Thoropass Journey with Austin Ogilvie

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 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 Austin Ogilvie, founder of Thoropass, a New York-based startup that's raised $98 million in funding. Austin, welcome to the show.

Austin Ogilvie: Jake, what's going on man? Thanks for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, great. Well thanks for joining. Um a little bit about Austin. Austin is originally from San Francisco, went to, to a boarding school on the East Coast, attended University of Virginia, and currently resides in New York. Prior to founding Thoropass, he built the data science platform startup Yhat, which was acquired by Alteryx. So I guess before we really dive in here, um walk us through. You started in San Francisco, which is great, I'm from the Bay Area. I know that area well, hub of technology. And you move uh to the East Coast and go to boarding school. Um walk me through that experience. It sounds like it could be really fun. What was the decision around that and what was the impact for you now looking back as maybe an entrepreneur?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah uh, how, how much time you got? Um definitely unusual for uh uh folks on the, on the West Coast to go East uh just in general to boarding school at all I suppose. Uh my, my parents both were from the East Coast, are from the East Coast, uh and I, I had three older siblings, sadly one passed away recently but uh yeah all, all three of them went East and it was just you know something that was important for our parents to expose us to. And um for me it was a real door opener, to be honest, it was great. Uh a lot of people ask like, "well what, what did you do, they shipped you off?" Very much the opposite, you know. Um I went to a school called Choate and it was a remarkable experience, like so I go back often actually and um you know I like to spend time with, with the students and with applicants and so forth. So still pretty plugged in.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Now was that an all boy school or is it co-, coed?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah, like 800 students in Connecticut.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Very cool. Yeah I wished I would have done that, it sounds like a good experience. Oftentimes you get into college and you might go abroad or do a semester somewhere else and kind of get that independence built in. Did that have any impact on your independence?

Austin Ogilvie: I mean, absolutely. Uh you go away at 14, it really forces you to develop your own preferences, your own opinions, your own world view. Uh which obviously we all do uh at some moment in life, but just getting a jump on it was uh was tremendous. And in San Francisco you know, it's my hometown. I have a soft spot in my heart and I love it and it's always there. And now working in tech you know, there's just ample opportunities abound to be in San Francisco professionally. Uh so I you know, it's not for everybody, but definitely I can highly recommend uh and you lose nothing to just go check them out if you're, if you're an eighth grader aspiring to take a look, I, I highly recommend.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great, cool. You know, you got into technology. Uh how did you do that? Did you study computer science? What was your transition to go from school and then getting into the tech space being on the East Coast?

Austin Ogilvie: Honestly, so I, I studied Arabic and Spanish and got a degree in political science. So definitely fell into tech uh inadvertently, um though very fortunately. Um I had an internship uh between summers at UVA at a company called EverFi in uh in DC. And this was like my first exposure to uh entrepreneurship. It was, it was three founders and me the intern in a tiny house on M Street. Now EverFi has, has gone on to, to do great things. They raised tons of money and employ thousands of people and uh have really crushed it. But at the time it was just you know, day one startup stuff. Um but, but that experience exposed me to the possibility that you could make stuff for a living. I had no idea that this was on offer uh as a career path. And you know, I think they're doing a lot better in schools now in conditioning students to understand that you know, if you're not strictly a math/science person, computer science is not eliminated from the, the possible things that you can spend your time doing. And I just got to say like, the, the, the tools available to learn, to teach yourself things are, are just incredible these days. And turns out you know a sufficiently motivated person interested in technology, you get Stack Overflow and Coursera and Udemy and off you go.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So is that your path? You self-taught yourself around product and technology and learned to code? How deep did you go?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah so after uh, after my internship that summer, uh I knew that I wanted to find a, a full-time gig in tech at that moment. Um and you know, coming out with all these languages and a political science degree, it's sort of unclear where you fit within the technology ecosystem. Um but I, I quickly discovered this product management field, which is really quite remarkable. It's a cross, cross-functional sort of gig at the intersection of all kinds of you know parts of the organization. My first job out of school was at another tech company in New York called OnDeck Capital, uh which is like a small business lending company using alternative data uh and applied machine learning to make lending decisions to small businesses, restaurants and so forth. Uh and a lot of the stuff that we were building, uh you know, very small business oriented apps, but they behave very much like consumers, right? So iPhone apps, web apps that are for normal people to use to apply for credit and stuff. And just doing that job, you are so close to software engineering day in, day out, you just become very curious. And uh you know, Python, R, SQL uh are, are tools that you, you quickly find uh a use for after you've sort of pushed the boundaries of Excel etc. And it was a really interesting moment. You know, I graduated in 2010 uh and this whole field of data science was just sort of emerging. And as a product manager working with data scientists, I just sort of got into all of that stuff. And uh you know I'm very grateful for that experience for sure, but, but a lot of it was self-taught.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really incredible. Yhat was a data science platform. What, what was the problem you were solving with that and how did you go about getting acquired? That's really a goal of a lot of companies, but sometimes you do it because you're, that's the goal, sometimes it happens because you need to. What was the process like for you?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah so I, what, I guess for starters like, well my, my co-founder and I were both product managers at OnDeck uh for several years. And a lot of what OnDeck was doing you know was right when uh the, the R and Python uh statistical programming ecosystems were sort of coming about in a, in a new way. Um there were, you know, historically there have been quant, quantitative analysis being done in different companies for a long time, but what was different is these open source tools were becoming massively popular uh and sort of overtaking SAS and MATLAB, these uh historical, very expensive statistical programming languages that have you know tremendous enterprise support. And the pro for adopting open source is like all of these people are coming out at the universities uh with R and Python skills. You know Wes McKinney had just published the pandas uh package for Python which kind of changed everything. Uh scikit-learn was going 1.0 which was like the at the time, and still to this day, like one of the most popular uh sort of general Python machine learning toolkits. Um and those tools, while free uh and becoming increasingly popular, the data scientists of the world want to use these things, they're the cool tools.

Um but the problem that my co-founder and I saw in using all of these new uh open source tools is that there's not a lot of commercial support uh for things like model versioning and deployment and you know, scaling any number of different uh commercial applications. We had to build all that stuff at OnDeck. Um and so every piece of business logic that we would want powered by some you know uh quantitative routine that the data scientists would come up with, was like a tremendous exercise to figure out how we're going to run it in production. And so that was sort of the, the impetus for starting the company in the first place is we, we looked at this and we were you know data nerds, this is the kind of stuff we're messing around with all the time for fun, uh using on the job all the time, uh but reliably frustrated with our own problems of you know difficulties in, delays in, in releasing things to, to prod.

And we just felt like, okay here's this emergent class of data professionals that hasn't existed, and it's very obvious that every company on Earth is basically going to need these people. And the academy is doing the best they can to produce more professionals with these skills. We need to look at the landscape and, and uh take, take a real uh uh take stock of, of the, the lack of uh available tools to support any number of different commercial applications. And so that's the company that we wanted to build. We started in, we, we left OnDeck in 2013 and over we, we, like we didn't know, we're very young, we didn't know any of the VCs or how to get going really. Uh but the one thing we did have is a connection to a principal, uh a then-principal at RRE Ventures, this guy Tom Lao who's now at IVP, he's amazing. Uh Tom had, had uh invested in OnDeck, and he had been periodically pinging us uh questions about different data tools while we were at OnDeck as part of uh his due diligence process when he was looking at deal[s]. Of course, we didn't understand that that's what was happening, but that indeed is something that VCs uh definitely like to do and value. They tap the portfolio for you know thoughts on particular technologies and markets and stuff. Um and so when we had, had worked up the courage to quit our jobs uh and made the final decision, like Tom was the one guy that we knew. So you know we're very fortunate to have that relationship. And uh I remember, I remember feeling like we were breaking the rules when we like snuck out from work one day during lunch and walked over there, and um he made a bunch of intros and it was sort of you know off to the races from, from there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Did you uh have to pitch to raise capital? Did you raise capital for that company?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah, so Greg my co-founder and I, we applied to Y Combinator before we quit OnDeck. And we got, I think our... we got an interview. We, we got an interview the first time and flew out there and then did the interview and got uh denied. Which is a sad flight home. Uh and then we quit. We were still in it. We told ourselves, "Look, companies have been built you know for, for many eons before YC. If we get it, we get it, if we don't, we're still going to quit and, and start the company." So obviously we had to hold ourselves accountable to that. Uh and met with Tom, we ended up raising... it took a while, I think it took probably 100 days or something which you know you were just burning your own cash and feeling nervous the whole time. But eventually we, we raised a million bucks from RRE and a few others uh in New York, uh Boldstart, Contour Ventures and a bunch of angel investors who would become you know very, very influential mentors and helpers. Highly recommend uh you, you populate your at least your seed round with very good angels for sure. Um and then we built for probably a year and a half and applied to YC again. Uh and this time we, we got the interview and we ended up getting in. So uh after that we raised another, another round. In total I think we raised about three or three and a half million, something like this.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's right. Do you remember how many times you pitched in the process?

Austin Ogilvie: I mean, a lot of "no"s. Like bas-, the unfortunate reality uh is this job is about getting told "no" for several years. It's just like part of, part of the program.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well you got acquired. That must have been a good transaction. You got a product built, it was enough value, you move on. And then from there was, was this your next step, your next stop of building what you have today, Thoropass?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah, so uh when we were, it was 2016, 2017, we were approaching Series A kind of territory uh revenue-wise, growth-wise. And we actually didn't really intend to sell the company, we were out for our A round. And uh, I mean to make a long story short, we had term sheets, and like one of them ended up being uh an acquisition offer. And we, we sort of looked at the landscape and we're like, "all right, uh here's this amazing... Alteryx," I don't know how many, how much you know about them. Alteryx is like, they had just debuted their IPO, uh a beloved sort of drag and drop data science tool predominantly designed for business users who are like advanced business users, not so much programmers. Or at least at the time. And you know, Alteryx recognized the same opportunity that we saw in the first place, which is this emerging class of data professionals working with these programming tools uh and they needed to add products to serve that audience to their, to their suite, and we were a very attractive addition uh for, from that perspective on their strategic roadmap. And from our perspective like, we grinded to get like 2 million in, in ARR over you know four years uh, and you know post-M&A Alteryx had us in sales opportunities that we could have never dreamed of. We, we couldn't have used all the VC money that we had raised to bribe our way into some of these meetings. And here we were, you know closing big million-dollar deals with Nike and you know McDonald's and these kind of kinds of hallmark brands of consequence that uh, that, that was a true opportunity that you know it was the right call, it was the right call for us.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, timing is everything in, in, in some, in some ways. Uh the company you have today, we had a brief chat, and you, and you feel like the timing from what you're building and where you're at today was perfect for the market. Um I want to, I want you to share with the listeners specifically what your product does and the problem it sol-, solves at Thoropass. The simplest form you can share.

Austin Ogilvie: Sure. So um Thoropass is a digital compliance automation platform and audit platform. So we help mostly software companies meet this eclectic mixed bag of security and privacy requirements. Some are regulatory, you know if you're holding patient data you have to adhere to the HIPAA rules, uh if you're in Europe or you have a large number of California users for your app there's all kinds of privacy rules. Um and there's a huge list of different standards that are out there from SOC 2 to ISO 27001 to HITRUST to ITAR for arms trafficking now has a whole InfoSec component. Like, it's alphabet soup.

And uh my co-founders and I uh had previously witnessed this in our own uh respective ways in our prior lives. For, for, for my perspective, Yhat, we were selling enterprise software to you know pretty big companies even before the M&A. Some good ones too in proximity, uh Johnson & Johnson, Square, like the-, these are great companies, uh but reliably those sales cycles would just take... like literally the Intuit deal was like 380k, which at the time was monumental, it's the biggest thing I'd ever been a part of. Uh but it took 308 calendar days or something you know ridiculous to close. And almost all of that time um had nothing to do with vetting the technology or piloting or you know business case justification or getting the budget you know secured. All of that stuff was a fraction, a small fraction of the entire time. It was mostly about security due diligence, company due diligence. Uh because those large enterprises, they take an insane amount of risk with every single vendor that they work with. Like, you just take like JP Morgan has 5,000 software vendors. Like, the chance that your company may have a bad problem maybe is small, but the chance that one of them in the portfolio of vendors with a bank like that has a problem is quite high actually, [it] happens regularly.

So this vetting uh was a real point of friction uh, and a lot more than just a bottom-line risk mitigation kind of analysis has to go into it as an operator because it's, it's, it actually is revenue impacting, right? You, you think "compliance" or "security," your brain tends to think about you know bottom-line protection, but doesn't necessarily seem obvious to, to people at first glance uh the reality which is, you really cannot do business if you uh are, don't put these organizational capabilities in place. So that was sort of the uh the inspiration was like, how do we help technology uh providers get in with these great companies, and how do we help these great companies that, that want to innovate and want to adopt these new tools, uh actually do so in a way that meets the, the bar that they have uh set for themselves? Or that their industry has you know self-regulated, or the government in many cases has, has mandated?

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So your platform is online, where... I, I was listening to one of your co-founders I think, Sam Li. And he was talking about you know, he compares your platform to TurboTax, where it automates the manual process, it streamlines it, it's all in one platform, it's all online, and really takes the time out of the process of doing whatever you're doing. So for you specifically, it's the manual process around compliance. Is that correct? And getting approved for SOCs and having the reports that potentially a client you're selling your product to is going to ask you for, and you kind of help guide them through that process and simplify it. Is that, is that correct?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah, no, spot on. You should come join our sales team. Uh uh that's exactly right. Like the, the truth is persuading people to buy any product, but especially a new product, is very hard, uh haven't you noticed? And the moment you have a buyer who is excited to buy your product, you know they, they'll say, "send me over the order, I'll sign it right now, oh and please include a copy of your SOC 2 report," or "please include you know the latest ISO certification." Uh and in that moment you just want to say, "No problem, it's on the way." Uh and how to get companies uh in that position it turns out is, is, it can be quite tricky.

Um you know, Sam, Sam and I both... he has a prior startup uh experience as well, very similar kind of um experience struggling with this, this uh due diligence, SOC 2 reports, lack of tooling. We, the, the, the movie was very similar for both of us. And you know, when he and I met it was like entrepreneurs' love at first sight kind of situation, just electric, you know. We, the two of us knew we were going to build something uh together. And it was the first or second time that he and I met, and he pitched me this idea, you know. He's like, "Why is there no standards-agnostic uh information security platform that makes it super actionable for people like us, you know, sufficiently motivated, hopefully somewhat intelligent people, uh to implement the controls that banks or hospitals or you know different enterprise companies uh need to see of their vendors in order to transact?"

And you know obviously he's telling me this, this story initially and, and I'm just sort of frothing at the mouth having uh very similar kind of experiences that he was describing from his own path uh, both before the M&A and then also after the M&A. I mean Alteryx, they were doing like 200 million uh or, or so when they bought us. Uh so not like Microsoft big, but, but like that's a real company. They have you know sellers all over the world, they're growing like crazy. And I saw it all there too, right? You, you have uh 5, 600 sellers trying to close deals with an Australian bank on a Monday, and Yale New Haven Hospital on a Tuesday, and then some California app with a million users uh you know the next Tuesday or whatever. And like, each of those stakeholders has dramatically different processes and expectations uh of their vendors. For good reason, like Rover you know, Airbnb for, for pet uh sitting holds a very different type of data uh which is characteristic of totally different risk than does Genentech or, or a hospital.

Um and so like, there needs to be some kind of a uh you know turbo tax-like experience to understand what you need to do uh, take action and actually how to do it. Uh and then the software passively monitors for compliance with whatever set of rules uh your company needs to adhere to behind the scenes. So you're not thinking about it all the time. It's just on autopilot. When somebody asks, "send over your most recent self attestation for HIPAA" or "you know, send your SOC report," it's an easy push, push of a button you know in Thoropass.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: How long does it take when a client signs up for, with you to go through the process to be compliant, to actually have a report at the end of the day they can give to a potential customer they're going to try and you know work with?

Austin Ogilvie: So it, it differs for different types of standards. Let's just take SOC uh, SOC 2. Um there's two different types of, of reports. There's a SOC 2 Type 1 and a Type 2. Uh the Type 1 is basically uh an auditor uh writing an opinion on the, the, the existence of controls at your company. They basically look at the way that you are protecting against certain types of risks and certain types of attacks, and validating with their formal opinion that you have uh controls in place. The Type 2 report, it goes further. It, it looks back at usually six months or more of operating history to say not just uh that the controls existed in that moment, but they were actually functional. They were achieving whatever the mis-, the risk mitigation uh desired outcome was for a particular control. So for instance uh you know a Type 1 control might be validated to exist that you have a code review process before code gets merged into master. Something you know, a process takes place where senior engineers review it, or could be any number of things. A Type 2 will actually look back at six months or more of uh, of code that you've shipped and validate that indeed that process had been adhered to successfully and was working.

So it's a long-winded answer, but you know basically you can get a Type 1 report with us in 2 to 4 weeks. Uh usually it's pretty quick. Um but then there's the operating history itself, which it just depends, you know. Some auditors will uh, will work with 3 months of operating history, usually it's four to five, you know, six months is... so.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So you save time for the client that's going to use your platform. How about money? Are you saving them money in the process?

Austin Ogilvie: So the, the way that these audits have historically been done is really quite remarkable. Uh you watch auditor workflow uh and they're literally looking through a list of requirements in whatever the, the standard is, SOC 2 or HITRUST or whatever. Uh and then they're requesting screenshots of various uh apps and services. So they want to know that all data is encrypted uh at rest. Say uh you are using S3 and you have you know Snowflake database, you got a bunch of places where data lives, uh and they'll just ask you like, "can you take a screenshot of the security settings for this page?" Uh and if you think about it, all of the digital exhaust uh that businesses produce is available programmatically today. Uh you don't need to work with screenshots. And indeed eyeballing to verify some security config is, is actually more error prone than it needs to be.

Uh so one of the levers that we provide our customers is this passive data ingestion for all of the consequential metadata that's relevant in uh these compliance audits. So the customer hooks up all of their tools and systems, their cloud provider, their business suite etc. And then when it's time to go through an audit, our auditors have a suite of tools that allow them to express uh the tests that they need to run programmatically, fully benefiting from the structured data that the platform has collected. So this does a bunch of things. Like, one it, it's a much faster process because the robot can, can test right away instantaneously versus a human has to manually eyeball, review things, etc. Uh so it's just faster turnaround time on the audit. Uh number two, it allows us uh from a business perspective to have dramatically better productivity uh and production capacity uh on our audit team, which is essential for uh you know obviously building a great company for, for uh our shareholders and so forth. But uh it equally is increasing the quality, right? Programmatic tests, they don't make mistakes you know. So you have a sort of leveling up of the quality, an increase to the production capacity, and a faster cycle time for, for the customer.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Is it a product as well as professional services? Do they have, do you have to engage a team of consultants in addition to the platform?

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah, so each of these different audit standards has a, a, a sort of different uh approach to who can perform the attestation work, the assessment work uh. For SOC 2, you have to be a CPA. Uh for, for ISO, for HITRUST, there's different um certifications or credentials that you need to have. Uh and we've done all of the leg work to make sure that we have a, a deep bench of services professionals that have all of those skills uh, and they're always you know upgrading and on the latest sort of uh techniques. Uh and then um the software has been designed from day one with auditors in mind. So you know we've really gotten into the weeds about "what does the standard, what is the spirit of this particular requirement? Uh you know how can we implement a UI that allows for the full uh spirit of that requirement to be captured in a totally different way that's non-visual and instead programmatic?" And it's been a lot of fun you know to build tools for this. This industry has been overlooked for quite a long time uh and you know building the Ferrari of uh audit workflow tools is, is really been a great part of the fun for sure.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's fascinating to me to know that compliance isn't about trying to protect you, but it's also about revenue opportunity. And I think that a lot of companies don't really see that and they might go through it early on when they have to get approved to with a vendor or a client to work with. When should a company start looking at a product like yours? Early in their, early in the stage of their development, later in the stage? What, what's a good time to start approaching a company like yours?

Austin Ogilvie: So obviously I run the risk of sounding biased in whatever answer that I, that I give here, but I really mean this. Like if you uh have, have gone through the, the hard, the really hard part of building something that your customer actually wants and they're willing to part with large sums of money for, and they ask you to send over the sales order "Oh and I need the SOC 2 report," you really, really want to be able to just send the SOC 2 report. It's, it feels very bad to blow up a deal at that moment and have to go back and go through you know some process time, as they say you know "enemy, enemy of all sales." Uh that being said you know, I, I, it, it would be contextual for the particular company, but if you are having conversations where you know you're knocking at the door for your first big you know enterprise annual sort of subscription, you, you need to have already done this like yesterday. Uh because it will be asked. It's one of the most predictable obstacles in all of enterprise sales.

And the last thing I'll say about this question is the, the, the, the really obvious sales that you lose as a result of this feel terrible. You know somebody, you, who's been championing the purchase of your product says, "Look, we just had to pack it up and go with Microsoft because their thing does what we need... not as well, but like they have their ducks in a row uh from a security and compliance perspective." That feels bad. What, what, what feels even worse, if you, if you uh have, have ever dealt with this in the past, is all of the opportunities that you never even had to look at because you, you, the, the perception uh that you were immature, not ready for enterprise uh is, is glaringly obvious, right? A startup with 20 people founded two years ago uh, it just doesn't look like a great uh vendor for a lot of different companies that just know, you know, "we'll, we'll keep this on our radar, we'll come back in a few years and see how it's progressed."

And it's like a, uh in programming we, we talk about bugs that's, that fail silently right. A bug that's loud is a bug that you get a lot of support tickets about, you get users emailing you and complaining uh, they're, they're negative tweeting at you to get support. Those are great bugs because you're very aware of them, you can fix them if you're aware of them. A bug that fails silently is the scariest of all. You know you've got some database right, that's just not happening for six months, nobody knows it. And then, "Oh, you discover you just haven't saved any of this customer data for X number of months." That's, that's a really bad problem, you can't go back in time and, and produce it right. This is a very similar bug in the sales machine. It's like, if a customer visits your website and they take a look at you know your security docs and they don't like what they see, how many of those never fill out the lead form, never get in touch with you, never take it seriously as a, as a you know candidate for an RFP submission? Say. So at the risk of banging on too long on this, I'll, I'll, I'll leave it there. But for 20K to, to have your ducks properly in a row without needing to stress long into the night worrying about the AICPA's definition of you know encryption that, that meets the standard... like it's, it's the cheapest 20K you'll ever spend in exchange for you know perceived or, or actual in many cases uh legitimacy for all kinds of enterprise controls.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really nice. U- I want to switch gears here a little bit. You raised close to 100 million. It's a lot of money. You have now roughly or close to a [thousand customers], I which is incredible. Um you, we talked a little bit about timing. Timing in the market, timing of a product. How long did it take you to get to your first million in revenue with your current company?

Austin Ogilvie: It didn't take that long. Uh I, it took us probably 10 months maybe to get to the first million and you know uh the, the pace just increased dramatically after that. And it's just remarkable to, to, to feel product-market fit. Like I would have had a very believable story to tell you back in 2014 or '15 uh about having achieved product-market fit with my, my data science company. And I would have, it would have been legit, I would have believed the story. But the difference with really finding you know the, the, the right mixture of product to solution... customer wants this universally. This is not Eva or Sam or Austin being able to sell it you know by themselves magically somehow, it's like [a] very predictable sales cycle regardless of seller, regardless of deal size uh, just feels tremendously different. And it's hard to describe the feeling, but for, for any founders who are listening, you will know 100% whether you're in that moment or not. And keep exploring uh if you don't, if you don't know for sure, you don't have it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, there's a lot of companies that strive for that, and in the process go through a lot of left and right dec- decisions, pivots, problems that have to solve. It's not always perfect. Walk me through one or two opportunities or not even opportunities, but situations where you had to make some changes, where you had to you know figure out a different direction with your current company. It sounds like everything's gone perfect, give us some insights about behind the scenes that maybe are something that you know others can learn from.

Austin Ogilvie: I mean there's, there's, there's no such thing as a perfect startup. Like they're all broken on some level. Uh so if you're, if you're struggling to figure something out, like take a deep breath and realize like it's a part of the program, to be expected. Um you know, we've had a lot of trials and tribulations that uh are honestly they still surprise me you know. We started the company in 2019. Uh we had five of, five of us including my co-founders and me in New, in New York. We had five engineers in uh, in Costa Rica. Pandemic dropped, uh and all of a sudden we have no idea in that moment you know, what is this going to do to our, our business, the, to the macro situation. Um obviously that was a, a trying moment where we, we ended up taking... fortunately capital was quite available uh you know back in the froth-fest of 2020, 2021. Uh and we raised an early Series A, um which you know we had not expected to, to do at that time. And I, I think in, in retrospect we probably could have waited a little bit. But uh you [know], hindsight is always 20/20, right? Um and then you know from bank failures to the macro shift, public stocks falling out the evaluations and all the rest. There's, there's been no shortage of, of trouble uh to, to deal with. Um, kind of runs the gamut.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: What keeps you positive about things when they're not going well? Like, do you have a process you go through? Do you have some sort of mentor or coach that helps? As a leader sometimes it's pretty lonely. If you have co-partners or co-founders it's great, you can kind of collaborate and work through stuff, but do you have any that helps you individually kind of get through the tougher times?

Austin Ogilvie: I, I mean number one is co-founders uh that you can lean on, that you can trust. It is very l-, lonely is the right word. Uh you know, there's, you're charting your own course, uh which is exhilarating and it's a profound privilege, uh but you don't know where you're going by, by definition. And that can feel quite bad. Uh and having co-founders to go through it with you, um especially ones that come from a different perspective. Uh like Sam, Sam and I both come professionally from sort of similar backgrounds, both programmers, both product guys. We both did startups, etc. Uh Sam, he grew up in China, like I didn't grow, grow up in China. Like, we see the world differently for a variety of cultural reasons. Uh and you know Eva, totally different profile. She was a career Managing Director at Citigroup running you know cyber security, governance and compliance for like half the bank. Like the, the, the richness with which we look at certain problems is by def-, definition you know very robust. And you know, that is quite different from you know seeing the world identically. Uh you know you're very likely to align easily in such a, a partnership, but you're also very likely to miss the same uh nuances of a particular problem. If you have uh you know co-founders that really complement your skills and challenge your perspectives in a, in a productive positive way, yeah you can deal with a little bit of like, "oh, this is a little tiring to figure this out, it's a lot of conversation." On the other hand, the decisions that come out of the machine [are] very good decisions most of the time. You're very unlikely to miss something collectively. So that's one. Uh co-founders, and like, get into the real stuff. Like what are your values, what do you want to get out of this, what matters to you, what... you talk about all of that stuff. It's not squishy, it's real, it's real stuff. Because when shit hits the fan, like you need to understand you know what one another's motivations and you know fears and you [know] all of that stuff is just, you have to understand it fully.

Um and then you mentioned mentors, like 100%. Like angel investors, CEOs, CTOs, other founders that um have served similar customers to the ones you're going to go after. Uh have executed similar sort of go-to-markets that, to the one that you envision you're going to go after. Uh you know solve different technical problems that are very likely to be ones that you'll encounter. You want those people on the cap table. As nice and, and helpful [as] some of the great VCs are, they, they can't know everything. Uh and it's very nice to be able to call or text you know some of these operators that have just gone through exactly what you're going through. Um because most problems in business and technology are like, they're not actually that unique. I think every company has some uh business and technical problems that are unique. But for the most part you're going to be seeing potholes that a lot of other people have rolled their ankles in a lot of times before. And the fastest way to not break your ankle in the pothole is just ask someone who's already done it a few times. Um because they'll tell you. And they'll help you avoid things and they'll tell you you know, "everything's going to be all right" or they'll tell you when things are, when you're up they'll get, they'll tell you that. Um so I don't know, not a silver bullet, but surround yourself with very smart people and compassionate ones ideally.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. How big is the company today? You've um, you've grown quite a bit. Um talk to me about the employees, and then the type of employees you like to hire. Because as we know, you know technology is technology, and there's process as to what your product does and how it solves problems. But at the end of the day, you know people are the magic behind the company, the resourcefulness, the ideas, the innovation. Talk to me about how big you are and what are the type of people that you like to bring on board.

Austin Ogilvie: Yeah, so we're people-wise, we're just under 200 uh all over the world definitely. We're born from the pandemic. Uh center of gravity in the US is definitely in New York, but we're really kind of all over the place. We built our engineering team predominantly in uh Latin America, mostly Costa Rica, but sort of all over the place which has been amazing for us. Um and you know, culturally you know, we want people who are adaptable. Uh folks who are thrilled by challenging problems. Um creative people obviously, willing to and capable of thinking outside the box. Uh original ideas are, are really valuable. You know, founders cannot come up with every good idea uh forever or even for that long. Uh so you, you really need people, especially at the early onset of a company, who are just thrilled by the opportunity to really you know inject their ideas and see them played out. Every Friday you know, for better or for, or for worse, you get to point at the, the things that you did and see them out in the world. And um it's not for everyone. Like it's definitely huge ambiguity, uh ch-, you know changes in direction are a part of the program. Uh and it's perfectly reasonable to, to want a more steady and predictable line of work. Uh but at least in our world we want, want you know ideally future entrepreneurs. Like that, next to winning the category, I think the thing that would make me most proud if I could look back in you know a few years uh and, and see is you know spawning more companies, more startups. Um so that's the kind of people we look for.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: How do you know when you have the right person? What's your interview process like? And the reason I asked that is, you know I've interviewed 20,000 people. We help startups grow, and ultimately each company has their own different way of trying to flush through to make sure they have the right people, and you don't always get it right. It's a, it's a, it's a hiring process. For you, what are a few insightful things you can share with the listeners that, if you're a founder that might be wanting to start a company, you're trying to get it right, what are some things you've learned that you know have been helpful? Whether it's tools or questions you've asked or a process you've, you take people through on the interview side.

Austin Ogilvie: So, I mean this could be an entire day-long conversation surely, and I, I make no claims to being an expert. Um at the early days, like you don't have a playbook for hiring any type of person because you've never hired any people. Uh and then each time you go through a hiring process for a new part of the org, be very deliberate in thinking about the process, because you're going to get it wrong on the first few. And record the things, the steps. "When did you email? When did you call? What did the website say?" All, you know, all of these little details [seem] pedantic in the moment, but your first AE is a prototype process for recruitment that you'll later go on to use many times. So thinking about the process um and tapping you know the, going back to angel investors, like literally tap the people on your cap table and figure out you know what, what are the pro tips that somebody you admire recruiting for that particular type of role uh has gotten good leverage from? And it may be over you know overkill uh, so you have to prune it back and strip it down um to meet the, the size and appropriateness for you know the size and scale of, of your company. But that's how you get started. That's how we got started.

And um I'd also say you know one of the best decisions that we've made, literally in all the decisions, was hiring um a VP of People uh when we did. Um you know, we raised 3 million [in] 2019, 10 million in 2020, and then 35 in 2021. And once you have big dollars like that, you're gonna hire a lot of people. That is the number one expense. It's like the only thing consequential to the burn rate of any of these companies is salary. So you know, you just look at the number and like calculate just roughly in your head how many people you're talking about bringing on. Having someone who has done that a few times... I, I can't overstate how valuable it has been. Like layering in the right amount of process uh you know as you go is something you're very unlikely to do it right if you're just going [by the] seat of your pants guesswork. But the good news is there definitely is a recipe to do it the right way. It's very worth it to you know invest in a serious executive that has, has seen the movie.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. You know, you've got a great story, I love the product you built. The, the, the story you can tell. And you know with all the companies we work with, we work with hundreds of startups, I can't tell you how many of them could utilize a product like yours. They might not even know it today, but they, I'm sure they'll, they'll listen to this and expect to get some calls. So um you know ultimately uh you know, really excited to see how things go for you, love to check back in down the road and, and hear the progress. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you want to share, or do you think we've covered a lot of ground here?

Austin Ogilvie: No, this is great. I really appreciate you having me on. Uh you know I was humbled that you, you contacted me and uh if anyone wants to reach me, you know send them my way: thoropass.com. My email is austin@thoropass. I'm very easy to find, and uh I love, I love this stuff. So I want to know what you're working on.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well um Austin, thanks so much for joining us, I really appreciate your time. And for all our listeners out there, thanks for joining us, it means [the] world to us that you've taken your time out of the day to listen to a great story. And look forward to catching up with you on the next episode. Take it easy Austin, thanks for having us and we'll catch up with you uh down the road.

Austin Ogilvie: Cheers.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: 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 share your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.  

This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.  

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