version of the product we both developed together, and very soon you realize that I need to pivot into another form of responsibilities, otherwise we won't get through our initial customers. So I spend a lot of time with customers and writing content around it. I wish I would have written more content thinking about it now, it would have been good to tag 2018 post of what you're doing now! Uh but yeah, most of the team was really engineering and machine learning.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And was that here in San Francisco?
Surbhi Rathore: Uh no, our early team was actually based out of India. And we had uh two people here in San Francisco which is me and my co-founder. Uh and then we had eight people back in India. We were bootstrapping for the first six months until we got into Techstars, and even after Techstars, still we got our first round of financing it was another six months. So we had to make sure that we can still operate uh with [a] low team. I think we had like five people in the company until we raised our first round of financing. So two of us here, three there. And then we added five more people but they were all in India first. And then slowly we built out the team in the US. So we didn't start with the team in the US except for the both of us just to be more capital efficient as a business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, so your, the person that's your left hand person that does HR, finance, operations, where did you meet? Did you know her before you started the company?
Surbhi Rathore: No. It's so funny you know, like I lived in Pune, India for such a long period of time before I moved Sydney and then started and then moved here, but I did not know any single person we brought on as our first 10. They were all net new people that we connected [with]. They got the vision, they got the idea, they got excited about it. We really cared very much about the people more than looking at the pedigree or the company that they're coming from or you know what have they done before. It was so much about hunger because we ourselves were hungry to do something. And so we just found more people like us and brought all of us together. So yeah, Priyanka, that's her name, uh uh our, our operations, and she is um, she was in Goldman Sachs before. So uh she's uh she was a big finance geek. And when she started in Symbl I told her, "Well we're not there for like a big finance function." Uh and it was the attitude. And I still remember she said "Don't worry, just write down all the things you do and I'll take all that over so that you can do the next set of things."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's great. That's really, really cool. Um continue.
Surbhi Rathore: And that was phenomenal, like just hearing that was phenomenal! And I think we heard similar things in different contexts when we interviewed and got those first 10 people. That it doesn't really matter the rules and responsibilities and things like that, we're here to solve a problem which is unique, no one else is doing it in this way, we're very proud to be building this. And just going through that journey and we are grateful that we are here. So let's do it!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You said two things I think are really important: hunger and grateful. And being able to find people that have those uh, con-, those, those attitudes, those, those thoughts. Um I think is really essential in building anything, you have to have the right team. But I think it comes, it's not so much from the skills, it's who the DNA of the person. So I think that's as important as anything that you can look at when you're bringing somebody on board. So you, those are the first 10. It sounds like a good foundation you started with. How big are you today?
Surbhi Rathore: We have 44 people.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay. So from 10 to 44 you had to make a pivot. You said personally, right? You had to make that shift as a leader where you're going to focus the things you're going to do, maybe delegate more. Um let's talk about the last 10 people you've hired. What's different between the first 10 and the last 10?
Surbhi Rathore: That's such an interesting question. And I've never thought about it honestly this way. Um I think uh the last 10 people that we brought on board are with the focus of like "who can hit the ground running without having to ramp up uh up in this domain or with the technology?" And we can do it now because we can get people from those you know businesses that we want to hire from or those people uh the experience that we are looking for with other folks. Also because like AI has come a long way. So the kind of people that you would find like five years back working in NLU uh you, it's hard, uh it was hard back then to find people like that. Now there are more people that have worked on NLU tech. So yeah, all the 10 people I have [hired] were mainly with one, one was the like "yeah we want them to hit the ground running for sure." Uh because the business, the timeline for business to show results is much accelerated now as opposed to what it was in early stages.
And then two, I think we also think about scalability a little bit now with the people that we want to hire. Experts or individual contributors that can grow into then building a team or leading a team. Because now we're thinking about the future a little bit and how do we enable them to go and unlock their own personal growth in the next stage. So we think a little bit more about those aspects now as opposed to [before]. And of course like hunger and passion never goes away right, because that is like so true, but it's more like additive skills now as opposed to replacement of skills. So yeah, gotta have the same hunger, gotta be grateful about the opportunity to work in early stage, to make an impact at the business at such 30 [early] phases, but now we can also ask a few things which we were not asking as much of, of people before. So that's great.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Are the engineers today still majority in India? Are they here, are they...
Surbhi Rathore: It's a blend. It's a blend now. Yeah, so post our Series A we did actually, we really accelerated hiring in the US and built out a pretty significant team. We are more on the US side than India now. So we're like 26 people here and India is now lesser than what it was uh from a ratio perspective. But yeah we have an awesome product team here. We got a product leader from AWS API Gateway, she was heading that before. Before that she was at Apigee and Google. And just someone who knows really how to build scalable enterprise platforms which are API first. That's kind of like hardcore. She's built a great product team here. Uh we've hired great engineers, machine learning folks here. Really excited to grow the organization here. Yeah we started more with go-to-market roles in the US when we got started, kind of complemented, and then very soon we realized that we do need even engineering and machine learning teams on both sides. So that's kind of what we did.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Um when it comes to hiring, obviously that's a, it's an area that a lot of companies have to go through and learn and build and you know get better at. Sounds like you've put together a good team and you're off and you're running, you're doing really well. Culture is oftentimes something that's not looked at as critically important when you hire for a lot of companies. They hire because the culture typically is you know, the tone is set from the founders and kind of how they think and how they operate and how they, how they view the world. You know everyone kind of falls in line with that. But as you add more people the culture changes. You have more leaders, they think differently, they do things differently. And controlling that sometimes is what founders try and do and sometimes they just, it becomes what it is. In your company today, what type of culture do you have? If you're an engineer out there listening and you potentially might want to work for Symbl, what are they getting into?
Surbhi Rathore: We have a very high ownership culture. And that could be sometimes scary for people uh because they would directly own a big responsibility, and no one else to kind of like "oh, oh should I actually do it this way?" like at every checkpoint. So we like giving that responsibility to people because we feel it really unlocks you know the next level in them. Plus it really helps the company to build trust with someone. And of course like you will fail at times and you will succeed, but that's all in the process of learning. Uh but the fact that you own something you become really responsible and obsessed about making sure that you, you understand the whole picture, not a piece of it. And so giving context to be able to own full aspects of the product responsibility process whatever that may look like, that's a big piece.
Uh we have a value which is very interesting which is called "Connect not Transact". Uh because in, we are a remote company and working in remote environment could be very disconnected and you could just be very transactional when you're working with people and you don't really find time to learn about each other. So we intentionally do things and put processes in place where you get to learn about each other, you see their environments, you get more context about "tell me what you like and tell me what you don't like" and uh and do like mix and mingles remotely uh between global you know cultures. And also talk about every holiday to explain [to] people what a, what a holiday in India means versus what a holiday in France means, and in Canada means, in the US. Because we are distributed in four continents now!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, so it's a lot of ground to cover.
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah! But it's so exciting because uh you're collaborating without borders right. And like uh we, we don't have, we like those, I've always like hated the concept of immigrations and you know not being able to move to another country or talk to people from another country. Like I'm a big fan of borderless collaboration and I really champion that within the organization. But yeah, with ownership uh comes obviously growth. And uh being self-aware about the areas that you need to improve, being vulnerable and accepting of your own growth challenges. Uh so all those aspects. But we work on pretty cutting-edge technology. So if you're an engineer listening to that, you've got to join Symbl. Uh because you work on the best-in-class tooling and the most cutting-edge models, and solving the most complex problems together with customers, which is the most exciting part.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's right. Yeah, that's really cool. So for those listening, what are the kind of roles that you are looking for now that you're trying to build into the teams?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, we're really growing our machine learning team here in the US and that's, so a lot of roles are around it. We're looking for machine learning infrastructure roles, we're looking for ML engineering roles, we're looking for research engineer roles, all in the context of spoken language understanding. So anyone passionate about understanding voice conversations that people are doing, like that's the realm for us. Building our own language model, embeddings, all of that kind of interesting stuff. So yeah, and following it in real-time with customers, which is even more interesting!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, sounds like a great experience for someone to want to join and grow and learn as they get there. Is there any role in the company that as you built it, you wished you would have hired sooner?
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, definitely I think the same machine learning engineering team here. We had a lot, we had an early team in India and I don't think we prioritized that last year when we were building our product team. In hindsight I wish that I would have accelerated the recruitment on our ML team here in addition to the product team early on, and uh that would have been really helpful. So yeah, I think that's the only one I feel like we should have done it sooner.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, there's been a lot of acceleration and hiring specifically in AI companies. I forget the number now, I think it's 500 to 1500 AI startups that are in the US or you know looking to create their own little niche, and some are getting acquired really early, some are getting funded a lot faster. OpenAI really opened the doors for a lot of companies to take um you know the initiative to really build. How is OpenAI um impacted you? It sounds like positively. Has there been anything that's made you change how you operate based on what you see they're doing?
Surbhi Rathore: Uh yeah, uh I think um one very interesting evolution that we went through uh after OpenAI, and of course like trending towards it, which was like a progression that we had planned but we didn't know when it is going to come in the life cycle of the business and not be accelerated to, is the applied intelligence piece. Uh we've always owned our own models and like built kind of like more specialized models for conversations. Um but adding up this layer of applied intelligence that will, that really minimizes uh figuring it out for businesses of like, "these are the generative or you know understanding models, now how do I take this and translate into real-time coaching? Or how do I translate it into uh generating uh you know let's say summarization of all the conversations or filling up CRM notes or fields, and those are I think the kind of things, or even influencing like NPS on a call."
So that, just bridging that gap from what is the output from a machine learning understanding, to how do you really apply it to business. Like that journey sometimes takes less or a long time depending upon how much is the subject matter expertise of the person that is, that you're talking to in the business. So we wanted to always bridge that gap. Also we are very, very excited about the evolution of this "builder persona" which was always limited to developers, and now it seems like every business stakeholders, uh every business stakeholder is really a builder. Because they can imagine the new use cases, they really know how they are going to transform their business processes, and the tooling is not as complex to implement anymore right, with like no code. Almost you can get answers from using OpenAI or ChatGPT are simple. Uh so that's the, that's the beauty of the evolution. But yeah, definitely it accelerated our growth towards the applied intelligence [piece], yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know "prompt engineering" we hear a lot about, you know. And how does that... first of all um prompt engineering as I understand it (again I'm not an engineer) is really asking questions to an AI model to get responses from it, and based on the data in that model it's able to contextualize it and give you back pretty good answers that you can then take and iterate on. Um for your company, tell us about prompt engineering. Is it part of a need for what you guys do, is it something...
Surbhi Rathore: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean I think prompt engineering I feel like is going to become such a basic skill now for everyone. And uh to be able to learn how to exactly uh get the right answers from [a] language model, but also how to break the language for your testing purposes right. So it has applications on both sides. And you can make it as simple as you want, like you can make as simplistic prompts as you want, and it can be as complex with like LangChain and multiple like chaining workflows and stuff. So um yeah, it's definitely something that we do as a company because we use language models and we have our own language model too, so um yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it, that's great. Cool. Well we've spent a good amount of time here, almost an hour really hearing your story. And you know I just want to go back to something you talked about culture. And you really defined your culture. Uh tell me about somebody in your company that you think fully embolizes [embodies] or embodies your culture and why. Me aside from you.
Surbhi Rathore: No, no, I got, culture uh keeps evolving. I think people mistake culture to be like a point-standing entity. Like "this is how it is, and uh this is how it's going to be, and everyone needs to adapt to this you know point uh in, in the lifetime." But it's not like that. Like every time you hire a person you add a little bit of new culture and you take a little bit of the old culture out of the company. And so it continues to keep evolving and shifting. Uh so it's, so it's so hard to answer that question. Sorry Jake, I will choose to decline it!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Fair enough. Fair enough! Because we can't, you really can't! Yet there is no one person that truly will symbolize that because culture is a combination of all those people together, it's 100%. Uh yeah, yeah, good. Well the first answer I like to, uh so very good answer. Um is there anything that I haven't asked you that you want to share about your company?
Surbhi Rathore: No, no, I think we covered all the grounds. But I'm very excited uh you know as we are building in this new age of AI and generative AI more so, to see how businesses make more use of it and do more with less. Um I'm excited for the next kind of like type of companies that will be built. So every company that's raising a seed round right now is going to be built so differently than the companies that built, you know, raised [a] seed round like three years back. Because they have access to the tooling that was not accessible three years back. And the, the things that we would hire 30 people to do you know traditionally, can be done with 10, and will be done with five, and will be done with two. And like that is something that truly excites me, so yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well Surbhi, thanks so much for joining here today. I want to give a big shout out to you for taking the time to spend with us, and also to our listeners for taking your time to listen to this podcast. And hopefully you were inspired, maybe entertained, maybe you learned something. Hopefully you'll continue to stay with us in our future episodes. And Surbhi, would love to have you come back in a future episode to give us an update of your progress, how you've grown, and who knows, maybe you'll be public and retired somewhere when we talk next, but fingers crossed. Thanks for your time and uh we'll catch up on uh online here. Yep.
Surbhi Rathore: Thanks for having me.
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, 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. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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