We are a platform for remote work. Our mission is to create great work from home jobs powered by AI. A lot of companies and individuals use us to convert all your text. There's a lot of video all over the web from YouTube to Netflix and all these be captioning sub-pedaled.
And so we serve all of those needs for everybody from the one guy with the podcast to large media companies like CNN. The Reggae News is coming in to CNN. On the other side of our business, we have freelancers who work at home and can earn money from the parajamas anytime. And we give them the ability to choose what they do when they do it.
They can make money to helpfully deliver the life they want. A lot of them are home with children or family obligations and we're able to fill the cracks in their day in a way they can't otherwise do. We have 150 employees, more than half our engineers. We've raised $31 million dollars.
They're really close for the first time. They're less value-ish with $206 million dollars. There are so many people in the world that would love to work remotely but can't. They don't have an opportunity in their small town or country.
I just think that there's going to be a huge change in our lifetimes where by the time I'm dead, I think it'll be a billion people who work remotely. Five million is 9 and 12. 10 million. 15 million dollars.
100 million dollars. I have a billion. It's $250 million dollars. One or two people in a bedroom actually for threats to these giant multi-billion dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose.
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The case in Chibola, companies is Rev.com. We are a platform for remote work for customers. We convert audio to text and our mission is to create great work from home jobs powered by AI. So we're two set of marketplace.
I use you guys. What if I transfer to our podcast using Rev? Yeah. So a lot of companies and individuals use us to convert audio to text.
Podcasts are used a lot. People in media use us a ton. But so do a lot of other industries, whether it's e-learning websites, they need videos captioned, whether it's market research firms that have a focus group to transcribe. There are user research teams that transcribe audio.
There's a lot of video all over the web from YouTube to Netflix and all needs to be captioned and subtitled. And so we serve all of those needs for everybody from the one guy with a podcast to large media companies like CNN who use us all the time for audio video. And then on the other side of our business, we have freelancers who work at home and can earn money from the pyjamas at any time. They work flexibly.
They can work as much as they want. And we give them the ability to choose the work they do when they do it and they can make money to kind of help the next dollar they want. A lot of them are home with children or family obligations and we're able to fill the cracks in their day and keep them busy, help them make money in a way they can't otherwise do. And brag a little bit how far you guys have come.
So you started the company how many years ago? Yeah, I started the company almost 10 years, nine and a half years ago. We have a few of our public we have a little metrics. You can mention the private one.
It's cool. Yeah, we have 50,000 people who work on the platform each month. We've raised $31 million. We were on the four AI list a few months ago and it said in there, there we just closed for the first time.
Their last valuation was $206 million. We have 150 employees, more than half our engineers. We have how do you get to 206 million usually the valuations around numbers? Why two of six?
I think in that case, multiple of numbers that have been. Oh, six, you know, it's always a peculiar process. I mean, I think it was a small round. I think in that case we agreed to the round size first pre money and then that got it on.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. About 2014, we were having trouble hiring engineers as everybody does because it's a competitive market and everybody in the Bay Area is fishing in the same pond.
I started talking to advisors and board members and one of my board members was involved in a company that had a big office in Seattle and also went to San Francisco. And he made the point, you know, that's not the only place to hire engineers. So I thought, well, you know, that's a good point. Let me think a little bit about this and look around at the world.
And I realized that the Bay Area because of the lack of construction and the housing costs and the various way the labor market and the real-time market works here, I thought it would be a tough place to be only based here, right? The Bay Area has the best of a lot of things, but I felt that it would be good to have another office in a city with a lower cost of the day, much looking around for a lot of reasons shows Austin and we now have offices in both places and we're hiring a lot in both offices. We think both markets are great for different reasons. We have some people that go back and forth between the two.
I think it's really hard to retain people for more than 10 years. If you're only in the Bay Area, I think there's a lot of examples of companies that had a really strong start and then a lot of their people left after they vested and they ended up without maybe as much of the of the core result people as they would have wanted. I know I saw some of you once where Mark Zuckerberg said, if you go back in time, he would have done Facebook in Boston. I don't remember what he said.
It was speaking to say for a guy like that. And I was reading one book. He was chaos monkey. He's a talk to a Facebook.
And the guy said that when he had the Facebook, he met somebody who was employed in between 90 Facebook and that he or she was the only person of the first 30 other than Zuckerberg was still there. Right. And so I can imagine if that's assuming this fact is true, he must have been kind of bummed that the first one crew is gone. Twenty people he got.
I mean, they're there cases they made up to you know it's a money. They did a great and they went on to other things. It's got to be hard to keep innovating the way you want to when you lose time like that. And what I see is that your very housing costs create this pressure on people to jump ship pretty fast and it's a rational economic strategy to kind of hop around company to company where you go to big company and get paid like cash or you got some options that maybe worth a lot of money.
You do that two or three times and one of them strikes goal and it works out. And that's probably good for the individual. Not great for the company. If the company has long term aspirations to big things because our Google's a very impressive company.
Obviously they produce this incredible sort of tension that is you know, maybe the best economic asset of all time. But what I find almost more impressive is that a company like Amazon at you know, twenty five years old can launch something totally new like a convenience store and see it kind of work. And you know, to me what's really impressive is innovation that can happen in the second or third decade. And I think to do that you need a different approach to culture and you need to try to build a company where people don't burn out and where they stay energized and excited about the next chapter and building great new stuff.
And I think that having offices in two places has helped us to do that to create that kind of more sustainable culture. So right now is we approach second decade. Our better definitely yet to come in. We're right now building some things with artificial intelligence that couldn't have dreamed three or four years ago.
So we're going to be producing our best products for sure in our second decade. And you guys, this is kind of interesting one right because the service you provide is really simple, which is awesome because I love simplicity in general, but be just easy for customers and employees even to grok. What are we trying to do here? What is the service for?
And so you guys are transcribing audio to text and you're doing it really well. You're doing it efficiently. Companies like Google are releasing AI. I feel like every year that's getting closer and closer to being able to do real time captions.
I was watching a live streamed video and the captions were so good and it was live. These are only being done, I guess, through ML. And so that's an existential threat where you guys are employing 50,000 people right now, which is awesome. And people are making money in their pajamas at home.
How does these sort of, obviously, you guys are using AI to assist humans, but the AI is coming to be able to do this really, really well. How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, that's one of our biggest strategic questions. And I'll tell you our view on that and other people with a different view.
The people who want to pay, the people who care about quality need the human in the loop to make it accurate. And let me give you some examples here. Let's just say you have a podcast, you actually have a lot of listeners, right? But you're kind of a small business.
There are plenty of podcasts that are swallowing you and then there's American life, right? So for the guy in his garage with no budget, he's probably perfectly okay to use an automated transfer from Google. Or we actually have a service for that. You can get an automated transfer that's more accurate than Google's.
And the automated version is probably good enough for this small guy. If he doesn't need a perfect plus podcast, tend to be recorded with good audio because we're sitting here with these great microphones and in a good room and so forth. This American life wants it right. They don't want any mistakes.
And even if the AI is a lot better than today, it still takes a human to make it near perfect. And when we go out to the market, whether it's our customers who want captions for Netflix or whether it's a market research firm, there's a focus group, they want things that accurately, they don't want them full of mistakes. They want a transfer of a caption file to go to a bunch of people and it can't be wrong. And as good as the AI is, it still makes a lot of mistakes, like a lot.
And the AI, we use the term AI, which is really a misnomer. It's probably more accurate to call it machine learning because the software we have that converts audio to text, it's not intelligent in the way that my three-year-old or my dog frankly is intelligent. It's not doing any further reasoning. It's doing strict pattern recognition using brute force.
And so it makes all kinds of mistakes that a human just wouldn't make. Particularly a human that knows our culture. So if you have an understanding, if I'm talking to you and I know you a little bit or I know people like you or your style, I can probably be more than that. I can probably guess what you're going to say next based upon the threat of the argument.
And this kind of software can't do those things. I think the way we look at the market is the AI is definitely going to shrink the market in certain areas because there will be some use cases where somebody says, hey, I was paying a dollar, let's say, for human to do it and I can have an AI do it for a lot less, I'll do that. But what we also see even more so is that as we've rolled out, a cheaper AI service, our volumes have grown dramatically. Because what's happening is people are coming to us and saying, I have a whole backlog of content that wasn't worthwhile for me.
It wasn't important enough to pay a human to do it. But at your lower AI price, I'll do all of it. And so we're looking around and saying, well, how much audio and video is really out there? So let's just take, let's just think about TV for a minute.
When I was a kid out of black and white TV in my bedroom, 41 is about that old, but it had like two knobs, a UHF and a VHF knob. And so you could count, it only had like maximum 40 stations, which probably like only a dozen had actual content on it. Now with YouTube, I have like half a million decent stations I can choose from. So in my lifetime, it went from like 12 stations to like 500,000.
And not every station there needs close captions, but all the big ones want it. And even the medium ones want it too, because it's better for the audience, it's better for SEO, it's better for foreign visitors or people with English language. It was good and cheap, you would want it. And what you guys are doing is making it cheap.
Exactly. So the amount of audio and video that is of high quality is growing exponentially. And so what AI does is it makes things more affordable and we're seeing massive market expansion. The other example I would say is how big was the taxi market in SF, circa 10 years ago, right?
It's a lot bigger now. The market for personal transport is so much bigger, even though the price has gotten lower. How can that be? Well, now every millennial who stayed one in the bar is probably going to use an Uber pool and pay like seven bucks, whereas before there was no option.
The taxi weren't available, if it were available, it would cost me time set. So the efficiency, people used to say this about Uber, they said, well, you know, how big could this be? Is this overvalued? Well, even if it took 100% of the taxi market, it wouldn't live up to this.
And what turned out was in cities like San Francisco, that same year, I remember when I read this argument, that same year they three-ext the total size of the San Francisco taxi market themselves. I remember somebody telling me, somebody told me that same thing. And we see the same type of dynamic. How much audio and video is out there?
It's limitless, right? And how many times were you in a meeting or somebody wanted to know what was said? Right? Alright, it's 2020, new year, it's gonna be a big year.
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The amount of audio and video that matters is limitless. AI is a breakthrough technology that is delivering higher value at a lower cost. It's going to expand the market. There's a lot of headlines that say robots are coming for the jobs.
People have these dystopian notions of people think of terminator and when robots are going to kill us all. That's not what we see. I think that's all movie tickets. What we see is that when we go to our freelancers and we give them software that does the most tedious parts of their job better, they think it's great.
Those are not the parts they enjoy. They want to do the parts that require them to think and use judgments. If you look across, I'm an economics geek, if you look at the history of industry, what I see is that as factories bring in more technology, they produce more stuff with fewer people per widget. They require more people.
Right now, if you read the big John Travakary owners, they can deal with robots. It's hard to work with a robot compared to the guy. I'm not sure if I'm a teenager. Maybe.
When you guys built software for your trans drivers, what would the cost be if there was no software per minute? What is your average cost now? That's the efficiency gain. Adding the machine learning components where you help their workflow.
You speed them up. You take away the tedious parts. I'll answer a question. I'll go one step back before then.
We intentionally chose an industry that we thought was very large, but they hadn't received any real innovation ever, frankly. Once in a while, I'll read some book about something that happened 200 or 2,000 years ago and talks about scribes. Transcribing what we said by a president or a king or a general. As long as people could talk and write, people have been transcribing.
When I was in high school, I remember one of my biology teacher had a wife who was a medical transcription and she would get cassettes mailed to her and she would sit there and type them out on a work process or something. That was the job. It was opening the mail and taking the cassette and putting it in and playing it. That was state of the art when I was in 10th grade, so it was 1994.
When I started this nine years ago, state of the art was you get emailed an audio file and you imported some software that's designed to play audio for transcription. Typically, you could often control it by a physical foot pedal that you plug into USB port. People tried to make it more efficient to the software's made for transcription. Someone that was good would have a physical foot pedal.
That way they could have a third hand. The reason for that foot pedal is it would control things like players' player pause or go back five seconds. People had done some basic things to try to get speed, but the technology wasn't very good. It wasn't.
You had to do a lot of software. If you looked at it with your kind of a very popular engine, say, not nice software, and they were typically typing into Microsoft work. That's how we started. We started doing the same thing everybody else did.
We knew we were going to build software to do everything that it could do to help in the whole process. It took us a couple of years, but we built software to help people do the job, which is to listen to audio and transcribe it. It was full of little productivity hacks in the software. For example, the person would have shortcuts for things like for a very common word they might see a lot.
They might have a little shorthand for it. Instead of writing the word because, B-E-C-A-U-S-E, they would have B-C space and inform because. There's like 10 other different types of little hacks that's in the software that each one is not that big of a deal, but when you put them all together, it makes somebody faster. We had teams of people that would watch people work almost like with a stopwatch and figure out when they're getting tripped up and say, let's go fix that.
We got to unblock this. Yeah, because we understood that the faster they could work, the better for everybody. They're happier, customer's happier. They make more money per hour of their effort.
Everybody wins and we put that software through dozens and dozens of versions and we believe it's the best out there. So we probably, as best we can tell, cut the time to do a job or rather build productivity. It's going to cut a time to do a job at half or build a activity on what the norm was in the industry. That was before we brought AI to bear.
We didn't bring an AI into the picture over the last year. I think we're still in one of this journey. The AI is not always helpful because with AI, it's garbage and garbage out. You can't make chicken salad out of chicken.
Bleep, bleep. If I record here with you with these microphones, the AI will do a great job. Whereas most people are doing that. A lot of it's in a conference room with an iPhone, Doritos bag next to the mic.
Right, fan on. Fan on. They die with a cough. They're not thinking about it.
Maybe somebody's got a foreign accent because they're just immigrant, which can be hard to discern people to discern the words. Then somebody like me gets excited and interrupts too much. You have a perfect storm of that's reality. So there's perfect conditions and there's reality and we get both.
It's self-driving cars in a parking lot versus in a city when it's raining. That's right. Tahoe in the snow with the fog in winter and I see conditions. So the AI today, what do I mean by AI?
We have proprietary technology that covers audio text and we run all of our audio through it and we find that in some cases AI can do a really good job and we give it to the human being and they love it. In other cases, AI can do a good job and so we kind of throw away the transcript. And the type of scratch. So let me ask you a question.
You started this business when you left your job to start this business but your job was somewhat related. You were at Odesque which has been rebranded or required or whatever to be upwork. So did you see this opportunity while you were there that a lot of these jobs or transcription jobs? What if we did that really well?
How did this come about? What's the origin story from take us from your guy with a job to start this company? What happened? Sure.
There was a step in another company in between. I'm not a startup about how this story. So I joined a startup that was called Odesque. It was called Upwork and the company went public in late 2018.
So it was doing pretty well. I joined this company in 2004 when it was super tiny. And what was your job title then? The title actually did.
The title was director of marketing sales. In reality, I did a lot of product management. I did marketing. I did a little selling before automated or sales process.
I did fundraising. I helped the founder with the series A and series B financing. I kind of got a lot of operations to work. I did everything to be done except for I never wrote software.
And I had a great founder like experience. I was early employee. Not quite a founder but I did a lot of different things. And I joined a company early on.
I joined a company before I had to pay me to work for a few months with a founder before. He could find a lot to do that because I believe he was building something really important. And I'll tell you frankly, a personal motivation. And there's a little bit of...
So one of the biggest questions for somebody who wants to join an early startup is how do you negotiate with the founder, particularly for equity, which is the thing that matters most in the early stage company. And I saved a little bit of money in my previous job. I was really happy to work for a few months for free. I give people a sense of your age at the time.
You're trying to get out of college. So a couple years, 25, maybe? Yeah, 25. And I remember calling on one of my mentors who was a bunch of capitalist for advice saying, I want to go work with this founder.
We have tremendous chemistry. I think the world of him and he respects me. And he's good at it. He's good at it.
I'm good at it. I think together we could really do a great job building business. And the question was, how do I frankly negotiate with him for what equity is they going to be working for? Because that was one of the main attractions for joining a company that was so early, they had no funding, no money to bank, they couldn't pay me, nobody had ever heard of them, they had like four customers.
But it was a big idea. I love the idea. And the advice I got from this mentor was, and I don't forget the advice. It was great advice.
It was, look, right now the information is very asymmetric. You don't know, he doesn't know what you're worth. And you don't know how to sell that to him. How to show him that?
So he said, just work for a little while, demonstrate value. And he'll realize that he wouldn't want to do this without you. And it's a lot of people want to spend a lot, I think it's a general point here about negotiation. A lot of people want to have a lot of time to use a different phrase, you know, dividing a pie that may never get baked.
And so they want to start baking the pie and figure out a little later how to divide it up. So what we did is we agreed, we said, we'll work together for, we'll take some time here, in a three months, and say three months, we'll work this down and try to figure this out. And during the three months, we worked the other ways if we were married, meaning I was 100% dedicated to making him and the company successful. And we put in place all the marketing programs with Google, and we did a lot of product work to get customers coming out the website, and we started hiring people for roles that we needed.
And we did some fundraising, and we were having some early traction in that process. And when we sit down to basically discuss and negotiate on talk, have the big talk that we built up to, amazingly, we walked in, each thinking, each with a same number of heads. Wow. So, when you chalked that up to you were too low, he's too generous.
How do you square that circle? Why does that happen? You both had an accurate view of what this was worth. You know, I think that there's this phrase in negotiation, like, do you go for the last dollar?
And I think it depends on life about what kind of relationship you want with the person down the road. And I think we each tried to come up with something that we thought would be fair to the person, but usually attractive. And we worked together enough that I was aware of how awesome the company potential was. He had an idea what I could do.
And if we tried to have that conversation too early, it wouldn't have gone well. And he knew that I took a leap of faith to work for no pay for several months because I believed in him in the business. And did you signal even at the beginning, because I've had a similar experience where I had a company, a guy literally was like, I want to work on this with you guys. I'll work for you.
I'll sleep on a couch and we'll figure it out in three, six months. Don't worry. I'll show you first. And one challenge we ran into and I love the guy, Sam, big shout out to Sam Sully.
We ran into was when it came time for the talk, we didn't know where the other person's expectations were at all. We had like beat around the bush so completely that when it came up and he was like, well, I basically want to be an equal partner. And we were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we didn't even think that's the discussion we're trying to have. We thought it was between X and Y.
And that set off a pretty bad tone. So I'm curious just to compare personal experiences. It might just be that every experience is different. But did you do a better job maybe of setting the tone or benchmarking in some way at the beginning?
Or did you just happen to have a better outcome than we did? So it's been 16 years. So I think we did have some rough discussions over maybe not quite ranges but some benchmarks. I mean, I had a good fortune too.
I was coming out of a job at a VC firm where I was a very junior person. But I had a lot of data on what people earned at startups and what they had in various roles. And we probably had a little bit of maybe some bookends on the conversation before going into it, I think. And certainly, it's a very delicate question.
But I do think that it's important to always have some broad meaning of the minds before you go into something. There's no way to do that. So one question I get a lot as I do this podcast is people will come to a career advice. And I'm like, look, A, you don't want advice.
B, you got to look at your own situation. But one question I often get is, should I go down this path start my company? Go down this path work for a big company. And the other one that's most interesting because I would say at least known to people is what it's like to do what you did.
Join early at a company that might make a base. And the question I get a lot is around, what should my expectations be? So for example, you joined ODS, which became up work and ultimately is a public company. So that's the financial win is what that startup actually made it through the gauntlet of things that startups normally could fail in.
And give people a sense if that person is 24 years old and weighing their options. They don't quite have a business idea. They love and want to start. They kind of know they don't want to be at a big company.
They're trying to figure out, OK, a big company is very clear what I'm going to make. And at this startup, I kind of don't know how to think about these options. But all the way like you did, where does that set you up financially? How would you sort of inform somebody who's trying to make a rational decision financially between those two options?
How would you talk to people about that? So it's a really important question. Obviously, there's no, there's no like, that the finance or anything. And I could give an answer and then somebody could say, well, I did the other path and I was really successful.
So you're wrong. But you framed it as big company versus joint founder and startup. And I want to add that there's a lot of room. A lot of range between that.
I would think that for most people who let somebody say, I want to be an entrepreneur or co-founder one day, if they haven't yet, I would probably advise them to get involved in a high growth startup first, because you're going to learn a lot really fast. Now, if you start the company, great. If you have some incredible passion for a problem, your father had a certain illness and there's a company that's going to solve that illness and you have a desire to solve it and you have skills to do so I think I'll do it. But what I find is a lot of people want to do a startup for kind of lace dowries.
They want to be an entrepreneur. They want that lifestyle and they're just hungry for it. And most people who haven't been in the game for a while probably don't have the background to be able to evaluate a new idea with high confidence that they're going to get it right. It's all really hard thing to do.
And that's why if you look at a startup that has raised venture capital from some decent venture capital firms, is growing quickly, is innovating a lot and you can join in a capacity where you're building and growing something, ultimately hiring people. You're going to learn a lot of skills along the way. You'll be exposed to a lot of different markets and categories and start to develop a better view over what a good opportunity company might be for you. Because there are a lot of people that jump from start to start up a lot of little startups that don't go anywhere.
And they probably have a lot of fun and maybe they end up happy in the end. But I think probably they went in hoping for either a financial outcome or some kind of legacy. And if you jump into a company that doesn't go anywhere, you don't get it. I think that if you find that high growth venture by company and do at least a couple of years stint at, depending on what sort of function you're into, you want to get in a position where you get exposed to multiple functions.
So you have some exposure to the business side of things. Products is often a good area because it costs a lot of departments. But you can get that from a lot of different fields. I think most people are better off in the high growth startup as kind of a bridge or maybe a step before breaking out of their own.
That's just doing the numbers of math. I think most people are better off that way. In my personal journey, I had spent the two years before joining Upwork at a venture capital firm where my job was to evaluate startups. I had a good fortune to be able to see probably hundreds of companies from the inside and understand how to compare things, how to benchmark companies.
And also I had the opportunity to learn a lot and talk a lot of people about how does a company build in during advantages, what people these days would call a moat and defensibility. And I got a lot of great advice from that and a bunch of very wise VC partners and entrepreneurs. And if I oversimplify that story, well, there's a lot of ways to build defensibility. I think network effects is a really powerful one.
And it was very clear for the first minute that if Upwork had any level of traction, it would have great network effects. And it would be very difficult to rebuild that. And that's proving to be the case. So I went to knowing that it worked, but it would really work.
Right. And when you said you had that experience and then you did something between and then you decided to start Rev. I was at Upwork for about three years. For a lot of reasons, I decided to leave the company, the CEO changed a couple times.
And they put me in a role that didn't think was the right role for me. So I said, let me go off on my own, get a job where I can save some money and start a company on my own terms and be able to call the shots in a way that hadn't been at Upwork. And that's what I did. I had a friend who worked at Project Refund and he was nice enough to introduce me.
I was able to get a job and it wasn't relevant to tech directly to work, but I learned a lot and was able to save a little money so that when I was ready to start a company on my own for the first time, I could do it with the flexibility of not needing to raise a bunch of people day one. And when I started thinking about what company I wanted to start, I got to thinking about what I learned from Upwork, which is that there are so many people around the world that would love to work and only but can't. They don't have opportunity in their small town or country. And I just think that there's going to be a huge change in my lifetime, in our lifetimes, where by the time I'm dead, I think it will be a billion people who work remotely up from a small number today.
And that takes some time because the technology has to mature, the bandwidth has to get better, industry and business have to change so that work that's done today in a cubicle farm gets spread across people's homes through software. And a lot has to happen for that tradition to happen. And so I thought, why wouldn't Red be the company? Why wouldn't I start a company to accelerate that to bring that forward?
And I was able to, more or less dissect, what did I think were the Achilles heels in Upwork's business model and build a different business model that we don't compete with Upwork in a meaningful way, but there's two things that are different about Rev and Upwork. For the customer, we guarantee quality because we only do one thing. We never audited the text. And because Upwork does everything under the sun, they can't possibly guarantee quality on any of the services.
You pick an Upworker, you hope that that Upworker is going to deliver what you want with Rev is telling you're going to get what you want. That's right. That's right. A different way to freeze that is that an Upwork you hire a person and will it dies.
On Rev pay for a service. So we stand behind it. So it's a different thing. It's staffing versus a service.
And then the other side of our business is the freelancer. So if you work on Upwork or Fiver or a platform like that, you spend a lot of time applying for jobs. The median case of somebody in these platforms is create an account, apply how much jobs don't find work. Right?
And even the successful ones are applying for a lot of jobs that they don't get. So that's time they're spending, they're not getting paid for. And applying for jobs means putting yourself out there emotionally, getting excited about something, it's doing a sales pitch. And most people don't have the door slam in the face and getting turned out.
And you have to turn it down a lot to get a job, which is mostly a lot fun. It's time. So what we felt is if we had a platform, they would provide one kind of service and we standardized it. So we knew we would only set jobs of a given category in our case.
It's audio files we can transcribe that are in English to start. Then what we could do is we could vet a workforce. So we don't let anybody do it. But we let anybody apply.
And if people pass our test and meet a criteria, we have a tiered workforce where there's a different level in a workforce. We let you do any job any time. And so those people spend no time applying for jobs. They can work as much or as little as they want.
And that's by design. So we had these key differences. I wanted to have guaranteed experience with the customer. And I wanted somebody with the right skills to be able to work as much or as little as they want.
Never have to sell themselves. Never have to bid on a job. Never have to race the bottom of saying, that guy will do it for $1.98. Never have any of those things.
Wake up and you have your cue. That's right. That was the concept. And then the question was simply, well, what would they be doing?
What kind of work? And we considered every kind of worker to the sign. We look good. Should they do software development?
Should they do graphic design? What are all the common job types that people do across the internet? And we study what was out there. And we quickly rejected any job that was pretty subjective.
Design can't work. Yeah. So like, hey, restaurant needs a logo for its website. But you think it's pretty ugly or vice versa.
We'll never agree on that. Whereas we've chosen categories that are pretty objective. Now, there's always less activity. But what we use is pretty subjective.
You give me podcasts and we get back to words to it. You or somebody else will probably agree that we did a great job or not a great job. And not a super high skill bar either for the workforce. Right.
So I don't need to have a degree or special training of like, you know, programming or whatever. That's harder for me to enter. That's right. Yeah.
A lot of people can do it. I mean, it's surprisingly challenging that you need to go to here and you need to be a good typist and good judgment. But you're right. It's a broad need for businesses because a lot of people have audio and video that matters.
And it's a broad skill set that a lot of people know and listen and type. And those are some of the things that led us to it. As far as the name, a bit tangent there, we started off with a kind of a funky name. We started off with the name Fox translate.com.
And the reason for that was so our first idea was the translate documents. And I thought, well, I wanted a website name that was very clear, not confusing people. So I wanted to work translate to be in it. I wanted to stand out versus others throughout there.
And I don't know where I thought of this. No, I didn't say where I thought of this. At the time, serving monkey and male champ, we're like animal doing well and task. Animals are cute.
So only what animal can I get and stick the name. And I wanted to be short. And somehow I came across this idea of a bunch of ideas, but then you look at what you're buying go daddy for $10. And a great creative constraint, by the way.
Totally. Totally. And I knew it was temporary, but we did it. And we had Fox translate.com.
I hired a cartoonist in Indonesia to make a cute cartoon fox. It was really, really cute. People would see the website and they would smile. It was a very adorable cartoon fox on our homepage.
You can still find it on the website. And that was a great, perfect name to get going. So I think I kind of tell people, think about naming something. I would spend like no time at the beginning thinking about a name because the odds of your business is going to work are not super high.
And so make it the best work. Once your business works, then you'll know more about what the business really is and then take it with the name of it. And so we got going in 2010 in 2012. I made it my big priority figure what a name would be.
And I got some advice from investors. I read books on naming companies. I read books on domain names. I looked for inspiration.
And the problem is you come up with a great name that you think would be awesome for business and you can't possibly get it. So it's really a two part problem. One is picking a name you love and then figuring out can you get the domain name. I'm giving you a bunch of steps here.
But I actually hired two different domain brokers to go out and buy names because any people have different views on names. I, from the beginning, I had what I call a multi-decade aspiration of the company. I wanted to build a company that creates many millions of work from jobs over many decades. So I didn't want the name to be narrowly tied to our first service.
I wanted to be broad enough to give me a room to maneuver. And I also thought that a good name that has a meaning to it would create a stronger brand connection to customers. I wanted people to think of it as more than just a commodity service. The first name I found in love with that I was not able to get was Circle.
I wanted to get the name Circle.com and I hired her to go find it for me. And she was unable to get it. I learned later that I think it was Jeremy Allaire had the name for his Bitcoin wallet company that launched like a year after. I was trying to get it because she couldn't find out where it was.
She gave me roadblocks like, oh, I'm going to call back. Ultimately, we couldn't get the name. And frankly, I think it's probably better that we didn't because that let me say more time thinking about possible names. And we ended up coming up with a different rev and we paid a bunch of money to get it.
I don't have to suppose to say number five. We spent 400 grand on the name. Nice. How do you know how to draw the line?
I mean, we didn't have much money. That was a big business was doing pretty well. So we weren't burning that much money. But that was like a huge portion of our our ass at the time.
But I kind of felt like, well, look, if it comes to successful, it's a job in the bucket. And if it fails, it still has to. By the way, you could sell that to me. Sure, for sure.
The reason for the name. There's probably two reasons. One is that when people hear the word rev, they think fast, that's kind of the first thing they think about. They think speed like rev your engines, accelerate.
And the nature of our service is we're really fast because we do something that is usually done by people in a body shop that's slow. Like a typical customer that wants a 30 minute podcast transcribed prior to us eight, nine years ago, it would take you 40 hours to get something turned around. More than that. Several days, three, four days.
And we were at the beginning, we were probably like 20 hours. And today we're like a couple hours where we're so much faster. The customers are going to blows their minds. That's one of the most common questions.
Because people will submit something Friday night at 11 PM and then at 1 AM they get back on Saturday night or whatever, one day or two hours later. And they're shocked. How does this even happen? And if you know how it works, it's kind of easy.
Well, people are working. Someone's working. Someone's working. And it was obvious that if we weren't working, we'd get faster.
Right? So the rev was good for that. But also, you know, there's, I thought I had some other kind of hidden meanings. One of my co-founders actually did something sort of clever.
This is something that some of your listeners can try. I think of a name. He went on a mechanical truck and he filled this account with like a hundred bucks. And I think I had at the time like 10 domain names I was thinking about.
So each domain name, he would pay people some small amount, like 15 cents answer a question. And the question was like, when you see this word, what are three words do you think of? Okay. And when you do this word, do you think you'll positively negatively about it?
So for like $10 per domain name, we got like this tag cloud. Oh, here's the word you'll think about when they hear this and there were sides based upon frequency. So you could clearly see what words you'll feel positively about and what people thought of when they saw work. So the primary thing people thought of when they saw Rev was speed.
It was secondary meaning that it wasn't helpful to us, which was like a reference, which was not really what we do. But I think the third reason was revolution. And, you know, that's what we've always wanted to help accelerate this kind of new and Dutch revolution towards letting people be their own boss, working home and being dependent. And, you know, we thought we're going to create a new lifestyle for folks and we wanted to have that come through.
My mom works for a company that has a very similar thing called user testing. Sure. And I remember introducing it to her because she was at home and she's like kind of like retired now. She didn't really want to go.
She worked in the workforce, but she didn't want to go back and get a job. She also was bored as hell at home. Okay, it's gone now. And, you know, if I told her, look, here's something you could do at home, pick your hours as much or as little as you want whenever you want in the day.
You already have the skills to do this because you're just going to browse a website and click around and tell people, you know, they'll tell you, go try to check out and you say if it's confusing to you. You don't have to be good at it. You just say what your actual opinions are. And, look, you're going to make, you know, 10, 15 bucks at a time and that can add up to like, you know, money for your manicure, pedicure and taking us out to dinner or whatever, right?
Like, this is a little slash fund for you. And so I've seen this, like, what this means for her to be like, you know, four hours a day, picking her own hours, doing the stuff and having her own income and her own autonomy. And it is a game changer. And so I've had specific brainstorms around how do we mobilize the stay at home workforce, the stay at home, workforce that's out there.
What are some other things? There's user testing. There's Rev. There's got to be some others because I just think that once you see the lifestyle that enables, it's clear people are going to want that and that's a game changer for people who are sort of bored and only at home and not feeling productive.
And it's a pretty big change. That's a wonderful example of your mom's story. And we see so many similar stories in our workforce. One of the things I hear most often when I ask people, hey, what's working in Rev, they tell me I love the contents because they're watching movies.
Look, listen to podcast. You're interviewing interesting people. So somebody and the way our system works is they can favor the client so they can put a heart next to your name. Oh, that's cool.
So that way when you look at your podcast, if they think that you do cool podcasts, they're going to think, man, I can't wait to hear his podcast. The people on the Apple Podcast app, listen to your podcast, they don't get paid to it. So when you get paid to hear your podcast, type it out. And if you think of, I mean, we do educational content, whether it's stuff from universities or stuff from online classes and how to use it, they'll be online classes and how to cook or how to bake or how to sell or we have churches doing sermons.
There's content for every possible interest. And this is kind of a tough question, but we'll wrap up because it's kind of a fun one. So if you couldn't do Rev, let's say 10, alternate, you can't be doing Rev right now, but you wanted to still work on this mission or sort of push, accelerate towards this future where people are working from home with this world. What's another, what's another idea you've had that you guys want pursuit because it's two different or it's too out there.
What's interesting to you that's in this kind of remote world that you're not doing today? Online education is big. In fact, I mean, this is a story here and this is a hobbling experience. We spent a couple years and millions of dollars trying to build a math-tootering service.
We failed to meet our metrics and so we shut it down. I was a math tutor when I was in high school and I spent a lot of time driving from one person's house to another. I couldn't tutor until I could get a car and maybe we're early or maybe we've been throwing market, but education is an industry that the government provides most of it and hasn't seen a ton of innovation. And I think there's a, I mean, everybody knows that there's this notion of the classroom that the whole model of reading a textbook and listening to a lecture may not be the best modeling more.
And I think it's clear that on education is a massive opportunity. There's a big company out of China called VIP Kit that has a lot of money. People in the US often stay home moms or retired teachers who will work online on video teaching English to Chinese children. And that's a big, big market.
And I think if you play it out, if I want to get the best education from my kid, where's that going to come from? There's a lot of things that you get from a teacher in person, but if you want some specialized knowledge, you can't get it. You don't have the best teacher in your school. I think it makes a lot of sense to look at the whole world.
So I think education is an industry where remote technology is going to be a really big factor. Love it. Jason, this is awesome. Where can people find you if they want to learn more or connect more with you on Twitter?
Shout it out so people who are listening can find you. Yeah, I'm on Twitter, Jason Chacola, so you can connect the Emmy. I'd love to hear from folks. Awesome.
Thank you very much.