Raising $30M from a Dorm Room With Indico CTO & Co-Founder Slater Victoroff

Rui: If you’re looking for stories, strategies, and actionable advice on how entrepreneurial careers start, you’re in the right place. I’m your host, Rui, and this is the Startup Journey Podcast. The show where every week, I sit down with different entrepreneurs, experts, and thought leaders to dig deep into what it takes to get a startup off the ground.

Today, I’m joined by Slater Viktorov, the founder and CTO behind IndyCodeData. Founded in 2017, IndyCodeData uses AI To transform unstructured data into actionable insights. It’s quickly becoming a very interesting player in the industry, achieving over 30 million in funding to date. Slater, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today.

I’m excited to hear all about your journey with Indico. To start, could you, in your own words, give us a quick overview about yourself and Indico?

Slater: Absolutely. You know, thanks so much for having me. You know, one of the things that I love about Indico in some ways, it was certainly, uh, you know, kind of scary going through it, is that Indico is a true dorm room startup.

So the way that I always like to say it is that Indico was founded from the hours of 5 p. m. to 5 a. m. on Sunday nights. Specifically eating pineapple and onion pizza from Domino’s. So, you know, judge of that what you will. But yeah, so, you know, we were at this, uh Olin College dorm room. And really, it was the love of machine learning that brought us into the space, right?

That was the most important thing is that I was doing Kaggle competitions with a friend, we were doing pretty good. But really, what sort of puts us over the edge is that we looked at all the time and we asked ourselves, what is it that we’re doing when we’re not doing anything else, right? It’s like when we actually have the spare time and you don’t have very much, uh, you know, spare time, you know, in school, we were going through a pretty, pretty challenging school and it was ML for both of us.

And after working on it for a year, you know, eventually it sort of grew to the point where we couldn’t really do both that and school at the same time. And then we raised the, 3 million and figured that we probably weren’t going back to school.

Rui: That’s, that’s quite interesting. This goes to the Silicon Valley lure, right?

Because we work with entrepreneurs, uh, all the time. I personally work with entrepreneurs all the time. And usually what we see is that the people in the best position to succeed are often older people with a few years of experience in a given industry. They detect an inefficiency, they set out to solve the problem.

They have the network, they have the And the pockets also to, to bootstrap at the, at the start, but then I’m always amazed by these examples of actually a company that comes out of nowhere, a couple of kids in a dorm room, and they end up building a very successful business, raising 30 million. So congratulations on that.

That’s the first point. And now I would be very interested in expanding a bit more. on how you validated this idea, how you built this first version of the business. Because you, you mentioned that it took you roughly a year to get enough traction, right? To, to know that you had the business. What happened in between the moment where you guys noticed that Okay, this is what we want to do.

And the moment where you actually were in a position not to go back to school.

Slater: Absolutely. So I think there’s, there’s two main pieces and I’ll maybe start with your, your first reflection, right? Of like, you know, yeah, usually you would be in a better position to start a company after you’ve been on the other side.

And then, you know, frankly, it would have been a lot easier. It was absolutely not the plan. That’s something, you know, I would tell everyone that would listen as we were kind of working on Indico or, you know, as we were just working on ML together, it wasn’t even Indico to start, right? That I’m not dropping out of school, right?

I’m absolutely not dropping out of school. And then, you know, they all told me that I wouldn’t eventually, they were right. But I think that, you know, One of the things that, you know, was an important mentality for us, right? And I, I, contrary to popular belief, I don’t think that people should drop out of school to found companies.

I think for pretty much everyone, it’s a terrible idea. Even though, you know, I might be an exception to that. And I think that the, the other thing is that I actually believe very much in the value of school, right? In fact, I would almost frame, you know, why did I not go back for the, for the last year of school?

It’s almost because I got so much value out of the first three years that I didn’t need the last one. Right. So I would like twist those framings a little bit, maybe from just the traditional view that people have of dropout entrepreneurs. But the process for us, I would say was even slower because it was, it was a year from the time we founded Indico.

Right. But even the founding of that company represented a pretty significant step for us. So it was a year of doing Kaggle competitions. Right. And then in that summer, uh, I remember there was a bet. Because people were reaching out, they wanted to do some contracting work and, you know, we, we knew, we had some idea that we were good, we didn’t realize how good.

So we said, okay, well, we’ll give it a shot. And if we can make 1, 000 in the next two weeks, then we’re doing it, then we’re making a company, right? We did it, we, you know, we doubled that goal. And we’re like, Oh, my goodness, like, now we actually have to make a company. And then that, you know, then that led into, you know, October of our junior year was finally when we got all the incorporation done and set.

But even that, you know, was a pretty big step. You know, at the time, you know, I think any, any undergrad that is interested in entrepreneurship has played around on a couple of, you know, startups, you know, side projects, plus plus. So I had done that. So, you know, at first I was even like, you know, this is just the most legitimate side project I’ve ever done.

You know, like I don’t have a lot of, you know, faith that this is going to really work out, but you know, we’ll give it a real shot. And the way that we approach it that actually I did really like is it was very developer centric. Maybe this wasn’t the best strategy long term, but the idea was that we wanted to build something that we could just immediately put out And so we built all of these ML APIs and we just asked the question, you know, what would we use?

We just started building that. We started putting it out into people’s hands. And the thing that’s actually interesting here, right. And, and this is, it’s maybe we’re talking about Indico V1 and V2 here a bit because. The first approach didn’t actually work like that market thesis, you know, we went through and we validated that developers were really interested in our product and that we could build an API that made machine learning a lot more accessible than any of the other APIs on the market.

And we later learned that there was no business model there is that, you know, customers can love everything. But if, uh, Yeah. Really, the problem was the technology was too new, and it meant that the buying power was not yet in the hands of developers, right? It was in the hands of other people in that stack.

And that led to sort of Indico that was not sort of this developer focused idea. It was much more traditional enterprise focused. And there, you know, it’s, it’s kind of the classic idea, right? Do things that don’t scale, right? Just, you know, Cold outreach, you know, it’s me personally going to these meetings and just being like, look, you know, we’ll do what it takes to make it work.

And there’s a really sort of tried and true approach to enterprise software. I think in particular enterprise sales, right? Do you start by selling the end result? So you say, okay, look, we’re gonna help you, you know, build these awesome models. They’re going to be so useful for what you’re trying to do.

And then you build the internal tools, right, to help you do that thing much more effectively. So we actually, we were really well positioned, right? Because we had spent these four years building these amazing developer tools. We’re like, great. So now we’re going to be the ones that actually use those developer tools, see if we can turn that into a real product.

And that, and that really was then the arc of V2, right? As we went through, we used it for a couple of customers that we got in just like a very grassroots, like pound the pavement kind of way, right? And then just smothered them with time and love, you know, meeting with them as often as we could, getting as much feedback as we could, focusing on delivering value and then after, you know, call it a year of, of that, of operating in that mode, we finally had everything in place and we’re like, okay, like we, we can productize this.

We understand how this turns into a product that. our customers. And that was really, uh, when we

Rui: started to grow, you know, very quickly. Makes sense. And I have a couple of, not a couple, actually a bunch of followups already. So you were saying that you were not an overnight success or overnight success. I don’t believe in overnight success.

What a big surprise, right? Because everyone, no, I’m kidding, obviously, but this is something that Here at Altar, we help entrepreneurs build their products, but we also try to act as much as an extended team of co founders as we can. And one of the things we see is that so often people fall in love with the idea to a point where if it fails or if they have to pivot, the mental strength is simply not there and they end up giving up.

So it’s much more about falling in love with What’s behind it, right? Either the problem that you’re trying to solve or, uh, the passion that you have. So a lot of people look at this and, and think, okay, these kids in the dorm room raised 30 million. It’s that easy. It’s luck, it’s, it’s whatever. Oh gosh.

Often not, right? Well,

Slater: I wish it was easy. It, I, I think making a company I think is arguably the hardest thing that a person can do. Yeah. I I, I, I really wish it was No, it is. I mean, you, you used the term overnight success. And I just love this ’cause I think that. People don’t know how long the overnight success takes.

UiPath is a great example of this, because I love it. Everyone started talking about UiPath like an overnight success, and it’s like, No. They were around for seven years, or you know, something like that, before they broke a million in revenue. And granted, from that point, they grew very, very quickly. But, you know, they missed the seven years of like, toil and heartache and we don’t know if we’re gonna make it and maybe we have to sell the company, right?

And that, I mean, that is what it is. For most folks, you know, that’s a hundred percent of their experience. They never make it, uh, to the other side in any way. But, you know, I think in practice, you just gotta take, uh, to do. The wins where you can. Um, and it’s just all about execution.

Rui: Really. You mentioned something I really liked, which was going fast to the market.

Right. And we do follow the lean methodologies by heart. We’re actually entrepreneurs ourselves. So we’ve, we know what it takes to build a company for sure. It’s not easy and putting the product as, or the service, whatever, uh, in the hands of the users quick will. De risk the whole thing for you in a, in a way.

Right. And I agree with you that it’s really important, but also being able to pivot. Once you notice that. It’s simply the business model is not there, right? If it’s too worldly or being able to pivot, it’s also something super interesting. Then I would like to touch in a couple of things that you mentioned, the cold outreach and doing things that don’t scale, because you know, I lost count to how many entrepreneurs I’ve talked about that hide behind the brand that does not exist.

They create a website and they believe that it’s going to sell for them. They won’t have, they actually need to protect the brand that is yet to be built, right? And they then obviously fail because the arguments are not there. No trust builders, no use cases, no nothing. So the advice is the other way around, which is no, go out there and sell that.

Not even the product or the service, sell the vision. Right. Because your early adopters will buy in, into the vision. Right. So I love that, that you touched this point and the, the cold outreach, because in the end it’s really about the founders. Right.

Slater: Yeah. And you know, it’s again, like if you don’t, if you’re not willing to put yourself out on a limb to really pitch, you know, what you’re selling, if you’re not willing to, you know, do the awkward and uncomfortable thing and, you know, email your second cousin and be like, Hey, can I talk to your boss?

Right. Um, then it’s, then you’re just not going to do it. Right. And I mean, I didn’t. I’m not lucky enough to have like a big business family, so I didn’t have a lot of family relationships to call on, but it’s again, it’s like the guy that you meet on the street, right, it’s like, can I get into an incubator, right, it’s take every meeting that you possibly can, yeah, I mean, that’s, that is a lot of what building that early momentum is, but you know, I think a lot of people, sort of similar like on social media, right, they see like one viral post and they’re like, oh, that’s not, yeah.

That interesting. It’s like they don’t see the hundred ones that nobody saw, right?

Rui: That’s it. And I, I remember clearly earlier in my career, I used to look at these entrepreneurs and think, and think, wow, they actually know everything. They have such deep insight and whatever. They are just figuring things out.

Now I know that. But also they know that amount of things because they actually did it. They had to go door to door, right? They, they got all the notes from investors. They, they got screwed by co founders or by early employees or whatever. So that’s why they are so knowledgeable. It’s actually, it comes down to experience in executing that, that vision that they had.

Regarding still, let’s talk a bit about the, the early stages of the company, because I obviously preparing for this conversation, I took a look at your profile and we, we spoke a bit beforehand and there was a moment there where you were actually the CEO, you were, so you were selling the company and dealing with investors, but you were also the CMO because you were running highly targeted technical marketing campaigns.

So that’s part of. a startup as well, right? From the start, the founders will do a bit of everything, accounting, they will do everything that is required to push things forward. Tell us a bit about that. How was that? That first set of months?

Slater: Yeah. I mean, even I think, you know, like let’s, let’s wind it back, uh, maybe even further, right.

You know, to, to the dorm room. Right. And all of the things that you’ve got to do to just, you set a company up, right? You know, and you talk about the incorporation docs, you know, I had to study security law, securities law for two weeks, figure out how can we legally raise friends and family around, right?

You know, how do you go, you have to spend all the time networking, right? And I think people don’t realize, you know, you see a company like Google, they don’t realize how many different functions are happening there. And when you’re two people, It’s not that, uh, you get to just stop doing some of those things.

You know, you have to figure out how to do pretty much everything, right? And I think one of the other things that people, so the way that we often talk about it, and actually I’ll, I’m stealing this shamelessly from our CEO, is what’s the next hat that you take off? And I think this is much more the, the right way to think about it is, I think some people are like, oh, you know, we’re not doing X, we need to hire someone to do X.

And I basically like, as a founder, That’s never the right mentality. Because if you can’t figure out how to get some function to work for your business, you’re never going to be able to find someone else to figure it out. It’s just not how it works. Is that you have to figure out how to do it first. Once you have figured out how to do it, then you can, you know, take that hat off, give it to someone else.

And they can maybe do it better, but you’ve got to figure out how to break through and frame things. And, you know, that’s not a, that’s not a responsibility you can ever hand away.

Rui: I absolutely agree. Also because the, the commitment and involvement early on, you really need to, founders get it, it’s their baby, right?

It’s really hard to attract top talent when it’s just an idea and a napkin still. So it makes sense that that involvement is there. And they usually use myself as an example, because I was actually the first marketing hire here at Altar. And I was brought in, in a moment where things were already working and they simply wanted to make, set a better strategy to, to, to set up.

a department, they wanted to professionalize something they were already doing very well. So yeah, I

Slater: mean, it makes, it

Rui: makes

Slater: total sense, right? That’s, that’s exactly when it makes sense for, you know, founders to, to hand something off, right. It’s like, make it

Rui: better. Absolutely. Let’s change gears here. Let’s move on a bit further down the line.

So after that first year, after you’ve raised those three millions in that road, to product market fit, right? Between the moment you were there in that first year until the moment that you were well established, can you share some of the stories or insights that you have about that phase?

Slater: Yeah, I think the hardest thing here, I think, is really about consistency of execution and tracking of progress.

And I think this is, this is where we got really upside down. Because, you know, I think, you know, maybe I’ll first talk about the things that we messed up in our journey towards product market fit, and then, and then how, how things actually eventually came together, right? There are so many metrics you can look at, and in many cases, A VC might ask you for a metric that is actually really stupid in your, uh, business context, right?

Or, you know, you might have, uh, an incomplete understanding of which metrics are useful in your context. So, you know, there’s vanity metrics, there’s critical metrics, there’s critical metrics that everyone knows are critical, there’s metrics that are uniquely important for your business, right? Knowing which is which is actually really, really hard.

It’s very easy to have some vanity metric that you then start to believe that this is a real metric of success because maybe even it works for fundraising, right? And there’s some particular, you know, vanity metric that is, you know, You know in in vogue, but not drinking your own kool aid And I think that was the biggest problem is you know for us for instance It was api volume is you know We were going out and we were selling all this stuff and we were scaling it You know, we were hitting like, you know a billion api calls a month or something and we’re like this is awesome You know, it’s so much progress.

But you know, it was it was one customer right and what was actually Most important was that the amount of value they were getting for each call was so small, right? And so, you know, and I think I think the other thing though is also, you know, there’s this this important balance between Recognizing when you’re doing something that’s not working versus when you just need to tweak things a little bit Right, is it takes a long time to know.

I think a lot of people don’t realize this, right? An enterprise sales cycle is 12 months. So if you’re changing your marketing strategy every three months, you have no idea if it worked, right? Yeah, you’re, you’re just going to fail. That’s, that’s the road map for you. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just like, it turns into this like frenetic spasming.

Right. And, and again, you, you never give your chance a real, a real chance of success. So I think it’s, it’s recognizing how critical each bet you place is. And not making them lightly, and then also committing to them once you have made them. Because I would say that almost always, if you’re looking at a company at the end of, you know, an important go to market experiment, there’s probably going to be things that went well and things that went poorly.

If you think just overall it was a success or it was a failure, you’re already not quite thinking in the right way. So, you know, like when we look at our funnel now. You know, we have really specifically like, this is working really well, this we need to bring up to benchmark, this we’re, you know, exceeding benchmark on this metric, we’re really, really bad at.

And now we’re not going to present that metric to a VC, but we know that we need to be laser focused on that. And that’s what the board needs. So just just really thinking hard about your metrics, right, and revenue recognition and all of those things. It’s very important. And I think that People understand user innovation and user innovation is, is key, but business model innovation and kind of pricing innovation turns out is just as important in the grand scheme of it.

Rui: Love it. And actually a couple of interesting insights in there worth exploring, namely the consistency of execution and how, uh, deciding how to measure success and not panicking if you’re not actually achieving it. But. thinking about it in a, as, as a longer roadmap, right? So, uh, thank you for that.

Perfect. So now let’s go a bit tactical here. Can you share some of the most important lessons you learned on how to deal with investors? Yeah,

Slater: so I’ll say, and this is, this is both for investors and customers, and I’ll start here and I can, I can talk more specifically about investors. The most valuable experience I ever had in learning how to talk to customers and investors was theater.

So, you know, I did musicals, I did plays when I was in, you know, high school and college and whatnot, and being able to present yourself in front of an audience and not be nervous when talking in front of a, you know, audience. a group of really fancy folks, right? Yeah. That’s really, really important. And I think that, you know, there’s, There’s a careful balance there, right, because, you know, for me, and I think a lot of more technical, you know, entrepreneurs, like, I hate networking, right, and I hate sort of the dog and pony show of being evaluated by people who have no idea what I’m doing, right, and I think a lot of technical folks kind of resent it.

It is a lot more acceptable and palatable if you think instead, okay, I am playing a role, here is how I have to come across, right, and allows you to sort of compartmentalize that and really think, okay, how do I, how do I reach these people? Because. And, you know, communication I find to be a really interesting part in and of itself.

So I think that’s, that’s one really key piece. And then to talk about maybe investors in particular, because I think that is, it is a bit unique and actually one other piece of context. I am an EIR at four or six ventures, you know, one of our, our leading VCs. I think that one of the biggest mistakes that early entrepreneurs make in talking with investors, uh, sorry, two, two big mistakes.

Um, number one. Always talk to a founder who has done it before and has done it before successfully and make sure they were the ones doing the actual pitching. Someone who is adjacent to the pitching, who is in the room and pitching but not making the deck, not useful. So that’s number one and also the VC is not really gonna tell you what they think because that’s not how their job works.

The second piece though is Recognize that just like in a hiring discussion, right, with an investor, there is a balance of incentives. Investors are looking for good investments. And certainly today there’s more capital available than ever in the past. And investors really want to believe in you. You know, they want to believe that you’ve got a good thesis.

They want to find something that’s, that’s going to be successful, right? And also they want to come across as a good partner. And I think this is something. That a lot of entrepreneurs don’t understand, like they think that they can’t do cold reach outs to VC, right? They think that, oh no, they tend to get really, really discouraged.

But I think the other thing that folks just have to realize, like, like in all of these things, it’s, it’s consistency. You know, fundraising is not sales in that your win rate actually doesn’t matter at all, right? It doesn’t matter if you have a 50 percent success rate or 25 percent success rate. That’s wrong metric.

With investment, you need one, that’s what you’re looking for, right? It’s just, you need one correct investor, right? And the, you know, the number of subpar folks you find, it doesn’t matter how many you add up.

Rui: Absolutely. Absolutely. And there’s, there’s something there because you’ve just described a, an overall mindset of being user centric, right?

And you tapped into communication to explain that, which is something I agree 100%. Your ability to empathize with who is on the other side will ultimately dictate how you act in front of them. And obviously the more you use from that, the more successful you, you’re going to be. I regularly say that I don’t actually write anything from a copywriting standpoint.

I actually steal messages from my clients, things they say about me. So. That’s why other founders will feel like I’m in their heads, right? Because it’s their own vocabulary. It’s how they frame things. 100 percent agreed on the user centric angle. And then the lesson on finding someone that has done it, I believe it’s critical here because I’ve also seen, not only with investors, also in board of directors, where the usual comment is, you need to pay attention to the margins, whatever it makes sense or not, right?

Yeah, margins are

Slater: important,

Rui: but not at every phase of your business. And that’s it. Exactly. And, and this is somewhat of a, it’s used like if it was common sense, almost to an extent. And I’ve seen a lot of people follow the wrong advice there, right? So it’s also important. And this is something that it’s, I believe, useful for anything you do in a startup, which is knowing in who to trust or what information to trust.

Your sources of information are really crucial here because you can easily make a bad decision that has been sent to you by the right person, right? Someone giving you money, telling you need to do this, you will feel like you have to do it and sometimes it’s just a bad decision.

Slater: I think that’s one of the things that is, you know, it’s a really, really key lesson for folks, right?

Is the, the specificity of experience, right? Is that I used to think about this, and I think this is one of the biggest mistakes I ever made as a founder, right? I used to think about credentials as this, you know, fuzzy mess of like, you have more or less credentials, and if you have more credentials, then that’s better, and I’ll listen to more things you say.

It really doesn’t work like that, and I think In, you know, as a founder, it may be even hard to understand where the lines between different kinds of expertise are, right? But someone, you know, if you’re trying to figure out how to scale revenue, your company scale sales at your company, and you’re at 1 million in revenue, talking to someone who has never joined a company less than 5 million in revenue, not helpful is a different set of problems, right?

You need to find someone who has done You know, as, as quantitatively close to the exact position you’re in as possible. Right. You know, if you are a, a marketing company, right? On a SaaS business model that has, you know, like is, is series A, right? Like you wanna check all of those things off when you’re going and asking someone for experience to really

Rui: make sure it applies.

Absolutely. And, and that’s a great insight. Perfect. So Slater, who did you have with you in the early days? So what was the team?

Slater: Yeah. So the, you know, the original nexus of us is me, you know, Slater Victorov is Alec Radford, Madison May and Diana Yvonne. And so that was kind of the founding cluster of us, right?

And, you know, we were all college friends, frankly. I think that’s one of the things, you know, you said earlier, it’s really hard to find high quality talent when you are, you know, a couple of kids in a dorm room, right? However, one of the great things about starting a company out of school, one of the very few pluses is that you know, you’ve got this amazing group of really hungry, intelligent folks that you know how to work with.

Right. And so that was, that was a huge plus for us. That’s exactly where we went is, you know, where are the, where are the people that we love working with?

Rui: Right. Yeah, and there was exactly college, you were all at the same level, right? All eager to do something as, as you were saying. So yeah, you were there in a position to, to, to, to test together because the interest simply aligned the phases in your lives were also the same.

So that makes sense. Can you break it down a bit for me as to what roles all of you were taking early on?

Slater: Yeah,

Rui: absolutely.

Slater: So, you know, and and the job titles are fuzzy at best, right? But I think in some ways, you know, we’ve never changed. So Alec is, you know, the the researcher, right? He’s always been the researcher.

Now he’s the researcher at open AI. And he sort of advises with us, right? But he was kind of far there. He was the guy that got me interested in deep learning original days, right? And, you know, in the very early days, I did a lot of the architecture, even though I was the CEO, I was still probably, you know, producing thing.

I don’t know, a huge amount of that code in 30 days, right? Um, and you know, there was kind of this, this gradual shifting, right? As Madison started, then he was the CTO, right? He eventually like took over the reins on that. Diana, we brought in because we needed someone who understood, uh, anything about business.

And you know, it was, it was three engineers at that point, right? You know, and then things have changed obviously a lot over time. So that, that’s maybe approximately where I, where we started is that I was the very technical CEO. Alec was a researcher. Madison as the, like, normal CTO, and then Diana as the business person.

Things are never that smooth or nearly that clean. So I would say that the way that we’re really structured now is, so, you know, I’m, I’m the CTO. So, you know, that’s changed. And I think that the CTO now, like, I’m not, I’m not responsible for architecture. They don’t, they don’t let me, they don’t let me do that.

And nor should they let me. But I think that, you know, I am really responsible for a lot of the macro kind of intellectual property stuff, right? Like, what are we pursuing from an ML perspective, right? How are we kind of driving our tech partnerships, right? Building, you know, the team, you know, all, all kind of that goodness.

Madison is now on the ML side. You know, obviously we’re, we’re all, We’ve all got pretty deep ML chops, right? But now, uh, he’s the ML architect. And Diana is our amazing VP of Talent and Ops. So she basically makes Indico an amazing place to work, which it turns out is kind of the most important thing. We didn’t realize that until COVID, right?

But, you know, making your company a good place to work where smart people feel supported and, you know, like there’s an actual community there. I mean, that’s, that’s what it takes to make a successful company right there. And you’ll never make a successful company

Rui: with that. I agree 100%. And I’m understanding this more and more each day.

It’s all about the people. It’s all about, you can have the best ideas, you can have all the infrastructure, you can have whatever you want. If the, the culture is not working, if people are not incentivized to doing the right things for the right reasons, you’re, you’re in trouble. Did you realize this?

Early on, was it something that came later? And do you have any horror stories or huge successes on, on that, that can help highlight its importance?

Slater: You know, I think that we intellectually realized it earlier, early on, you know, people, I think they kept telling us, you know, culture is important. Culture is important.

So I would say it was very at the top of our minds constantly, like, how do we keep a good culture? I would say because it was so close to the top of our minds, it never became it, right? So, you know, one thing that I would say is that, actually, so one of the things that was, was toughest actually is recognizing when our culture had to change through our life, right?

So, you know, in the early days, and, and, you know, honestly, one of the ways that this came to a head is when, As a founder, as a kind of person who is going to be a founder, you tend to do some stuff that is actually a really bad example for employees, right? Like sleeping in the office and staying up all night and, and it became like a really big problem.

And, you know, that was, I think, some of the first, you know, more difficult things about culture where we had to really definitively say, like, what is the culture that we want to set around? working late, right? You know, when stuff’s got to get done when it doesn’t like, how do we have to be conscious about our actions to make sure we’re not setting the wrong expectations?

So that was really, really key. I think that You know, we, we were kind of lucky enough to have a really strong start on the culture side as well. You know, we kind of worked through mission and vision and values and, you know, I, I think our core values have been really strong for us through the years. And they’re really, I don’t know, they’re like interesting and provocative.

I’m sure everyone thinks their core values are interesting and provocative, but we really try to emphasize, you know, sharing between people, sort of a do first mentality, right? The idea that, you know, what I often say is that Indico is typified by the idea that we are working on something fundamentally new.

When you are working on something fundamentally, new. By definition, nobody knows how to do it. And that means that to do it successfully with the highest degree chance, the highest chance of success, you have to bring everyone’s information to the table. So what I, I usually say, you know, this is sort of the high watermark for us.

So, you know, me as the CTO of the company. Any single person in the co should feel completely comfortable even in the middle of an all hands meeting raising their hands and saying Slater, you’re full of shit. This is why you’re wrong about X, Y, Z, whatever you said. And for us, it’s not just that, and I think we recognize that as a leadership team, It’s not enough for us to, you know, like finger wag at employees and be like, oh, you should speak up more.

It’s like, no, that’s not how it works, right? It’s our job as the leadership team to create an environment where people feel comfortable doing it. And, you know, I think really, really kind of key shift in how we frame that. And we just say, If we can’t make people feel that comfortable, then we’re not going to succeed as a

Rui: company.

Absolutely. How, how can you make that happen? So how can you empower people? Because that’s the tricky part, right? Yeah. Because we all know it’s like, like in marketing, going to the whole company, sharing a message on, on a, a, a, on Slack or whatever saying, Hey, can you please engage more on social media?

It’s simply not going to happen. That’s not how we do it. Right. So how can you enforce this behavior?

Slater: You

Rui: know,

Slater: it’s, it’s a good, it’s a good question. Right? And, and I think Enforce is It’s tough. You know, I think that people often underestimate the degree to which culture trickles from the top down. So the most important thing is you model this in the way that is healthy and productive, right?

So, you know, you have difficult conversations and you know, have people listen in, you know, like, here’s how we talk through something that’s a little bit tricky together, right? You, you know, you go out and you know, contributing back to the community is a big value for us, right? So I go out and I volunteer my time, you know, Right?

So I think showing and doing and it becomes at a certain point self reinforcing, right? I think being really, really sort of dogmatic and kind of specific about who you’re bringing on in the early days, right? And make, because the culture, it does not self correct. It kind of continues to go off the rails.

And I think the other thing that is tough, and something that we actually put in place is that, Legitimate culture issues are actually some of the hardest ones for people to give voice to in an interview process, right? People often aren’t super specific. They often, uh, feel that they can’t necessarily voice them without, you know, being overly judgmental with a person they don’t know very well.

So we implemented a bit of a reverse policy. Because we actually had a few Few cases in the early days where folks sort of joined and then something didn’t work out and people were basically like, yeah, we all sort of had this gut feeling in the interviews that this wasn’t gonna work out for, you know, whatever reason.

But you know, they seem to check all of the boxes. So what we’ve done now is sort of the inverse, is that before we make any hiring decision, we bring the hiring committee together and basically say at least one person has to raise their hands and kind of volunteer to say like, I think this person is going to be great, like I will.

And, and it then serves the dual purpose of like. That person then helps them, you know, get onboarded in sort of a more unofficial way. But we also find that that’s usually not a very hard bar, high bar, right? Like, you know, you interview 12 people, like one of them is gonna be like, Yeah, like, I really like this person.

I think they’ll be successful. Yeah. However, there are cases where just, Everyone felt a little uncomfortable in the meeting for whatever reason. And it really speaks volumes because there are times when, you know, you get, you know, this person passes but just barely across the board and then you ask the question and it’s just silent and that speaks volumes.

Rui: Yes, absolutely. I want to actually go back a bit on the work life balance topic, because this is really interesting. When you said that you actually had to change your own behavior, so you wouldn’t incentivize the wrong one for everyone else. And there’s a part in here that I’m interested in knowing, which is what were, what a day in your life was back then, how many hours a day were you working, and what the focus split was, if you were spending 30 percent of the time hiring and 70 percent selling or whatever the case.

And then if it actually happens, so did you actually change your behavior to make sure that you were not. Not forcing, but influencing people into following the same, the same things.

Slater: Yeah, so, absolutely, and I’ll probably even rewind it a little bit before IndiCode to give, you know, some context. Because, you know, I work very hard, just as a general rule, and in my junior year, Uh, sorry, no, my sophomore year, uh, near the end of sophomore year, I was so overloaded that I ended up working 220 hour weeks back to back.

And that is the, I mean, and, and, you know, you can do the math. That means I was both working all the time and not sleeping eight hours a night. It was, it was rough. You know, I was kind of working in a company where there was this round the clock model where I was a PM for folks and, you know, like four or five different time zones, depending on the project.

And, and it was awful, and I burnt out really, really hard, and I’m like, I’m never going to do that again. My default state, you know, I think that, you know, I think some people, you know, they balance out at about 40 hours a week. You know, I feel pretty comfortable working, you know, maybe about 60 hours a week.

An important piece of that, it’s not that I’ll work 12 hours in a chunk every day. 12 hours, I think, you know, that, that’s actually my limit for, like, you know, if I work chunk of work that is, Longer than 12 hours. Like I’m, I’m like tapped out, but I am a really big fan of jumping in and out of work. Right.

You know, it’s like take, you know, an hour break in the middle of the day, you know, like make, make more time like later at night. Uh, I also, you know, almost always work at least a bit on the weekends. Right. I, you know, I, I think a lot of founders are probably like this. It’s like. I can’t put work down really for two whole days.

I get, I get super anxious and stressed out if I try. Absolutely. So yeah, so I think those are, those are a couple of pieces. There’s actually, Bradfeld has this term that I really like, work life harmony more than work life balance, because I think that, yeah, it’s, I don’t think they’re in contention. I think that if you get it right, and I’m thankful enough to have got it right, they support each other, right?

And, you know, your, your life gives you the ability to And your work gives you the ability to perform better at life. And I’m lucky enough to kind of check that off. I think that. Back then, you know, in the early days of Indico, Yeah, I mean, they were, I was pretty consistently doing 12 to 16 hour days, I would say.

You know, sleeping in the office a lot, just because I, I really enjoyed it. I absolutely loved Indico, and I wasn’t thinking about it. As time went on, right, I think that stopped becoming cute, and it, and we’re like, alright, you know, actually, if this continues, then things, then things could get, you know, a little bit toxic.

We did have a nap room. We first tried to kind of offset things a bit by saying like, take an hour during the day for yourself because folks work hard. So that, that really helped. A big thing that we had to stop do was stop using Slack at certain hours of the day, right? So we really try to tell people, you know, if you, we’ve got like a check in channel on Slack where you’re like, hey, you know, I’m stepping away for half an hour or something like that.

And if folks, sometimes you work later at night, you know, it might be seven, eight o’clock, but, you know, we try to tell ourselves as a leadership team, like, don’t drop that message in Slack then, because we don’t wanna be setting the expectation that people should be working at that. Right. Uh, and, and just a lot of, just like, even when you’re working late, try to not like openly communicate that or be like a little bit conscious of how you’re, you’re presenting that.

I think those were some of the most important pieces.

Rui: Perfect. So Slater, we’re actually almost at the, uh, at our time. So, uh, let’s go through some rapid fire session with some finishing questions. Can you share one key lesson you learned on product? Don’t under implement.

Slater: You want to get something out to market quickly, of course, make sure that, you know, in MVP, the V is just as important as the M.

Rui: I was going to say that you stole it because I was going to say that the viable is there for a reason. That’s something I usually say, right? So it’s not a minimum product. It’s a minimum viable product. Unless it’s meaningful. I mean, it’s simply not going to work. So perfect. One key lesson you learn on marketing.

Slater: It just has to be so much simpler than you think. And I think engineers should be involved in pretty much everything, but not like it takes a very, like, that’s probably the hardest thing for them to actually plug into is marketing because the message has to be so.

Rui: I actually was going to, this is a topic for another, for another time, another conversation, because I was going to ask you, how can you actually bring them in?

Because it’s not as easy, right? Because the business vision is not always the main priority for, for the

Slater: technical. And we even, we even bring people right into the business. Sales calls, which is very strange to do with engineers. But even then, you know, marketing, you’ve got to be

Rui: more intentional about it.

That’s it. And I agree. And, and I would say that it also has a lot to do with consistency and actually how many times and how you communicate the reason why, but that’s, that’s the topic for another conversation. So can you share one key lesson you learned on managing people?

Slater: Uh, servant based leadership, right?

You are there to help them. They are not there to help you. That’s it. Bake

Rui: cookies, go get coffee if that’s what it takes to take it to the next level. Exactly.

Slater: You’re there to get stuff done and as a founder, you are lucky to not have to pay yourself what that would cost.

Rui: So good. Absolutely. Cool. One key lesson you learned on creating and maintaining a good culture.

Play

Slater: video games with your team, you know, do small stuff because the small stuff really matters. Like we, we rock climb, like we share pictures from our weekends out, right? Like, remember that you should. Don’t force people to be friends, but if you’re doing things right, like, you know, working with your friends is a lot better than working with a bunch of people you don’t like.

Rui: Just yesterday, I was with my head of content learning how to throw cards. We actually destroyed part of the furniture here, so I agree 100%. Nice. Now, one resource that was invaluable to your success. This can be a book, a podcast, a mentor, whatever.

Slater: I think that, well, I mean, founders, uh, certainly, uh, I would say that my co founders were certainly the most, most valuable resource.

You know, just being there with me in the trenches, right? I, I admired the crap out of solo founders, uh, and I just, I just couldn’t do it. I just absolutely could not do it. And yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s definitely the most

Rui: valuable. I think it’s the first time I got that one. And actually it’s, it’s brilliant.

Yeah. Yeah. Having, having someone that is actually going through the exact same thing. Right. Having your back, I can imagine how, how powerful that is. Slater, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to sit down with me. Where can people know more about you if they, if they want?

Slater: Yep. You can reach me at Twitter.

You can check my personal site out at slater. website, which, you know, I was very happy to get. And you can look at Indico, you know, indicodata. ai.

Rui: Perfect. So thank you so much. It was indeed a pleasure being with you today. Now to our listeners, I hope you found this conversation useful. I know I certainly picked up some valuable insights from a Slater story.

Thank you for listening. I’ll see you again in the next edition of the Startup Journey podcast.