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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:04.305)
All right. Welcome to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle Evans. And this week we've got another awesome guest with us. Virag Garabjianian. Virag, welcome to the podcast.
Varag Gharibjanian (00:15.342)
Thanks Cal for having me. Great to be here.
Kyle (00:18.049)
Excited to have you. I'm excited to talk more about your background and some of your experience, but let me introduce you briefly and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. Verog is the founding partner of Actuate, which is a boutique advisory firm that helps innovative companies accelerate revenue through strategy, business development, and disruptive technology partnerships. So a lot to talk about there in that description, but why don't you tell us more about yourself and what you do.
Varag Gharibjanian (00:41.71)
Hehehe
Varag Gharibjanian (00:47.11)
Sure thing. So, you know, my story starts with the fact that I grew up in an Armenian family in Southern California. I was always expected to be a doctor or a lawyer, but I was a little bit more rebellious. You know, I was good at math and physics, so I went into engineering and undergrad. But, you know, my second year of college at UCI, unfortunately some tragedy started to happen. I lost about six people in my family in a few years, and I still bring that up to this day.
Because it forced me to, you know, ask the age-old question of, you know, what is it you want to do with your life? And, you know, fast forward a year of like soul searching and digging. This is back in like 2008, 2009. It was technology kept coming up. It wasn't as obvious as it is today, but the idea, especially of computing platforms at that time, smartphones taking off and what the future version of that could be was what really excited me. I got really lucky that my, you know, first real experience in tech was
at the world's largest private infrastructure company, wireless infrastructure company called Mobility. CEO there trusted me with a good amount of money to basically build the technology from scratch. We were trying to make mobile devices communicate with each other back in the 3G days in a more ad hoc kind of mesh networking decentralized way. And that helped relieve some of the congestion on some of those networks. So it was that first aha moment where I thought,
this intersection of technology and business is really where I wanna be for the rest of my career. Graduate from UCI, wanted to get a more formal education in that intersection. So I thought MIT would be a great place to do that. Packed the bag, moved to the East Coast, just started shaking hands and eventually ended up at a boutique consulting firm called Endeavor Partners.
That was kind of a think tank of MIT Harvard people that were helping mobile device manufacturers and wireless carriers with strategy and some IP work as well too. And so I had to prove myself there. There was a lot of research at first, but then it started becoming more client facing, managing larger projects. And it was answering those questions of how do you grow the company through better product portfolios, better business strategies.
Varag Gharibjanian (03:09.826)
and better technologies that align more with the goals of the business. So did that for a few years, was lucky enough to go to MIT across the street, did a lot of great things there for a couple of years. But I got really deep into the AR VR space in the summer of 2016. And I got to try every demo available at Silicon Valley, uh, representing applied materials at that time, so a huge semiconductor company. And I felt like I was looking into the future, the next computing platform. And.
I knew that's what I wanted to work on going forward. So graduate, come back to Los Angeles, and join this very early stage AI computer vision startup. And they were doing all the perception technologies for helping devices understand their environments and their users. And we were dialing into the AR VR space. And my role there was to figure out the go-to-market strategy.
and tie that back to how the product would be shaped from the amazing AI that we had. And then eventually hiring a team around that. And we landed some amazing deals with the larger companies like Qualcomm, Lenovo. And after a few years of that, we were getting enough of that kind of escape velocity where Qualcomm wanted to roll us into bigger plans and we sold the company, which was great.
I already had, you know, was doing some great consulting with, with larger companies and startups. And so that's what Actuate was, was born out of that friction of, you know, technology partnerships, um, and helping especially smaller startups as well with go to market and, uh, how that would relate to their products, all of that. And so that's what I've been doing. I'm in LA and, um, joining you here from Pasadena. That's the, uh, the background behind me here now. So that's a little bit about me. Happy to.
you know, zoom in wherever you'd like, but it's great to be on the show.
Kyle (05:11.733)
Awesome. Well, we definitely want to zoom in on a couple of those areas. But before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the things that you like to do outside of work or outside of the office?
Varag Gharibjanian (05:13.943)
Haha.
Sure.
Varag Gharibjanian (05:22.854)
Oh, nice. Great question. So I do outside. So I'm, you know, pretty like family friend oriented, love being around people. So spend a lot of my time with you know, the family I've got, you know, a nephew and niece, and then a nephew on my wife's side. So there's a lot of you know, family time. Sports love playing golf and tennis, grow up playing basketball, but I'm getting too old for that now. Snowboarding when the season's right. And then like, you know, try to do a lot of reading.
right? Like research on the trends in the industry, business principles. And then if I've got time, you know, looking at the stock market and looking at where the opportunities are there as kind of a, as an investor as well too. So.
Kyle (06:07.273)
Okay, that's a lot of great stuff. So I do want to zoom in, like you said, on a number of different things that you talked about. And you mentioned earlier in your career, being involved in some of the product management, some of the management and strategy, both on some of the hardware and software side, being involved in some of the development of these technologies. Tell us a little bit more about that experience. Like,
Varag Gharibjanian (06:09.046)
Yep.
Kyle (06:35.385)
you know, what was it like in helping to craft some of these things, especially earlier in the days of AR and VR and as this XR experience is starting to be shaped and taking shape ultimately.
Varag Gharibjanian (06:53.458)
Yeah, taking you back to like 2017.
Varag Gharibjanian (07:00.982)
we had realized that the XR space was probably the best for the company's core technological capabilities, which at that time were the ability to track hands and gestures, believe it or not. So just with cameras. And funny enough, like that was a little bit too early because the devices that we were dealing with at that time barely even had cameras on them. But they did, they were very basic.
And so that's where it's an example of where, you know, hardware meets software and you need certain hardware to enable software. It's put deep in the, in the tech stack. Right. So in that, uh, the ex I think the exercise there in product management in those early days is really staying in touch with the key decision makers and stakeholders in the industry who are going to determine what that hardware is going to look like.
And that was part of our value prop. There were other players who were literally building the hardware as well. Um, that's, that's an option, but it has, of course, like business trade-offs. And our value prop was, we're really focused on the software and we'll, we'll pair with, you know, the ecosystem's choice of, of hardware, right? But we had to, to do our job and to make our software relevant. We had to be very much in touch with, you know, all the big players that were going to define that role.
Qualcomm is and was and has been continuous to be the largest stakeholder, I think, with the largest share. And so we were very much in touch with them. So it was an exercise of like understanding what is your roadmap? What are all the other OEMs going to be doing in this space? What kind of cameras are they gonna be onboarding in the next 12 months, in the next 24, 36 months? And then...
educating them on, well, what are our capabilities? What does our roadmap look like? And trying to align that as much as possible. That did lead to eventually a win, because at some point, we were setting up the software to be pretty harbor agnostic. Meaning, should it be this kind of RGB camera, or if it's going to be a depth sensor, we could handle.
Varag Gharibjanian (09:29.686)
those two and others. But at that time, we realized that we were part of a larger kind of stack of other technologies. It's not as if just hand tracking is important, right? There's other feature sets. And so there was a set of cameras that were emerging at that time until like 2018, 19, where one other capability that came even before hand tracking was...
being able to track environments, just knowing where the headset is in three dimensional space, those were enabled by two very basic black and white cameras. You know, they call them monochrome cameras, whatever it means, the same thing and cheaper, smaller and, and set in a way to do that functionality really well. At first it seemed like that was very hard to do hand tracking with, but eventually when training of data sets started getting better,
I and more advanced, we started iterating on that more and more. And then realizing like, oh, wow, these are, these are aligning really well. Like we can get more and more performance if we keep investing in this. Of course, through, again, this is where BD and PM are very closely related through a lot of busy dev and, and influence. You're able to kind of tune those cameras a little bit for what you might need to edit your software to, to make it more performant. And we were successful in doing that pretty well.
And I think that's, that's where like the rubber meets the road of good biz dev while you're, while you're building out technology and then within that, you know, eventually a good product with a good offering. Right. So I think that answers your question, but I can, I can zoom in more where needed.
Kyle (11:15.113)
Yeah, no, you've brought up a couple of things that really come to mind, like as I think through a lot of this and some of the experience that I've had in similar cases. I'm interested just zooming out a little bit on the relationship that you've had with developing products and then the biz dev like you were talking about. So as we're working with...
Varag Gharibjanian (11:17.588)
Ha ha.
Varag Gharibjanian (11:38.786)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (11:40.757)
you know, business development and as we're building products, you know, with the product management and whether that's hardware and software or potentially just software. Like, what are some of the things that you found that really make that work from both your experience and then maybe some of the things that you've seen that, you know, hey, these are the things that worked and that, you know, the principles that make this work going forward so that, you know, you're not...
either fighting against each other or you don't have like, you know, one group working in one way and another group working another way. You're really working in tandem to make this thing happen.
Varag Gharibjanian (12:22.922)
Yeah, it's a good question because it points at what could be like a lot of important tension, right? Again, in an organization.
Varag Gharibjanian (12:36.414)
And let me like maybe describe that tension a little bit and what I did to sort of help. So there might be a, when you're in early stages of a company, there might be a opportunity with a larger company or what might be a kind of bigger deal. And that's really great for the company commercially to like, and jump into that and get your first customer. That's a really hard thing to get by the way, your first customer. That's a separate podcast, but like, but that customer may want you to do things that are
in scope, some of which might be out of scope, right? And so as a biz dev person, you may really want to lean into that and, and push the company that way. And there's benefits in doing that, right? You get your first customer, you learn from there, you drive revenue. But at the same time, I think it's, it's important to, before you leap in too far, you want to know like, well, what are, what are the customers want? Right? And this is where like really solid customer discovery comes in and hopefully.
You have enough money raised or the bandwidth and the time to go out and do that before you jump in with two feet to just one customer where you take on too much risk. Right. At the same time, the other side of the pond and even in a small company is a CTO or a product person who's trying to advance the technology with what drives them. It could be like new cutting edge research. It could be, you know,
wanting to build for the sake of building, which when you're a builder, that's what drives you and motivates you. And then you might start building things that are not aligned with what customer needs are at that given point in time. Right. And it's, it's in that intersection where. If you can land on an intersection where real actual progress happens in finding product market fit eventually, right. I actually think that this is.
It's a normal tension. That's the first thing to note. Um, but there aren't any good tools actually out there yet. I think that do a good job with this. It's still an exercise that sits in spreadsheet form. And that's what I did. That's what I did. Right. Which was, let's go find those first 10 customers that makes sense with business goals, we know we want to go after this industry because that's where there's. There's growth.
Varag Gharibjanian (14:59.074)
That's where there's a willingness to pay. There is a need for this kind of technology. That exercise, which is more go-to-market strategy is done. Let's get the 10 customers that make the most sense and have conversations with them just in discovery on what their needs are. From there, let's back that down to like, okay, what are the technologies that enable those needs? And then looking at a cross-section of those 10, like which are the most common, right? One of them.
might be paying a lot more, but if it has two or three, you know, features or technological capabilities or attributes that like aren't aligning with the others, you gotta, you have to, as the business person in early stage, you have to, you have to know, or the CEO, that could be the CEO's job. You need to know what that, you need to be real about that. Right. Uh, and then put that in spreadsheet form and communicate that with your product people or with your technology team. Uh, and.
And identify it like, okay, you know what, this is what we have now, but these two or three things keep coming up across seven out of the 10 that should be part of the roadmap. And then of course, it's more of a PM exercise from there in terms of, okay, well, which one of these do we tackle first? What's like a first step towards having that, that capability and then prioritizing, you know, by effort and all that, right. But.
Sad to say that it is, it is a lot of conversation and then as simple as spreadsheets, you know, I mean there could be a tool that emerges that's better than that to be a little more analytical or a little more visual about that. But that's what we did at our time.
Kyle (16:32.781)
Yeah. No, that definitely resonates both with me and I'm sure with a lot of people listening. I do want to talk some more about some of the things that you mentioned, but as we get there, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your present day actuate. What is it that kind of led you? You mentioned some of the things that kind of led you to that.
Varag Gharibjanian (16:36.338)
Hahaha
Kyle (16:57.753)
What was it that led to actuate and what is it that you kind of focus on with what you're doing right now?
Varag Gharibjanian (17:04.81)
The first impetus for Actuate was...
the friction behind technology partnerships. With more and more companies doing more interesting things in a more distributed way and all over the world, it becomes more important to basically like find the needs of some companies, could be large ones or ones that have some product market fit and then figure out what are the gaps between what they're trying to do internally and for their customers.
And then find the right technologies that make that better, right? Whether it's a product offering or whether it's an internal operation. And there's just so many options out there of companies that can do amazing things. Like how do you go about defining the requirements? And by the way, if it is for a large company, then like, it's not one person's requirements, it's, it could be eight people or more. And there isn't really like a structured way of doing that. A lot of, a lot of organizations may have it.
Might have a team that's supposed to do that. And they may have a more structured approach, but more often than not, even if they do, it's a little hand wavy in nature. And I've been, and I've been somewhat of a victim of that. I've seen them be a victim of, of not being structured around that. So that's the original impetus behind actually, it was like technology partnership as a service, once I started doing that more and more, I realized. Well, there's more and more needs out there. On the startup side, there are many who.
Kyle (18:19.142)
Thanks for watching!
Varag Gharibjanian (18:37.71)
still face the challenge, especially if they're more technical of like having a proper go-to-market, figuring out how to land a customer deal, especially if it's a higher ticket one, they may not have had those experiences. So helping them with that and then believe it or not, like, you know, fundraising has just comes up more and more, right? Like, because those things are closely tied, especially on the go-to-market. I specialize a little bit more on
quote unquote, deep tech, which it's kind of a vague term, but really what it means is like technologies that aren't just a simple mobile app or a simple web app, right, it requires a technological differentiation or innovation that enables the product's capabilities. And people who can build those are often the same people who don't have as much experience on the business side. So that, you know, is a good alignment with me
the world's best programmer or engineer, I can get in the room pretty quickly and kind of understand the capabilities or limitations or what they're trying to do and then get to the business side very quickly from there. So, right now it's services for startups on especially B2B deep tech ones that are go-to-market and fundraising and some biz-def coaching. And then for the larger companies or mid-cap companies,
It is technology partnerships. Sometimes it's just building a point of view on, Hey, can we do with AI in our business, right? I mean, that's coming up more and more obviously. So it's, you know, it's, it's consulting projects around that. And then more recently there's been more and more requests around like deployment of some of these technologies. Right. And so that's something, especially around XR and AI where I specialize a little more that's coming up.
Kyle (20:33.233)
I think that's really interesting. And I'm interested in, first off, some of the go-to-market. Like, what are some of the issues or difficulties that you see in companies or people that you're working with that they have in some of that go-to-market, whether that's initial go-to-market or subsequent go-to-market with the things that they're working on?
Varag Gharibjanian (21:00.766)
So the worst I've seen is...
Varag Gharibjanian (21:05.462)
Companies who just say, hey, we're going after this market and this is the size of that market based on this report. It's gonna be a $20 billion market in the next three to five years. And we're going after that market. Okay, that is not nearly specific enough, right? And so not being able to answer the question of within that market, like get more specific, like what segment, right, within that market.
So what location, we're talking about a customer target here, especially if it's B2B. Like, are we talking about just North America? Are we talking about Europe? Uh, what company sizes are we talking about? Is it like small cap, mid cap, large cap? Right. These all have different implications on how you, what channel you reach them through. Uh, and then, um, getting down to like the psychographic of like, who's actually going to buy this, right? And that is totally missing. And then, and.
Oftentimes it's not really like a staged approach that makes any sense. Like, Hey, phase one, we're going to start here. Once we tackle that market, then we can move to this second market or an adjacent market, and it makes sense to do that because now we've kind of proven ourselves here or we have access to this set of customers where it's easy to reach that second stage, right? Something that's like logical. And especially what's missing is.
Even if you are that concrete, it's like, why this one first? And why would that be easier? Or how would you reach them? Or do they have the willingness to pay? Those kinds of questions are just unanswered. They're just left way too simplistic. And then oftentimes, you'll see folks that without having any of that defined, they're already defining a channel of how they're going to reach them. It's like, well, I know your channel makes no sense if you're not being specific about the segment yet. So you know.
Even within the channel, the specifics of how you're going to do that matter. Right. If we're going to go after we've defined now, mid cap healthcare companies that are in the United States. Okay. That's quite specific, right? Uh, hospitals, especially let's say. All right. Our founder happens to be a physician who's worked or rotated at all these different hospitals that helps that makes sense, right? That gets more clarity and that's a not the best example, but you know what I'm getting at, right? That.
Varag Gharibjanian (23:32.01)
That is a much better convincing go to market than some of the stuff I see today.
Kyle (23:38.631)
Why do you think it is that some companies struggle with that part of their go-to-market strategy?
Varag Gharibjanian (23:57.482)
Okay, I'm taking a second here because I want to be careful of how I say that. I, I tend to get exposed to more.
technology driven companies, founders that, or early teams that are holding on to some differentiated new innovative technology that no one else has. If you have the capabilities to actually build that, that could take a lifetime to be that good. A whole career focused on doing that. So, you're not gonna put the time into reading the books or listening to the people who are talking about go to market. And...
You could be a little bit naive about what it takes to actually land a first customer because maybe you haven't done that before. On top of that, we went through, you know, like a 10 year bull cycle here of, of money flowing pretty more freely than it is now. And so you found a lot of people who were able to raise money without having that question answered well. Right. And so, and maybe even like outsourcing that to the first.
is that person they may find, but they haven't really done the upfront analysis, so they hire the wrong person, you know, it turns into a mess. So it's kind of a confluence of factors I think came together that made that more and more of a problem. I'm trying to think if there's any other reasons. Those are probably the primary ones that come to mind right now.
Kyle (25:31.381)
Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I guess from your perspective, like as you're working with, you know, a number of different companies or clients in helping craft this, like what, you know, what is your approach in helping them like actually craft a better go-to-market strategy?
Varag Gharibjanian (25:57.102)
Sure, and before I answer that, I want to add one more reason as to why I think it's been a challenge.
I do notice there's some startups that get started out of a team of people that may have come out of a larger organization. Let's say it's 10 people from name X Fortune 100 company and they were working on some tech, they spun it out and they got a ton of funding. When you're at a large organization, people don't realize that a lot of times people will buy your technology or entertain using it because it comes from that brand.
And if you haven't had a lot of startup experience before, you will be humbled when you get to the table, when you realize that like, when you don't have that brand behind you, uh, you don't have the same perception anymore. And it really becomes a lot more of a business of exercise. And a lot of people just kind of discount that because it's already been done for them at other companies. So they don't really know what it takes. And
At a big company, you can be a little bit more vague and just enter and that brand will take you quite far. And you just don't have that when you're starting out. To answer your question about how to help, I like to be a little bit more analytical about it. I think from the different books and stuff I've read about different people who have tackled this, like there's many different frameworks. I like to look at four or five different things.
while trying to prioritize markets, right? I look at which market is biggest, which one's growing fastest, which one has a willingness to pay, which one do you have good access to, which one actually really needs what you have or has another way of framing that in the Y Combinator terms, like has a recurring urgent problem that your technology uniquely solves.
Varag Gharibjanian (27:55.538)
Just starting with that, if you can do that and then do a simple exercise of brainstorming around, Hey, here's the five markets we're thinking about and kind of just filtering, scoring, and then filtering and ranking across those. You have a strong hypothesis, but that's all you have at that point. That doesn't mean you, you jump in with everybody into that. You might maybe for three to six months, but you want to define success and then go out and.
You know, uh, define the channel and then go out and try to try to do it, test it. Right. And then see what you learn. See if you hit that metric you were looking for. And if you didn't, was the metric too high? Was it, um, it was, it was just fine, but you came up short and you're wrong on one of the assumptions you made across those criteria I mentioned. Then take the next one and, uh, with your learnings and try again. Right. So that's how I.
tend to set it up.
Kyle (28:56.245)
Yeah. I think that having a go-to-market, like an actual go-to-market strategy is so important. And actually taking the time to do it is something that I think too often is an afterthought in a lot of product development and a lot of the things that we're doing just because you, kind of like you were saying, like you can have a really good idea or you can have a really strong
Kyle (29:25.369)
Like the idea of the product will sell itself or like we've got this thing and people will just buy it. And that's, it's just not the case. Like you have to be able to understand who it is specifically that is going to need this thing. It's not just a matter of like creating a really great thing and somebody out there is going to buy it. You have to be able to create it very specifically for, you know, somebody, like you were saying,
the physician who has rotated across these hospitals who has this need, and we know very specifically who we're going to be targeting. Otherwise, you're trying to sell to a $20 billion industry and you get lost in all of that. And so having a really good understanding of what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do it is so important because like you said too, there's not...
infinite amount of money flowing right now. And so like you don't have an infinite runway anymore, like in the past. So these things are even more important than they were, you know, a year or two ago when runways were longer and cash was abundant. Like it's much more important to like dial in very, very specifically on a lot of these things because you don't have, at least in my experience, you don't have the amount of time and bandwidth.
to make as many mistakes. Like obviously you can still experiment, but like the cycle has to be much tighter and much more focused than it has in the past. I'm interested in how that kind of jibes with what you're seeing.
Varag Gharibjanian (31:05.198)
It's true.
Varag Gharibjanian (31:11.558)
I'm in 100% alignment there. Uh, it's, it's harder than ever and you have less cycles to try. Um,
I think the best case would be like you had just as many cycles and, and you were being prudent about it. And, you know, um, but I think we were in a place just a couple of years ago where, you know, you could kind of keep pushing without getting much in return and that could have been okay. And it was hard to differentiate. You know, the, the signal from the noise there on like how interested people were, you know, and what you're doing. So now it's a lot more concrete, right? People really want to buy things that are going to solve.
their problems, right? So, um, you gotta do. You know, more with less and, and test more quickly and, and put guard rails in place so like, you're not going too far down a path, right? That isn't the right one. And then like be able to pivot fast. Right. So it's harder for sure. It's harder.
Kyle (32:17.049)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested, like, you know, what are some other, you know, potential blind spots or potential areas that you're seeing as you work with companies and clients that, you know, maybe aren't as, again, kind of like the go-to-market strategy, maybe aren't as dialed in as they ought to be, or as you would expect or hope that they would be as they're, you know, developing new products, or new services, or new features.
Varag Gharibjanian (32:56.726)
I'm trying to think of one that's a little bit more product related here for the audience, but...
Varag Gharibjanian (33:08.331)
What I do see often as well as, this is a little bit more business focused, but like a proper sales funnel, right? Even as you're doing.
Discovery, sometimes the best discovery is just going for the sale. Right. Uh, you can ask, you can have a lot of conversations with people about like, is this a problem? Is it not? Can you rank it? Can you do, you know, that proper customer discovery, but sometimes you don't really know until you put an offer in front of them and push for the sale and see if it's something they're willing to put money towards, uh, and then. Even as part of the testing.
being very clear with customers on when they're gonna get to experience the value of your product, what steps they have to go through. And this is again, in more of the context of like a B2B motion. If the customer doesn't know what to do next or isn't clear on how long it's gonna take for them to see the value of what you can provide, how much they're gonna pay for it and what steps they need to move through with you to get there, it's, I've used the analogy of,
It's like getting in a car with someone you don't know and then not knowing what the destination is and how long it's gonna take to get there and how much traffic there is along the way. Like who would wanna get in that car? Like not many people. So I think too many early stage companies, they just kind of assume that the customer might wanna drive that. It's like, no, that's on you. That's on you, right? And again, that comes from some of those.
potentially some of those preconceived notions of like, I was at a big company and it just like, everyone wanted to work with us. That could be one reason or they're not as business oriented. You have to really telegraph that, right? So you have to, a little bit of theory of mind stuff, right? Where put yourself in the customer's position, even better if you might have the same problem that you're trying to solve for them and use your product or like go through the funnel the way you're doing it now, would you buy it?
Varag Gharibjanian (35:17.314)
Would you be proud about it? Would you be excited? And, you know, audit that really well. Like I'm a fan of having three steps always, or like the number three is a magic number in sales and beyond. And like, what are the three steps? Tell them that and telegraph it for them so they sort of know what they're getting into. That's a blind spot I see oftentimes, right? It's a lot of...
customer discovery or leads that are just kind of, we don't know what the next step is and the customer doesn't either. That's never good.
Kyle (35:53.785)
Yeah, no, I definitely agree. And you've touched on, I think, a really interesting point of the being able to bridge that product market fit of you being able to show that there is not just the value there that, you know, the customer can see and it is apparent, like it's not hidden, but
Varag Gharibjanian (36:08.139)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (36:21.605)
so much so that they're willing to pay for it. You know, you're kind of like you're saying, you get out there and are able to actually sell a product. And if you're not able to do that, if a customer is not willing to actually pay for a product, then you don't have, you haven't achieved that product market fit yet, where you have solved something in a way that is valuable enough.
or at least they can't see the value yet in a way that they're willing to pay for it. And so that's something kind of like you're saying that you can actually get out and test. You can, by not being afraid to get out there and sell a product, you can experiment and see if the value is there, if people understand the value that you're providing or if they don't. And if they don't, why don't they see the value? Like, is it not there in the product? Or is it just, you know, so far away from
where they are or where they can access it that you need to make some sort of adjustment. I'm interested in exploring that a little bit. Like how can customers or how can we, and especially some of the people you're working with, how can we stay close enough to customers to actually get some of this feedback? Like how, when you're working with them, like what are some of the things that you do in order to do that and get that feedback?
Varag Gharibjanian (37:56.686)
I think willingness to pay is an important one.
Varag Gharibjanian (38:05.75)
too often we think the product needs to be like very, very polished before we can put it in front of a customer. And that there needs to be a certain amount of polish to it. Uh, so that it's not so ugly that no one is so everyone's so confused how to use it. Right. But, but sometimes that is a good test. Like, Hey, this is something that doesn't look very great, but it's so targeted to a problem that I have that I'm willing to go through that mess.
to try it, right? That could also be a solid test at some points. Okay, the product's kind of full of some friction, but it is trying to get at something that it's already doing something better than how I do it now. Right.
Varag Gharibjanian (38:53.042)
I encourage some of the clients that I work with to get it out there earlier.
But I think it's not wise to...
Varag Gharibjanian (39:11.962)
get it out there too far, too quickly, because sometimes you only have, you know, one shot on the larger stage and you want to be ready for that. And so I'm a believer in like the kind of private beta approach of, hey, let's get the first 10. Let's just get 10 people to love us, right? That are in the same segment, hopefully. And they get to try this, give feedback.
Varag Gharibjanian (39:40.786)
I also don't think it's wise just to give it away for free to start. Be like, maybe a little bit for free, but to get the full cycle through your MVP, even would you pay or would you not pay? And, um, that is very telling. If they won't pay anything and that's like, that's already a sign, right? Like you're
The way you're communicating your product, if it is something that is really solving a reoccurring urgent problem, then they should be willing to pay even when it doesn't seem like it's polished yet. So yeah.
Kyle (40:19.789)
Yeah, that's definitely something that we've talked about a number of times, is the pricing strategy and it's definitely, I think we and a number of people are in agreement that the freemium model is, it's okay in a very, very slim number of cases. And generally speaking, like people, you should be asking...
Varag Gharibjanian (40:24.374)
Yeah, okay.
Varag Gharibjanian (40:28.654)
Sure.
Kyle (40:49.317)
customers to pay because you should be providing value that is that people are willing to pay and there's only like some very small number of cases where Giving it away for free makes sense and that typically is like in a very in much more of like a network effect type model which is most generally not in Most cases of the products that we're building. It's much more that you know, we you should be
Varag Gharibjanian (41:08.974)
Potentially, yeah.
Kyle (41:19.313)
pricing your product appropriately and not giving it away, kind of like you were saying.
Varag Gharibjanian (41:24.746)
I would add to that as well that I've seen situations where early stage companies are so technology or product driven that way too much like early, they are releasing that product to people just sending it out there and don't have a way to even track why these people might be balancing what they think of it.
It's like, you just gave this to your first 100 customers. You threw them a link, they came on, they tried it. You don't know how long they stayed or why they bounced. I think it's probably more wise to control that a little bit more. Be on a video call with them while they're going through it and see what they do, or even be next to them in person while they're doing it. So that you can...
You can really see what's going on. Get a way better learning signal, basically.
Kyle (42:20.537)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested, you kind of talked about some of the deeper technologies and some of the things that you have experienced in as far as AR, VR, XR, and even AI now. Where do you see these technologies currently? And where do you see them going into the future?
Varag Gharibjanian (42:43.746)
XR is an interesting inflection point. There are more than a few ways to track, technology diffusions, new computing platforms. I'm a little bit more academic from my background on how I look at that. I've done some research on this before. There is a concept called,
dominant design. It's a word coined by a technology researcher named James Utterback. The idea of a dominant design is that when there's a new kind of technology, you could take this back to like printers, you know, or fax machines, more modern day smartphones and all that. There is a moment where there's a lot of almost, I think he describes it as a kind of a Cambrian explosion of a lot of different forms.
of let's say a given device, a technological device, and they all have different functions that are trying to tackle. So let me ground that a little bit with cell phones for like, if you imagine the years, like late 90s to like 2007, how many different types of phones were there in different forms for different functions, right? There was like candy bar, there were other feature phones, there were these like, you know, flip devices. One was a little more gaming oriented.
The other a little bit more, just say, just for calls and texts. Right. Uh, and then we have this iPhone moment where Apple figures out, not necessarily brand new technology, but they figure out, you know, this interaction mechanism, right? If pinch to zoom, multi-touch. And all of a sudden everyone switches and starts adopting that design. And, uh, that is.
the concept of a dominant design. There's a change in going from that explosive kind of phase to one that is more, hey, we now figured out how users interact with this and it's more about process. It's more about manufacturing capability. It's a different skillset now. If you're a competitor to that device, you can now kind of piggyback off that design and innovate on maybe more on the supply chain. And you see that now, like an iPhone is not too different physically from a Samsung Galaxy device, for example.
Varag Gharibjanian (45:14.47)
So what does that mean? That's a long setup for where are we with XR, right? So XR is kind of a term for extended reality. It includes AR and VR, especially I focus a little more headset driven, right? And I think on the VR side of that, we're a little bit more mature where we have somewhat of a dominant design to give some of that credit to
Meta and their ability to build the quest and you know, there is now a standard set of features and a form factor that everyone kind of understands now and there's a dominant base of users of Call it, you know 10 million users or something like that, right that use this pretty regularly Mostly for gaming there's enterprise uses and stuff, but we've kind of hit a dominant design there in my opinion where Now, especially with you know, the vision pro coming in that is in
interesting inflection point that is kind of bridging AR and VR. And so we're almost at that moment where you can almost think of the smartwatch era, where there was a lot of other smartwatches before the Apple Watch, but then the Apple Watch comes out and now it's the most or the best-selling smartwatch there is. So I think we're on that cusp. On the AR side, especially a lot of AR glasses, we're not...
as mature there. It's more exciting, but it's also a harder problem, especially with displays and battery. There's just a lot more technological challenges. But the Vision Pro is interesting because it is a nice blend of these, right? But it's still not the same full-blown vision of mixed reality or augmented reality glasses that are always on the go and replacing your smartphone.
Right? I think that's not there yet. So we're probably...
Varag Gharibjanian (47:12.939)
six to seven years away where we've got something that.
You can start to replace maybe your laptop with or your smartphone with, right? Definitely between now and then you've got, you know, kind of a more repaired situation, right? Um, but probably six, seven years away from something that's a little bit more. Replacing your smartphone and on the go everywhere always, um, a, to switch over to AI a little bit. I think, um, there's all these different forms of AI, obviously generative AI is where all the focus is now.
I don't see that as a new computing platform. Many people think this is now the next thing beyond the smartphone. I don't see it like that. I see it as almost a little bit more of infrastructure, almost like blockchain was, in a way. It is almost like this layer that can now sit in between all the services we already have and just make them way easier and more interesting to use.
and more capable than before. But you predominantly still access that through the same computing platforms, right? Smartphones and laptops. So.
It is very, very exciting time in that way. I'm seeing more and more products that I use every day that are being supercharged by AI, which is really amazing. And I am very blown away by the capabilities of, you know, some of these LLMs and the questions that they can answer in a way that you would never be able to, you know, before with just a Google search, right? I mean, it's pretty impressive. And we'll see like in the next three, four years, we'll have more and more products that are supercharged with that.
Varag Gharibjanian (49:00.298)
And I think the LLMs will get more and more accurate, right? I think there's still some mistakes they make. They go off the deep end in terms of what they say and they can't back it up with valid evidence yet, right? And so there'll be some tuning there, but.
breakthrough has happened in that regard. So, which is really an exciting time. So will we see any brand? I think the question is, will we see any brand new native AI products? Uh, that mean you now displaced the predominant digital apps you knew you use now and start using that instead. I don't see that yet. I think it's certainly possible, but I don't see that yet. I still think you want to message your friend.
Right? You have to do that through some form of text. Like you're probably going to do that with, with text. You're probably going to do that with messenger or Instagram or WhatsApp. Could you do that a little bit better now? Cause there is something sort of suggesting you what to write. Yes. Or email. Yes. But like, you're still going to get on the computer, get on your app and, and do it in that way, there are some interesting companies that are now taking what an LLM can do and they're trying to change the interface.
On top of that, one I'll call out is Humane. They're doing interesting things, their ex-Apple team, where they're not leaning into AR or VR, but more of like, hey, we don't need your screen anymore. We can do all the, a lot of the stuff through voice. And that's interesting, but it's TBD on whether or not it can be done that way. But I do think with the existing devices we have now, there is an easier way to have them speak to one another.
use voice as input. So I'm looking forward to in the next two, three years, the ability to pick up my phone and say, hey, make me a reservation at eight o'clock at such and such place, the classic example. And now Siri or whatever the agent is can actually understand that, have the hooks into the relevant digital services and apps speaking to one another well enough where that can actually happen. And that is a new mode of interaction.
Varag Gharibjanian (51:14.818)
but it's not nearly as exciting as what Spatial XR can do, way future down the line. And there is, this is a question you didn't ask, there is an interesting intersection between those two technologies, XR and AI Windows, merge which is already happening in some Unity apps, some amazing agency comes to these applications that you just didn't have before. And that's already happening now, which is cool.
Kyle (51:42.497)
Yeah. I think you've touched on some incredibly, incredibly exciting points that are both happening, like you said, and then will be happening and probably something that we just can't even think of at this point, which will be incredibly exciting as well. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. Well, Rog, this has been a really, really great conversation. And I think we've
Varag Gharibjanian (51:57.994)
So cool. It's a good time to be alive in this space without a doubt. Yeah.
Kyle (52:10.833)
Really, really great topics as we've gone through. I have a couple wrap up questions that we'd like to ask everybody as we wrap this up. The first one, and these don't have to be product or business related, but have you watched or read or listened to anything recently that you've found particularly interesting and would like to share?
Varag Gharibjanian (52:16.43)
Cool.
Varag Gharibjanian (52:37.782)
You know, as soon as you said it, there was something that popped in my head. Uh, if I think more, it might, there might be something that surfaces higher up, but there was a post from Sam Altman. Who leads Y Combinator. And he talked about how
OpenAI and its invention of chat GPT went against many of the principles that he and his organization tries to push to all startups. And then from there, that's a quite influential organization across like how startups think and get to market. And it was interesting because he said,
Basically, those same principles were not used in creating this. It was a lot of, we don't know who the customer is, and we don't know what the problem is we're solving. But we threw a ton of money and resources at it, and we came up with something that was just really interesting. Then now people are kind of pulling into whatever they do.
Varag Gharibjanian (53:46.174)
Which is a challenge. It's a very...
controversial thing to say from someone who's been pushing a different narrative for so many years. There is something about that I don't like and there's something about that I do like. So one thing I like about it is I think we've been
over the last 10, 15 years with all that money that was flowing a little too like caught up in building things that
Varag Gharibjanian (54:16.238)
could drive a ton of revenue, right? But weren't really like game changing category changes in how we live our lives, right? So it was a game of getting attention, monetizing that, and it's like, here's the next app, right? And at the end of the day, so much competition in that space, we still use like the same 10 apps mostly, like there hasn't been a lot of turnover in that.
I would have loved to see more products and services. When I was 15, thinking about being in year 2023, I would have had a very different view of the future. There may have been some flying cars, there may have been headsets already that we're using all day long, just really big changes, internet level changes. And that's part of what he said that made me think, if more people think like that, maybe we'll get there. We're a little more open to that.
Kyle (55:07.537)
Good.
Varag Gharibjanian (55:15.254)
That's cool. That's kind of what I got into technology in the first place, was those kinds of mega changes, let's say. What I don't like about it is it kind of, it's like, that may not serve the typical startup who needs to also survive in this environment, right? So it's something I'm still processing, but was something to flag my attention. You know, I was like, Oh, wow, that's, that's interesting.
Kyle (55:41.121)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you. And I don't know what direction to take that because agree completely. We get so, and probably gonna wax philosophical here, we get so focused on the business case for everything that if there isn't a way to make money off of something, then what...
Varag Gharibjanian (55:44.022)
Yeah.
Kyle (56:06.565)
what is it that we're going to do? Or if there isn't like the need, the apparent need for this that eventually will translate into being able to turn this into some sort of viable thing, then like, you know, we focus so much on that as opposed to going almost back to this like childlike mentality of I just want to create for the sake of creating and see what comes of this and maybe something amazing and maybe nothing and
Varag Gharibjanian (56:26.242)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (56:36.217)
to just do that. And eventually, we may get a lot of nothings, but we may get these incredible inventions that are life-changing or society-changing types of things that otherwise we wouldn't get. And I think fostering more of that would be incredible. How we foster that, I don't know, because it's an incredibly difficult question.
Varag Gharibjanian (56:58.026)
I don't know either. Yeah, it is. I would love to see like, let's get let's have both happen. Maybe that's a something for big companies to continue taking on because they can they have the budgets to support that or it's large universities that have those research institutions that can do that stuff. But I want to see more of that happen. If startups could do that, that'd be really cool as well. Right. So let's try to back those things that have big ambitions as well. You could
There could be some, you know, thinking out loud, but there could be some intersection of those, right? Where they, you know, there are some companies doing that with mobility and, you know, air travel and things like that. That's cool stuff. All right, let's see that come to market. I love that.
Kyle (57:40.345)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, that's a great call out. Awesome. And I guess the last question, are there any products that you're using or have used that you're either enjoying or maybe not enjoying? Those could be digital products or physical products.
Varag Gharibjanian (58:02.478)
Hmm. An easy one is, you know, GPT 4.0. I just, I just upgraded to that and I was a little mind blown at like how much better it is. Uh, just, I think.
It's such a capable product that most don't know how capable it is because they literally don't know what it can do and they don't know how to interact with it. I think it's a really interesting thing. I've never seen that before out of a product. It's usually a product has like a set of affordances and it's clear what you can do with it. But this is, it's just blue ocean. It's like every day I'm like, Oh my God, I can do that too. So that's pretty wild. I've never seen a product like that before. Um, the other quick answer is
I have a Tesla that I just, I think, it's just an amazing car. You know, I'm still very bullish on them and how much better it is than other cars I get into that are more expensive sometimes. It just, it's leaps and bounds better in so many ways. That's kind of more obvious, but I haven't bought anything more recently that I would call out beyond those two.
Kyle (59:15.545)
Okay, those are good call-outs. Definitely. All right, well, Brock, again, this has been a great conversation. We've covered a ton of ground, but where can people go to find out more about you, to find out more about Actuate, about all of the things that you're working on?
Varag Gharibjanian (59:16.702)
Yeah.
Varag Gharibjanian (59:35.626)
Two ways to get in touch easiest is my LinkedIn. So not too many people with my name. So Varag Garibjanian, you know, you type that into LinkedIn. Maybe we'll leave it in the show notes. The website is actuatetech.io. So A-C-T-U-A-T-E techtch.io. So, you know, if you wanna get in touch, message me. What's going on, LinkedIn? If you wanna just, you know, just view what's going on.
and what we do, then go to the website.
Kyle (01:00:05.937)
Okay, awesome. Yeah, we'll put both of those links in the show notes so you can check that out. You can get in contact and chat with Varag about anything tech related or specifically about some of the things that may be pertaining to business specifically if those are important or top of mind right now which for a lot of companies they should be. So.
Awesome. Well, really appreciate all of your insights. Everything that we talked about, I think has been a great conversation with a ton of helpful information. So appreciate you and appreciate all of the things that we were able to discuss.
Varag Gharibjanian (01:00:46.69)
Kyle, I appreciate the really inquisitive questions that kind of bring some of this stuff out. So thank you for doing what you do and keep doing it, please, for everybody else.
Kyle (01:00:58.037)
Awesome. Well, thank you and thank you everyone for listening.