Venture Everywhere Podcast: Marty Ringlein and Andy Ambrose
Marty Ringlein, CEO and Co-Founder of Agree.com chats with Andy Ambrose, partner in The Fund Austin, a part of Everywhere VC, and MP of Palm Venture Studios in episode 54: Let's Agree to Agree.com.
Episode 54 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Andy Ambrose, partner in The Fund Austin, as part of Everywhere VC and Managing Partner of Palm Venture Studios. He chats with Marty Ringlein, CEO and Co-Founder of Agree.com, an all-in-one platform for sending, signing, and managing agreements securely. Marty shares the "why" behind Agree.com focusing on the fragmented nature of digital signatures and money movement. Marty also discussed how the company is positioning itself as an "advanced agreement platform" that not only streamlines the signing process but also integrates invoicing and payment processing, making transactions more efficient for everyone.
In this episode, you will hear:
Agree.com’s vision to dominate the AR/AP automation space via e-signature integration.
Using OCR and Generative AI to enhance data extraction and invoice generation.
Monetization strategies via SaaS subscriptions for larger teams and transaction-based revenue models.
Integrating CRMs and ERPs for large enterprises to foster collaboration, breaking down departmental silos.
Iterative storytelling when pitching and aligning product growth with market needs.
Ensuring a positive user experience while managing the evolution of the product.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Andy: Hey, everybody. I'm Andy Ambrose with the Venture Everywhere Podcast. Super excited today. I've got Marty Ringlein in with Agree.com. And just a bit of background on myself. I'm a partner in The Fund Austin, Everywhere Ventures, as well as a partner at Palm Venture Studios.
00:00:50 Andy: I'm a past founder. I solved in this space, back in 2015 to 2020. So I'm getting a little bit of PTSD but also nostalgia. So I'm really excited about talking with Marty here, about what he's building, which is really cool.
00:01:05 Marty: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you. I think we'll have some fun stories to share and I think you'll be able to even share some good insights for me and then this path that we're on with Agree.com.
00:01:16 Andy: Amazing. Well, I'd love to start, Marty, with just the why. How did you get into this? Give me any and all background you have to how you got to starting Agree.com.
00:01:25 Marty: So there's this adage that we're all familiar with, “The deal's not done until the wire hits” or the check clears or whatever it might be. But I just noticed that for most of the things that we sign, at the end of that, somebody has to pay somebody money.
00:01:40 Marty: But the process to do so is completely fragmented and disjointed. I’m just wondering why? Why if at the end of most signatures, there is money movement, why don't the e-signature players in the market do that?
00:01:52 Marty: And I was driving down the 101 in San Francisco and I saw this big billboard for Adobe sign and it said, “Send, sign, done.” And I was just thinking, that's not true. The signature is this important element in completing a transaction, but it's a formality and it's more of like an invitation to be invoiced than anything else.
00:02:12 Marty: I almost don't care that you signed, what I really want to know is did you pay? If I'm a landlord signing on a new tenant, it's great that they sign, but where's the security deposit? Where's the first month rent?
00:02:22 Marty: If I'm an agency signing on a new client, it's great that they signed, but did they pay their down payment? Are they going to pay for time and materials? If I'm a founder raising from an investor, it's great that they sign the SAFE, but what really matters to me is did the investment come through? Did it hit the account?
00:02:38 Marty: And I think it was just a frustration of, this feels really obvious. This should exist. And I think as I'm saying this, everyone's thinking, “Does it not already exist?” And now you're thinking, yeah, every time I do sign, there's a completely different process to get an invoice, to make the payment, even to have someone follow up if you forgot or you were late.
00:02:58 Marty: There's no reason that those should be completely fragmented. So we thought, hey, instead of complaining about it, let's go build it and let's just make the world of e-signature better and all in one.
00:03:08 Andy: That's so awesome, Marty. When I think about it, it's really the workflow around, the signature is just one little tiny piece of a much larger event that's happening in some particular use cases.
00:03:21 Andy: So workflow, like if you have to, for example, add payments, why is it disconnected from a signature and then getting to an agreement? And maybe you could just elaborate on that. How much are you building around workflow?
00:03:33 Andy: And then maybe specifically, are there certain industries or use cases that you're seeing that what you've built, we'll call it an advanced agreement platform, is it solving for?
00:03:43 Marty: I like that advanced agreement platform. That's a good one. So, and then take two steps back and even just building on your last question and segueing into this one, it's 2014, e-signature feels like a commodity feature from the venture side.
00:03:56 Marty: You wouldn't really find a startup that was just building a business on the backs of e-signature. Preview on the Mac, you can sign for free. In Acrobat, you can sign for free. Google Docs now has it, you can sign for free. Like it's a commodity. And we also felt the same thing was true about invoice generation.
00:04:12 Marty: 15 years ago, we had all these toolings that were really cool and innovative around being able to generate invoices and more professional invoices and do them electronically. So the way that we looked at it, and I think the spirit of answering your question is the, why now?
00:04:25 Marty: What's happened today that's unlocked anything that makes this experience better, especially from a workflow management perspective? And it's the obvious one, AI. So we're not building an AI company, but in 2024, you don't build a modern company without using AI to enhance that product.
00:04:41 Marty: Just like in ‘94, we wouldn't have built a company and not have put it on the internet. So what we can do when you upload a document, we can go and render all the contents of that document. So we can grab everything, every bullet, every hyphen, every indentation.
00:04:59 Marty: But what's important about these documents that move money, lease agreements, SaaS sales agreements, SAFE agreements, convertible notes, in those particular types of agreements, payment terms exist in there. Who pays who, how much they pay, net 45, net 60, any stipulations.
00:05:15 Marty: Those terms, those are just variables. Those are the same variables that would go into something like an invoice. So we realized, hey, if I wanted to render all the contents back into an app to make it more modern so you can do redlining and collaboration and editing, which you can't do in some of the traditional players today like DocuSign or PandaDocs, okay, well, that's really cool.
00:05:34 Marty: That's a good use of Generative AI on top of OCR so that I can bring all that in, I can make it fully collaborative. But if I'm doing all that work, I'm extracting that really valuable content data, why wouldn't I extract those variables for invoice and generate an invoice?
00:05:49 Marty: Like with most teams, what they do now is, this is true for sales teams, it's true for investors, is once that thing is fully executed and the money doesn't need to move, a payment doesn't need to be made. It's a manual process. It's a human process. Someone takes that executed DocuSign, they open it up, they look through and say, okay, I owe $33,000 and I owe it to this legal entity.
00:06:08 Marty: And so now I got to go into another platform, kick off, either creating a purchase order, creating an invoice or even making the payment. And so here, well, we can just dynamically, one, if we've rendered all that content, we can find all the input fields, which is really great.
00:06:22 Marty: So that makes signing and sending even faster, but let's pull all those fields and all those variables for the invoice. It's automatically created an invoice. So no human in the loop, no human error. No accidentally moving of the comma where it's not 33,000, but it's 3,330. And then let's make that more efficient.
00:06:38 Marty: And then if you're doing all of that, if you went from contract to invoice, secure payment processing tied to all of that makes sense. It makes this whole process work more efficient. When we think about workflows, it's all about speed of signature velocity matters, being able to process payments quicker, faster matters, matters to the business. Even matters to me as the customer.
00:07:00 Marty: This isn't all just about businesses collecting money quicker. When I'm buying a service, when I've hired that agency to design my marketing collateral, I'm excited. I want them to get started right away. I don't want them to wait the two weeks for the payment. I want to pay them right away.
00:07:13 Marty: When I'm trying to buy SOC 2 Compliance from a thorough pass, I want that SOC 2 right now, I need it because I need the SOC 2 to close my next customer. I don't want to wait for payment to clear. I want payment to go through right away because I want those services record. So that's how we think about total end-to-end workflow.
00:07:28 Andy: Yeah, that's amazing. It's brilliant. Is that part of your business model? So when you say free, maybe just double click on who is the ideal customer for starters, and then what is the revenue model that you've contemplated here?
00:07:42 Marty: It's funny. Free is… It's a double-edged sword. You tell someone something's free, especially a commodity feature that they don't think they see value in paying for today, like e-signature. I think a lot of people feel frustrated when they get a bill for that. It's like, “Why am I paying for this?” It feels like it should be free.
00:07:58 Marty: But when I tell you that it is actually free, one of the biggest responses we get from new customers that sign up is, and I've never gotten this with any other business I've started is, is they really want to understand the business model because free sometimes connotes no value.
00:08:11 Marty: It's like, okay, I'm not gaining anything here. You didn't build anything of substance. It's like, no. What we've done is created a really interesting monetization model, which I'll get into, that allows us, affords us the opportunity to give away e-signature and invoicing for free, which they should be free. You shouldn’t be paying for e-signature in 2024.
00:08:28 Marty: And we do it in two ways. So e-signature and invoicing, totally free for everybody. Agree.com, shameless plug. But though you're asking, well, how is it free? Are you selling my data? The answer is no. Contract data is very important. We take the security of that very seriously. It is for larger teams.
00:08:44 Marty: So for your larger SaaS sales teams that collaborate with legal and finance, we sell collaborative features for those teams. And so they still get invoicing and e-signature for free. But whenever a contract is edited, a legal team wants eyes on what the edit was and what the edit means. So they buy a seat, like a B2B SaaS subscription. And then the sales team buys a seat, just call it $50 a head a seat.
00:09:08 Marty: And then when it's done and it's executed, obviously finance wants to know if an invoice was created or a purchase order was created against that. So they also buy a seat. So that's one way in which we make money.
00:09:18 Marty: And then what we want is we want all the funds to flow. So these are four organizations that do between, typically like one to 50 million in revenue a year, and all of that revenue is flowing through the Agree platform.
00:09:28 Marty: And so we get to monetize a little bit like your bank does, where those one hour to three to five days, depending if it's ACH or wire, where the money's moving through, there's things that you can monetize on like the float, the way like Venmo or even the Starbucks card works. You can do things in the future, like invoice factoring and escrow. And so all of those more FinTech pathways lets us offer these more commodity things completely for free.
00:09:53 Marty: So if you're an independent contractor, you get to totally take advantage of Agree.com. You get to use everything for free. And then if you're a larger organization that wants some of these more collaborative features, we offer that and then we just sell that. We also have some really cool CFO tooling that we do around AR/AP automation.
00:10:09 Andy: Fantastic. So you really are positioning as a FinTech.
00:10:14 Marty: Yeah, that was important to us. Everywhere Ventures came into our pre-seed. We'll talk a little about that, but our lead in the round was Better Tomorrow Ventures. And that was really important to us specifically because they're a FinTech fund and this can be a very complicated space where what are you? Are you legal tech? Are you B2B SaaS?
00:10:32 Marty: And typically investors like to figure out what bucket to put you in, wanting to see if like you're a fit for the investment thesis, but also just to see what partner in the fund they should be routing you to. Sometimes I say lease agreement as an example, and some people think, “Oh, that's PropTech, that's landlord tooling.”
00:10:46 Marty: So you're talking about using AI, are you an AI company? But first and foremost, this is all about money movement and payments. And then we use e-signature as this amazing wedge for companies where the contract is the source of truth for revenue. And we just wanna help those companies move revenue faster. And we believe that all starts with the contract and the signature velocity.
00:11:07 Andy: That's awesome. So I'm sure you probably, as you're talking to larger and larger enterprise, you get the question, “Can you hook into this system of record or that system of record?” So I'm sorry, everybody, we're going deep on product, but this is just fascinating, really cool what Marty's building. Maybe just share a little more about how you would solve this for a larger enterprise.
00:11:29 Marty: Yeah. And I'll kick this off, which is a reminder. And then for any entrepreneurs listening or any first-time founders, what's important in the way that we build these things, especially for scale, is we still believe in the MVP, still believe in, if you're not embarrassed by your first version, you've launched too late. So that's kind of dangerous here. Why does the head of compliance or legal want to use an application that the founders are embarrassed of? They don't.
00:11:53 Marty: So we're big believers in you mature your customer base as you mature your products. So that closed beta that didn't even have invoicing, we serve a different market. And then as we release more features, and so integrations is one of the most popular ones. As we release those, we start to mature upmarket for people that need those.
00:12:11 Marty: People ask for custom API, for custom workflows, mature upmarket. Invoicing and purchase orders get really complicated and difficult as you start to move up to Fortune 1000, Fortune 500. But yeah, integrations, the common ones are CRMs and ERPs. So your Salesforce, your HubSpots, again, mostly sales team centric. So I want to pull data and send data back to those systems.
00:12:32 Marty: And then when we talk about tooling for the finance team, be able to integrate into your QuickBooks, your NetSuite, your Xeros, your Sages of the world. So we want to make sure that that's all there because we want to be the place where sales, legal, and finance collaborate together. Those are traditionally three very siloed teams in an organization.
00:12:51 Marty: If you're a small company, you kind of just swivel your chair over to the person in finance or you just DM them on Slack when you're sending contracts back and forth. But for larger groups, they usually live in software that is also siloed. The legal team lives in ironclad. No one in sales has a seat to ironclad. The sales team lives in Gong, and then the legal team has a seat in Gong, and then the finance team has their own tool that legal and sales don't have seats in.
00:13:16 Marty: Agree is unique that it is a little bit of a collaborative environment. Certainly not competing with Slack in that way, but everybody wants eyeballs into this. And I talked about that idea where legal wants to see what was changed, that's obvious. Sales kicks things off. That's obvious with the client. And then finance wants to know when an invoice or purchase order is created against an executed contract. That's obvious.
00:13:36 Marty: But who actually gets left out of this loop and where we get really excited about the collaborativeness of it all is sales who started everything. Because especially, when we're talking about revenue, they can't track where that revenue actually is. A sales leader, they don't actually know when they're gonna get their commission. Because what they don't know is they don't know important things.
00:13:53 Marty: When was the invoice created? When was the invoice sent? And the most important one I want to know, when was the invoice opened? And then when is, let's just say, they're paying via ACH? When was the ACH processed? When did it clear? And then when did it hit the bank account?
00:14:06 Marty: Unless you're a salesperson at a two-person startup, you don't have access to the company's bank records. You don't know when the funds actually hit. You're beholden to waiting on a human to communicate that to you. So we've done is we've taken the audit trail that you have to have for compliance reasons, for digital acceptance, for signatures.
00:14:22 Marty: So I tell you when the contract was created, when it was fully executed and all the steps in between, we extend that. And so we actually show you when that invoice was created, when it was opened, when it was processed. And it's almost like UPS tracking or FedEx tracking that you get for packages, but for your revenue.
00:14:39 Marty: And for anyone that lives in a major metropolitan city, you would have seen these really cool examples, where they do it down to number of stops. They'll tell me, hey, my package is two stops away. Like imagine that granularity of tracking for your revenue, actually knowing how many stops away your revenue is for you.
00:14:55 Marty: Because again, on something like ACH, three to five day delay, where is that money, right? It left the client's account, certainly, didn't hit my account. That is my revenue and I wanna be able to see it and track it. But I wanna do important things with that. I wanna be able to know scheduling when I'm gonna kick off the project with the client, when we're gonna get things started.
00:15:12 Andy: It goes back to your ability to get into cashflow management and factoring, and I think this is really amazing. Your early part of that answer reminds me as a founder in the early days at our MVP, we used to say that it was like that episode on Seinfeld when Kramer was actually mouthing the VRU.
00:15:31 Marty: Yeah.
00:15:32 Andy: He was the VRU. He was answering the phone live. You just create product. You got to iterate around what the customers are saying. It sounds like you're doing that. I think let's switch gears just a bit here. Enough on product. Thank you for that. We could go hours on it, but I think you've been a serial entrepreneur and an investor.
00:15:49 Andy: So I heard a few things that were like pearls of wisdom. And I think for any founders or any other companies that are raising, I'd love to start with, you raised very recently in the last 12 months, right?
00:16:01 Marty: Yeah, yeah. We raised in March, the pre-seed.
00:16:03 Andy: Okay. So let's agree. It's been not an easy time to raise money. So congratulations.
00:16:08 Marty: Thank you.
00:16:09 Andy: Tell us a little about that, but if you could also share any insight on raising in this tough environment, raising at this stage, any nuggets of what you focused on to be successful at that.
00:16:22 Marty: Yeah. More than one, thank you to you and Everywhere for coming into the round. So you certainly helped. And Scott and Jenny were very early to have conviction, which certainly helped us because I think, first, peril of wisdom that's related to fundraising, that's related to the thank you is that, momentum and traction builds momentum and traction when it comes to fundraising.
00:16:39 Marty: So folks, this is frustrating for founders. A lot of folks will ask, well, who's in? And there's a reason for this. It's not like they're looking for other folks' names or brands to say like, oh, that gives you validity or tells you that there's something here. They don't want to be the only one left holding the bag.
00:16:54 Marty: They don't want to say, hey, if you're raising 3 million and I'm in for 150,000, and you only raised the 150,000, you're definitely losing that money, right? So they want to make sure that you have an ability to fill that route and that you're actually going to be able to be as successful as you said.
00:17:06 Marty: So don't get frustrated when you hear folks ask these questions where you're thinking, well, if you were just in, everyone else would be in and everyone keeps saying they're not going to come until the next person comes in. But it is great when you can find folks that have strong conviction for you and what you're building, and then they do make a commitment of some sort. And then you use that as traction to help fill out the rest of your route.
00:17:26 Marty: Jenny and Scott were certainly that for us. And we're always appreciative of that. Then the other one, especially for first-time founders, I always got to share this one because nobody wants to hear it. People say, “Give me fundraising advice.” They're looking for that one magic pill, “Hey, if I just did this one thing, it'll be easy.” And they want that one thing to be easy.
00:17:44 Marty: This is also a lot like weight loss. Nobody wants to hear what it really takes is exercise, changing your habits, eating healthier and say, oh, that sounds exhausting. I don't want to do it. So it's the same thing with fundraising. Lots of practice, lots of pitch practice.
00:17:58 Marty: The one wisdom that I don't disagree with, I just want to reframe it as everyone always says, “You need to hear a hundred no's before you get to a yes.” I don't think that's true. I think you need to pitch a hundred times before you've perfected enough that you start hearing yeses. And we're definitely no stranger to that.
00:18:15 Marty: So I will get in front of anybody and everybody that will let me pitch, not even necessarily because I think that they're a right fit or that we're even fundraising at this moment. It just lets me keep telling my story and then keep watching how the other person responds to these changes in my narrative and say, okay, that's landing and that's not landing.
00:18:33 Marty: For example, on this call, I mentioned a few times, and I'm cognizant that I've mentioned it, this is how important this is, lease agreements as an example, residential commercial lease agreements. And I only use it in this context because it's an example of something where everyone signed and everyone moved money at the end of it. And it's very unlikely that anyone listening hasn't gone through this process.
00:18:54 Marty: We've all signed a lease and then we've all put in a security. So we all know that workflow. But when I say that to an investor, and I never say that to an investor, they immediately think, oh, okay, you're building things for landlords, you're building things for commercial. It's like, no, no, that's just one example. I get pigeon-holed there.
00:19:08 Marty: And so I learned that very early on, had a few pitches with VCs that didn't want to have any more conversation because they thought I was just building a landlord tool, a rent payment facility. And I never say that word again. And so listen for where people doze off. And that's not their fault. Don't think, oh, they're being rude and they don’t literally fall asleep.
00:19:26 Marty: And you can tell when they've lost engagement. That's on you. Change your pitch, modify it, ramp up the excitement. And then notice that one thing you said, that one word you said, where like ears went up. All of a sudden, they've made eye contact. They're focused. They're listening. Okay. Double down on that.
00:19:40 Marty: You have a small window of time. It can be a minute pitch and it can be a 10 minute or 30 minute. Your goal shouldn't be to get a check at the end of that. Your goal should be to buy more time, get them interested, get them excited. Cause you want them to be wanting to be a part of this journey or adventure you're on. I always think about it from that lens.
00:19:58 Marty: And so with ours, you asked about the fundraise. It was tough, but the worst thing about it was everyone kept saying, “This is too obvious. Why doesn't this exist yet? This should exist.” And that's flattering, validating, but also saying, “I don't know if we should invest in this. It seems anybody could do this or should do this.”
00:20:14 Marty: And then when we walk them through some of these more complexities of like, hey, why is e-signature commodity? How could you use it as a wedge product? And then how is this a bigger FinTech play? Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, these jokers aren't talking about e-signature. They're talking about accounts receivable automation. That's super interesting. And I've never heard anyone pitch me AR automation through the guise of e-sig.
00:20:39 Marty: And now I went from something that was so obvious, like maybe I'm out to, oh, wow. And then we had one partner at a really big fund. He's been there since the beginning. He's like, “In my 22 years, I always get the same version of different pitches. This is the first time I've heard a pitch that really felt unique.” And I was like, oh, okay, there we go.
00:20:55 Marty: They didn't end up coming into the pre-seed, but it still felt good to hear. We were too early. They do A rounds. So again, talking to them and practicing was important to me.
00:21:03 Andy: Awesome. Great advice. What about your co-founders? You have co-founders, right?
00:21:07 Marty: Yep. Will and Evan. Will, I've known for seven years. We've been working together. We actually met over poker, a founders game in Silicon Valley. Founders and VCs get together twice a month to play a little poker game. Well, poker is just a great game. I think it teaches you a lot about business too, but good networking of people around poker. So I'd advocate for it. But we've been working together for seven years now.
00:21:30 Marty: He was just starting to sell his first company that he started out at Berkeley and then he asked me for a little bit of advice because I had a few exits in the past and then my immediate angel investor question was, what are you doing next? I want in. And then we’ve just been hacking together ever since. He also started the fund with me, the Adventure Fund on the investment side. And then there's my co-founder in Agree.
00:21:48 Marty: And then Evan's fund, because he's been with me together, working for 15 years now. He was actually at the very first company I started and one that we sold to Twitter. And then once we left there, we started a new FinTech that actually put its hooks into the event tech space. We were doing the processing of payments, but we actually ended up only doing it for one vertical and that was ticket sales to conferences and events.
00:22:14 Marty: And then he was my co-founder there. So went from working for me to co-founder, we sold that to Eventbrite. And then from there, this is relevant to the Agree story. Evan goes off on his own, starts another FinTech. Let me be first check in, small check, but just a small angel round.
00:22:32 Marty: And they were building in the expense management space and they ended up getting acquired by Brex. And then Brex had asked me to join a part of that acquisition to help build out expense management. And so Evan was leading all of the infrastructure side of Brex. But there was a lot that we were doing around OCR for AP, accounts payable, on invoice suggestion. And then this was all in January 2020.
00:22:56 Marty: And then later that summer, we get access to the GPT-3 beta. And that's where there's this crazy unlock of like, whoa, OCR was only like 87% accurate and reliable. That’s you, you're using best of breed at that point, like Google, but Generative AI plus OCR, it gets near 100%.
00:23:12 Marty: And I think the whole world was like, Generative AI plus what? I couldn’t unsee Generative AI plus OCR does what? And then obviously I hyper-focus on contracts and then specifically sales contracts or contracts that have payment details in them.
00:23:27 Andy: How do you and your co-founders divide and conquer? Who's a specialist in what?
00:23:32 Marty: This one's a privilege, but I love surrounding myself with people that wear multiple hats. I don't like the term generalist because they're all very good. They wear like three hats. I don't think I appreciate the person that wears a hundred hats. You wear three hats and you're uniquely talented at those three things. And there are three very specialized things.
00:23:51 Marty: So my own background, I'm a comp sci undergrad. I fell in love with HTML, CSS, JavaScript in the early 2000s. So what you might call front-end today. But I also got my hands on a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop. And I've turned out to be a decent designer. You put design and front-end together in the early 2000s. There just weren't a lot of people that had that unique skill set. Back then, that's what they referred to as a unicorn.
00:24:14 Marty: And then Evan is also a great front-end engineer, amazing back-end engineer. I mean, that's what he does primarily at Agree, but also, a strong eye for design where he wouldn't design our logo or design like a new interface. But when I'm designing an interface, for example, I still design the product today. Just an easy example, like I'll design the button, but I don't have to design the hover state.
00:24:36 Marty: He's got enough of a design eye where in the code, he can just say, “Oh, one, it needs a hover state. What would that look like? Here's what I think it looks like.” And then once it's live in production, I'll obviously hover over it. It's like, oh, that's pretty good. Or it's like, hey, you can use a little tweak. It's just faster to do that in the code than it is to go into Figma or something to that effect.
00:24:53 Marty: And then Will, same way. He started technical. His first startup was a hardware startup. So he brings a unique lens to the company. But we all have our roles. I do lead product. Evan, obviously, infra and engineering. And then Will does COOs, the title. But think about most like founder-led sales, all of our onboarding demos, helping me on the marketing side of it. I just think when you're a small team, everyone does product.
00:25:14 Andy: Yeah, that's amazing. I'm a big proponent of having co-founders. It's just hard to pull this off.
00:25:20 Marty: I don't ever want to do it alone. I pretend to be an extrovert at parties, but I am an introvert. But I don't want to do this alone, but I also have free founder advice for those listening. I like the saying, “When two people always agree, one of them is irrelevant.” So I don't like surrounding myself by, folks that are like me. I am a big proponent of, and I know this is not in vogue right now, but culture fit.
00:25:40 Marty: But I think the culture that I look for is one in which we are different and we have opposing views. And so I don't think culture fit means that you look like me, sound like me, talk like me and do like me. I do think it is an environment that you create and that you look for people who thrive in that same kind of environment.
00:25:57 Marty: And the one that I like is for folks where we can see the same end game, but the path to get there, we have varying views and opinions on. And I like this clash. And it means I have to be with people that are okay with a little bit of clash. They're okay knowing that 90% of the time, or EFS 10% of the time. I'd rather not talk to you today. Let's pick this up again tomorrow.
00:26:20 Marty: Someone might say, well, that sounds like you need a little bit of that friction to build something big, massive, and to do it fast. Everyone's like, the only thing that matters, like that AR, escrow, forget it all. Speed of execution is the only thing that matters. So we got to move fast and we got to build things that haven't been built before and aren't being built by the big players in the space that are worth $15 billion, that have been around for 22 years. That's a lot to take on with a small team.
00:26:46 Andy: What keeps you up at night?
00:26:48 Marty: Just to be honest with the founders listening, it's unfortunate that you live in a world where I want to build this world-class product. I want to solve this great solution for a cohort of customers. And I want them saying, I love this thing. But at the end of the day, if I'm going to build a high-growth company, it's going to be capital intensive. So I need funding.
00:27:06 Marty: So then I'm always going the difference between the metrics to drive the business. And then the metrics I know that will also be important for raising the next round. And you might say, hey, those should be one and the same, but some of them are vanity. Just throw it out there. If you're going to raise a series A in this market, the old logic was hit a million ARR in your goal. I don't think you get a call back at a million ARR.
00:27:25 Marty: Now, if you need somewhere between three and five, if you have two and you're on your way to three, like you might get someone to pick up a call, but it's an odd way to build a business. Okay. I need $3 million ARR. For what reason? Nobody will answer my call if I don't. But also, business that generates 3 million ARR would in theory be a healthy business that's on its way to success. So that's one that keeps me up at night.
00:27:45 Marty: The other is just, we talked about being embarrassed of your first version. I'm constantly embarrassed. I know where all the skeletons are and all the things that are broken. And so it seems like an odd thing for a founder to say, but sometimes people message me and they're like, hey, I just used it for X, Y, Z. And I'm like, how the hell did you use that piece of crap? I promise it's not, but as a founder.
00:28:04 Marty: You're insecure about what you put out there. Cause you just know, I have the 10 year roadmap in my head and I know how great and awesome it's going to be. And I almost don't want anyone to use it right now. Cause like, if you wait next week, it's going to have this, it's going to have that. And I want you to see the best polished version.
00:28:17 Marty: So I have to like swallow my own pride and ego. It's like, no, this version actually is really good. People are using it. There's thousands of people on the platform, sending thousands of contracts. And there's tens of thousands of dollars, being money moved. It's like, wow, we made something. This is incredible.
00:28:31 Marty: But I think maybe the spirit of that is product market fit. It's a constantly moving goal, constantly evolving and changing. And I always want to have it, but I just want people to love what we do. And there's this 80-20 or even power law, 92-8%. But there's some segment of people who will use your product that will not have a great experience.
00:28:48 Marty: And that's true for any product like Netflix has it. Some people just can't use it or won't use it or don't like it. Tesla, as any great products you can think of. Apple computers. And that's hard to hear. I can get 92% of people telling me, oh my God, you've built the most amazing thing. But what keeps me up, it says 8%.
00:29:04 Marty: It's funny, I had a woman who organically signed up to the platform, comment on Twitter. She's a landlord. She owns three units, side hustle. And she used it for her new tenant. Agreed. That's awesome. I have a buddy who sold his company to Compass, the real estate technology company, and he's a founder. He's a product person.
00:29:24 Marty: And he sent me an email with a Loom where he was struggling to upload a file. And it's not that the upload was broken. It's just, I'm shocked that this stranger who organically finds the platform can go full end-to-end, can get a lease sign, have her tenant signed, has a new tenant in her building. And then my buddy who's, 20 year veteran building technology products, super successful founder, can't upload a file.
00:29:47 Marty: And so that keeps me up at night. It's like, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to handhold him through it? Am I supposed to just keep persevering knowing 92% of people are having a good experience?
00:29:55 Andy: Okay. All right. Well, let's wrap this up. I'm going to do a speed round. Give me a book, newsletter, podcast.
00:30:01 Marty: Yeah. So I won't do the cliche Malcolm Gladwell’s even though I'm a big fan. Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets, great book. It's a poker book but it's written as a business book. The one thing I'll say from it that I really love in poker, the best hand you can get is Pocket Aces, Texas Hold'em.
00:30:17 Marty: So if you get Pocket Aces, like almost guaranteed you're gonna win, right? 75% chance you're gonna win. The worst hand you can get is 7-2 off, and you know you're almost guaranteed gonna lose. But what I like about what she says about Pocket Aces, when you get dealt the best hand, it's almost a guaranteed shot you're gonna win.
00:30:34 Marty: 75%, there's 25% of time, you're going to lose with that. It's statistically, you will lose sometimes with the best hand, which means, it's the important part, the inverse. When you feel you're dealt the worst hand, it is not a 0% chance that you lose. There are some times you win with 7-2 off.
00:30:50 Marty: And so I think when I'm down or like, it feels like the world's on top of me, or like everything's going wrong. Hey man, sometimes that losing hand does win because the guaranteed winning hand often loses, just probabilities and statistics.
00:31:03 Andy: If you can live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:31:07 Marty: I love Spain. I love a little town south of Barcelona, Alicante, right on the Mediterranean. That's where I'd go.
00:31:13 Andy: All right, cool. I'm gonna check that out. Favorite productivity hack?
00:31:18 Marty: Walking my dog, clearing my head. I think that's the best thing. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Everyone says touch grass, but I think like, get a dog, go for a walk, clear your head, because I'm working the whole time. I'm thinking, I'm brainstorming ideas, but like fresh air.
00:31:32 Andy: So the next question is how do you unwind when you're stressed?
00:31:35 Marty: There we go. So the dog is good, but also poker, man. But I love movies. I love actually going to the theater. For me, some people have different relationships with movies, but it's more of a zombie mode. My brain just shuts off. I just stare there and for two hours, no one can talk to me. Right?
00:31:50 Marty: There's no cell phone. And then I just get exhausted. So like the worse the movie, the better. Because I could just like, brain sign off.
00:31:57 Andy: Okay, lastly, where can listeners find you?
00:32:00 Marty: Twitter is the best one, @martymadrid. So just find me on Twitter. Love to boost my Twitter following. But honestly, my email is super easy, marty@agree.com, or I got also a great personal one, marty@marty.com.
00:32:14 Andy: All right, that's easy. All right, everybody. You heard it here. Marty, thank you so much. This has been really wonderful. And everybody, thanks for listening. Have an awesome day. Cheers.
00:32:25 Scott Harley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Marty Ringlein in Founders Everywhere.
Read more about Agree’s $3M pre-seed round.