#39 - Getting a Billion People Working From Home

we are a platform for remote work our mission to create great work from home jobs powered by ai a lot of companies and individuals use us to convert audio text there's a lot of video all over the web from youtube to netflix and it all needs to be cashing and subtitles and so we serve all of those needs for everybody from the one guy with the podcast to large media companies like cnn breaking news coming into cnn on others side of our business we have freelancers who work at home and can earn money from the pajamas at any time and we give them the ability to choose to work their do when they do it they can make money hopefully the lifestyle they want a lot of them are home with children or family obligations and we're able to fill the cracks in their day in a way they can't otherwise do we have a hundred and fifty employees more than half our engineers we've raised thirty one million dollars there we disclosed for the first time that our lost value which was two hundred and six million dollars there are so many people around the world that would love to work remotely but can't they don't have opportunity in their small town or country i just think that there's gonna be a huge change in our life lifetimes where by the time i'm dead i think it'll be a billion people who work remotely five million is nine a million ten million million money million dollars hundred billion dollar half a billion hundred and fifty million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually put threats to these like giant multi million dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to shoes add another zero to that price buddy add two more zeros first million every week we sit down with self made millionaires and asked them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories where all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did feel like shit at the i ask them how'd do you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own your own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million hey my name is jason ja company is is rev dot com we are a platform for remote work for customers we convert audio to text and our mission is to create great work from home jobs powered by ai so we're two set of marketplace i use you guys yeah wonderful transcribed by our podcast podcasts using rev yeah so a lot of companies and individuals use us to convert audio tech podcast uses a lot people media uses a ton but so do a lot of other industries whether it's e learning websites the new videos is captioned whether it's market research firms that have a focus group to transcribe there are user research teams that that transcribe audio there's a lot of video all over the web from youtube to netflix and it all needs to be captioned and subtitle and so we serve all of those needs for everybody from the one guy with a podcast to you know large media companies like cnn who use us all the time for audio video and then on the other side of a business we have freelancers who work at home and and can earn money from the pajamas at any time they work flexibly they can work as much as little as they want and we give them the ability to choose the work they do when they do it and they can make money to kind of helps leave the the lifestyle they want a lot of them are home with children or family obligations and we're able to fill the cracks in their day and and keep them busy help them make money in a way they can't otherwise do and brag a little bit how far you guys have come so you started the company how how many years ago yeah started the company it's almost ten years nine and a half years ago we have if i mentioned some of our public we available metrics you can mention the private ones too it's cool there you go we have fifty thousand people who work in the platform each month we've raised thirty one million dollars we were on the forbes ai list a few months ago and it said in there there we disclosed for the first time that our last value which was two hundred and six million dollars we have a hundred and fifty employees more than half our engineers we have how'd you get two hundred and six million usually the valuations around numbers why why two zero six i think in that case multiple of of a numbers is that how you gonna end up it o six you know it it it's always a a peculiar process i mean i think it was a a small round and i think in that case we we agreed to the round size first this is the pre pre money and then that could add it on gotcha okay alright gotcha about twenty fourteen we were having trouble hiring engineers as everybody does because it's a competitive market and everybody in the bay area is fishing in the same pond i started talking to advisors and and you know board members and one of my board members was involved in in a company that had a big office in seattle and also one in san francisco and he made the point you know as that's not the only place to hire engineers so i thought well you know that's a good point let me let me think a little bit about this and look around at the world and i realized that you know the bay area because of the lack of construction and the you know the housing costs and the various way the labor market and the real estate market works here i thought it would be you know a tough place to be you know only based here right the the bay area has the best of a lot of things but i felt that it would be good to have another office in in a city with a lower cost limit did a much looking around for a lot of reasons chose austin and we now have offices in both places and we're we're hiring a lot in both offices we think both markets are great for different reasons we have some people that go back and forth between the two i think it's really hard to retain people for more than ten years if you're only in the bay area i think there's a lot of examples of companies that had a really strong start and then a lot of their people left after they vested and they ended up you know without maybe as much of the of the core original people as that they woulda have wanted i know i saw some interview where mark zuckerberg said if you could go back a time he would've have done facebook in boston mh i don't know meant but he said it which the big thing to say for a guy like that and was reading one book i think it was chaos monkeys to talked about facebook and the guy said that when he had the facebook he met somebody who was employed in twenty nine of facebook and that he or she was the only person of of of the first thirty other than zuckerberg was still there right right and so i can imagine if that's assuming these facts true he must have been kinda bummed that the first his one crew was gone twenty eight people he got they i mean they're their case they made you know it's of money that did great and they went on to other things it's gotta be hard to keep innovating the way you want to when you do talent like that and what i see is that your bay your housing costs create this pressure on people to jump ship pretty fast and it's a rational economic strategy to kinda hop around company your company whether you go to a big company and get paid a lot of cash or you're gonna start up and you get some options that maybe worth a lot of money you do that two or three times and and one of them strikes gold and you know and it works out and that's probably good for the individual not great for the company if the company has long term aspirations to do big things because our google's is a very impressive company obviously they they've they've produce this incredible search engine that is you know maybe the best asset of all time but what i find it almost more impressive is that a company like amazon at you know twenty five years old can launch something totally new like a convenience store and see it kinda work yep and you know to me what's really impressive is innovation that can happen in in the second of third decade and i think to do that you you need a different approach to culture and you need to try to build a company where people don't burn out and where they they stay energized and excited about the next chapter and building great new stuff and i think that having officers in two places has helped us to do that to create that kind of more sustainable culture right so so right now is we approach our second decade our best are definitely yet the comm we're we're right now building some things with artificial intelligence that i couldn't dreamed up three or four years ago so we're gonna be be be producing our best products for sure in our second taking and do you guys this is kind of an interesting one right because the service you provide is really simple which is awesome because i love simplicity in general but b it's just easy for for customers and employees even to to g what are we trying to do here what is the service for and so where you guys are transcribing audio to text and you're doing it really well you're doing it efficiently companies like google are releasing ai i feel like every year that's getting closer and closer to being able to do real time captions it because i watching a live stream video and the captions were so good and it was live is it only these these are only being done i guess through ml and and so like that's an existential threat right where you guys are employing fifty thousand people right now which is awesome and people are making money and their pajamas at home how does the sort of obviously you guys are using ai to assist humans but like the ai is coming to be able to do this really really well how do you think about that yeah i mean that that's that's one of our biggest strategic questions and i'll tell you our view on that and other people who have a different view the the people who wanna pay the people who care about quality need the human in the loop to make it accurate and and let me give you some some some examples here let's just say you know like you you a podcast you usually actually have a lot of listeners right but you're you're kind of a small business there are plenty of podcasts that are smarter than you and and then there's this american life mh right so for the guy in his garage with no budget he's probably perfectly okay to use an automated transcript from google or we actually have a a service for that you can get rev automated transcript that's that's more accurate than google's and the automated version is probably good enough for the small guy if he doesn't need a perfect plus podcast podcasts tend to be recorded with good audio because we're sitting here with these great microphones and in a good room and so forth this american life wants it right they don't want any mistakes and even if the ai is a lot better than today it still takes a human to make it near perfect mh and when we go out to the market whether it's our customers they want captions for you know netflix or whether it's a market research firm there's a focus group they want things that accurately they don't want them full mistakes they want a transit or caption file to go to a bunch of people and it can't be wrong and as good as the ai is it still makes a lot of mistakes like a lot mh and the ai we use the term ai which is really a mis it's probably more accurate to call it machine learning because the software we have that can converts audio to text it's not intelligent in the way that you know my three year old or my dog frankly is intelligent it's not doing infer and reasoning it's doing strict pattern recognition using brute force and so it makes all kinds of mistakes that a human just wouldn't make right particularly a human that knows our culture so if you have a so understanding if i'm if i'm talking to you and i know you a little bit or i know people like you or your style i can probably guess what you're gonna say next based upon the threat of the argument and this kind of software can't can't do can't do those things i think the way we look at the market is the ai is definitely gonna shrink the market in certain areas because there will be some use cases where somebody says hey i was paying you know dollar let's say for human to do it and i could have an ai i do it for a lot less i'll do that but what we also see even more so is that as we've rolled out a cheaper ai service our volumes have grown dramatically because what's happening is people coming to us and saying i have a whole back catalog of content that wasn't worthwhile for me it wasn't it wasn't important enough to pay a human to do it but at your lower ai price i'll do all of it right and so you know we're looking around is saying well how much audio and video is really out there so let's just take let's just think about tv tv for a minute when i was a kid out of black and white tv in my bedroom forty one i'm my that old but it had like two knobs the and a v f knob and so you could count it only had like maximum forty stations of which probably like only a dozen had actually had actual content on it now with youtube i have like half a million decent stations i can choose from right so in my lifetime it went from like twelve stations to like five hundred thousand right and not every station there needs close captions but all the big ones want it and even the meeting ones wanted to because it's better for the better for the audience it's better for seo it's better for foreign you know foreign visitors or people with english second language it was good and cheap you would want it and what you guys are doing is making it and cheap exactly so so the amount of audio video that is of high quality is growing exponentially right and so what ai does is it makes things more affordable and we're seeing massive market expansion the other example i would say is look how big was the taxi market s nsf you know circa ten years ten years ago right it's a it's a lot bigger now right or the market for personal transport is so much bigger even though the prices gotten lower how can that be well now every you know millennial who's thinking going in the bar is probably gonna use an uber pool and pay like seven bucks whereas before there was no option you know the taxis weren't available and if they were available they would have cost three times that so the efficiency people used to say this about uber they said well you know how big could this be is this over valued well even if it took a hundred percent of the taxi market it wouldn't live up to this and what turned out was in cities like san francisco they that same year i remember this when when i read this argument that same year they three x the total size of the san francisco taxi market themselves i remember some somebody telling me some people told me that same thing right and it's we see the same type of dynamic how much audio video is out there it's limitless right and how many times were you in a meeting or somebody wanted to know what was said right alright it's twenty twenty new year it's gonna be a big and you know we had to come in with some new awesome partners so for january we're partnering up with microsoft and my first million that's right this episode is brought to you by microsoft because whether you're just starting out or you're well on your way to your first million microsoft teams can help your team hit the ground running with must have features like real time chat editing and video calling all in one easy to use platform teams is a no brainer at a price you can afford yep there is a free version of teams as in it cost zero dollars see for yourself at a k a dot ms slash the hustle again that's a aka a dot ms slash the hustle to check out teams brought to you by microsoft i love it microsoft that is a trillion dollar company we're talking about my first million they're they're on my first trillion so that's goals for everybody they got there because they build epic products microsoft word excel powerpoint these are products that stand the test of time and now they've come out with teams to help teams chat communicate at work together and i think it's awesome alright great let's get back to this episode the amount of audio and video that matters is limitless so ai is a breakthrough technology that is delivering higher value at a lower cost and so it's gonna expand the market and you you know the there's a lot of headlines that say robots are coming for the job as people have these sort of dystopian notions of people think of like terminator and went of the robots gonna gonna come and kill us all that's not what we see right i i mean i think it's that that sells movie tickets but what we see is that when we go to our freelancers and we give them software that does the most tedious parts their job better they think it's great because those aren't the parts they enjoy right they wanna do the parts that require them to think in and use judgment so mean if you look at across i'm an economics geek if you look at the history of industry what i see is that as as factories bring in more technology they they produce more stuff with fewer people per per widget and they require more skilled people right now if you talk you know you read the big challenge of factory owners is there any workers that can deal with robots right right and because like well it's kinda hard to work with a robot compared to right they guy teenagers basically yeah may maybe maybe yeah may maybe so so let me ask you when you guys before you guys built software for your transcribe what would the cost be if there was no software per let's call it a minute and what is your average cost now so like that's the efficiency gain right through through adding the the sort of the machine learning components where you you help their workflow you speed them up you get you take away the tedious parts yeah look i'll answer your question but i'll i'll kinda go one step back before then you know we we intentionally chose an industry that we thought was very large but that hadn't received any real innovation ever frankly and you once in a while i'll be reading some book about something that happened two hundred or two thousand years ago and talks about scribes you know transcribing what we said by put by by a president or king or general so as long as people could talk and write people have been transcribing and you know when i was in high school i remember one of my my biology teacher had a wife who his wife do medical transcription and she would get cassettes mailed to her and she was to their type them out on a word processor or something and that would that was the job and so was it was opening the mail and taking the cassette and putting it in and playing it and that was state of the art when i was in tenth grade circa ninety nine nineteen eighty four mh and so then when i started this you know nine years ago state of the art was you could emailed the audio file and you imported to some software that's designed to play audio for transcription typically you can often control it by a physical foot pedal that you plug into your usb port so people try to make it more efficient so the software may or transcription is and somewhere that was good would have a physical foot pedal so that way they could have a third hand and the reason for that foot pedal is it would it would control things like players player pause or go back five seconds so people had done some basic things to try to get speed but the technology wasn't very good it really wasn't it was desktop software if you looked at it you just with your kind of bay area product lens you say not not nice software and they were typically typing into microsoft work and that's how we started we started doing the same thing everybody else did but we knew we were gonna build software to do everything that it could do to help in the whole process and there's a lot of pieces to that it took us a couple years but we built software to help people do the job which is to listen to audio and transcribe it and it was full of little productivity hacks in the software so for example they would have the person would have shortcuts for things like for a very common word they might see a lot they might have a little shorthand for so instead of writing the word because b a they would have b c space and it's been informed because and there's like ten other different types of little hacks that's in the software that each one is not that big of a deal but when you put them all together it makes somebody faster and so what and and we had teams of people that would we would watch people work almost like with a stopwatch and figure out when they're getting tripped up and say let's go fix that money we gotta unblock this yeah because because we understood that the faster they could work the better for everybody they're happier customers happier they make more money per you know hour of their effort everybody wins and you know we put that software through you know dozens and dozens of versions and it and we believe it's the best out there and so we probably as best we can tell cut the time to do a job or rather dell productivity was it cut the time cut the time in your job in half or dell productivity on what the norm was in the industry and that was before we brought ai to bear but and so we've been bringing an ai into the picture over the last year i think we're still you inning one of this journey and the ai is not always helpful because with ai it's garbage in garbage out you the old thing you can't make chicken salad out of chicken yep bleep bleep and if if i record here with you with these microphones they i will do a great job whereas most people aren't doing that right a lot of it's in a copper room with an iphone doritos bag next to the mic right fan on fan on they chime with a cough yeah they're not thinking about it oh and then maybe somebody's got a foreign an accent because they you know immigrant and which is which can be harder for certain people to discern the words and then somebody like me gets excited and interrupts too much and so you have a perfect storm of like that's that's reality right right so there's like perfect conditions and then there's reality and we get both right it's like self driving cars on a parking lot versus you know in a city when it's raining type that's right tahoe in the snow with the fog right you know in winter and and i and i i and i i see conditions so the ai today what what do i mean by ai we have proprietary technology that converts audio to text and we run we run all of our audio through it and we find that in some cases the ai can do a really good job and we give it to the human being and they love it in other case of the ai can do a good job so we kinda throw away the transcript right in a different scratch so let me ask you a question you started this business when you were or you you you left your job to start this business but your job was somewhat related right you were i think o autodesk which has been rebranded or acquired or whatever to to be upwork and so did you see this opportunity while you were there that hey been a lot of these jobs or transcription jobs what if we you know just did that really well you know how did this come about what's the origin story from take us from you're a guy with a job to you start this company what happened sure there was a step in another company in between not not a startup in i'll tell the story so i i joined i startup up that was called o odessa autodesk because it's not called up upwork and the company went public in late twenty eighteen this was doing pretty well joined this company two thousand four when it was super tiny and what was your job title then the title ted title and what i actually did the title was director of marketing and sales in reality i did a lot of product management i did all online marketing i did a little selling before we automate automated our sales process i did fundraising i i helped the founder with the series a and series b financing i i kinda got did some operations work i did everything to to be done except for i never wrote software mh and i had a great founder like experience i was an early employee not quite a founder it but did a lot of different things and i joined a company early i joined the county before they could pay me to work for free for a few months of the founder before he can finalize why did you do that because i believe he was building something really important and and it i and i'll tell you frankly a personal motivation and there's a little bit of so one of the biggest questions for somebody who wants to join an earliest safe startup up is how do you negotiate with the founder particularly for equity which is the thing that matters most in the early stage company and i i saved a little bit of money in my previous job i was willing happy to work for a few months for free and give people a sense of your age at the time of twenty kid out of call ago so a couple years out of five maybe yeah twenty four twenty five and i remember calling on one of my mentors who's was a much venture capitalist for advice saying i wanna go work with his founder we have tremendous chemistry i i think the world of him and he and he respects me and there's the things that he's good at are different than what i'm good at and i think together we could really do a great job building building this business and the question was how do i frankly negotiate with him for what equity stake i'd be working for because that that that that was that was a one of the main attractions for joining a company that was so early that they had no funding right no money in the bank that couldn't pay me nobody had ever heard of them that like four customers but it was a big idea and i love the idea and the advice they got from this mentor was and i don't never forget that this device was a great advice it was look right now the information is very asymmetric you don't know he doesn't know what you're worth and you don't know how to sell that to him how to how to show him that so he said just work for a little while demonstrate value and he'll realize that he wouldn't wanna do this without you mh and it's you know a lot of people wanna spend a i mean i think was a general point here about negotiation a lot of the people want to spend a lot of time to use a different phrase you know dividing a a pie that may that may never get baked and sometimes just wanted to start baking the pie figure a little little later how to it that so what we did is we agree we said we'll work together for we pick some time period it might about three months and say three months we're we're gonna sit down and try to figure this out and during the few months we worked the other as if we were married meaning i was a hundred percent dedicated to making him and the company successful and we you know put in place all online marketing programs with google and we did a lot of product work to get customers coming off the website and we started hiring hiring people for roles that we needed and we went did some fundraising and we were having some early early traction in that process and when we sit down to to basically discuss and and and negotiate on talk have the big talk that we we built up to amazingly we walked in each thinking each were the same number in our heads oh wow so and what do you chalk that up to you were too low he's too generous but how do you how do you you know square that that circle why does that happen you both had a accurate view of what this was worth you know i think that there's this phrase in negotiation like do you go for the last dollar and i think it depends on life about what kind of relationship you want with the person down the road and i think we each try to come up with something that we thought would be fair fair to the person but attractive but but but but hugely attractive right and we worked together enough that you know i was aware of how awesome the company potential was he he had an idea what i could do and if we tried to have that conversation too early too early it wouldn't have gone well right and you know he could he you know he knew that i took a leap of faith to work for no for no pay for several months because i believed that him in the business and and did you worked out did you signal even at the beginning because i've had a similar experience where i had a company a guy literally was like i wanna work on this with you guys i'll work for free you know sleep on a couch and we'll figure it out in three six months don't worry we'll i'll show you first and one challenge we ran into and i love the guy sam you know big big shout out to sam foley you know we ran into was when we when it came time for the talk we didn't know where the other person's expectations were at all we had like beat around the bush so completely that when it came up and he was like well i you know basically wanna be an equal partner and we were like whoa well well like we didn't even think that's the discussion we're trying to have we thought it was between x and y right and that set off a pretty bad tone so i'm curious just to you sort of compare personal experiences and it might just be that every experience is different but did you do a better job maybe of setting the tone or or benchmarking in some way at the beginning or did you just happen to have a better outcome than we did so it's been sixteen years so these are little hazy but i think we did have some rough discussions over maybe not quite range but but some benchmarks i mean i was i had the good fortune to you know i was coming out of a job at a vc firm where i was a very junior person but i had a lot of data on what people earned at startups ups and what they had in various roles and we probably had a little bit of maybe some book ends on the conversation before going into it i think gotcha and i mean certainly i that that's a very it's a very delicate that's a very delicate question but but i do think that it's important to always try have some broad meeting of the minds before you go into something i mean it's it's and there's no easy way to do that so one question i get a lot as do this podcast is people come for career advice and i'm like you don't look hey you don't want advice and b you gotta look at your own situation but one question i have to get is should i you know go down this path start my company go down this path work for big company and the the other one that's most interesting because it's you know i would say at least known to people is what it's like to do what you didn't join early at a company that that might make it big and the question i get a lot is around what are what are my what what should my expectations be so for example you joined o autodesk which came up work and ultimately you know public company so that's the that's the win you know financial win is what that deck startup actually made it through the gauntlet of things that startups normally could fail in and give people a sense if they're that you know that person is twenty four years old and weighing their options they don't quite have a business idea they love and wanna start they they kinda know they don't wanna be at a big company and they're trying to figure out okay a big company is it's very clear what i'm gonna make and at this startup up i kinda don't know how to think about these options and you know if a company makes it all the way like you did where does that set you up financially how how would you sort of inform somebody who's trying to make who's trying to do a a sort of a a rational decision financially between those two options how would you talk talk talk to people about that so it's a really important question obviously there's no there's no like that the defender answer thing and i i could you know give an answer and then somebody could say well i did the other path and i was really successful so you're wrong but you know you framed it as big company versus join a founder and startup up and i wanna add that there's a lot of room range of between a lot of range between that okay and i would think that for most people who let's say somebody says i wanna be an entrepreneur entrepreneurial or founder one day if if they haven't yet i would probably advise them to get involved in a high growth startup up first because you're gonna learn a lot really fast now if you start the company great if you have some incredible passion for a problem your father had a certain illness and there's a company that's gonna solve that illness and you have a dying desire to solve it and you have skills to do so then go do it but what i find is a lot of people want to to start up for kind of lifestyle like they wanna to be an entrepreneur they want that lifestyle and they're just hungry for it and most people who haven't been in the game for a while probably don't have the background to be able to evaluate a new idea with high confidence that they're gonna get it right it's it's all it's all really hard thing to do mh and that's why if you go if you look at a startup that has raised venture capital from some decent venture capital firms is growing quickly is innovating a lot and you can join in a capacity where you're building and growing something ultimately hiring people you're gonna learn a lot of skills and along the way you'll exposed to a lot lot of different markets and categories start to develop a better view over over what a good opportunity company might be for you because there are a lot of people that jump from start to start up a lot of little startups ups that don't go anywhere and they probably have a lot of fun and maybe they end up happy in the end but i think probably they went in hoping for either a financial outcome or some kind of legacy and you jump into a bunch of companies that they've done going anywhere you don't get it i think that if you find that high growth venture back company and do least a couple your stint at you depending on what what sort of function you're into you know you wanna get in a position where you get exposed to multiple functions so so you have some exposure to the business side of things product is often a good in back a good area because it cuts across lot departments but you can get you can get that from a lot of different fields i think most people are better off and the high startup it's kind of a bridge or or is it is is maybe a step right before breaking out of their own that's just doing doing the the the the numbers of math i think most people are better off that way you in my personal journey i had spent the two years before joining up upwork at a venture capital firm where my job was to evaluate started i had good force choose to be able to see probably hundreds of companies from the inside and understand how to compare things how to of benchmark companies and also i have the opportunity to learn a lot and talk a lot of people about how does the company build enduring advantages what people these things would call a emo defensive and def and i got a lot of great advice on that in a bunch of you know very wise vc partners and entrepreneurs and if i we simplified that story there's a lot of ways to build def i think network effects he's a really powerful one right and it was very clear from the first minute that if if up upwork had any level of traction it would have great network effects and it'd be very difficult to rebuild that and that's proven to be the case right so so you know i wouldn't knowing that if it worked would really work right and when you you said you know you were you had that experience and then you did something in between and then you decided to start rev i was at upwork for about three years for a lot of reasons i decided to leave you know the the company the ceo changed a couple times and april being enrolled that didn't thing was the right role for me so i said you know let me go off of my own get a job where i can save some money and start a company on my own terms and be able to call the shots in a way that i hadn't been at up upwork and that's that's what i did i i had a friend who worked the private equity fine then he was nice enough to introduce me and i was able to get a job and it wasn't relevant to tech directly the work but i learned a lot and and was able to save a little bit of money so that when i was right start a company on my own for the first time i could do it with the flexibility of not needing to raise as capital day one mh and when i started thinking about what company i wanna i wanted to start i got to thinking about what i learned from upwork which is that there are so many people here in the world that would love to work only but can't they don't have opportunity in their small town or country and i just think that there's gonna be a huge change in my lifetime in our lifetimes where by the time i'm dead i think it'll be a billion people who work remotely up from a much smaller number today and that takes some time because the technology has to mature the bandwidth has to get better industries and business have to change so that work that's done today in a cubicle farm get spread across people's homes through software and a lot has to happen for that tradition to happen and so i thought why wouldn't red be the company why wouldn't i start a company to accelerate that to bring that forward to get opportunity to people and i was able to you know more or less dissect what did i think were the achilles heels in up upwork business model and build a different business model that we don't compete with without working in any meaningful way but there's two things they're different about about rather than upwork for the customer we guarantee quality because we we only do one thing we can for all to text and because upwork does everything out of the sun they can't possibly guarantee quality right on if it rated services yeah you pick a you pick an up worker you hope that that upwork is gonna deliver what you want with rev rev is telling you you're gonna get what you want that's right and different and that's right a different way to freeze that is that know you hire a person and enroll the dice on rev pay for a service so we stand behind it mh so it's a different thing it's it's staffing yep versus the service and then the others side of our business is the freelancer so if you work on upwork or fiber a platform like that you should spend a lot of time applying for jobs the median case of somebody in these platforms is create an account bunch jobs don't find work right right and even the success successful ones are applying for lot jobs that they don't get so that's time they're spending they're not getting paid for and applying for jobs means putting yourself out there emotionally getting excited with something it it's doing a sales pitch and most people don't only have an the door slam in the face and getting turned down and you have to get turned down a lot to get a job which is most will not fun this time so what we felt is if we had a a a platform it would provide one kind of service and we standardized it so we knew we would only accept jobs of a given category in our case it's audio files we can transcribe that are in english to start then what we could do is we could vet a workforce so we don't let anybody do it but we let anybody apply and if people pass our ta and meet a criteria we have a tiered workforce where there's different levels in our workforce if you're in the top level of to workforce we let you do any job time right and so those people spend no time applying for jobs right they can work as much or as little as they want right and that's by design so so so we had these key differences of i wanted to have guaranteed experience with the customer and i wanted somebody with with with the right skills to be able to work as much or as little as they want never have to sell themselves never have to bid on a job never have reached the bottom of saying the that guy will do it for dollar i'll do it for ninety eight cents right never have any of those things wake up and you have your queue that's right that that was the concept and then the question was simply well what would they be doing what kind of work and we considered every kind of work under the we looked at should they do software development should they do graphic design we we looked at what are all the common job type people do across the internet and we study what was out there and we quickly rejected any job that was pretty subjective yep design can't work yeah so like hey restaurant needs a logo for its website but you think it's pretty i think it's broadly vice versa we'll never agree on that whereas we've chosen categories that are pretty objective now there's always little what we was pretty subjective you give you a podcast we get you back the words to it you or somebody else would probably agree that we did a great job or not a great job right depending how we did and not a super high skill bar either for the workforce right so i don't need to have a degree or a special training of like you know programming or whatever that's harder for me to that's right yeah a lot a lot of you people can do it i mean it it's surprisingly challenging and that you need a good year or you need to be a good type and good judgment but you're right it's a it's a broad it's a broad need for businesses because a lot of people have audio and video that matters and it's a broad skill set a lot of people know that you can can type and those are some the things that that that led us to it as far as the name you know a bit bit tangent there we started off with a kind of a funky name we started off with the name fox translate dot com mh and the reason for that was so our first idea was to translate documents and i thought well i wanted a a website name that was very clear not confusing to people so i wanted to word translate to be in it i wanted it to to stand out versus all their things that were out there and i don't know where i thought of no i tell you where thought of this at the time survey monkey in mailchimp right we're like like animal doing well so and task animals are cute so what animal can i get and stick the name and and i wanted boxes as quick it to be short and i mean somehow i i came across the this this idea of i had a bunch of ideas but then you look at like looking you buy godaddy for ten dollar twelve twelve dollars and okay great creative constraint by the way totally totally and and i i and i knew it was temporary but we did it and we in a fox translate dot com i hired a cartoon in indonesia to make cute cartoon fox because it was really really cute people would see the website and they they would smile because it was a very like adorable cartoon fox on our on our home homepage you can still find it you know on the web somewhere and that was a great perfect day at going so you know i think i kinda tell people when think about naming something i would spend like no time at the beginning thinking about a name because the odds that your business is gonna work are like not super high and so make make get the business to work once your business works then you'll know more about what the business really is and then think about what the name ought be and so we got going in twenty ten in twenty twelve i made it my big priority to figure out what a name would be and i have some advice from some investors i read i read books on naming companies i read books on domain names i look for inspiration and you know the problem is you come up with a great or name that you think it'd be awesome for business and you find you can't possibly get so so it's it's really a two part problem one is picking a name you love and then figuring out can you get the domain name mh i'm just skipping a bunch of steps here but well i actually hired two different domain brokers to go out and try of buy names because any people have different views on names i've from the beginning i had what i call a multi decade aspiration of the company i wanted to build a company that creates you know many millions to work from jobs over many decades so so i didn't want the name to be narrowly tied to our first service i wanted to be broad enough to give me room to maneuver and they i also thought that a good name that had some mean to it would create a stronger brand connection to customers i wanted people to think of was as more than just some commodity service the first name i found in love with that it was not able to get was circle wanted to get the name circle dot com and i hired the domain broker to find it for me and she was unable to get i i learned later that i i think it was jeremy lair had the name for his bitcoin wallet company that launched like a year after i was trying to get it because you know she couldn't find out where it was and she had this she gave me roadblocks like know we will call me back right dwayne brokers is usually gonna get callback i ultimately we couldn't get the name and frankly i think it's quite better that we didn't because that let me say more time thinking about possible names and we ended up coming up with for rev and we paid a bunch of money to get it i don't know if i've disclosed but i'll say it never fun we spent four hundred grand on the name nice how do you know how do you know how to where to draw the line on that right i mean we didn't have much money okay that was a big the business was doing pretty well so we we weren't burning that much money but that was that was like a huge portion of our of our assets at the time but i kinda felt like well look if the company successful it's a job in the bucket right and if it fails it's still an asset by the way yeah you could sell again for sure for sure the reason for the name there's probably there's there's sort of two reasons one is that when people hear the word rev they think fast that that's kind of the first thing they think about everything speed like rev your engines accelerate and the nature of our service is we're really fast because we do something that is usually done by people in a body shop that that's slow like a typical customer that wants thirty minute podcast transcribed prior to us eighty nine years ago it would take you forty hours to get something turned around more than that day several days three four days and and we were at the beginning we were probably like twenty hours and you know for that and today we're in a couple of hours we're we're we're so much faster of the alternative that customers that kinda blows their minds and one of the most common questions and because people will submit something friday night at eleven pm and then at one am they get it back on saturday more one am saturday night or whatever morning two hours later and they're shocked how does this even happen and if you know we work it's kinda easy well people are working right someone someone's worked someone is gonna be working and it was obvious as we've more people working we get faster right right so thought re red was good for that but also you know there's i thought i had some other kinda hidden meanings one of my c founders actually did something sort of clever this is something that that if some of your listeners can try if they're trying to think of a name he went a mechanical tu with and and he filled this account with like a hundred bucks and i think i had at the time like ten domain names i was thinking about so for each domain name he would pay people some small amount like fifteen cents to answer a question and the question was like when you see this word what what what are the three words do you think of okay and when you this word do you think feel positively negatively about it so for a ten dollars per domain name we got like this tag cloud yeah here's here's the here's the words you will think about when they hear the when they hear this and it's they were sized based upon frequency so you could clearly see what words people felt positive about and what what people thought of when they saw word mh and so the primary thing people thought of when they saw rev was was speed was a secondary meeting that it wasn't helpful to us which was like reverend like a which was not not really to what we do but i think maybe the third reason was was was revolution mh and you know that's what we've always wanted it we've always wanted to help accelerate this kinda new industrial revolution towards letting people be their own boss work from home and be independent mh and you know we we thought we're gonna create a new lifestyle for folks and and we wanted that have to come through my mom works with a company that has a very similar thing called user testing sure and i remember introducing it to her because she was at home and she's like kinda like retired now she didn't really wanna go she worked in the workforce but she she didn't wanna go back and get a job she also was orders as hell at home kids were gone now and you know if if i told her look here's something you could do at home pick your hours as much as little as you want whenever you want in the day you already have the skills to do this because you're just gonna browse a website and click around and tell people you know it'll tell you go try to check and you you say if it's confusing to you you don't have to be good at it you just say what your actual opinions are and look you're gonna make you know ten fifteen bucks at a time and that can add up to like you know money for your manic ear pedicure and taking us out to dinner or whatever right like this is a little s fun for you and she loved it she loved it she did it so much the user testing hired her to review other testers and basically helped in sort of help build their workforce out and so i've seen this like what this means for her to be like you know four hours a day picking her own hours doing this stuff and having her own income in her own autonomy and it is a game changer and so i've had specific brainstorm storms around how do we mobilize the stay at home workforce the stay at home mom workforce that's out there how do what are some other things there's user testing there's rev there's there's gotta be some others because i just think that once you see the lifestyle that that enables it's clear people are gonna want that and that that's a game changer for people who are sort of bored and lonely at home and not feeling productive and and it's a a pretty big change that's a that's a wonderful example your mom's story and mean we see so many similar stories in our workforce one of the things i hear most often when i ask people hey you know what's their working in rev they tell me i love the content because they watching movies listen they're listen look the listen a podcast you're interviewing interesting people so if somebody and the way our our system works is they can favor a client so they can put a heart to your name oh that's cool so that way when you have your next podcast they can check out if they think that you do cool podcast podcasts they're gonna think man i can't with you here's podcast podcasts the people on on you know the apple podcast app listen to your podcast they don't get paid to it these people get paid to hear your podcast and type it out and if you think of i mean we do educational content whether it's stuff from universities or stuff from online classes and how to use dolby be your online classes how to cook or how to bake or how to how to how to so so or we have churches doing sermon there's content for every possible interest and this is kind of a tough question but we'll wrap up because it's kind of a fun one so if you couldn't do rev and let's pretend alternate university can't be doing rev right now but you wanted to to to still work on this mission or or sort of push accelerate towards this future where people are working from home with this flexibility and autonomy what's another what's another idea you've had that you guys you know won't pursue because it's two different or it's to out there what's what's interesting to you that's in this kind of remote world that you're not doing today online education is big in fact i mean a a story here and this is a humbling experience we spent a couple years and you know millions of dollars trying to build a math tutoring service and we failed to meet our you know metrics and so we we shut it down you know i was a math tutor when i was in high school and you know i spent a lot of time know driving from one person's house to another there i couldn't tutor her until i could get a car and maybe we're earlier maybe we picked the wrong market but you know education is education an industry that where the government provides most of it and hasn't seen a ton of innovation and you know i think there's there's a i mean everybody knows that there's there's notion to the flipped classroom that the whole model of read the textbook and listen to a lecture may not be the best model anymore and i think it's clear that all online education is is it is a massive opportunity there some big companies there's a company out of china called vip kit mh that that has a lot of people in the us often you know stay home moms or or or retired teachers who will work online on video teaching english to chinese children and that's a pretty big big market mh and i think if you play it out you know if i want to get the best education for my kid well where's is that gonna come from there's a lot of things that you get from a teacher in person but if you want some specialized knowledge you can't get it you don't the best teacher in your school i think it makes a lot of sense to to look at the whole world and so i think i think education is an industry where remote technology is gonna be a really big factor love it jason this is awesome where can people find you if they wanna you know learn more connect more with you follow you on twitter or you know shout it out so people who are listening to this can find you yeah i'm on twitter j at jason cha chicago so you can connect dm emmy and love to love to hear books awesome thank you very much