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Demystifying the conversations we're already having here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous and Raju Rishi, will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health to venture investing and much more.
Raju: And so I, like, looked at this thing, and it was, like, a big number. I don’t remember what the number is. I would love to have remembered what that number was.
Will: I think we can guess [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. I was looking at it and this is in 1984 right? And I’m, like, looking at it, I’m like, I go home to my dad. I said, “I don’t think I should go to college. I can become assistant manager.” And I showed him this number, and he, like, slaps me on the head. He’s like, “No. Just get this out of your brain. You’re going to college.” [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Nick: [crosstalk 00:00:26] I’m going to buy an Atari in four weeks. This is [crosstalk 00:00:29]
Raju: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I was very good at Atari. I could turn over Space Invaders.
Nick: Mm-hm.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: Yeah. It was terrible. It was like, so time consuming.
Raju: I’m Raju Rishi.
Will: And I’m Will Porteous. Welcome to RRE POV, the show in which we record the conversations we’re already having among ourselves, our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Raju: Hello, listeners. This is Raju Rishi, along with my partner, Will Porteous, and this is another episode of RRE POV. Today, we’re joined by Nick Leonard, co-founder and CEO of VoiceRun, the world’s fastest and most extensible voice agent platform, which we will get into this. But I’m going to tell a little bit about Nick’s background first. Rather multifaceted, actually.
He grew up in Muncie, Indiana. Went to college at my alma mater, MIT, where he majored in mechanical engineering and was a member of the number one living group at MIT, [excitedly] Phi Beta Epsilon. Sorry, there’s, like, a 10% chance that he and I are going to sing the fraternity song later in this podcast. So, you don’t want that, so you kind of odds are better for the listeners, but there’s a 10%. You have tolerate that. Okay, he—[laugh]—sorry.
He started his post-college working life at Pratt & Whitney working on short takeoff and vertical landing engines, which is kind of here, but it’s like, not even just short takeoff; it’s like just vertical takeoff and landing now. And we might have Scott Furman on one of these days, also another fraternity brother working at a company called Archer that is doing exactly that. So, short stint there. He shifted into EdTech space, first at 2U creating online degree programs with top universities. Then he was a co-founder and CEO of FundForward, a startup enabling public schools to fundraise.
And finally, he shifted to Jobcase, a venture-backed company focused on career services for employees. Then a third career shift into AI and customer service space, first at Posh Technologies, a FinTech company building AI assistance for customer service. And finally, and most powerfully now, he’s the co-founder and CEO of VoiceRun, which is building—as I said earlier—the world’s fastest and most extensible voice agent platform, and we at RRE are investors in this latest startup.
So, I will kick things off and just ask you some random, circuitous questions, Nick. Nick has spent a little bit of time with me, so he knows how random and circuitous I can get. Okay, so first Muncie, Indiana to MIT. Is that, like, a natural pathway? Is there, like, thousands and thousands of grads going from Muncie to MIT?
Nick: You know the answer to that. There’s—I don’t think there’s thousands of thousands of grads coming out. You know, growing up, I mean, I love Muncie, obviously hometown, a lot of love for, you know, the values I learned there, but I would say, I don’t know anyone that’s gone to MIT out of the Muncie public school system that I was a part of. But we have had, again, the occasional person go to an elite university. The funny story there is actually, like, how I knew what MIT was.
Actually, you said circuitous, so let me actually give you the—when I told people I was going to MIT, the only thing close that people knew back home was the Muncie, Indiana, transit system.
All: [laugh].
Nick: So, yeah, a lot of people got a little confused. Like, why is our valedictorian working with the bus system? That’s that kind of grounds it for you. But yeah, actually, we learned about MIT, you know, my mom got really into reading magazines, like, when I was in middle school, and Discover magazine was one she picked up. She loved science, she knew I liked math and science. And I don’t know, seventh, eighth grade, she was like, “You know, Nick, this MIT place, it’s in this magazine every month. Every month. Check it out.” So, yeah, it wasn’t that long I applied to MIT and Purdue, those were the two schools I applied to. Happened to get into MIT, and went.
Will: That’s fantastic. Wow, that’s a beautiful story.
Raju: Yeah, we are happy to have you. I know you did some, like, debate stuff that was kind of like, part of the route here. Like, I don’t know if you want to touch on that or—
Nick: Yeah, yeah—
Raju: —like, that’s, like, a do-not-talk-about moment.
Nick: No, no, no. There’s nothing with you and with your listeners that I won’t talk about.
Raju: Okay, great [laugh].
Nick: Yeah, no, I think that the two things that really kind of helped me stand out, I mean, you know, I was generally well rounded, you know, did well academically, was an athlete, but was mainly these two programs that were, kind of like, political in nature. So, if you’re familiar with, like, Boys State, Boys Nation—
Raju: Sure.
Nick: —[crosstalk 00:05:21] there’s two boys from every state that go and represent their state. I was one of the ones picked from Indiana, and so I was there. I met George W, and we met our senators, and did a bunch of that stuff. And then I followed on with this other program that’s called the United States Senate Youth Program, which is kind of similar, government, you go meet your [laugh] senators, you meet W. I met him twice.
Will: [laugh].
Nick: Kind of weird. It’s like, “Hey, man, I’m back.”
Raju: “You’re the Muncie kid. You’re the Muncie kid.” [laugh].
Nick: In that circle, I was like, I was the ‘interested in MIT’ kid. It wouldn’t surprise you that all the people that were going to these programs were like, “I want to go to Harvard,” “I want to go to Yale,” “I want to go to Columbia,” and I’m like, “I want to go to MIT.” And it was like, “Oh, nerd.” [laugh].
Raju: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah, it’s awesome. That is fantastic. So, you obviously went to MIT, and you obviously went to Phi Beta Epsilon. And I can understand the draw. It’s a rocking house, right on campus. We have that cool ass elevator, now. The elevator wasn’t there when you were there, right?
Nick: No, it wasn’t there. It’s actually—I’m sorry, I’m going to get heated about it because, you know, I was going up and down those stairs all the time. And now these young kids, you know, like, they probably have skinny calves.
Raju: I know. I know. I go up and down those stairs, too. Like, I think—I don’t even know if we had stairs back when I went.
Will: So, I have to interject, for our listeners who haven’t ever perhaps seen the house, maybe you guys could just summarize, for a little bit, kind of the values of this great MIT institution. Because you’re separated by a fair bit, a bit of time from when you were part of that community.
Raju: Yeah. I’m going to let Nick do the honors here because it is a really close institution, and we have 100 and how many years? I don’t even remember Nick.
Nick: 135.
Raju: Yeah, so five years after I was born, we kicked this thing off [laugh]. So, it’s a hundred and, like, thirty-five. And we have a reunion every year in Cambridge or Boston area, and everybody shows. I mean, like, people come back, all the big ones for sure. But like, the history, it's one-of-a-kind. There’s no other, like, chapters anywhere else. It’s just MIT. And there’s a lot of love from the alumni. But maybe talk a little bit about, kind of, the things that stood out for you at the time and still stand out.
Nick: Yeah, I think for me, the thing that stood out most was, like, PB was always on the forefront of, kind of, like, inclusivity and diversity. You know, I know a lot of people on Twitter don’t want to talk about that in 2025, but I think it’s still an important topic. And what was, you know, interesting for me was, you know, landing there, you know, going back to Muncie, I don’t—you maybe could guess—Muncie has some diversity in certain, you know, kind of demographics, socioeconomically, a little bit of racial diversity, but in some ways, it’s entirely void. Or at least at the time, entirely void. There weren’t a lot of—you know, we didn’t have a lot of Asian people in Muncie growing up. We didn’t have a lot of, like, Latinos in our community.
And so, then to land at MIT, which is, like, first of all, I’m going from Muncie, which is a small factory town, to a big city, right? So, that first, okay, we’re going to get more diversity. And I’m going from a big, you know, imagine I’m going from Indiana to Boston. So, now we’re going to get even more diversity. Then we’re going to go to a college campus, and then even within that college campus, at PB, like, we’re known for being early on that, which just felt like an interesting thing at the moment. Like, in the moment, it’s like, “Oh, this is cool. I like this house. This is awesome.”
But what became, really… you know, what made it bigger, was when, like, I started going to the reunions, you know, and I learned that, like, actually, you know, many decades before, like, maybe it was one of the earliest houses to, like, allow Jewish people into the house, right? And it’s like, okay, actually, this is a this recurring theme over 130 years that we’re, like, getting people in, you know, kind of, I think it’s like, it’s a lot of MIT’s values, but almost even more so, right, of trying to have this, like, of valuing, like, different perspectives. And in some ways, you know, when I go to MIT, and it feels like everyone went to, like, Phillips Andover Academy, or Thomas Jefferson, or, you know, some Harker school in California, all these, like, amazing, preeminent, like, preparatory schools, all sudden, I kind of realized actually, there were people that saw value in, like, the perspective I brought from Muncie. And so, that was really valuable to me, and made me feel like, you know, I love that part about PB. There’s a lot of good things. We also threw amazing parties and had, like, people that I would be friends with forever and people that would later be—you know that you trust enough to invite onto your cap table someday.
Raju: [laugh]. Wait, wait, wait. That’s amazing trust [laugh].
Nick: But I mean, I think the one thing that stuck out to me was that, like, the ability to just include. And it wasn’t, like, a—it wasn’t an initiative. We didn’t have, like, an inclusivity initiative. It’s just like, that’s the culture. That’s how we operate.
Raju: Yeah. I agree with you a hundred percent. That, and this whole focus on being a gentleman. I think that was massive for me. Because, you know, you kind of have this opinion of fraternities as being, like, you know, bunch of drinking.
And, you know, you get into MIT, you know they’re going to be slightly different, but you don’t know, like, the—you know, there’s a wide range of people. And of course, you know, we do all of that, but there is this focus on, you know, just what a gentleman means and how to behave, how to act, and you know, just sort of absorb that philosophy into your soul. And I love that. I love that. So great.
And honestly, we’ve been pretty prolific in startups. You know, founder of Zipcar, you know Bob Walmsley, who was at Object Design, Veracode, Tailwind. And I started a handful of companies myself, along with a bunch of our fraternity brothers. Farsight was already on this podcast, and that was three Phi Betas. And now it’s you.
Nick: I have email list of, like, 30 people that are all founders, and we’re figuring out the right way for us to connect better, and you know, make sure that we are able to get the best terms from our investors and [crosstalk 00:11:12]—
Raju: Mm-mm, no, no, don’t share that list.
Will: [laugh].
Nick: They’re all going to make sure we’re better about that.
Raju: I was like, do I get a family discount? Do I get a family discount? Um, okay.
Nick: I had look up the, like, you know, big brother tree, to see if you were in my line. You weren’t though.
Raju: I know I wasn’t. I had Peter Gordon was underneath me, and then I, you know, think a bunch of other people that I had. I lived in second rear. I don’t know if it was a thing back then. Like, I was the only guy to live there, which was, like—
Nick: Yeah, the parties.
Raju: Yes, it was the core of all the parties. And I lived there three semesters—
Nick: Yeah.
Raju: —which is crazy. Okay, did you take 270 by the way?
Nick: Yeah, I took 270 over [IAP 00:11:49] during the four week class.
Raju: Yeah, this is the class where you kind of get, like, a box of stuff, and you have to build, effectively, a robot, and you have a competition against others. They now call it 6270, dude.
Nick: What?
Raju: Yeah.
Nick: I realize I misspoke. 270 is the full semester class. 2671, is, like, the prep class for that you take.
Raju: Okay, okay.
Nick: It’s Course 6 class, now?
Raju: Yeah.
Nick: See—
Raju: What the heck?
Nick: —computer science—that’s Course 6 [crosstalk 00:12:15]—they’re always trying to steal the cool stuff.
Raju: I know.
Will: [laugh].
Nick: Neuroscient had a moment, and they’re like, “Oh, well, we can do computer science and neuroscience.” They’re always trying to, like—
Raju: Sucking everything in.
Nick: You know. [crosstalk 00:12:28]—
Raju: I’m going to just—
Nick: The satellites now, too. [crosstalk 00:12:31].
Raju: They’re going to credit for everything. Oh, biology? That’s Course 6.
Nick: Yeah [laugh].
Raju: That’s computer science. That’s computer science. It’s bogus. Will, it’s the thing, like, you know, this one part of the school because all the classes, all the majors, are numbered at MIT. And of course they would be, of course they would be. In fact, if you want to get into the MIT Museum, you don’t actually have to show, like, an alumni anything. They just ask you your course number.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. And if you can answer properly, you know, those, like, just comes out when somebody asks you, yeah, Course 6 everything.
Will: So, Course 6 is kind of eating everything else?
Raju: Yeah. They’re just like—
Nick: [crosstalk 00:13:10] eating the world, Course 6 is eating the other majors. Like—
Raju: It’s like, the—
Nick: [crosstalk 00:13:14].
Raju: It’s a mark in Greece and philosophy at MIT. Like, you know? Anyway, what was your project at 270?
Nick: Yeah, so 270, when I was there, WALL-E had just come out—you know, the movie WALL-E?—and so we had to design—like, this was competitive… it was competition. You’re going to compete against everyone, and you had, like, these objectives. You could score points. One was like, you know, you push a box, like, a little box, into a square, then you could stack the boxes and you got, like, incrementally more points, or you could crush cans.
Raju: Wait, wait. Could other people knock down your stuff, though?
Nick: So, you could interfere.
Raju: Okay.
Nick: I love that you went there because I went there, too. Maybe there’s [crosstalk 00:13:54] there. Most of the people, you were allowed two people driving, right? So, you had two controllers, and most people were like, “I’m going to design this one awesome robot that does all these tasks.” And I was like, “Forget that. I’m going to create two little bots that suck. We’re going to push one box into the square, get the one point to win, and my other one is just going to go over there and mess them up.” [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, exactly.
Will: [laugh]. You saw it as a battle from day one. Just interfere with others?
Nick: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s understanding what is winning. They defined winning as scoring more points, you know, you got to figure out what’s the best way to do that. And I felt like, you know, at the time, like, my craftsmanship wasn’t going to be at the point where I could just dominate through sheer, like, technological brilliance on this one thing, so you got to win on strategy.
Raju: That was awesome. That was awesome. Okay, let’s move to working the life. Pratt & Whitney, the first sort of thing. What was sort of like the drive? You were just like, I want to use this major and I want to use it in some way that, you know, is meaningful?
Nick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think for me, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do when I grew up [laugh]. I—so there was kind of a default path. I had two different options coming out, right? So, I had option one was go work at Pratt & Whitney. I got that job. They gave it to me in a day. I was like, “All right, that seems pretty cool.” You know, from a kid from Muncie, Indiana, like, going to work as a design engineer on next generation propulsion systems is, like, the coolest thing ever.
Raju: Absolutely. Still cool.
Nick: Yes, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, well, now it’s even cooler. In 2025—
Raju: Yeah, I know.
Nick: —it’s even cooler. But you know, my dad was a 43-year Army vet, flew helicopters, and so, man, it’s cool. UTC at the time is who owned Pratt & Whitney. They also own Sikorsky that did all the helicopter design. So, it’s like, oh, we made it. Family, we made it. We did it.
Raju: [laugh].
Nick: The other option I had was to go to UBS and trade interest rate options. I didn’t know anything about that, but was told, “Hey, you’re smart. [crosstalk 00:15:50].” So, I kind of wrangled between those two options. And yeah, I felt like I was copping out if I gave up on engineering immediately. And so, [crosstalk 00:15:58].
Raju: Yeah, yeah. I actually—it’s funny that you say that—I was recruited heavily out of college to become an actuary.
Nick: Yeah?
Raju: And I was like, I got two offers to be an actuary. I’m like, what? What is this field? But they paid an incredible amount of money.
Will: Dude, you’re too optimistic to be an actuary.
Raju: Yeah well, but they were like—all they wanted to know was like, what’s your math scores? You know what I mean? Like, you would go in there and be like, okay, what’s the chance that, you know, there’s, like, a boating accident and somebody loses their arm, you know? You know, we’ll ensure the left arm a little bit more than the right arm, based on, like, history. I was like, okay, I’m not doing this [laugh]. So, I went on to Bell Labs. But similar thing, I wanted to use my engineering thing. Okay, so you only stayed there a little while, and you shifted to—
Nick: Yeah, it wan’t long [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, yeah [laugh]. Okay, so, but you shifted to EdTech. And there was something there because you kind of worked at three companies in that space, and so—and founded one, right? Like, what was the motivation around that?
Nick: You know, I think there’s the short-term motivation of, like, what got you, like, up and running, and then there’s, like, what’s the long-term that keeps you going every day? And so, the short term was, you know, I had a bunch of friends from MIT who were doing tech startups and seemed to have a lot of success. I had friends at McKinsey who were, like, on this up and run—you know, up and fast path. And I remember having a conversation with my manager, and he was like, “Nick, you’re one of our best engineers of your class. You keep working at this, you’re going to be a manager in 15 years.”
Raju: [laugh].
Nick: And it was like—he was like, “You don’t realize how fast that is.” By the way, it’s been about 15 years. So like, [crosstalk 00:17:33], I’d be becoming the manager.
Raju: Dude.
Nick: This would be a big year.
Raju: You could be a ma—you could have just, like—
Nick: I could have been I could [unintelligible 00:17:40], right now.
Raju: Yeah, right?
Nick: [crosstalk 00:17:42].
Will: Nick, the path is not taken. I mean—
Raju: [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Nick: Yeah, so that ended up being, like, what got me up and, like, looking. And then I really reflected on, like, what are the things where I felt most motivated and excited to work on? And at the time, it was in education. When I was at MIT, I spent two different summers in high schools and colleges in China, teaching math and science, believe it or not. And I had always been kind of—you know, I think when I reflected back on, like, I still feel, to this day, that I hit the lottery when I got into MIT. I think a lot of people knew they should apply to lots of different elite schools. I didn’t. I only applied to one, and MIT let me in.
And I think a lot about that is, like, you know, awareness, education. There’s all this stuff that goes into it, into access, you know? And I think one common thing that always resonated with me was this idea that, like, if you think that genius is evenly distributed, but the results we see is not evenly distributed, then, like, what’s happening, right? And so, I just always had a real passion for, like, how do I—you know, education, and then eventually, even at Jobcase with the frontline labor, it felt like the opportunity to give back, right? It’s like, how are we able to give people the perspective and context and opportunities to, like, make more? And that’s really what drove that, kind of, era of my career.
Raju: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I’ll tell—this is a true story as well, in terms of, like, path not taken. In my senior year, I was working at this restaurant called Bun and Burger. And I think Will knows the story. I started off as a dishwasher, and then, like, a week in, the short order cook, you know, decided not to come in and manager was like, “Hey, do you know to cook?” And I was like, “Not really.” He goes, “Well, you’re cooking today.”
And, you know, he’s, like, taught me, like, you’re going to cook burgers. You put the well-done ones in the back because the grease flows backwards and they fry up, and then the ones in the front have less, you know, heat on them. Anyway, I was really good, and I learned it very, very quickly. And a week later, the you know, cook came back, and they were like, “Nah, I’m sorry. He’s got your job. You can take the dishwasher role.” And he was like, “No, I’m out.”
And he left. And then I was cooking for, like, a bunch of time, and I got into MIT. And so, I gave my two-week notice. I was like, that’s what you do. And the manager comes up to me. He goes, “Whoa, whoa, what do you mean you’re leaving?” And I was like, “Oh, I got into college,” and he’s like, “No, no, no. Like, you’re good.” And he takes this, you know, small piece of paper, and he writes a number on it, he pushes it over, and he said—like, it was, like, some kind of, like, mob hit or something like that. Like, was it like, “Will Porteous: you must, like, kill him.” It was like, I don’t know what it was. And so I, like, looked at this thing, and it was, like, a big number. I don’t remember what the number is. I would love to have remembered what that number was.
Will: I think we can guess [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. I was looking at it and this is in 1984 right? And I’m, like, looking at it, I’m like, I go home to my dad. I said, “I don’t think I should go to college. I can become assistant manager.” And I showed him this number, and he, like, slaps me on the head. He’s like, “No. Just get this out of your brain. You’re going to college.” [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Nick: [crosstalk 00:20:57] I’m going to buy an Atari in four weeks. This is [crosstalk 00:21:00]
Raju: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I was very good at Atari. I could turn over Space Invaders.
Nick: Mm-hm.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: Yeah. It was terrible. It was like, so time consuming. So anyway, I understand that. Okay, so you get into EdTech, and you know, it’s kind of an interesting, you know, pathway because, you know, it was first, like, sort of a… company. But then you founded, and you—or co-founded—and were CEO of a company that was helping public schools fundraise and whatnot. And your first kind of foray, I guess, into entrepreneurship. Like, any good lessons that you learned, good or bad out of, like, starting that company?
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, the brief description is, like, we had a belief that, you know, obviously many private schools fundraise incredibly well. Public schools, and mainly the organizations adjacent to them, like, the foundations, the boosters, the PTOs, they generally don’t fundraise well. And so, part of that is, like, wealth disparity, [laugh] but a lot of it is know-how disparity. And so, our thought was like, can we fix the know-how disparity.
And so, I’d say the big takeaway for me, right, was like, how many reps did we get to truly, like, test the hypothesis, right? And so, for us, you know, I think we did it for 18 months, and I’m not really proud of how many reps we got, right? So, first thing we did was say, okay, we’re going to, like, sell directly. We’re going to take this tiny cut, but that’s just the start, right? We’re going to sell directly, and then we’re going to allow for some viral growth.
So, like, the PTA, you know, if we help them succeed, then the football boosters is going to want to use our platform, and so, and then across this town, like, the next school is going to want to do it, right, and that’s we’re going to have some viral growth, you know, some PLG motion. And we got a good, like, you know, took us a while. Like, we built stuff, no AI, no code gen, we’re building stuff, we’re trying to sell it, you know, we’re doing all that stuff. We get a couple customers, and we’re helping them succeed. So, it’s like, product success, let’s go.
But turns out, no one else is, like, signing up [laugh]. The thing that we learned, right, is that actually, I don’t really want—if I’m fundraising and I have a shared community of donors, I don’t really want them to know what I’m doing, right? I don’t want to share my tech, my secret sauce because, like, I want them to keep doing bake sales while I’m collecting $20-a-month subscription donations, right? That’s what I want.
Raju: I see. I see, I see.
Nick: And so, you know, it took us a while to get there. Took us, like, six months to really get to that insight. And like, today, if an entrepreneur was seeking advice for me, and they said, you know, “It took me six months to get a critical insight,” it’s like, “What are you doing wrong?” Like, that’s not okay in 2026.
Raju: Yeah, I love it.
Nick: And so, I mean, that was, like, the big. You know, we had a couple more reps. We had a couple more reps. We tried one with, like, more, like, capital projects. And so, you know, we had, like, two or th—we probably three real, like, we think this could be the product and distribution that works. And, you know, each of them, we ended up realizing, “Okay, well, the product might work, but the distribution,” or vice versa.
It ended up turning into a decision of, like, do we want to make this a lifestyle business that maybe someday gets rolled up into some mid-cap PE shop, you know, in ten years. And that wasn’t what Kyle—also a PB—or I was trying to do. And so we, you know, we kept it going to make sure we, like, did right by our current customers and slowly rolled it down.
Raju: Yeah. Awesome. Good learnings. I always find, like, hey, you know, whether it works or doesn’t, there’s always great lessons.
Nick: Yeah.
Raju: And you know, you kind of, like, sometimes you skew too far, you know, because you’re, like, “I’m never going to make that.” Yeah, but yeah. Will?
Will: Hey, hey, Nick, I got to ask, I mean, the way you describe that, it sounds like it was pretty logical, pretty rational, like, the succession of realizing you didn’t have something that was totally coming together, but that was also your first go, really. I mean, was it that straightforward, or was it—I mean, there must have been some emotional moments there.
Nick: Well, you guys have already invested in us, so now I can tell you about how dumb I was back then [laugh].
Raju: [laugh].
Nick: You know, I think now that I’ve had the time to process what was happening, that’s the way I would explain it, but at the time, no, we’re like, beating our heads, you know? We’re trying to figure out, like, we can help you so much. Why are you, you know? And it’s so hard to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. Like, why aren’t you just doing this?
And you know, the reality for them is, like, “Look, I’m a part-time PTO volunteer. I think about this 12 minutes a month.” But at the time, [it isn’t so 00:25:21] obvious. And so, you know, I think that was difficult. One thing that we were trying to figure out is, like, you know, we were just working out of one of our apartments, you know, and we didn’t have a big startup community. Or if we did, it was like, latent to us. We weren’t accessing it, right?
Like, even with what Raju was saying, we have a lot of successful entrepreneurs in PB, obviously, people who care a lot about each other, and like, I didn’t properly access it at the time, you know, and get the advice. And so, you know, I think that was—there were a lot of, like, kind of lonely moments with me and my co-founder, just trying to build. We’re just trying to build. And, you know, I think at the time, the answer wasn’t always ‘build.’ The answer was like, ‘sell,’ you know? You’re always trying to get that balance right. And so, yeah, no, there was definitely some, like, down times, but I don’t know, it’s always easier when you’re not a solo founder. I have, like, a ton of respect for people who are trying to do that. That seems so difficult.
Raju: Yeah. I rarely invest in solo founders, honestly, just because I know, having started three companies, how difficult life is. And there’s a lot of psychology associated with being an entrepreneur, and you know, there are moments where you’re, like, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” And there’s so few people that can, like, put that burden on their shoulder and just power through. Usually it’s like, “Don’t worry, dude. You know, it’ll be all right. You know, this will balance out.”
And you know, one of my favorite statements, which I have not said to you yet, Nick, which I will say to you at some point, which is, “It’s never as good as you think and it’s never as bad as you think.” [laugh]. So, like, there’s going to be moments in time where you’re like, “Oh, my God, this person quit. They’re, like, core to the, you know, development,” or, you know, VP of sales, whatever it might be. And it’s like, it’s just chill. It’s fine.
Like, you know, we’re going to transition the leads to some other sales people, you’ll pick up a few, your co-founder will pick up a few, it’ll be fine. And you know, the good part is, like, we just closed, like, Morgan Stanley. And it’s like, oh, shit, we just closed Morgan Stanley [laugh].
Nick: [unintelligible 00:27:18].
Raju: Yeah, exactly. We got to hire 50 people. So anyway, that’s, like, a pretty common occurrence. Okay, so, all right, let’s move from there to, you know, the next sort of horizon, which was, you know, a shift into Posh and voice agent space, which was sort of like, Posh was a precursor to VoiceRun. So, maybe talk about the impetus to move, and then what you learned, and then, you know, just like, blend right into, like, why VoiceRun exists.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, the impetus move—maybe I go back to my earlier framework where it’s like, the short term, what got you to move and then what kept motivating you? I had this take that aged really poorly—
Raju: [laugh].
Nick: —[crosstalk 00:28:07] you know, at the time in the 2010s, my wife was at Harvard Business School. I was living there while I did the startup, and I noticed that, like, in the 2010s everyone wants to be a product manager. Like, everyone at Harvard Business School is like, “I’m going to be a product manager at Meta.” Maybe it was Facebook then. I’m not sure exactly.
Raju: It was.
Nick: Yeah.
Raju: Definitely was [laugh].
Nick: I want to be a product manager. And you know, if you go back ten years before that, it’s like no one wanted to be a product manager. And so, I had this, like, take of, like, okay, what is the thing that people are going to want to be? And my take was, oh, it’s these, like, very strategic, talent-focused people-leaders. This was my take in 2020 because it felt like to me, you know, you take all the things that great CEO or founders do, and then over time, you start peeling them away as an organization scales, and it felt like the one that wasn’t getting peeled away was like culture, setting, people, leadership, recruiting, all this stuff.
There were, like, operational recruiters, but they weren’t, like, the true—it didn’t always feel like they were at the same strategic level, often at the C-suite, right? Like, it’s very rare that you’d say, hey, my CHRO, or my Chief People Officer is going to become my COO right? It’s like, no, [unintelligible 00:29:13] going to become my COO or something like that, right? This is the way it’s going to happen in the future, and if you look at 2030 you know, HBS grads are going to be like, “I want to go be a strategic talent partner at X company.”
Which aged… for a second really well. Covid happens, people leadership is more important than it ever has been, everyone’s flipping to remote. I was like, “I’m so right with this take. I should have went five years ago.” I’m going to go and help companies scale, do people leadership work, still be involved in product.
And that landed me at Posh, super awesome, strong founding team there, doing AI serving banks and credit unions, full stack, you know, chat bots into voice. And I was like, I’m going to help the people team. In addition to all the other stuff I might bring. I’m kind of a generalist. That was that. And then what I didn’t foresee was this, like, you know, LLM. Obviously a lot of people should have foreseen it did not foresee it, and I think the result, my new takeaway, starting in about 2023, 2024 is like, “Oh, actually, teams can be really small and still have huge impact.”
And that’s, like, part of our philosophy, how we operate, at VoiceRun. It’s like, we want an incredibly small team. Maybe we have to end up paying them more than we would otherwise because they’re that capable, but we’re going to have a much smaller team, and then a lot of the, like, strategic people leadership needing to get peeled away from the COO, actually, I think that I was wrong. I think for a lot of companies, you know, you can still have the founders be doing that when you’re 15 people. Fifteen awesome, AI-augmented, hyper-productive people.
Raju: That is, I think one of the biggest sort of unlocks for AI is the augmentation. I don’t know if it necessarily, like, takes over the world immediately, but the augmentation, it definitely gets people who are productive to be much, much more productive. Yeah. So, yeah.
Nick: Yeah, totally. And so, basically where Derek, my co-founder. So, Derek and I, we were at Jobcase together, we both left at the same time, we joined Posh, we were there for that whole stint, and then we started VoiceRun in summer of 2024. The big takeaway that we had in the moment was that all voice experiences need to be LLM backbones. And that might, you know we’re getting into a little bit more technical stuff there, but—
Raju: No, we should, we should. Like, there are our listeners are, like, combination of business and usually entrepreneurs and LPs and, you know, so they understand this stuff.
Nick: Yeah. So, you know, basically every voice experience before 2024 is based on some small language model, right? You’re talking something that you can train on. You might not even need a GPU. You know, these things are tiny, they’re going to bucket whatever—
Raju: You can my Radio Shack machine, man [laugh].
Nick: You’re going to take what the person said, you’re going to bucket into one of 200 categories or intents, and you’re going to take that category and you’re going to say, here’s how you respond, and it’s hard coded. It’s really stilted and clunky experience. And Derek and I were building stuff on LLMs, kind of like, nights and weekends for Posh, like, for them. And it became very clear to us that, like, LLMs have to be the backbone. And what also became very clear to us is it’s very hard to transition.
Once you have customers that are using small language models, and they’re used to this paradigm, it is very hard to transition to being, like, LLM backed. You can put LLM around the edges, and you know, I know Posh done a lot of innovation since then, so I don’t know what they’re doing now. I’m sure LLMs are part of it, but it’s still a very hard transition. And you know, what ended up being, our key insight was that, as you know, as hard for a company like that we were at, which is a startup founded by MIT [laugh]2017-2018 grads, right? These are, like, some of the most innovative people. They were Course 6.
Raju: Ah.
Nick: I know. I know.
Will: Course 6 strikes again.
Nick: Yeah.
Raju: Again.
Will: It’s a recurring theme, listeners [laugh].
Nick: They’re awesome. They’re awesome. They’re awesome entrepreneurs. And still, you know, it’s challenging to make that transition. And so, then we sat back and we said, “Well, if that’s a challenge that they’re working through, like, how is take your tech, your big tech company of choice, or non-tech company with a software arm, you know, like, how’s Morgan Stanley going to do this?”
Like, they’ve got, they got the resources, but like, how are they actually going to do this? And so far, it’s, well, they’re not. They don’t have voice AI at the forefront of what they do, but it seems so clear that it needs to be. And so, we started VoiceRun. We can talk about the journey. We did multiple different launches, and—
Raju: Yeah, no, we don’t talk about the journey, but I’d actually love to get into, there’s so many players in the voice AI space. I really want to jump into the differentiation that we have because, I mean, obviously it’s one of the reasons why we invested and we did a bunch of homework, but like, I’d like you to share that with our listeners and recap it for me because, you know, I don’t retain much [laugh].
Nick: [laugh]. So, I think there’s two ways to look at it. Let’s start with, like, the consumer side. Anyone who’s talking to a voice agent today is probably not happy, right? They like, they get that smell. I don’t know whatever smell it is when you listen, it’s not [unintelligible 00:34:04], but you can kind of tell this is an AI.
And people, you know, I mean, we can see, you know, even on our data, that you’re going to get 20, 30% of people who are just going to start being, like, “Agent, agent, agent, human, human, human,” right? You’re so trained to talk to—want to ask for humans because they’ve had bad AI experiences. And so, that’s where we are at, that’s where we’ve been at, and it’s so obvious that we can look out in the future and say, okay, they’re going to be amazing AI experiences where someone’s going to have the opposite experience. Someday in the future, someone’s going to answer the phone, it’s going to be a human, they’ll be like, “F—shoot.” Talking to a human? Oh, my God [laugh]. I’m not impressed. So, our goal for consumers is to accelerate that, right? Like, how do we get that to happen now? Now, there’s the enterprises, right? So, we believe that it’s like existing enterprises are going to be the ones to bring these experiences brought, you know, mass market.
Raju: Yeah because they got the biggest value in it because they employ an army of people today.
Nick: Totally. Or they have access, right? Like, you think about it, like, if you… you know, one very fast growing company, right, like, incredibly fast-growing in a vertical was like, Toast, right? Founded in 2012 you know, it’s been almost 15 years, and they’re like, now, they’re a leader in restaurants and every restaurant knows Toast. Like, 15 years in the AI age is forever.
When you say, “What’s it going to look like in 2040,” like, that’s forever. So, you know, it’s like, is it reasonable to expect some verticalized voice AI company that does, hey, we do voice AI for restaurants to be the ones going to go and hand-to-hand combat sell 250,000 restaurants that are in the US, or, like, you know, 1.5 million across the globe. Probably not. So, the fastest way to, you know, create great voice AI for consumers is actually go to enterprises that are already there, right?
And so, our approach is to say, you know, since we’re talking about, like, the Toasts of the world, like, you need to have a great voice AI capability. Your old model of having this ecosystem of players that can all plug into your APIs, you can do that, but you need to have a first-party voice AI offering that you can sell directly to your customers, right? Because they’ve got, I don’t know, tens of thousands of customers, and there are other places in restaurant verticals and other verticals that have 100,000 customers. Those are the people that should be getting voice AI, mass market.
Raju: Okay. So, principle number one in differentiation is to focus on those players that already own the customers or own the venues. So, it’s an enterprise-first kind of approach. What else? What else is different about your platform versus, you know, there’s a half a dozen or a dozen whatever. We all know who they are and they’re not—I mean, I don’t want to disparage any competitors, but like, they’re not that great. So [laugh].
Nick: You said it. So, start with the enterprise first, and then start to say, “Okay, well, what does that mean? What are the things that enterprises face?” And ultimately, they need to—they’re going to have higher standards. So, they’re going to need high quality stuff. They’re going to have weird use cases. It needs to be incredibly extensible. Anything that they might want to do on a web interface, they need to be able to do through a voice interface. And three, it’s really difficult for an enterprise to reorient itself and go commit to doing a large infrastructure build-out.
Those are the kind of the three problems, so if you want extensibility and be able to handle all this complexity, you have to be code-first. Like, there’s just no other option. There’s no no-code solution I’m going to build that’s going to have all the right drag-and-drop elements and, like, fill out this, like, text bubble here, that’s going to have the extensibility that’s going to support Morgan Stanley’s voice AI. Like, you just get out of here. It’s not going to happen.
So ultimately, you have to be code-first. And so, if you’re—Morgan Stanley’s example—you’re saying, oh, we have to be code-first? Our only option is to build it in-house. That’s what [crosstalk 00:37:45]. Our only option to build in-house. Fortunately for us and fortunately for them, my co-founder is brilliant, and he, you know, when we really narrowed in on this product, was like, the key to code-first voice agents is it needs to be serverless. AWS Lambda is a huge product. Google Cloud Run are huge products.
Will: Interesting.
Nick: Technical teams are comfortable building on serverless infrastructure and they love that they can just deploy. It’s just out there. And so, VoiceRun is a serverless voice agent development platform that is code-first. And so, there we’ve solved two of their huge—their biggest problems. If Morgan Stanley said today, “Let’s get a voice agent going. Can we get something out in production in limited scope next week?”
We could get it out next week. That’s something that, like, in the span of enterprises, is just impossible to fathom, but their CTO is looking at it and saying, like, “Oh, this is code. I don’t have to worry about, like, will you support my use case I need down the line. It’s code. I can.” More so, our customers own and control that code, right? Which, if you’re the CTO, oh, my God, I have to own and control the code. I can’t be, like, dependent on this customer—or on this vendor—that, like, maybe, you know, maybe they get acquired, or who knows what might happen to them. Like, if I don’t own that code, I can’t just have my operations go down. And so, for us, it’s great. Our customers own the code.
Raju: Amazing.
Will: Well, it sounds like you’ve not only designed for a great product experience, but also you’ve designed for a great decision experience for customers. They can be up and running inside a week. They can own the code. You can give them a pathway for the long-term. You can take advantage of what they’ve built over decades. I mean, it’s almost unheard of, from a design standpoint. How’s that translating into acceleration of the business?
Nick: Yeah, it’s really exciting. Our biggest—our slowest part is the decision from our customers, you know? Like, can they orient themselves, right? So actually, we have to design a lot around that. How do we make this really approachable? And from that perspective, our approach looks a little bit more like an Accenture, you know? And I say that as a compliment to Accenture, right?
You know, when a big company interacts with them, they’re working on this big deal, but over the time, they’re engaged, right? They’re like, building the solution while they’re still in discovery. And that’s how we operate with our customers. When we start talking to someone, we have that discovery call, we’re going to send them a phone number, like, after the discovery call. It’s not going to be like, here’s the notes. It’s like, “Here’s a phone number. By the way, it doesn’t meet all your eventual production needs because we don’t know what those are yet. We don’t have API access yet. But the first thing is, here’s a phone number.”
Then we say, “You know, obviously it wasn’t perfect. You know, if we want to make that really great, what we could do is, you know, we can sign, you know, an NDA, we can have you do a security review if you want. Of course, we’re, you know, SOC 2 compliant. We can do a bunch of different, you know, security checks with you, but why don’t you just give us API access? We’ll just, you know, into a sandbox demo environment and we’ll just build it against your APIs.” While we’re talking about identifying their customers, doing, you know, the commercial agreements, like, we’re already building. This isn’t something where they have to go and, like, imagine it, and, like, go into a room and say, all right, can we handle this risk, right? Can we handle the product development risk of, like, working with this vendor? It’s like, no, no, you have the product. Call it. What do you think?
Raju: That’s, that’s really cool. That’s really cool.
Will: Amazing.
Raju: And do you—like, okay, truly agentic enterprise infrastructure, you know, ready, kind of caliber stuff. You let them deploy anywhere they want? I mean, what if they want virtual private cloud or, like, on-prem, or anything like that? Is that an issue? I mean, sounds like it’s not because they own the code, but, you know, I just want to get some clarity around that.
Nick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So infrastructure-wise, we own the infrastructure code, they own the business logic code, and our typical way people work is they want to deploy onto our cloud. However, you’re exactly right. Some places don’t want to do that, right? And sometimes that’s a there’s a real technical reason why they want it on their prem. Other times it’s, hey, there’s two pathways here. We can go down approving you as a compliant vendor and that’s a three to four year process or you can deploy in our virtual private cloud, and that’s a couple-month process.
And so, in those cases, we can take all of our infrastructure, you know, deploy it in binary directly into their cloud. We support AWS, Azure, GCP, whatever they need. I think another component of doing something in someone else’s cloud is it’s not just about running the infrastructure and code in their cloud, right, because a great voice agent experience is going to be dependent on models. We haven’t even talked about models yet.
Raju: Yeah, we haven’t. And I was going to ask you, do you have model dependency here?
Nick: Yeah. And so, we think—you know, our point of view is that if you’re trying to build a best voice agent, you need to have access to the best models. And you said the audience a little bit technical, so we dive down into what models make a great voice agent experience. Like, there’s a few different categories. There’s noise cancelation, there’s turn-taking—like, when is it my turn to talk—there’s speech-to-text, there’s LLMs, there’s text-to-speech, and then there’s another paradigm with speech-to-speech models, right?
So, we don’t go into all of it, but you’re going to use a constellation of models to make a voice agent experience work. And within each of those categories, there’s, like, multiple different vendors, right? And so, if you want to build the best voice agent possible, you want to have access to all of the vendors in all of the categories. And so—
Raju: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nick: Orchestration becomes a key component of what we do. Maybe someday we’ll have our own first offering in certain model categories, but primarily you want to have access to whatever the best is, or whatever the best is available to you given your compliance setup. And so, for example, if you are a bank, you love this, you want to deploy it in your prem. You use AWS. You can say, “Oh, well, we can’t use OpenAI. OpenAI is hosted only in OpenAI or in Azure. We’re in AWS. Sure, it’s secure and safe, but that’s not an approved vendor and that’s going to take a long time to become an approved vendor.”
Oh, but Anthropic is deployed in AWS. Cool. We can use Anthropic. Great. We can use text-to-speech models that are in AWS. We can deploy some on-prem. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text models tend to be a lot lighter and a lot easier for, you know, in-cloud deployments, so we can do that. And so, that ends up being this key component that is all part of this ability to serve and to build a voice agent that is compliant in whatever circumstance your customer is. It’s both deploying the infrastructure, it’s helping them write the code that they own and control, we forward deploy and work alongside people to do that, and it’s making sure we pick models that are already available to them pre-approved.
Raju: Yeah, and I love this. I mean, you’re providing that framework for them that makes it easy for them to say, “Hey listen, these are choices you can make here. If you decide not to make a choice on this particular LLM, you can use a different one. We give you optionality around it.” You know? And you can do that in a variety of different, sort of like, you know, zones of existence, if you want to be—you know.
And then I want you to talk a little bit about observability because this is such a big issue in voice world. Because what winds up happening is like, okay, like, you know, it handled a bunch of calls. How’d it do, you know? How do we adjust? Does it auto adjust? Can we fine-tune? What are the, sort of, operating parameters? Because I think this is going to be one of the most important pieces of the voice agent world.
Nick: I love that you brought this up. This is the third leg of the stool. You need to have the business logic that makes your voice agent, your voice agent, you need the infrastructure that’s going to run at low latency consistently anywhere in the globe, and the third part is you need to know what the heck is going on. And we call that our tooling layer. And so, you know, historically, you can think of tooling as some very basic stuff.
I want to see the transcripts [laugh]. I want to listen to the recordings, right? Like, those are all elements of tooling that have existed in any kind of voice product. You see versions of that even in human, you know, employed call centers where you can see those type of things. Now, it gets really exciting, as you say, like, okay, how do we bring the tooling layer into the AI era, right? And so, this is where things get really fun.
And so, you know, you’re a customer, we’ve co-built the business logic, we’re running in calls right now, and you say, well, what do you want to know about your calls? It’s like, “Well, first thing I want to know is, like, every call, was it good or was it bad?” And what we’re going to work with you. What does good mean? We’re going to come up with a bunch of different criteria for what good might mean, and every single call that happens, LLM review. LLM is going to review every call.
We’re going to go through all of your criteria, and we’re going to evaluate it, right? Then we’re going to take that data and we’re going to roll it up, and every day, you’re going to get a report. We can have that in email or in your Slack or wherever you want, and it’s going to say, “Hey, yesterday, you did 532 calls. Their average minutes were X and, by the way, our LLM review, here’s how you scored. One of the things that we are most nervous about, given your scoring is this one element of the call where we’re supposed to collect zip code or something. Oh, and by the way, here’s a code edit that we’re recommending.” Right? So, we’re going to try to close that full loop where we have LLMs review the transcripts, identify the problems, and then come back to you and say, “Hey, here’s our recommended fix.” That’s why [crosstalk 00:46:52]—
Raju: I need this in all parts of my life, Nick.
Will: [laugh].
Nick: Um… yeah. I mean, you got to close the loop. That’s—
Raju: I mean, like, just, can you, like, listen to the my interactions with my wife, make some recommendations, auto fix?. Would that—is that possible?
Nick: Yeah, well—
Will: [laugh].
Nick: —[crosstalk 00:47:09], second, a second feature that we are we offer, which is simulations. And so, you know, what I just said is great if we’re reviewing live data, but say we do a new build, there’s all this new business logic, we want to make sure it’s doing a good job. So, what we do is we build out 70 different, 100 different agents that are simulation agents that are designed to stress test our, you know, our actual service agent. So, we think, like, reservation management, right? So, say you were like, calling a restaurant, you want to make a reservation.
We want to have a happy path sim that’s just going to make a reservation the normal way. We want one that’s going to, like, start a reservation and then change, like, the number of guests, and try to, like, do all these things that are difficult, and then when we say new build, we’re going to say, all right, test. Boom. 100 phone calls go out. It’s all happening agent-to-agent conversations, and then we’re going to pass all those same LLM reviews on the agent-led conversations, the agent-to-agent simulations, that way we can, you know, basically do what I think traditional software would call a regression test. Say, like, hey, are we still succeeding the ways we want? And so, to throw it back at you, I would say, well, the first thing we got to do is design the different Raju simulations, right—
Raju: Mm-hm, yeah.
Nick: —and run them against, you know, the wife agent.
Raju: Yeah, they’re all the same, very just, you know, [laugh] simple-minded, makes a lot of errors, probably screwed up today [laugh], apologizing in the first sentence [laugh].
Nick: All right, so now you’re, you got your Raju simulations, right? It’s only one, it’s only two. There’s not a lot, but we have this core agent. And so, we’ve talked about, okay, we have LLM review, we have simulations, and we write the business logic. You know, we’re going to take advantage of the best coding agents available to do that, right? They have access to our MCP, right, where all of our documentation is, so whether you’re coding these things in Cursor—whether we’re coding them in Cursor—or Cloud Code, or in our web app, we’re going to take advantage of that.
The fourth thing is a little bit of the magic sauce. I think all four of those things—all three of these things so far are great, but the fourth one really puts it over the top, which is because we’re code-first, we have, like, a pre-designed A/B testing paradigm within our agents. And so, we could A/B test basically anything because it’s code-first. We can A/B test voices. We can A/B test models. We can A/B test system prompts. We can A/B test business logic.
And so, what we’ll do is you can imagine that same process, right? We read all the conversations from yesterday. We noticed something that we didn’t like. We now have—our LLM has reviewed all those conversations. Now, maybe we’re not coming back to you with a code fix; maybe we’re saying, hey, we have three hypotheses of what’s going wrong here, and we have three separate A/B tests that are set up that we want to run. Do you approve them? We can run the A/B tests and then the next day come back and say, hey, these were the winners. Here’s the recommended update.
Raju: Yeah. I love that. I love that.
Will: Amazing.
Raju: I would—yeah, I’m going to use this. You know, I think each investor should get a little secret sauce. Like, I mean, I think it should be, like, the cap cable should be sent secret sauce, and I need to test my apologies. Several times [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Raju: Okay.
Nick: I’m going to be running [crosstalk 00:50:23] coordinate with you.
Raju: Fantastic. All right, so we’ve gotten deep into this. A couple of quick questions on the product, and then we’re going to just jump into Gatling Gun. Any industries where this is kind of resonating right now that, you know, like, our listeners are part of them, they should probably give you a call if they’re part of that industry or not?
Nick: Yep, I think about it, you know, we’ve had a lot of pull from restaurant technology.
Raju: Yep.
Nick: We’ve had a lot of pull from insurance. That’s a whole crazy ecosystem to understand. I do believe there’s a lot of value in banks. We’ve talked to some; there’s a lot of interest. That’s a longer sales process [crosstalk 00:50:56]—
Raju: Yeah, it always is.
Nick: —organization. I think the restaurant tech bit is actually way more generalizable, right, which is, you know, we think about who cares about owning the code? It’s not the restaurant; it’s the technology provider. And if they are a system of record, there is huge value for them to own the voice AI, right? It’s like, OpenTable wants to own the web experience, right? They’re upset that Google front-runs them, you know, and, like, takes a cut. That makes them angry.
Same thing with DoorDash, right? Like they’re upset that Google gets in front of them, right? And so, you know, they’ve felt the pain of, like, having an interface and having someone else get in front of it. And so, if you’re a system of record, whether that’s restaurants for reservations, or whether that’s a fitness studio that, like, takes, you know, booking, or anything like that, you want to own the voice interface and I think it’s a huge risk if you’re one of these systems of record and you’re just going to rely on ecosystem players to do this for you. You need to have a first party offering.
Raju: I love it. I love it. And I think you’ll get some calls. Anything else you want to share about the company, like open job recs, your website, where to send gifts, you know, like that kind of stuff?
Nick: Yeah—
Will: [laugh].
Nick: voicerun.com, that’s where you can go. If you’ve got gifts, you can send them to Raju and Will at the RRE office. [unintelligible 00:52:08] add to them and then provide them back to me.
Raju: Okay, yeah. I’ll trade you for secret sauce with those gifts.
Nick: [crosstalk 00:52:14].
Raju: Okay.
Nick: Gatling Gun?
Raju: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Okay, I’m going to jump into the Gatling Gun and keep it relatively short because, you know, we spent a lot of time with you. I love this. You know, I love you. This is fantastic. This is just a good podcast. Okay, so, rumor has it, you’re part Viking?
Nick: I’m, like, culturally, part Viking. My mom always told me, like, not to complain when I was cold or whatever because I’ve got Viking blood. Nah, it turns out, nah, I’m just, like, mostly German.
Raju: Okay. That’s too bad. So, you don’t own a broad sword or a long ship, like a Drakkar?
Nick: No, no Drakkar. I mean, I think the Germans liked broadswords, [laugh] but you know, I don’t know. Honestly we’re [unintelligible 00:52:48].
Raju: Yeah. You should have one. I mean, I think you should get one. Plus it’s a really, really interesting tool to, like, just show your children in case they’re misbehaving.
Nick: Yeah, and so that they can show their friends if their friends are misbehaving.
Raju: Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Okay, so a couple of very just generic questions: what’s your favorite AI movie of all time?
Nick: AI movie of all time. Tough one. I think I’m probably going to go with you know, Will Smith’s Will Smith’s was fun. I liked that one.
Raju: Yeah, that was a good one.
Nick: My co-founders can be very angry. Sorry. No one just saw me purse my lips as I held back, but he’s a big Space Odyssey guy.
Raju: Space Odyssey guy.
Nick: [crosstalk 00:53:27] He’s going to be mad at me.
Raju: Will, what was yours? What was yours? You still—I mean, you could change. I know I asked you, this—
Will: Probably Her.
Raju: Yeah, Her, yeah. Ex Machina. I’m going to go with Ex Machina, and I’m going to also add in Ghost in the Shell, which is anime, which, you know, I was into. Okay, funniest AI, whatever? Like, funniest thing you’ve heard AI do or, like, a movie? Any quick responses to that? Or a movie?
Nick: Yeah, or movie. No, I mean, I think broadly, I’m like, all here for just the meme increase, the increase in memes. Like, I’m here for it. I love when people just, like, lean into their ridiculous AI versions, you know, OpenAI’s Sora, when it came out, and, like, I think, like, Mark Cuban was all about it. He’s like, “Make fun of me.” I was like, “Oh now, this is what I’m here for.” Like, [unintelligible 00:54:18].
Raju: Yeah [laugh].
Nick: “Well Mark, I would love to.”
Raju: My favorite, did you ever see that Saturday Night Live skit about Alexa?
Nick: Oh.
Raju: With the old people? And it was like—and they had, like, featured, like, Alexa would be like, okay, you could put it in, like, old-person mode, and it would just be, “Uh-huh.” It would use the word, “Uh-huh.” Old people would be talking and, you know, “My son and my grandson…” “Uh-huh.” And then you could call it, like, a variety of different names, like, Allegra or Elena.
Will: [laugh].
Nick: [laugh]. That would work. That would work, yeah.
Raju: Yeah. I really love that. Anyway, this was an incredible amount of fun. I really enjoyed the time, Nick. And obviously Will. I love Will. And so, like this episode just kind of, you know, brought a lot of stuff together. And, you know, hopefully was very beneficial to our listeners, but I’m going to let will Porteous, who’s such a gentleman, and could have gone to Phi Beta Epsilon had he been at MIT—
Will: Had I been so lucky.
Raju: We would have had you as a brother. We would have definitely had you as a brother.
Will: Well, and I would have been honored. Nick, thank you so much for joining us this morning. This has been amazing. RRE POV listeners, you know, we love bringing you great RRE entrepreneurs, great RRE companies. Thanks for tuning in with us once again, and we look forward to being in touch with you soon. Take care.
Raju: Thank you for listening to RRE POV. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on X or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.