“Hunt for a problem worth solving, and then solve it better than anything else on the market.”
— Hiten Shah (Co-Founder & CEO at FYI)
Powered by RedCircle
Today’s guest is Hiten Shah, Co-Founder & CEO at FYI, long-time serial founder and investor (120+ investments to date). Hiten has been in the profession of building companies since 2013— pioneering technology solutions in the analytics space that are easy-to-use and intuitive. First, with Crazy Egg, then with KISSmetrics, and now, with FYI.
In this interview, Hiten shares some great insights into problem-hunting, product-development, and the performance psychology behind ‘0 to 1.’ Throughout this interview, you will experience his deeply empathetic, humble, and more importantly, engaging approach to company-building! Especially if you possess the ‘company-builder for life’ mentality that so many great founders have!
“This is one big problem we see founders do: preventing the thing (problem) next time is not as important as solving the thing first. Especially with a big problem!”
— Hiten Shah (Co-Founder & CEO at FYI)
Highlights
Problem-hunting— go where most don’t, and out-solution those who are there!
The 5-Day MVP rule
Solving big problems faster!
Don’t understand something? Start with context!
Controlling how you respond to what happens.
Solving for the future, not recreating the past.
Transcript
Arjun Dev Arora 0:00
Welcome to the founder and funder experience brought to you by Format One. This podcast serves to bring to light the different journeys select founders and funders took to get to where they are today. We hope their lives and their learnings continue to inspire both present and future innovators.
Hello, everybody. This is Arjun Dev Arora. I'm the Founder and Managing Partner of Format One, we help support funds and founders and help accelerate their efforts via people, capital and strategy.
Jon Low 0:26
Hi, Jon Low here, co-founder and partner at Format One, I'm the lead on executive coaching, collaborating with Arjun. But enough about us. Today's guest is the lovely Hiten Shah! Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you've been up to?
Hiten Shah 0:44
Yeah, I am probably most known for building a bunch of different software companies. A couple of them have been in the analytics space. And I started the first one in 2005. It's called Crazy Egg— creates heat maps where people are clicking on a page. So it gives you a visual representation of kind of analytics data. We were one of the first companies to do that back in the day— it's a self-funded company and still around.
And then I started a company called KissMetrics back in 2008. And that one had a lovely kind of funded, venture kind of funded journey. And I learned a lot of stuff there. And then I kind of took a break for a little bit, ended up investing in about 150 companies and counting. And then, during that process, I met my co-founder for my new company called FYI. And what we do is we help people find their documents in three clicks or less. And we also help teams kind of manage the mess.
Jon Low 1:40
An extensive career in entrepreneurship! Som did you always know you wanted to start a business even before college straight into college straight out of college? How did you get the bug so to speak?
Hiten Shah 1:54
Yeah, I get to blame my dad. He told me, he's a physician, and he told me since I was five years old that I should be an entrepreneur and work for myself. And that's not something you typically hear a South Asian father who's a physician say. You'd usually say, hey, go become a doctor like me and go join my practice.
Well, my dad didn't have a practice— that helped. But he just told me that since I was five, I think he has his own reasons for telling me that that are personal to him. Like, I think he wanted to be an entrepreneur. But in school, back in back in India, when he was in school, he kind of hit the borderline kind of general or go into the track of like, becoming a doctor and nobody in his family had been a doctor until then. And so he was sort of by default, I'm going to be a doctor if I get this grade or score on some specific test in school. And so he didn't get the opportunity to kind of go figure out if he could be a business person and work for himself.
And I think that that's something that he held pretty, pretty close, and kind of gave me the advice to do that. So, he's lived vicariously through me since I was five years old because I have never worked for anyone. Except once, which was an internship, medical devices in high school, and medical devices company, and the company is called Masimo. They're a public company now. And my dad actually had pre IPO stock and stuff that I stole from him.
Jon Low 3:27
Nice, nice, even entrepreneur when you're an intern. Yeah.
Hiten Shah 3:35
Well, they're a public company out there. They're doing really well. But like, one of the funny things is, I believe I took the company picture back then where they're pretty tidy, compared to where they are now. So that's my claim to fame with that company.
Jon Low 3:52
Did you grow up in the bay? Like you mentioned, your dad kind of migrated at some stage late.
Hiten Shah 4:02
I was actually born in Africa, Zambia, and my parents had moved there from India. And then we moved to New York when I was five. And then right around the time I was 12, we moved to Southern California. And that's where I grew up. And then I went to Cal, UC Berkeley. And then I actually moved back down to Southern California before moving back up here to the Bay Area, which is where I live now.
Jon Low 4:26
Wow. Amazing. Do you have much of a connection with the place? You know, with Africa.
Hiten Shah 4:36
No, I don't. I don't remember much at all. I remember the smell and taste of beets, believe it or not, the vegetable, and a lion in our backyard. And some big memories of the school that's about as far as I get. And I haven't been back. My dad's been back but I haven't been back.
Jon Low 4:54
Do you want to go?
Hiten Shah 4:56
I don't really have a strong desire to travel already. Anyway, so no, no real draw at the moment. Yeah.
Jon Low 5:05
You mentioned something really interesting — you started the first if not one of the first kind of analytics businesses.
Hiten Shah 5:19
Yeah, it was called crazy. That wasn't venture backed, right. And it still exists. So my wife actually runs it.
Jon Low 5:30
Wow, amazing. Yeah. Tell us a bit about, you know, you know, this idea, this experience for you of being the first because now when people talk about data analytics, everyone's like, Oh, of course, like, why wouldn't you have it? Right.
But back then, you know, that technology was at a specific state stage, how people work professionally to perform, so to speak, in different functions of business was very different. You know, while people might be, you might still have had data driven people, right? The meaning of data driven had an entirely different meaning back then to what it is today. Can you kind of paint a bit about that context?
Hiten Shah 6:16
Yeah, what's going on back then was like there were analytics tools that were pretty lightweight, and not in a way that was easy to understand, even though they were lightweight. And what that really meant at that time was everything had graphs, charts, and numbers. And there were so many people that were trying to improve their websites that didn't care to understand what a bounce rate is, or like, how many pageviews they got, or anything like that.
And what they really cared about was like, what are people doing on the site once they get there, and they had no way of really understanding that in a way that they could like, instantly, sort of understand it, and then make a decision, or make an improvement.
So, as a result of that, we started playing around with this idea of being able to show every click on a webpage that a person does or that people do, and then just focus on different webpages and showing you kind of what, what, what it looks like, what the traffic looks like. And so you can see hot spots and cold spots with the product. And it really was a different way to do analytics. And what people were doing at the time, was just so focused on charts and numbers and graphs and stuff. And we actually, for the longest time have had no graphs and charts in the product. And still I don't think we have like a tremendous amount or anything significant like you would see in most analytics products.
So we kind of changed or helped change how people think about analytics, going from like, Oh, it's not approachable to me to Oh, I can, I can actually use this kind of technology and get something out of it. So I would say that, like we really helped make it a lot more easy to understand what's going on. And obviously, that concept has been kind of popularized since then. And a lot more products have kind of heat maps and things like that.
Jon Low 7:59
Amazing, yeah, I can kind of think back to your point. like back then the users of a website could be a business of any scale and sophistication. And unless you're a super sophisticated user, you're not going to look at charts and graphs and ratios and be like, Oh, I totally get this. But since then, since you know, Crazy Egg, obviously, is a mature company now of its own, you eventually went on to Kissmetrics. Did you apply a similar philosophy to kind of identify more whitespace for analytics? Or did you realize you wanted to do something entirely, you know, new and revolutionary?
Hiten Shah 8:38
Yeah, we tried there to do a few different attempts at it. We actually started at a time around 2008/2009, when Facebook applications were a big deal. And so as we were observing kind of the world at Crazy Egg, we noticed that there's just a new kind of sort of entrance in terms of the type of person that wants to understand analytics. And at that time, these are a lot of folks that were like, relatively young, coming out of college, or even still in college and a lot of cases building these Facebook applications, and sort of painstakingly trying to understand the data that was coming from Facebook, about their applications. And so we started exploring that.
And then we realized really quickly that those people just need ad-tools to make money and didn't really care about analytics. And we're happy to go roll their own because they were engineers, for the most part. And so we kind of went into something a lot broader and started implementing our analytics tool that we were building at different sort of organizations, including TechCrunch, where they were kind of using our tool to measure different authors and the effectiveness of their posts, and stuff like that, which was very kind of challenging to do in Google Analytics and other tools.
And through that process, we learned something very significant, which is maybe we learned twice but, basically ad based businesses and Like that, and generic analytics tools are just really tough to kind of scale and grow. And so we went back to kind of our roots, so to speak, and looked at Google Analytics a lot deeply, a lot more deeply and started talking to a lot more people. And it turns out that there are marketers at the time, and this was about 2010 2009 2010. There are marketers that were out there that were really looking to connect the fact that someone's a visitor, and then when they come to their site, and they purchase, or they sign up, you want to know as much as you can about them, before they kind of signed up as well as after.
And this was something that Google Analytics still today does not do, they do not let you put in an ad like email addresses. So, you can kind of see an individual customer's journey or a group of customers journey accurately. And so and then on top of that, kind of, let's say, the data and tracking issue, which I can dive into a lot deeper, but it gets pretty technical, pretty fast.
But basically, we were just able to show the whole customer journey from before they signed up for purchase till after, we basically realized that a feature in Google Analytics that was also weak, was funnels. And so we built a funnel tool that shows funnels that are left to right, not top to bottom. So, a lot of analytics tools before we came around, which show the funnel top to bottom, and it was good, it looked nice, it looked pretty. But it wasn't as usable.
When you started wanting to see. well, I want to see that funnel by the people that come from Facebook versus the people that come from Google. And you can't really do that really easily, especially if you have like 10 or 20 different comparisons you want to do. So our left to right funnel had had it so that you could see the data below it. And the reason I'm mentioning all this is one of the commonalities that sort of between Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, that sort of I accidentally find myself in is basically this idea that we sort of the way we build our organization is to hunt for a problem worth solving, and then solve it better than anything else on the market.
And in both those instances, the feature set that we built and the little little differences that we built, whether it's the tracking differences, or the visualization ones, in both cases between a heatmap and a funnel, they end up getting embedded in other products, because they're just that good of a difference between how it was done before, and how it's done after we kind of figure that out.
And so now if you look at the funnels and a lot of popular analytics tools, even Google Analytics, now, they have the same views and the same layout and style that we had invented back then that didn't exist until we sort of started poking around and solving kind of the problems that we discovered. So, you know, I think for me, that experience of both those companies really shaped how I think about building the organization around me, working with people to kind of make sure that like if we discover something, we're doing our best to make sure that we're the ones that get more benefit than we did. Because, you know, back then, even with both those companies, I don't think I personally, and even the team, realized how impactful our discoveries were. And our solutions to some of these problems. So this is the kind of stuff that I think about in the back of my head and make sure that like, you know, we're not kind of losing out on some of that scale.
Jon Low 13:20
Oh, that's amazing. What a unique product mindset you and the team have had to go through the journey. Like you obviously took a mindset to develop this new company, FYI. Can you tell us more about how that came to be? Because when I think about anything more than three clicks to find the document, I like to throw something on my computer as an emotional response. So please, please, please.
Hiten Shah 14:01
Yeah, so that one's really interesting. We actually, we, my co-founder and I, once we met we, we started doing a bunch of consulting, we were even considering starting a fund. And so we were just exploring a lot of things. And then we realized that we just really want to build stuff. And so we started building a couple different products, one was called dugo. That helps you basically give advice on pitch decks, if you're somebody who's an advisor or something like that. There's a company called docs on. So, we had kind of had some role models out there, but are different was focused on pitch decks and really focused on the workflow between people who are giving feedback on your pitch deck and you being able to see it, for example, you know, that whole process is still a little clunky, if not very clunky.
But that was also a time when we thought we were going to build a fund or something like that. And this was going to be one of the tools that we provide the market. And so we weren't really trying to charge for it or anything like that. And really quickly we realized that that's just not a business.
We wanted to be in for a number reasons— I think it's still a good business, I still invest personally. But overall, like, we didn't want to get into the business of having a fine and doing it for 10 or 15 years when I think we really just like building businesses and software. So we, we basically started building a second product that I still get a lot of flack for. Because I said, we can just copy and paste Dogo and build. The second thing, it turns out, like, you know, that's, that's never, you know, that's it's never as simple as it's described. And so we took the code, copy and pasted it and then built this thing called Draft Send, where you could upload a PDF, and then you could kind of record audio. And we're not, we don't create a video, but it feels like a video because as you're moving the slides, the audios going. And there's a lower bandwidth and all kinds of other stuff with it, it had a really great launch on Product Hunt, where a lot of people launch products.
And you know, and then it flopped, basically, because it was a product that we would have to narrow down to like sales or marketing or customer support use cases in order to make it kind of work. And we really wanted to build a much broader product at the time. And so as we were building that we kind of took a massive kind of step back and said, well, like what are we missing here?
Like we really like the space of documents and doing things with them. And so we just step back and ask people, what's their number one challenge when it comes to sort of creating and sharing documents. And it turns out, the number one challenge is finding them because now there's so many different tools that you need to go find them in. And so that was like the first aha moment for this business. And then really quickly just based on past experience, and having failed a couple times with my current co-founder, Marie, we decided to build something really fast.
So, we had what we call a 5-day MVP rule of what is the obvious solution to the problem of finding documents across tools, which is a service that connects to a bunch of tools. And it gives you a search box and lets you find those documents. And you can just type it in the search box. And the reason we did that is because everything that was before us to solve that problem was called kind of an enterprise search tool and imply that you had to search. And so we were like, well, all those things have failed in one way or another and they have not scaled. And there isn't a ubiquitous solution.
This is the enterprise search tool everyone uses. And so we wanted to really figure out why. And what it turns out is like people just don't want to type in a search box to find documents. And more importantly than they don't want to, they don't do it. That's the bigger problem, whether they want to or not. And so what they do is they go ask their co-workers, or whoever shared it with them, or whoever they remember was on the document to help them find the document, they're usually doing that in Slack, or via email, or even like on calls like this in meetings.
And or they're just like hunting and pecking basically trying to log into different tools and try to find the document, especially whether they're in search of it, and can't find it really quickly. And the tools that exist are very focused on helping you create the documents, not find them.
They're not really designed for that a lot of people complain about Google Drive search, because you know, they say Google's a search company, but they can't build a great search for Google Drive. About 70-80% of people we talked to complained about it, the rest are just like, hey, it's fine. And they kind of like to figure their way around it. And then now there's so many other tools, whether it's tools like Evernote, or notion or even like companies that use Google Plus they have Atlassian Confluence. And there's Kota and like just countless tools now that you can sort of write content in and that teams are starting to use and companies are using pretty heavily, especially across departments.
And then you have even things like figma, which technically there's design documents in Figma, even though they might not call them documents, they're sitting there too, and you need to find those.
So, there's this whole like, you know, lots of tools, lots of information in them, and you need to find them. But this search box thing doesn't work. So, we basically spent a bunch of time just iterating and trying to figure out what the right solution was. And what we landed on was a Chrome extension. That actually is, it's also a full web application, but we put it in a Chrome extension, we open up our sort of view in a new tab in Chrome every time you load it. And it's not just a search box, there's a search box at the top. And that's like 10% of the real estate, maybe 5% of real estate. The rest of it is basically this layout.
So, on the left side, you have all the different apps that you've connected, and you can connect a bunch of different apps, we have about 24 that we support, you can click on them. And you can just see a list of all the files in them based on sort of reverse chronological order of which ones have been modified last, and we have like an item detail that tells you the title and who the Creator is and an icon to represent where it's from, as well as when it was modified last, how old it is and all the collaborators on it. And so that piece also goes in the sort of main area that we call the activity feed that shows you All activity across these documents. And across these tools have, basically who's doing what. And then on the right is one of the most powerful things that we figured out, which is that we can take all the people you collaborate with, and put them in the sidebar on the right.
So, you can click on them and see everything you have shared with them, see everything that they've created as well, that you have access to. And this experience is why we say find your documents, three clicks or less, because 70-80% of the time when people are trying to find documents, they will find it just by clicking around our interface, they'll see the feed, they'll scroll, and they'll click that's like one click, right, they'll they'll click on a profile on the right of somebody, click and then see everything that's associated with a couple of clicks. And they already found the document they need.
Or they can go in straight into the app area, click on one of the apps and see all the documents in them and kind of find them that way. And then as a last resort, they can use our search, which is great as well, but we just search titles today and plan on keeping it that way. And then what we learned as we were kind of building all that out and started talking to companies and teams, it turns out that teams have similar problems, too. So we've been exploring that in the last few months and kind of learning a lot about how it teams and kind of organizations as a whole, treat all these different tools and kind of all the information in them and what can I need that they have to know.
Jon Low 21:19
Really fascinating, because I mean, I also think like for big organizations, you know, knowledge sharing, and knowledge management is something that, you know, people don't really do that well, in some nice way, right. And so it's like you're knocking on that door as well. I just think about being able to like, five, five teams are reinventing the same wheel.
Hiten Shah 21:44
Yeah, we keep hearing that over and over again. And it just kind of getting worse, because there's always these new tools that are out there that just keep coming out. And then companies do adopt them. A lot of this whole bring your own tool to work and things like that, that those movements are there. And you know, we're just seeing it folks actually struggling with a lot of it, especially when it comes to things like compliance and data leaks and documents. You know, think about how many times you hear of something like a leaked document, right? So, we're starting to see a lot of like, different use cases off of the technology we built. That's not just for employees that are looking for documents. It's also for kind of the organization as a whole as well.
Jon Low 22:23
Yeah, fascinating, because you know, you studied psychology, right. In college.
Hiten Shah 22:28
it was organizational behavior. Yeah. And I mean, I love that for the same reason.
Jon Low 22:34
Which is funny, because you're doing you know it FYI, right now you're getting like, like, David level insights into how people behave under the screen. Right?
Hiten Shah 22:43
That’s pretty accurate. Yeah.
Arjun Dev Arora 22:45
And that the kind of soft power networks and kind of more structural organizational debates around how documents are shared. And you know, where that all lives and the data that you can understand deeply in order to help an organization?
Hiten Shah 22:58
Yeah, yeah, it's funny, people tend to look at these tools and try to, you know, figure out how to build, you know, like, there's a lot of like project management tools and ways to kind of organize all this stuff. But it's very rare that a company has an ability to look at that kind of behavior and see what kind of sharing is going on. What kind of clustering is going on even things like what department works the most with what other departments and even down to like different individuals and like how they're working well together, and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, we do bring a lot of those insights straight straight to you if you kind of sign up for the product and kind of check it out. So like that's, that's definitely like some of the things that we're noticing now.
Jon Low 23:37
I see. That's pretty incredible. But you know, now that we're all everyone's mostly working remote, and probably even when the economy reopens, it's going to be a higher portion of remote working than not, and to take a pulse point, or to get a read on how people are behaving patterns of behavior within org, right? The data really sits on the UI, right? What they're doing on the user interface, because they're not hanging out at the cooler. They're not, you know, going to PhilZ coffee, right, because it's the best coffee in the world. Yeah.
What are your thoughts on, you know, the implications of being able to, you know, use that data and kind of infer, you know, state about people, you know, what are they up to what are they getting hung up on or like, are giving it a visual representation that says, hey, this whole function is really struggling this week, can a manager get in there just check out what's up?
Hiten Shah 24:47
Yeah, you know, those are all sort of really interesting things. We started interviewing CEOs and learned something pretty interesting. We asked them a specific question, which is if we could wave a magic wand, what you know, what is the magical solution that you need for kind of your biggest problem, and turns out that the, you know, and this will, this will be really fascinating, but like, they are looking for a red, yellow, green for every individual and every individual organization, every team, and trying to understand that. And they have no ability to do that today. I don't think this is a problem we're gonna solve that FYI anytime soon. But it is the problem that we're seeing. And their solution is this red, yellow green thing.
Now, if you look at a lot of the project management solutions, like Asana, or Monday, or even things like Clickup, which is a new entrant in kind of the productivity space, they all have red, yellow, green, they're all focused on things like tasks, and are really kind of pushing the envelope on sort of getting all that task information across the whole company in their tool. So they can show that that's not that's not like the tool we built. And, you know, it's a very different way to kind of solve the problem.
But it is something that I'm seeing that if a company centralizes on a project management tool, they start getting the red, yellow greens, and I think people do get excited by that. The biggest problem with that is there's no passive activity that's being sort of feeding into that to help you understand it even more. And that's, I think, something where there's a lot of implications here that I think some are really great, others are terrible, and like companies have kind of tried this, like Microsoft recently tried to provide these kinds of insights down to an individual employee. And there was a big stink about it, you know, and people were pretty upset that, you know, there was that level of granularity that they're providing, just because it was very much an analytics tool, not necessarily a productivity tool.
And I think that's a line that we're not going to cross because what happened is Microsoft had to pull back a lot and not show data on individual people. Because and a lot of it is because of how they framed the tool. But if you think about how far that tool got, and got to that point of being shipped with those kinds of features, there is a high amount of demand for it. It's just that it has this sort of big brother type feel, and people don't like that. I don't, I wouldn't like it either. Right It is the concept of it more so than the application. Right.
So this is definitely a very interesting category of sort of problem. But I don't think anyone's going to be able to solve it in a way that is, oh, you have all the analytics you need about your team. And each individual, I think we're gonna solve it in a way that's more holistic about the company, company performance, okay, ours, because there's a bunch of okrs tools now that have the red, green, yellow, sort of designations.
And honestly, like, as a founder, and the way I think about the world, I run away, when I see like the software, the software having the common patterns, I pretty much run away from that, just because it means that we're just getting to a commoditized solution to the problem. And I'm always looking for differentiation, especially in the earliest stages, before there's like time for exploiting that differentiation. And this differentiation, like if we did a red, yellow, green, and it was passive. And let's say we got past the big brother field, it would still look like a lot of the other things out there, and that differentiation just wouldn't feel the same. So I love the idea of the amount of data that we have about employees and about collaboration. I think that there are some real serious implications, you know, that a lot of people do worry about, and I think rightfully so.
Arjun Dev Arora 28:52
Yeah, I think the implication from a product perspective is so structured around this concept of productivity, but so much of our work now and knowledge work is driven more by creativity and a human component, which is so hard to measure. And so how do you? How do you structurally measure that? Is that possible? What might that look like? That's antithetical to the red, yellow, green? Or, you know, maybe similar, but is it the same? Those are some large philosophical questions about the future of knowledge of work, knowledge work, but we shall see how that shakes out ,right?
Or how does that actually enable benefits to the other side, right? You're getting visibility on employees, right? But how does it create a 10 x experience for the employee and what they want to achieve? both professionally and personally versus Hey, I'm just, I'm just trying to get insight into you.
Hiten Shah 29:38
Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty interesting kind of problem to solve that I think is gonna take some time for us and the issues aren't technical. You know, they're very societal and individualistic in terms of how people feel when they know these things are being done to them. You know, and I think the average person does not appreciate it. And we have a Big privacy push in the world right now. Right as well, just because of all the technology and the tracking it like that push is going to continue, especially with antitrust stuff going on and a bunch of class actions that have been either going on or settled and continue to be. So yeah, it's this whole productivity thing and creativity and all this working from home. We're just like, we're just pushed, so forward so fast, that I think the solutions are kind of, they're not even lagging behind, they're trying to get too far ahead. Because it's possible, technically, all these things are possible.
Jon Low 30:34
But the human element, like you said, is so important to consider and to be really thoughtful about as, as all of these technologies you continue to get built. That's great to hear that you guys are being so thoughtful about this with FYI.
Hiten Shah 30:45
Yeah, it's got to be careful, especially as a startup too, right? We can't afford a screw up like Microsoft had, and then half and then pullback, because that taints our reputation in a way that Microsoft just gets away with.
Jon Low 30:55
Yeah, so well said. And, you know, looking back at 2020, for you, and FYI, well, you know, a lot of things raised the head, you know, remote work, and all this idea of being able to have that creative flexibility as a kind of working professional, whether geographically or timezone based or country based, right. What are some of the highlights for FYI, during this year? What were some of probably, I would say lowlights that revealed some helpful insights, you know.
Hiten Shah 31:29
Yeah, we were focused on getting a certain sort of team getting team wide and company wide adoption with our tool before March, and kind of the virus came around. And the conversation completely shifted, because the people we were talking to have different priorities.
Because they, a lot of them, were not working from home majority of them were not working from home teams were not even allowed to work from home. In some cases, just because that was their policy, you have to be in the office to work. And obviously, they had meetings set up like that. So, the priorities went to dealing with working from home and transitioning to it. And that was a major scramble for every company that we saw. And they weren't really buying new tools, or even trying to use new tools for that. They were just trying to solve the problems that they had, which was more of like, making sure that existing tools they had worked, making sure people had internet and all that all the stuff that you can imagine and on top of that, having to shut down their offices, because that's a whole orchestration in itself, especially at larger companies. Right.
So all the people, executives, HR, it, everyone's really focused on a problem. So we basically had to stop our conversations on that level. And then what we discovered as we were talking to people, and kind of within about a month or two, I realized really quickly that like they have new problems. And these new problems have to do with a few really interesting things that we discovered.
So one of them is that now that everyone's working from home, more documents are being made way more like orders of magnitude more in some companies. Also, another thing is the sharing of documents went from being locked down in certain companies, like you couldn't do external sharing, or only certain domains needed approval to be completely open. And that means that the employees might not be used to how that works, and how that tooling would work.
So we just basically started learning that there was a much more interesting problem for us to solve that had to do with visibility as to what's happening in terms of access to documents and access to information. And so we've been spending a lot of our time worrying about that, and working on kind of the tooling to help it teams and managers and executives get a better better understanding of what's happening with the documents in order to prevent kind of bad things like leaks and, you know, regulation being compromised, or a compliance being compromised because of the way that people are using documents and who has access to them and things like that.
So those are kind of some of the new layers of this problem that we've been exploring as we kind of shifted this year. And so I guess a low light would be we had this aggressive idea that we can go get people to use our product and adopt it. And we had a feature set in mind for that. And that required us to get people using it as teams and as entire companies, which we didn't have at the time yet, in a big way. Although the product has been spreading just organically inside of companies, because what happens is you see someone using it, and you say, hey, what is that over, someone finds a document that you found that document fast, and then kind of the word of mouth spreads and it still is. And that was great.
But we were building some features that would make it easier for teams to collaborate on these documents and things like that. And we kind of shut down those projects, because we had to put them on hold. So we went in, we had started them and then we had to put them on hold and then we had to figure out what to do next and So, I don't know if that's a low point, being an entrepreneur for quite some time. Like, I think I wouldn't say anything's a low point, I think Arjun can relate.
It just is what it is. And you're just like doc knocking it out as fast as you can, whatever the problem is, and you know, the bigger the problem the faster you try to fix it to be honest. Which is not what most people would say. But yeah, the big problem, try to fix it faster.
So this was kind of, you know, big problem, you know, we did, we need to figure out what we're gonna do. And so we just basically started talking to different people in the organization. And then we discover that there's needs that are different than what we were focused on at the time. And so we stopped pursuing a lot of those collaborations, sort of doubling down on collaboration, and started focusing more on visibility, and providing visibility into kind of what's happening with documents and their behavior. Less so around. Basically, it's like finding them for a different reason. kind of thing.
Jon Low 35:51
Right? Wow. So sad. And, you know, you mentioned something where you said, This hasn't been so many lowlights, just as a serial entrepreneur. You know, one thing I see a lot these days is that I see kind of a crowd of founders that burn both ends of the candle they've done, like, and then I see other founders who are working just as hard. But, you know, they're somewhat grateful to be able to do what they do. And somehow they're just powered with no sleep and probably use air and water. Maybe a few drinks, I don't know. But, you know, how do you maintain kind of your energies for the long run as, as a founder who's been through, you know, multiple renditions in tech?
Hiten Shah 36:44
Yep. I think like, it's, it's not a, we focus so much on what's happening, and what happened, what what just happened, or, you know, the events that are happening in the business, whether it's like a, you know, virus hits, and like now, you know, our customers are focused on bigger problems, or different problems, and we have to go discover what those are, where to thrive, and thrive. Those kind of things are like, really, really tactical.
And if you can boil them down to their basic sort of principles, first principles, if you want to call it or get to five whys root causes like those things are, are actually a blip on the radar, of what what actually are the meaningful milestones in a company, even though when you're in the middle of a big problem like that, you're like, kind of stuck in it until you get out of it?
And like, you know, I mentioned that because like, I don't worry about any of that anymore. The thing I worry about is like, how, what is my reaction to these things? And how am I helping guide the team that needs to work on this? if it's, you know, larger organization and the teams working on it? Or how am I getting help from other people to work on this problem? Or how am I delegating so that, you know, I'm not taking on the full burden of it if I don't have to? Right.
So, it's those kind of things that I'm worried about. So it's almost like bias towards action over even thinking too hard about, oh, this happened, or that happened? Or Why did happen? Or who did it or any of that, it's more like, okay, that happened, great. Let's go find all the information, we need to get to the next step, which is fix this thing. Not, you know, anything else. And I think oftentimes, you kind of wallow in why that happened, what happened in the middle of trying to fix something, you're kind of thinking about why it happened, what happened and how to prevent it next time when it's like, hey, look, preventing something next time.
And this is one big problem we see founders do, preventing the thing next time is not as important as solving the thing first, if especially with a big problem, just go solve it, don't worry about preventing it, because one of the weird things about a startup is just because you've faced that problem once doesn't mean you're going to face it again. Unless you figure out what the commonality is in what you did, and how you feel about it, and what your contribution was to the problem, whether it's like ignorance, or, you know, avoiding like something, some bias or, you know, whatever it is, and like, those are the patterns I look for, those are the things I try to find in myself and even people on the team, because, you know, in great part as as the founder, but also the CEO, it's my job to pull people out of their funk, right, and also identify it. And a lot of it isn't always just about what happened. It's more about your reaction to it. And then kind of how you adjust as necessary.
So at one point, we had a bunch of pretty massive engineering issues. that had to do with hiring and sort of a lack of visibility on code and things like that by our head of engineering and like, he just felt really bad about causing that problem because like, once we realized it was a problem. That was his area of responsibility. And like, he actually got in a funk, but I've worked with him for eight years.
So I let him get in a funk for a day, not two weeks, because usually his timelines are about two weeks, and I kind of gave it to him straight like hey, because of what we're working on, and this exact month. We as an organization do not have time for you to wallow in your shit. We just don't. So, I'm going to pull you out of it right now and say, hey, it's okay. It's all good. Let's figure out what to do next. And by the way, you already have half a plan, if not 90% of a plan, just for this to plan out and just deal with that. Because you don't need to worry about this. It's not that big of a deal. And I think he's the type of person that takes it personally. And I don't even need to mention that it was his mistake.
He's already on it, taking care of the problem and being self aware enough to be like, yeah, I screwed up, here's what I'm going to do. But internally, he's wallowing in it. And that's causing him to like, just not make the best decisions, because he's like, Oh, I did it, how do I prevent it? How do I prevent it, but fixing it is more important than preventing it. And by fixing you generally will prevent the problem next time anyway. And I think this is I know, I'm in the weeds. But like, this is a little nuance that I don't think most founders appreciate, which is the fact that like, you don't need to think about how you're going to prevent it, you're gonna solve it. And then you can worry about what happened and how to prevent it like a specific headspace that you're in that you can call a post mortem or a retrospective, instead of trying to do it when you're still trying to deal with a problem and fix it.
So, if you have a major engineering problem, and you have a personnel problem on engineering, you kind of need to replace all these people, basically, or all the people that are kind of causing the problem if you notice that that's the problem. And for us, it was just a level of engineering, sort of performance. We couldn't get out of the people on the team for the business that we were heading into. That was a real problem. The business we were in was fine. But it was what we were heading into that required a different caliber of engineers basically. And so we need to replace all of them. Thankfully, our head of engineering is that caliber. So. it wasn't like we were completely lost.
But we had to redo our recruiting process, we had to let go of everybody that kind of carefully, everyone that was there and let them know, to and then basically transition. And so there was a whole process. But again, if he did get out of this funk, we wouldn't just be two weeks too late, we might have made all kinds of mistakes. Because his funk was all about how do I prevent this from happening? How? And it's not even exactly that. It's more like, How did this happen? And a lot of that, you can say, Oh, you need to figure out how it happened to prevent it. Or not prevent it, sorry, make sure or fix it. And usually how it happened is less important to fixing it than how you're going to fix it period. Right?
Any context of how it happened to help fix it is great. But when you take the attitude of what happened and try to diagnose what happened to like, a great level of detail at a time when you actually need to fix the problem. You're actually kind of shooting yourself in the foot because you're likely to actually cause the same mistakes, because that's just the headspace you're going to be well, I tend to go for like, hey, let's move forward. What's next? How do we fix it headspace because that tends to be better. And then when we need to be in a review what happens to headspace? That's just a different model. That's what I believe we should be reviewing things when we're relaxed. Now, we're in the middle of an emergency where diagnosis is more important than analysis.
Arjun Dev Arora 43:03
I really appreciate that like relentless sense of urgency and forward facing, get momentum that you you just shared with us and deeply and then creating the right space for when and where it's appropriate to review, reflect, analyze, understand, you know, but but that kind of, you know, always in sixth gear reality of being a top tier founder and pushing, you know, the business forward towards the truth that you see, or the customer, you know, pain that you're looking to solve is so powerful.
Hiten Shah 43:34
There's also just a really good analogy. Do you want to be the news? Or do you want to be a firefighter? The news is worried about how it happens. Always. The firefighters are worried about making the fire go away, right, stopping the fire, stopping it from spreading, blah, blah, blah. I don't want to be the dudes, dude. The firefighter at our team has to have that context.
Jon Low 43:54
Yeah. It's interesting, also, because, you know, like, when people are in panic or wallowing or in fear, right, and they're intelligent people, then they're really good at justifying why bad decision is actually a really good decision, because it's so intelligent, but it's still like, kind of theoretically retroactive and, and, and I like what you say about pulling him out and just say, Hey, what's happening here?
Hiten Shah 44:21
Yeah, it's a little bit of like, yo, it's okay. Like, this is not to worry about it. Like No, you're good. Like, let's just go fix it.
Arjun Dev Arora 44:47
And yeah, the last few couple minutes that we've got. We'd love to better understand you're in a little bit about your investing history. You know, you've invested in so many great companies, I know. It's hard to cover in a couple of minutes. But you know, very quickly, are you still investing today? And maybe what are some of your, you know, biggest investing lessons as an early-stage investor?
Hiten Shah 45:08
Yeah, I invest sometimes. And I say that because I always try not to invest these days and things, but people keep sending me things. And like, you know, I have the means to invest in companies. But I also like investing in my own companies. So I always have, and always have had that sort of issue.
So that you know, and at the end of the year, it gets worse, where it's like, oh, yeah, I'm not gonna invest next year. So if I say, if I say that I'm probably lying. So I'll start there. And then you know, I think I went from somewhere that 120 investments to 150 in the last like 18 months, maybe less.
So I'm, I'm probably more active than some angels, and even some fund managers. In a lot of cases, I write small checks. So lessons learned, I think, early stage, nobody really knows if this business is going to be successful or not. And a lot of people lean on, like, oh, the team and the founders and things like that. I think that's great. What I really look for is: how does that person think? And do they have resilience? Or are they going to develop the resilience for the business, and there's a lot of different data points you could take for that.
Such as, like, I ended up investing in Clearbit. And I was the first check into the business, which, you know, it is what it is, he was gonna get money from other people, I just thought it was just timely. And Alex over there had worked on two or three different ideas that were small ideas after his time at stripe, and small in the sense of I just personally didn't think they were matched to his abilities, he had written a whole book on JavaScript, he had built like certain parts of stripe Checkout, if not the whole thing early on the little pop up stuff there. He was, basically, for lack of a better word, at that time, considered one of the experts of JavaScript, I would say, I mean, he wrote a book on it, right. And he built some of the JavaScript that was running on a lot of sites at that time, too, and probably still does. And so I'm sure some of this code is still running over at Stripe, even after so many years. And basically, he left and he was working on ideas.
And then he landed on this one, and we were over at Cyclops and SF, we were just talking. And he's like, Hey, I got this one. And I think I'm gonna raise money for it. I'm like, Yeah, like, I'll write a check right now because I liked it. And I think it maps to you. And the reason is like, it was just something where when he started talking about it, I could just connect the dots without him saying too much about what he was going to do next. And what the potential of that business was, just because of the way he talked about it without him having to say a lot about what it actually was going to end up being exactly or having even a great idea of that because the idea was good. And he was the right person to go pursue it. And I think that that's what I look for is some version of that resilience that I saw from him. And that self awareness of knowing that the other ideas weren't as good and weren't, like worthy of raising money. It wasn't like that sized idea. And the one that he was working on now, which is the business that clearbit is in was the thing that he wanted to pursue. And again, it was like a quick convo. And he was one of the many people that I met multiple times, nothing, nothing super special about our relationship or anything like that, in particular, was just very much timing. So I think timing has a lot to do with it.
Another good example, where I didn't invest, but didn't really even think of asking, I don't think we discussed it was when Ryan Graves was joining Uber. I think he reached out to me, and he just wanted some thoughts and wanted to tell me about the new thing he was doing. Until we talked about it, we met it, I think it was Samovar Tea over in SF, and you're just telling me about the weird company that he's joining and what they do. And in my case, like I didn't have contextual awareness at the time of that, like, Look, I might not go out. And these black cars might be a thing for other people, I actually had friends that were really into the black cars and kind of the early Uber days and just didn't have enough context.
So these days, I think a big lesson from then was like, there are some opportunities where like, the markets are just really big. And it's just even if even if the company starts with a small idea, there's a lot of opportunity, if the people who are running it are always in the mode of basically discovering and exploiting opportunities. And that's what Uber is. It's a company that has been fantastic at discovering and exploiting new opportunities in very challenging markets. And so that's my sort of random I missed on Uber's story. I don't think we talked about funding or anything, so I'm not gonna say hey, offered it and I said no, but I'm sure if I asked he would have tried to help me kind of get in on that ramp. Right.
And I have no regrets or anything like that. It was just awesome that I was asked to meet with him at a time when he wanted to talk about it and he wasn't the person he is today. After all those years at Uber, and I think that kind of stuff is one of the things I love about investing is like you get to meet these people. You invest or not. And there, they go on to do all these crazy things. And you're like, Hey, I knew that person before they became that crazy person that did all these fantastic things, right?
So, yeah, I don't have a lot of lessons except I think the big one for me was like, being able to contextualize something that you might not understand. And being able to understand the customer and the use cases and how the founders Think about all that, I think is a really important skill set for anybody who's considering investing, contextualizing things that might not be in your wheelhouse and figure out how to assess those things objectively. And the best investors at every stage that I've seen are early stage or even much later stage. They're able to do that.