Clint Betts
Lance and Nigel, thank you so much for coming on the show. Found out you guys were Giants fans, so apologies for the Dodgers hoodie that I am wearing. But nonetheless, it is incredible to have both of you. What you're doing at Vantage Discovery is quite incredible and pretty unique, as I did a deep dive into this thing this morning. It's pretty cool. Maybe, Lance, we'll start with you as CEO; tell us what Vantage Discovery is and how you became to be the CEO of this thing.
Lance Riedel
Sure. Yeah. So Vantage Discovery is a generative AI-powered SaaS platform. So, we enable intelligent search, discovery, and personalized recommendations so that e-commerce can be just amazing for customer experiences. They can find what they want. We can personalize those experiences for them. A lot of how we got here is just career backgrounds in search discovery. We're talking about the early days, the internet 1. O, and working on early commerce vendors. Then, at Yahoo, we were in Yahoo Research, which was kind of the early days of what was called big data, building out personalized search and recommendations for Yahoo. I did a couple of startups, and then the last startup I did was acquired by Pinterest. So Pinterest was really where we got thrown into a place where we had massive people pinning things together. I don't know if people, your audience, are familiar with Pinterest, but you can pin your interests, your clothing, your lifestyle, and these types of things, and we can learn from them. And we really wanted to use that to be able to turn that into a shopping platform.
And so that was what I was in charge of there was understanding the content that was coming in, figuring out your vibe, your style, your interests, and then matching the right perfect outfit to you or when you search for chair by making sure those chairs were fit the living room and style that you were. In order to do that at the scale that Pinterest was and is today, and they're very much a shopping platform today and moving on, we had to invent a lot of new technologies, and we had to use a lot of the AI that you see now powering ChatGPT and what people call Gen AI today. Right? And a lot of the early tech that we were playing with and using to understand visual components, understand the semantics of what you were talking about, pull that all in together, and then built an engine around that.
Fast forward a few years, Nige and I were off doing other things, and I got pulled back into working with the co-founder of Pinterest on some projects, and Gen AI was exploding, and this idea started coming back like, hey, Gen AI is now everywhere, all these models, these ways of interacting with these large Gen AI models. How could we harness that and then allow anybody that has an e-commerce site to really leapfrog their current [inaudible 00:03:17], you know, pretty crappy search experiences in a lot of these places where very frustrated users are going there and saying I want a certain type of shoe, or I want this style, and then they get crappy results.
They just go to Google, and Google's making hundreds of billions of dollars because everyone just goes to them to do it, and it's like, hey, we really could take this technology and give that power much more to a lot more of these retailers and brands. And so Evan Sharp, who I was working with, he's the one that really started encouraging this, and I called up Nige and said, what do you think? Can we do this? We hooked up together and raised our seed round, and this is how we kicked off getting this started almost two years ago now.
Clint Betts
So, how did you go about raising money, Nigel? What was the idea and strategy behind that?
Nigel Daley
You know, when Lance called up, it was a no-brainer to join him. We've been friends for 25 years, worked together at multiple companies, and the idea that we had to rebuild a lot of this core search engine that we had at Pinterest but make it available to all retailers and bring that kind of power that Pinterest had around personalization to any retailer was a story we knew would resonate pretty well with both investors and obviously retailers. And so we reached out to a number of the folks that had encouraged us to start this, and these are very connected folks, folks like Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, and Johnny Ive from Apple Fame and now at LoveFrom building out amazing things there and obviously Evan Sharp and so between them and the folks they knew it was quite easy for us to raise a seed round.
Clint Betts
How's it been going so far? At what point have you guys felt like, hey, we're really onto something here? Was it right away, or did it take a couple of iterations? As you were building this thing, at what point were you like, all right, so our thesis is correct.
Lance Riedel
I think that the thesis around how customers would love this, we'd kind of proven out through our careers. We knew what was crap and what was an amazing experience, and what worked. So, I think that vision has always been rock solid. We knew. The key piece we needed to do was make sure that these retailers knew that there was something better for them and that we could provide it. Right? So that was the key. The first part was building the tech so that we could get to a place where we could what we'd call a show, not tell. We can talk; there's a lot of confusion in the market. Everyone can say like, oh, we've got Ge AI search or semantic search or these types of things, but being able to actually prove it before we can go out and crawl someone's content and then show it in a UI to them, say, hey, try it out and demonstrate that, that was the key piece. Once we got to that, we started going out and using this to show the customers what was possible. Right?
Nigel Daley
Yeah. I think those initial demos we put together were really in that vein of show, not tell, and just help people understand what they could do with this kind of technology. Yes. You can have a natural language search for products, but that's sort of the entry, the bread and butter, the needed next step for any of these retailers. But look beyond that into more advanced search and discovery experiences. For example, I want to search by maybe my style all the way up to personalization, individual personalization. And so those initial demos that brought out some of these more advanced capabilities really, I think, opened a lot of eyes to what's possible here.
Clint Betts
You mentioned something interesting there around this whole idea of everyone's now an AI startup. Right? And for the most part all that really means is they have a ChatGPT account.
Nigel Daley
Yeah.
Clint Betts
So how do consumers or even CEOs and leaders who watch or listen to this show tell or know the difference? If they're going to put AI on their website, should there be some sort of accreditation thing? I think it'd be kind of cool. But what should be the threshold? If you're going to put AI in your name, what should it be?
Lance Riedel
Do you mean if you want one of our retailers, like one of our customers or someone out there that wants to have AI and not just throw a chatbot and see if people use it or not? I mean, to me, it doesn't move your fundamental metrics. Right? And, you know, there's a lot of how we developed our technology was because we had experience with it four or five years before it hit mainstream. Right? So we've been iterating, iterating, iterating on what it means to actually use AI to make a customer happy. And that includes really understanding people and what they want and how they understand products and then products and being able to take someone's feed, like a product feed, and then combine that with this AI to build these experiences.
So I would say if you want to have AI work, if you integrate it into your system, it should drastically move metrics, meaning you should have customers that are delighted, find a lot less drops, a lot less, hey, I couldn't find what I was looking for, return visitors, lifetime value of your customers, 'cause they want to go back to you. They don't need to go to Google to find it. They're like, oh, I love going to company X because the experience was so great there. So those are the things that you'll see change if you've implemented AI correctly, I believe.
Clint Betts
And Nigel, you mentioned a list of Silicon Valley legends, and I wonder if you guys are Giants fans, meaning you most likely live and have built this company in Silicon Valley. There was this idea, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, or maybe through the first half of it, that Silicon Valley was experiencing an exodus almost. I don't really get the sense. I never really got the sense that that was true, but in particular, right now, it seems like it's still the startup capital of the world. Can you give us a sense of the state of Silicon Valley right now?
Nigel Daley
Well, you're kind of talking about the divide right here because Lance actually escaped Silicon Valley just before the pandemic hit and now lives in Austin while I am still in San Jose, so you've got both sides of this.
Clint Betts
Yeah. This is what I want. Yeah. I want to hear [inaudible 00:09:56]
Lance Riedel
Well, except for I'm a frequent flyer too. I mean I think I spent most of early last year in Silicon Valley back and forth so.
Nigel Daley
Yeah.
Lance Riedel
It is a true statement that our investors, key partnerships, things like that are absolutely still in Silicon Valley.
Nigel Daley
And that's why he was coming back primarily for our investment roadshow for our A round. And that's clearly still here in the Valley. This is still where the decisions are being made around funding. But then I think we are finding founders and others sort of leaving this area to live where they want, build a team, maybe distributed around the country or even offshore, which is exactly what we've done. Our team spans from the Hawaii time zone to the Eastern time zone, and we all work remotely. And then we do have a couple of offshore teams as well that work really closely with us.
Lance Riedel
Yeah. I'll reiterate that. I think while the VCs and the money and kind of those core things are in the Valley still. I mean, obviously, there are VCs everywhere, but that seems to be the core talent. You find talent everywhere. Right?
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Lance Riedel
I think that's [inaudible 00:11:06]
Clint Betts
Yeah. When you can figure out the distributed model and make it work for you, all of a sudden, your talent pool is the world rather than who's in the radius of your office. Right?
Lance Riedel
Yeah. And I'll say that's one of our key strengths because, obviously Nige is just and both but Nige has especially been the person to figure out how to expand large companies like Pinterest and others overseas and build distributed offices around the US or wherever. So we kind of have that DNA to be able to know how to believe and trust in your distributed team and make them produce in a happy part of the company way. Right?
Clint Betts
Yeah. Nigel tells me [inaudible 00:11:52]...
Nigel Daley
[inaudible 00:11:52] remote teams.
Clint Betts
These remote teams are kind of like offshore teams. That would be great to get a sense of.
Nigel Daley
I mean, I think one thing about building any kind of distributed team, onshore or offshore, is that a mix of both is communication amongst that team, which is really, really important. And I don't mean just lapping up Slack and making sure everyone can talk to everyone. I think providing context and continual communication for folks getting together in person occasionally and for offshore teams going and visiting them, you know, a couple of times a year, is super effective at making them feel understood and heard and part of the team. And so one of the practices I've done at this company and other companies is a daily update where it's sort of what I'm hearing, seeing that others can respond to. I think some of our leaders have taken that over now at Vantage Discovery and are providing daily updates in various ways to their teams. And that level of hyper-communication, you might call it, is really, really important to help keep everyone on the same page. And it's the kind of communication you'd naturally have if you're all together. Right?
Yes. It takes time. It takes effort. It's not free. But it is super effective, and it amplifies your own impact as a leader if everyone has the same context or as much context as possible. Finding remote teams is a real trick. I think we definitely got lucky with some referrals in our case. I think you often do want, ideally, some referrals, folks that you can talk to who have worked with these teams overseas. You know, and then I always like a little bit of a trial period and then lean all in. Right? We've got a team in Eastern Europe, and right off the bat, once we knew this was the team we wanted to work with, we went and visited them. You know, and none of their other clients had ever come to visit them. It meant the world to them. They absolutely love working on our project. Everyone at the company wants to work on what we're doing. We just see a lot more engagement, excitement, and buy-in for this group that ultimately aren't technically employees of our company, but they definitely feel like they are.
Clint Betts
It's not often I have the CEO and COO on here. And so this question's going to be particularly interesting for our viewers and listeners just to get a sense of the difference between those roles. And that is what a typical day looks like for each of you.
Lance Riedel
Sure. I'll start with that. Yeah. But you pointed out that like the CEO, Nige and I have known each other for 25 years and have worked on and off throughout that. We've had a very tight. The level of trust that we have between each other, as well as the yin and yang of our personalities, I would call it, just blends so well. So I think that it's very easy for us to hand off or to know who's taking what and why, and Nigel keeps the balls rolling, everything lined up in such a beautiful way that leaves me to help to go find the hotspots or to work on other pieces. So my day, getting back to your question, we're very much in, there's startup life, and then there's startup life that we're in right now. What I mean by that is there's actually this kind of honeymoon period when you start a startup where you got the idea, you got the funding, and then just go, and just everyone's cranking a building, and it's not easy, but there's a lot of pieces to that.
We're now in the go-to-market, building everything out and scaling the company piece. And so, every day, being a CEO is different. Right? There are, you know, one day you're talking to customers. One day, you're talking, trying to land a key employee, and all this is happening. So my day starts with getting calm to, literally meditating and just taking time to just understand what is the most important thing is health of my family, these type of things, and having a good solid base. Without that, I would go insane, honestly. Then, going through the calendar and really strategizing what the most important things are, You won't be able to hit everything.
So what are the most key important things? And I think that the key skill of a CEO is seeing through all of the massive stuff coming at you. What is the most important thing I can do now? And what can I do? And so that's what I do in the morning is kind of like get that centered, and then I go and Nige and I meet up, when Nigel and I meet up, we go through and kind of correlate that, yes, these are the important things, who's going to take what and where, and then we have meetings throughout the day, which can vary depending on these needs. Right?
Nigel Daley
Yeah. And I think I have a similar start to my day where it's meditation, and then, as Lance said, we get together every day just like we would if we were in an office. Again, I think that it's really important that we're communicating. We're on the same page. We have the same priorities. Right? Any indecision at the top is felt, you know, is magnified further down in the organization, so it's super important that we're aligned and start our day each that way. And then again, my day varies. Typically starting something, you know, it's been said that at a bigger company, you might start something every week or every month, but at a startup, you have to start five things a day. There's always something to get going, to get started, to kick off because there's a lot going on. The rest of the industry is moving so quickly around you. And that's one of the things I love about this role, actually. I've come to really, really enjoy having a lot of fun in the COO role.
Clint Betts
How are you? How big could this company get? As I was looking at it, I was like, man, this could be a massive, massive company. How are you guys thinking about the total addressable market, competitors, the landscape, and all that type of stuff? It seems like you have a bit of a head start on the technology front. Give us a sense of that. I mean, if this thing works, it works pretty big. Right?
Lance Riedel
Yeah. I mean, we see this as a fundamental change that hasn't happened in 25 years, specifically for the commerce market. There are a lot of other use cases for our technology that go well beyond e-commerce, but we're kind of planting there first. What we mean by that is the opportunity to take away what has happened where most consumers go to Google or Amazon today and start their journey to find a product there because of all these very poor experiences everywhere else. Right? So we think that as this breaks out, people want these personally connected experiences with their retailer or their brand, and every brand now has that opportunity to make those connections. And you can think of this as a Pinterest-like experience where I could be on retail and be like, this is the things I like.
Here's my Instagram account, or where's my Pinterest, or I want to upload a photo, or I start collecting the things I like to show you what it means to what I want and to personalize your products to me and every retailer, every brand really wants that ultimately is to have that connection. So the addressable market, I think, is as massive as that whole shift. And I got to think and translate all that I want into these keywords and then kind of go and peruse and peruse and then click and go link down to like, no, here's what I mean. Right? Here's who I am. Now I want to shop that way.
Nigel Daley
And so I think it's not the former commerce TAM. Right? We view this next era as AI commerce with a much bigger addressable TAM because of the additional capabilities, the increase in metrics, and the lift that this kind of technology can bring to retailers. And then there's a horizontal play here. This platform is generally applicable to any information or data that needs intelligence attached to it. And so there are many other industries that this platform can service beyond retail, but that's what we're focused on right now, which is retail, e-commerce, AI commerce, and advertising.
Clint Betts
I mean, I know that this is a question that has no answer because it's unknown and you probably get this all the time, but I'm interested in it because you guys are so deep in this, is what does AI look like next five to 10 years?
Lance Riedel
Yeah. I mean, there's the, oh, are you going to say something, Nige?
Nigel Daley
No. You go ahead. [inaudible 00:21:20].
Lance Riedel
Oh. Sorry. I thought you said something. So, you know, there's this whole effort around AI and reasoning and being able to reason that, I wouldn't say we're on the bleeding edge of that. We're kind of a fast follow to see where that goes. Where we think AI is going on the other side is really understanding you and building that trust where you can build your trusted profile. And it's basically people call it assistance, but it really is this mirror to you that you can then utilize that context towards anything that you're doing, any activity you're doing, you know, purchasing obviously e-commerce where it knows intrinsically every little detail about you in a trusted way.
So you own that trust. You own that profile. Then, you can use it as a tool to augment anything that you need to do or achieve. And that can come out in a lot of ways. Obviously, shopping and this personalized shopping is a lot of that, but it could be in going out and actually doing any type of activity that you need to be done for you that's personalized, whether from grocery shopping to making connections for you, anything like that.
Nigel Daley
Yeah. I think it's a really exciting time to be in this field and see the tools that are coming out and how those are helping consumers. I think this notion of agents is really exciting, and I am definitely kind of watching to see how that may move into the retail space. You know, you could imagine a future where you have a personal shopper curating a personal store for you, bringing together products from different places to put in front of you to make the final decision. So things like that are really, really exciting. We're working with a few large marketplaces that actually have some of this vision and are thinking down the road about what this could look like.
Clint Betts
2024 is kind of an interesting macroeconomic environment; some industries are doing really well, and some industries are not, prices, inflation, all that type of stuff. We had an election. All that type of stuff kind of goes into it. Now we have some uncertainty, some certainty over where we're going to be in 2025. What's your outlook? How are you looking at and planning for the next year?
Lance Riedel
Yeah. Do you want to cover it?
Nigel Daley
So we've got a good amount of runway space, having just raised in the spring, so we can definitely weather quite a few ups and downs. We weren't really sure how this election was going to go and what it might do to consumer confidence, but from what we can tell, the folks who thought the economy was in the toilet now after the election seemed to be much brighter about it. So maybe that will lead to more consumer spending confidence. And again, we've got the runway to see this through and really start to show retailers how this can help their bottom line.
Lance Riedel
Yeah. I'll add that a lot of our tech; we believe what's going to happen in 2025 is this vision of having a much more personal connection to your consumers is going to almost erupt. It's like the fast fall of what ChatGPT did to information; now, it's going to turn to personalization and that trust factor. So we see a lot of retailers and brands needing this, and we feel 2025 is the year where that's going to happen, right, where there's going to be this almost awakening to the possibilities of like, oh, this is what my connection, my retail experience can be. Right?
Clint Betts
Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and I want to be respectful of your time and give you guys enough time to answer as well. So we'll end on this question for each of you, and you can't say to each other. That can't be the answer to it. At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today? And we'll start with you, Nigel.
Nigel Daley
Well, I was going to say, Lance, so you've cut me off at the knees there, given we've been friends for 25 years, and he's pulled me along to lots of great opportunities. But I think I really felt like I found some of my operational callings when I went to Pinterest and led technical program management, led infrastructure engineering, led was chief of staff to a couple of heads of engineering there. The person who hired me on Pinterest was Michael Lopp. And so I do credit him for sort of bringing me into a much more operational side of things, which I've really, really enjoyed. So I'll go with him. He's now working at Apple on a number of search projects there.
Lance Riedel
I also have a Pinterest connection on this. So when we were acquired into Pinterest, one of the key people there who really pushed forward and convinced us to go to Pinterest was Evan Sharp, who was the co-founder of Pinterest, and he's been threaded through many different parts of my professional career since then, and personal life. I consider him a true friend. Not only did he help us get acquired into Pinterest, but he also had a lot of ideas on Pinterest and was trying, and he was always someone I could talk to and help make them happen. Right? Several different, either big technology visions, he helped me create two or three different teams at Pinterest through that.
And then after I left Pinterest, he's the one that called me up and said, hey, do you want to do some projects with Johnny Ive? And I was like, okay, no, I'm not going to say no to that. And then was the one that pushed for, even suggested that we start a company around this, and then we still work and are tightly connected. So Evan, shout out to Evan. He's been instrumental in my making things, teaching me how to even be a CEO and teaching me how to treat employees and run a company where the love of your employees and the love of your investors and your customers is, can be what's the center of it. So, I really appreciate Evan.
Clint Betts
Lance, Nigel, it's incredible to have you. Congratulations on everything you've built. It's unbelievable. I think the product is unbelievable. Again, as I was researching this this morning, I was like, holy crap. This thing could be huge. So, congratulations on all of that. Congratulations on everything you've done, and I appreciate you coming on the show.
Nigel Daley
Great. Thanks, Clint.
Lance Riedel
Awesome. Thank you.
Edited for readability.