In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Venture Partner Patrick Ennis sits down with Varun Puri and Esha Joshi, co-founders of Yoodli AI Roleplay, an AI-powered communications coach helping people become more confident speakers.
Varun and Esha share their leap from Big Tech into startup life, eating noodles on secondhand couches while chasing a bold mission: making effective communication accessible to everyone.
They dive into:
• The origin story behind Yoodli, (and where the name came from!)
• How AI roleplays bring “exposure therapy” to speaking practice.
• Use cases ranging from sales training to doctors having end-of-life conversations.
• The decision to build in Seattle vs. SF with support from Madrona and AI2.
• Co-founder dynamics, culture-first hiring, and why they turned down a famous Silicon Valley VC.
This is a must-listen for any founder building with AI, thinking about culture-first scaling, or just wanting to speak with more confidence.
Listen on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon | Watch on YouTube.
This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Patrick: Let’s start with a little bit about your your backgrounds? Why did you leave Google? Why did you leave Apple?
Esha: So my background’s in software engineering and product. I was at Apple for a couple of years based out of Los Angeles and London. It was a really fun experience right after college. Awesome to be able to lead some of their newest products at the time like TV+, which is their entertainment subscription business. While I was there and even before when I was in college, I really struggled to speak up. I still struggle with it. It’s not something that goes away, but with a lot of practice and intention, you can feel more comfortable with it.
And I remember at the time there were people of higher authority who struggled to say words, or I saw my friends and peers were really remarkable, but didn’t have… Rather, they were really remarkable; they had amazing ideas, but they didn’t have the confidence or training to use it. And so I thought there’s got to be a better way. What can we do with technology to help people, i.e., myself at the time, improve and be more confident? And what’s possible? I also always wanted to start my own company, so I figured this could be an opportunity to do that.
Varun: My backstory is that I grew up in India, came to the US for college, was at Google, ran special projects for Sergey Brin, who’s one of the founders. It was an incredible role, so much access and exposure, and meeting folks I had read about in the newspapers. I was the only person at Alphabet reporting to Sergey, so it came with expectation and pressure. From there, I worked at Google X, which is Alphabet’s moonshot factory.
My reason for leaving was, one, I said, “I’ve had this incredible opportunity. I want to do something really big with it and take some bets. Now, shame on me if I just continue to play the game when I’ve had some exposure to try and do something more with it.” And second, I’m very, very passionate about this problem. As Esha mentioned, her why is to help women speak with confidence. Mine is that I think there are so many smart people in the world, especially kids in India, who deserve to be on this stage more than either of us, who deserve that job more than the extrovert who might get it, for example. And they miss out because they don’t back themselves while speaking. So it’s how do we build technology that can help billions of people do to speaking what Grammarly did to writing or Duolingo to language learning, and impact lives when it comes to both professional and personal outcomes.
Patrick: It’s interesting. You’ve always emphasized to me that over 280,000 years of homo sapiens history, humans have always struggled to communicate. And they’ve come up with various ways to coach and get better, but it’s always been done the same way until recently. Is AI really the reason why now?
Varun: I actually don’t see Yoodli as an AI play, per se. For us, it’s how do we solve the problem? The problem is that people doubt themselves before important conversations, interviews, sales pitches, salary negotiations, podcasts, etc. It’s more of an exposure therapy question. How do we normalize the process of recording yourself, watching yourself, and cringing? You do that three times, you’re going to get better. I think AI is one tool that enables more of that exposure therapy, but if it weren’t AI, I’m sure there would be another way to enable this gamified exposure.
Esha: To add to that, if you think about what options are today to better yourselves speaking-wise, that ultimately culminate in the act of exposure therapy. You’ve got coaches of any kind, speech coaches, interview coaches, career coaches, sales coaches. You have Toastmasters and various clubs and opportunities to help with that. All of these are really great options, but they are inconvenient for a number of reasons. Number one is cost, two is physical location, and three is just getting up in front of people and speaking. These three ways pose challenges for folks who don’t have access to resources, don’t have access to transportation even. And so the thinking is for those folks who need a safe space at least to get started to practice, nothing revolutionary with the idea of practice. You think about any sport, any new skill, you have to practice and you have to get yourself over that initial hump. And I think with communications and communications coaching, it’s no different. Practice in the case of speaking, see yourself, hear yourself, cringe, and then if you can get over that initial hump, you’ll get to a place of normalizing this activity.
Patrick: And you have a very varied customer base. My 93-year-old mom loves Yoodli because she goes to the Elks Club events, and occasionally she has to stand up and give a short speech. And that really hit home. And I realized your market size is literally the 8.2 billion people on this planet.
Esha: When you say it like that, it’s a big number. And it is, honestly, it is fascinating to think that, but it’s true. We’ve got individual customers who are using Yoodli for a big presentation tomorrow and an interview. And then we have companies using Yoodli, too. This could be for sales training. It could be for conference prep for big events coming up. It could also be for helping your partners at a company who are selling your products get up to speed. So there are varying use cases. The tool supports all of the three, and we have different ways of adding value across the board to make sure that everybody has a good personal experience. But then also companies and coaches are able to use the tool to understand how their clients are doing and how they’re progressing over time.
Varun: And just as an example, the kinds of use cases that have been really fascinating are there’s an obvious focus on GTM enablement. You need to train your sales, your customer success, your user-facing teams on how to pitch with confidence using your company methodology. Or we have healthcare organizations, hospitals, that are using Yoodli to train doctors on difficult end-of-life conversations. That is so impactful. There’s one thing to train a sales team, an incredible use case. There’s another to teach a doctor how to have challenging life and death conversations with patients. And we’ve learned from our user base that people have made Yoodli their own. Just last week, I was speaking to someone in India who had a stroke at a really young age and has had a very deep stutter since. And he says Yoodli is his private practice environment. We’ve heard of applications and people using Yoodli for dating. We know of investors who are using Yoodli to practice before the LP pitch. It’s super fun and interesting.
Patrick: That brings up a great point. When you’re doing startups, everyone tells you it’s all about focus. That’s actually not true all the time because if you focus too much, you don’t capture the broader opportunity when you have a very powerful capability like what you have. So how have you thought about that, just nailing one particular wedge versus going after the North Star of 8.2 billion people?
Varun: The way I think about it is, we are building a category called AI role-plays. Our laser focus on the enterprise is GTM enablement. That’s what we know we do really well. We quantify the impact and the outcome, but then we have a consumer tool where consumers are making Yoodli their own, and we have folks approaching us for a whole host of use cases. So I think it’s possible to build a horizontal platform the way we’ve built it, fingers crossed, while having specific verticals that you focus on from a GTM standpoint.
Patrick: So soon, I want to get into team building, and how you built the company, and why you chose Seattle. But first, let’s ask the question that everyone is no doubt wondering. Where does the name Yoodli come from? It’s such an awesome name. What’s the etymological root of Yoodli?
Esha: Well, okay, we have a couple of different stories. I’ll give one of them, and then Varun, you can give some other ones. When we started, we were an AI-powered public speaking coach. It stems from our love of public speaking, but also this really visceral feeling and pain of, oh my gosh, it’s scary to get in front of people. And so when we came up with a name, we’re like, well, what is similar to audio and voice and sound? Yoodelay-hee-hoo. The Sound of Music. I think a lot of us grew up knowing what that is. And so Yoodli is like that. That’s reason one.
Varun: Reason two and three that we publicly talk about are, well, it has two O’s and an L. It sounds Silicon Valley-ish, it has Hulu, Google, etc. The SEO and trademark was relatively easy. The truth is, all of that’s a lie. We say that publicly because it makes a good story.
Patrick: By the way, this is public, just so you know.
Varun: I know, but it’s a podcast. I’ve not said it enough times. Most people enjoy the story. It was my freshman year of college. I had just come to the US. I was looking for my roommate, Tyler. I was a couple of Fireball shots in, and I couldn’t find Tyler. There was another Fireball shot, and I was like, “Tyler, where are you? Yoodoohoo. Yodoohoo. Yodoohoo. Yoodli.” And Yoodli just became this chant within our friend group. So when we would go to a party or we’d be looking for each other, we’d just say, “Yoodli.” I mean, in our friend group for fun, we keep saying, “Yoodli.” When we came up with the idea for our company, our thought was that it would be so cool if grown adults said Yoodli with a straight face. And some of our favorite moments at Yoodli, even today, we’ve been getting some press, et cetera, and investors write about Yoodli, is when a college buddy I haven’t heard from in a couple of years will message me saying, “I cannot believe my organization is saying go use Yoodli. Like, I cannot take that seriously.”
However, the way to validate this is when we came up with the idea, we wanted it to be true to our personality. So our best friend, Andrew, we’re all part of the same friend group, came up with our first little jingle. So if you look at any of the Yoodli videos, it has whatever the formal stuff is and then, at the end, it has a Yoodli logo and 30 seconds later you’ll hear Andrew saying, “Yoodli.”
Patrick: That’s wonderful. So let’s pivot now to the company building.
Esha: Can I actually add one thing quickly?
Patrick: Of course.
Esha: So there’s some part of the population that knows what Yoodli is and can pronounce it. There’s a larger part of the population that does not know how to pronounce Yoodli so much so that every time we get on calls, we know, okay, the first couple of minutes we’ll be like, “Is it Yhudley? Is it Yoadly?” And we have to be like, “It’s Yoodli.” With a smile on our face. That led us to create a roleplay on the Yoodli platform to educate others on how to say Yoodli.
Patrick: Because you wouldn’t change the name.
Varun: It’s too personal, Patrick. No matter what marketing expert tells us to change it, we just can’t. Our friends will, at this point, disown us.
Esha: And people come to us and they’re like, “You’re a B2B SaaS platform. Don’t you think you should have a little bit more of a sophisticated name?” And I was like, “Well, Hooli in Silicon Valley is far from sophisticated. Google is a made-up word. So what’s the big deal?” And so here we are.
Patrick: I think that’s great. We always talk about staying true to your North Star. You have a vision, and the name is part of that vision. So let’s get to that. At the very beginning when you’re starting the company, it’s all about relationships and who you’re going to involve in a company. Then it’s about where do we build the company. So let’s start with the team. So, where did you two meet, and where did you two first start working together?
Esha: We met about 10 years ago at a college internship at Intuit in Mountain View. And it was a college internship, so we’re coming to this first experience in tech with these bright eyes and bushy tails. And being in college at an internship, we had a lot of fun.
Varun: We were sophomores, so we weren’t as worried about getting the job offer. Everyone else was more trying to convert, Esha and I. I think we got the internship at the last minute, so we were just there having a great time. We became very good friends. The Intuit crew is actually some of our closest friends, and we’ve been friends since. Our entire friend group was digital nomading during COVID, and around one of these COVID, socially distant dinners, we came up with the idea of Yoodli. We tried to convince some of our other friends as well to join, but it was just Esha and me who jumped in.
Patrick: And when that conversation happened, you were at Google and you were at Apple, or were you leaving?
Esha: We were employed.
Patrick: Okay. So it’s a big step. You go from working at famous companies, probably making decent money, good benefits, to a startup where initially you’re making nothing and you’re eating cans of beans in the basement That type of thing. Is that what you did initially?
Esha: Similar to it. It was probably cans of Maggi noodles that our parents had given us, sitting on couches that were bought secondhand, figuring out what we’re going to do and working through the nights, working, iterating on random things. But yes, that’s true. A lot of that was coming to Seattle, having a very intentional decision of leaving where we were before. It was the pandemic, but prior to the pandemic, I was splitting time between London and Los Angeles. Varun was in South Africa or was in sub-Saharan Africa. And so for us, it was a big move to come to Seattle and to start this company. And we were really attracted to the opportunity here of there being a number of great investors, but also the AI Incubator, where we figured, okay, we’ve never done this before. We’re first-time founders. We’ve been told that there’s this AI thing that we could use to help with this. We just want to-
Patrick: This is the Allen AI Institute? Which Madrona has been a big part of through the years.
Esha: That’s right. But when I say AI thing, I don’t actually mean AI2, I mean there is some concept of AI, and we were learning about it, and we were saying, “Our goal is to help people become more confident communicators. How we do that is we’re going to figure that out.” And Seattle was a really interesting place with resources like the Allen AI Institute incubator, Madrona being a VC, and there being a tight-knit community space to work on this.
Patrick: Silicon Valley had all of that to an extent. So take me through your thinking. Was there something specific about, well, we love the sunny three months in the summer, and we love the nine months of rain and darkness. I mean, what else factored into your decision?
Varun: A couple of things. One, both of us had been in the Bay Area, and we wanted a change, and we knew we wanted to be close enough to the Bay Area. The second big decision factor for us was that we spoke to Oren Etzioni. Oren’s a close mentor and friend. When we’d just came up with the idea, he was very blunt with us. He was like, “Look, y’all are first-time founders. You don’t know too much about too much.” And if you all know Oren, that’s exactly what he’d say with all of the love and warmth. “Why don’t you come here and we’ll help build a company around you?” This is pre-GPT. “We’ll give you the resources to experiment with AI, we’ll give you the place to continue to test with new hires, et cetera, as opposed to a typical incubator, which is in and out in three months.” And given the stage in life we were at, we’re like, “YOLO. Why not?” So I think from having the idea to leaving the respective companies was a very, very short time period.
Patrick: So, fast-forward to after Madrona was involved, we were already investors, things were going well for Yoodli, and there was very famous Silicon Valley investor who wanted to invest, give you money, take a board seat, and you turned it down because it didn’t seem like it was the best fit. That must’ve been a tough decision. Take me inside what you were thinking about the pros and cons at that moment.
Varun: I can take this. I mean, we’ve had a few of those, which is exciting. Where we’ve had names we’ve heard about in the media all of our lives offer interest in Yoodli. Think for Esha and me, our why is we want to help billions of people speak with confidence. We are starting with GTM enablement. We are seeing great traction there, but we want to build a company that’s very true to who we are. We have this B2B thing and this B2C thing. We’re doing B2B, but we keep saying, “Yoodli.” We own our mistakes. We come to Madrona being like, “Hi, you all took a bet on us and here are 50 things we don’t know.” And sometimes have asked really silly questions.
In the company and the culture we want to build, we want to experience more of that. And at various crossroads in Yoodli’s history, be it with a dream candidate, a potential customer, an investor, whenever we’ve been at a crossroads on do we take this check or not, is this the right person to give the offer to, even if they would transform our trajectory? We’ve basically looked each other in the eye and been like yes or no and then we take a snap decision. So far it seems to have been okay. I think both of us are very intuitive, gut-driven founders.
Patrick: And so many famous companies throughout history have had two founders, whether it was Steve Jobs and Wozniak or Bill Gates and Paul Allen. I’m not putting pressure on you two. There are advantages, but sometimes there are disadvantages to having two founders. So, can you tell us some stories about times when it really helped to have an equal co-founder and times when there was some friction because of that?
Varun: I can give a couple. It’s Esh and I are very, very close friends, which means there have been so many times where I’ve just made mistakes. At team meetings, I’ve said something ridiculous, at a board meeting, or fundraising, I’ve said something that may not be fully true to us. We will go for a walk, and Esha will absolutely call me out. In the team setting, we’ll have a good conversation, we’ll go on a walk. And she’s like, “What is wrong with you?” It’s at the point where, when it’s my birthday, my mom and dad will message Esha saying, “Ensure Varun takes the day off.” It’s so personal. I don’t see how I can do Yoodli without Esha. It’s just so much more fun this way. We have our friends who are equally invested in the success of Yoodli. Our fights, we rip each other’s head out with respect, et cetera, as siblings would, but we know we will have each other’s back tomorrow, no matter what. At least that’s how I feel.
Esha: I feel the same. What’s interesting is, as a founder, you have to make a lot of decisions, which is a vague thing to say, but decisions about who to take money from, who to hire, leaders to bring on, strategic direction, but also, being first-time founders, there’s so much that we didn’t know and still don’t know. So we come across these decision points and we’re like, “Well, what do we do?” And we started a company before ChatGPT existed, so now we can be like, “What do we do? Let’s both search on ChatGPT.” But before there wasn’t that, so you’d Google to search for, but you also are like, I want to talk through this with someone. I’m going to talk to somebody who also doesn’t know what they’re doing, but at least we both don’t know what we’re doing together.
So there’s this idea of having somebody who cares about something as much as you do with you, which is a little bit hard to do sometimes with an investor, just keeping it real, or with a candidate or an employee. And so that’s been one of the biggest highlights is having somebody so you feel less alone in the founding process.
Patrick: So you’re first-time founders and you’ve been doing a great job from the beginning, but where was that moment where you felt like, you know what, we may be first-time founders but we got this, we understand what we’re doing and we’re not going to be as nervous as perhaps we were at the beginning?
Varun: I think it’s gone through ebbs and flows. There are times I’m like, “Oh my God, Esh, we figured this out. This Yoodli thing is taking over.” Then just the next day I’m like, “Oh my god, we know so little.” There are many moments mostly around convincing people we really respect and admire to take a bet on us. I would say landing Google as our first customer or in the early days getting Google on board was such a voucher of approval when we were just starting the company. Patrick, having Madrona join us, was, “This is awesome, Esha. We likely know what we are doing. People like Patrick and Matt are willing to take a bet on us.”
The biggest one for me is getting the right hires, especially leader hires. Our approach to company building is we don’t have all the answers, but we will try our best and be really honest and vulnerable. And in doing so, we’ve brought on Derek who’s our CTO, who has built and led teams before and understands the engineering scaling side of things. We just brought on Josh to run our revenue function. Josh ran a lot of sales in CS at Tableau. He was a VP at Salesforce. I mean Josh is an industry expert and we often joke that convincing someone like Josh to join us is one of our biggest professional accomplishments because we will learn so much from him.
Esha: And have been learning so much. And also another piece of the founder experience that can be really humbling is to bring on folks that are wholeheartedly better than you in some function and then say, “Okay, we’re going to make space for you to come because I think you can crush it and you can handle this part of the business in a way that we can’t.” And so time and time again, almost for every single function or in some cases many big decisions, we’ve brought on folks to help with that. And then we’ve moved to another part of the business, still overseeing and being really involved. But there is a really interesting internal dynamic that you have to reconcile with and be like, this is what’s right for the company, therefore it makes sens,e and I’ll go focus on something else.
Patrick: That’s great. And how do you balance when you’re early building the team, you tend to reach out to people you know to hire them, but as you grow, you’ve got to do more of a broader search, often a nationwide search. And it’s not quite as personal, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but you’re someone who perhaps they weren’t there for the first four years, they don’t know the origin of Yoodli, although you make them watch that video over and over again, I’m sure. But how do you adapt your recruiting and hiring strategy as you grow and as you get bigger?
Varun: We are still figuring it out. So we were 10 at the start of this year. We are now 30, we are growing to 50 at the end of this year. We have frameworks in place to scale ourselves, whether it be through investor networks, recruiting agencies, folks on the team who are specialists in hiring specific roles. That being said, Esha and I see our roles as being culture custodians or at least ensuring people who come in will expand our culture. We are very closely involved in every hiring decision. In most cases, we’ll do the initial 15-minute vibes check, and we’ll get on a call with a candidate and say, “Look, we want to tell you everything that’s awesome and everything that’s not about Yoodli and see if you’re still excited.” And then based on that, they go through the rest of the flow.
Esha: There was a period of time when we were pre-product-market fit, and we were figuring things out. And the reason I bring that up is because it gave both of us time to actually clarify and articulate what the values of this company are and whether they are different from personal values. And I think the answer is not really. It took us the first year and a half to be like, “Well, this is our inclination for who we want to bring on.” And now after having some data of who stayed at the company, who’s left either for performance reasons or culture reasons, we can clearly articulate that.
And so to bring that full circle now as we’re hiring people relatively quickly and we’re doing vibes checks and also skill checks, we have that written out into a values doc, which seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do, but the act of getting to that doc and that list of core values that we can then now use and repeat and show a candidate actually brings that more front and center in the conversation much sooner than it being an ambiguous topic that is hard to clarify.
Patrick: Have you found the Seattle market and the Pacific Northwest market deep enough that you’ve been able to hire locally or have you started recruiting people from out of region?
Varun: Absolutely. I mean the talent pool here is incredible. In fact, we do have some remote folks, but our entire focus is on building an in-office culture, and we fly remote folks in. We have been more than overwhelmed with the quality of candidates from the hungry new grad from UW who’s knocking on our door to someone who’s done Amazon, Microsoft from an engineering infra standpoint to incredible startups. I mean, we are right next to places where Lexion and Read AI and WhyLabs were. That is so much knowledge sharing.
Patrick: Yeah, that’s great. I think the Pacific Northwest ecosystem has really developed certainly over the long time that I’ve been here. When I first moved here in 1998, seems like forever, but when we were recruiting people from out of region, a real issue was the trailing partner or the trailing friend issue. It’s like, well, can you find a job for my friend? Can you find a job for my partner? And Seattle wasn’t quite as deep back then, so it was harder. But now when you need to move people out of region, you can. But the reality is you don’t need to because such a depth here.
Varun: I mean also for those of you all who haven’t visited the AI House, that’s where we are headquartered. The place is bumping. There’s events happening every day. There are maybe 15 startups in the area. It’s just so much fun. And I feel like one way in which Seattle is very different from the Bay Area is everyone cares. I don’t know if other folks have seen this as well. Seattle just has this incredible community where if on LinkedIn I message anyone being like, “Oh, you went to UW? We are working with UW.” Or “Hey, I’m in Seattle too, would you be down to chat?” Seattle gets a bad rap on the Seattle freeze when it comes to making friends. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but on the professional side, I’ve seen the exact opposite.
Esha: It’s lovely walking through a building like this one and on different floors, people who are part of the broader tech ecosystem and even just walking here running into somebody who is also working on their own company. And that connection is there because of events that investors, VC firms put on that people in the broader community do. And that’s really lovely.
Patrick: So, back to recruiting. When you’re recruiting, let me ask you to rank order four attributes, and I think I know what your answer will be, but integrity, work ethic, relevant experience, and raw intelligence.
Varun: Integrity, work ethic, raw intelligence, and then
Patrick: And relevant experience.
Varun:… and then skills.
Esha: It also depends on the hire. If it’s a leader hire, relevant experience is higher up, but I think it’s always going to be integrity. What was the second one?
Patrick: Hard work or work ethic.
Varun: I just, and maybe this is naive, but one and two, I mean one is table stakes. There’s no question.
Patrick: Yeah, you can’t teach integrity, and it’s really hard to teach work ethic also.
Esha: If those things are not there, then you get into conflict or you get into really hard decision making, and what seems fundamental falls and drops, and you’re like, whoa. There’s a broader, bigger issue here around how we see the world and how we make decisions in hard times. That is a problem. Without figuring that out, it’s difficult to actually solve the main reason why we came together anyway.
Varun: Yeah, I mean, one of our values, and we ask candidates this point blank, is to disagree and commit. Give us examples of when you disagreed and committed. And if we get some, “Well, I was perfect and then I realize I’m slightly not perfect.” We’re like, “Okay, give us three more examples.” So we can really get to the root. One of the things we look for first is people to be like, “Here’s an example where I really messed up and own it, and my God, I botched it so hard, and I felt terrible, and I will never do this again.” I think those are the kinds of stories that resonate with us the most. When I’m talking to candidates, I often say, “Look, we hire for humility, authenticity, vulnerability, and then the rest.” And I think we do the same thing in our interviews.
Patrick: So let’s finish up with some fun lightning round questions. We often learn the most from our struggles and when things aren’t going well. So what do your customers not like about the product and what are you working on to remedy that?
Varun: We often get the question of — is Yoodli doing everything for everyone? That’s not a product question; that’s a marketing question because we are trying to build a category. When they use a product, they love us, but often from the outside, and competitors will position against us in this way, where, “Well, Yoodli, they’re for manager training, they’re for interview prep.” And we’re like, “Huh, go use the product. It’s actually GTM enablement and more.”
Esha: Some of our customers ask for their learners’ practice sessions to be automatically shared with them for visibility, but also accountability of practice and then being able to see the scores change over time. And our answer is, “Nope, no can do. We’re not going to automatically share people’s recordings with managers.” We started off as a judgment-free personal private coach, and so that’s what it’ll be. Of course, we’ve got sharing functionality, and we make it really easy for learners to do that, but we will never automatically share recordings. Maybe a conversation intelligence tool, we’ll automatically do.
Varun: Oh, one more good one. We’ve had many customers ask us, “Why don’t you use AI for evaluation? You use AI for interview prep. Why can’t we just use AI to pick which candidate to hire?” We’ve lost so much money saying no to deals like these. We’re like, “No, we think AI is good. It’s not perfect. A human should be the decision maker. Have a human in the loop, not AI making final calls.”
Patrick: So what’s one thing that you wish you started doing earlier as founder, CEO?
Esha: I think probably posting content and establishing ourselves as the company is thought leaders in a space. Because what we’ve seen some really good founders do, second time, third time founders, is even before they have a product, before they have customers, they’re just writing about establishing themselves as a thought leader, but establishing the brand as a brand to know. So then by the time the product is released or you’ve brought on customers, you seem bigger than what you are, just given the knowledge you have. And that’s a tactic I’ve seen done really well, especially among B2B companies. That’s one small, albeit significant thing I’d do differently.
Varun: One for me is, and I think it’s taken us time to get to the confidence to be able to do this, go to customers with a very clear point of view of what we believe right or good looks like. A good example is we are like, “Look, the future of is experiential. Nobody’s going to, or very few people are going to learn from books or passive videos. It’s all going to be these roleplays.” Now that’s a provocative thing to say. We aren’t a hundred percent sure if that’ll be right or not, but we are starting to take bold bets, put our chips on something, and be like, “This is what we believe to be true.” And we are making proclamations around that until we are otherwise disproven. And all with humility, of course, and being willing to have strong opinions loosely held. I think when we first started Yoodli, we had a great idea with a lot of opinions. Now it’s everything we are doing is in direction of those few key opinions.
Patrick: So let’s finish up with another personal question and topic. You and I had an interesting conversation a couple of days ago about what it means to be a founder and who’s a serial founder and who isn’t. And many founders are like, “Oh, I’m a serial founder. That’s all I’ll do for the rest of my life.” And it was interesting the way you approached it. You’re like, “Hmm. I don’t think of myself that way. I think of myself as the founder of Yoodli.” And I thought it was a great answer because it’s from the heart. But please elaborate on that, and I know you both may have a few words on that to finish up.
Varun: Yeah, so each context on this is Patrick and I were just chatting, and he’s like, “Varun, what happens? You love Yoodli, you want to do it. What happens after?” An honest answer, I think I’m a really good founder of Yoodli, and I want to do Yoodli for a really long time. My running joke is that we are going to take Yoodli to the moon or down to zero. I think different founders are incentivized by different things. I hope we make a lot of money, whatnot, but it’s more about how we build something that so many people find value in. I love being the guy at the airport wearing my Yoodli jacket, and someone comes up and is like, “Oh my God, Yoodli. I used Yoodli to land this job.” Or my mom’s at a dinner party in India and someone goes up and says, “Your son works at Yoodli?” It’s just such an incredible feeling.
The long and short of it is, I want to do Yoodli for as long as I can, and I have too much fun with it. I don’t think I have it in me to do multiple startups. I don’t know how I’ll get this attached to anything else. I don’t know if I’ll be good enough at any other idea. And boy, if and when Yoodli does end, I’m on a sabbatical. I am peacing out for a long time.
Esha: Honestly, no additional notes. Yeah, I feel the same. It’s funny because people are like, “Oh, I’m kind of tired of this idea. I’ll move on to the next one.” I’m like, “First of all, don’t you want to take a break? Are you tired?” But second, going back to what he said about, Varun said, “I think I’m a really good Yoodli founder.” I feel very passionate about what we’re trying to solve. And so much so that three years, two years before starting Yoodli, when I was thinking about what should I start a company in? I was always thinking something with confidence and communication because I cared about it. And so in a lot of ways this is that, and I, from years before Yoodli, I felt that way. Even throughout Yoodli, I still feel passionate about it, and I want to work on it for as long as we can. And the next idea, it’s too difficult to think that far in advance, but I’m also like, yeah, I would like to relax for a second in between and really process everything that we’ve learned.
Varun: And we want to take this all the way. Too many people struggle with this problem. We could spend all of our lives together and still not solve it. Let’s make a real crack at really advancing the world with this problem.
Esha: With 9 billion people and a lot of folks as individuals, maybe not working, it is a long journey to world domination. Phase one could be this B2B SaaS approach, and that’ll have to be multiple stages, of course, I’m sure. But to circle back and help those people who don’t have access to resources, that is a long journey. So here we are.
Varun: Yeah. And we’re in a stage V0 dot crap. It’s not like we’ve cracked anything yet.
Patrick: Well, that’s a great way to end it. Really appreciate your time. Know how busy you are. I know everyone enjoyed listening to your type of stories and a lot of great advice, and congratulations on the success you’ve had so far with Yoodli.
Varun: Patrick, thank you for having us, and if this isn’t evident, thank you to all of Madrona. I mean, our running joke is Madrona, the third co-founder. Anytime we have any questions. This morning for instance, we opened a new job rack. I kid you not, I emailed 25 people from Madrona on the same thread, being like, “Hi, can you help us hire?” I don’t know if this is typical of VC firms, but just the number of, the frequency, and the sometimes triviality of questions with which I reach out to you all, it’s just incredible. We feel very grateful.
Patrick: Well, it’s my third VC firm, and I will say no, this is not typical of VC firms. We work really hard at Madrona at that because we want to earn the trust and respect of the entrepreneurs who are at the center of everything. And I wish we had time to name all 25 people because there are 25, but certainly Matt McIlwain and Rolanda Fu, we’re there 24 hours a day for you with the rest of the team. Well, to finish it up today, thank you both so much for joining me.
Varun/Esha: Thank you for having us, Patrick.