BENJAMIN DORR

>> Craig Gould: Benjamin Dorr, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Benjamin, you’re the CEO of Wellsaid, a, leading AI text-to-speech company providing platform to create natural sounding human, like synthetic voices for enterprise applications like training, marketing and product experiences. It sounds like a mouthful, but, you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s really straightforward and it’s sort of groundbreaking in, in a lot of ways and something that maybe we couldn’t have done 10, 15, 20 years ago. Right. And so, but Ben, I love to start these conversations with one common question, which is what are your memories of your first job?

>> Benjamin Dorr: Oh, well, thank you so much for having me, Craig. This is awesome. I can’t wait to dig in here. what are the memories of my very first job? so I will, I will, I will skip the mowing lawns job and switch right to working in, this was a management information systems department. This is what it was called in the 90s.

>> Craig Gould: Yes.

>> Benjamin Dorr: When we were trying to be fancy. and I got a job as a, as a summer intern. and it was effectively building computers, in a machine shop and running running cables, like running network cables all over this place. And my favorite memory from that job was I was building a computer from the ground up. And I had a power supply where the power, switch was reversed, the on turned it off, the off turned it on. And I had the bright idea that I was going to switch the power supply in the back rather than just turning the switch over the different way or maybe not even worrying about that. And, and as soon as I did, an electric shock went into the computer, went back out into a, it was plugged into a UPS across the entire machine shop and an 8 acre machine shop. It just went, everything went dark. And everyone’s like looking and trying to figure out what’s going on. And I’m sitting there in this office just with my head in my hands, knowing that the intern took down the entire company for an afternoon. so that is one of my, one of my clear memories. good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgment, I guess.

>> Craig Gould: I remember going to a little shop and ordering a PC to have custom made. And it’s like the funny thing about computers is the price point never changes, but like the performance gets better and better and better. And so it’s like, you know, for whatever reason, I paid the exact same amount for that computer in 1996 that I would have paid for the Mac. I’m working on now but I was paying a premium to get a 36,6 modem so that I could dial up. I mean it was just.

>> Benjamin Dorr: Yeah, well, so the, the same analogy that went on with Moore’s Law, right. In terms of computing is going on with AI today and especially AI voice. so four or five years ago, well said pioneer in terms of human sounding voices. Right, like that, making it not feel so robotic. Not like the way that you interact with Google Maps or something like that. But that quality curve has kept going up. Whether it’s us, competitors, other technologies, the quality curve for AI voice keeps rising. And you can see as it rises other use cases unlocking that first use case was, let’s say that transactional conversational voices that are voice as an interface. We’re working with computers, you’re working with self serve interfaces at a restaurant or what have you and they’re talking to you or you can talk to it. but over time it’s now unlocking different levels of content creation that is more and more professional and profound and becomes a complement to the type of content that we produce all the time today. But really unlocks new use cases so you can start to use voice to connect with people in a way that you used to only do among a sort of a subset of content that was, you know, worth it from a professional standpoint. and so we’re seeing that quality curve go up while the cost also comes down. So you’re having this window unlock for content creation within AI generally, whether it’s text, speech, video, images. But as we think about it from an AI voice, that is an underlying trend that allows us to work with professional content creators to supplement their, to supplement or complement their current, creation process.

>> Craig Gould: So in the past like you said, the text to speech was, was rather robotic. And so, you know, there, there were plenty of use cases where that was good enough because we were needing the transactional content. Well, you know, what’s my bank balance or whatever, right? But now it’s going to a place where it can actually serve content at the level that a voice talent would be able to provide. Right? Because we’ trying to get to a place where we can have a synthetically live, branded experience with a voice that’s attached to either video or. Well, there are lots of different use cases, right?

>> Benjamin Dorr: You can think about this as whether this is a voice actor today or a custom voice based on you or your Persona or likeness from a vocal perspective, the ability to create content that complements what you’re already doing this kind of, I mean maybe stepping back and sort of describing a little bit of what’s unique about. Well said is that we worked with voice actors from the beginning to build those data sets, to build our model and to build the application that allows folks to take use of avatars that are based on those voice actors for which they get paid royalties. Which is, which is also relatively unique in this world. to be able to drive that quality, the control, the clarity of the voice. It’s one thing to look at all content and try to train a model around that. It’s another to say there are people who know how to interact with others, to drive an emotional connection, to have a different take on a piece of text, right? Like the way you can take any script and read it an infinite number of ways and drive an emotional response. There are people that know how to connect with us as people. and what we’ve tried to do is we know that is the foundation of professional content creation, that voice actor data and that relationship is the foundation of what we do as a business. And so we enable that. That’s where our platform enables people to access the ability to generate really, really high quality human sounding content in a way that’s way more scalable than working with a voice actor on their own. There’s always going to be a place for voice actors and then there’s an element of content creation that they can take part of within tools like ours that I think bolsters their own income.

>> Craig Gould: Those lessons about how to create that connection in the emotion, whether that’s in cadence or where you put emphasis or just the humanity. Is there a knowledge base that kind of goes across the entire WellSaid platform? Or are those lessons kind of embedded in these different Personas based on the actors who you worked with to train those specific models?

>> Benjamin Dorr: Really good question. From an ML perspective, there’s combinations of data sets to be able to think about language understanding, right? So you have a set of text and you’re breaking that down into phonemes, et cetera, and looking at what that represents vocally, et cetera. And we have some secret sauce in terms of understanding that information from a language understanding perspective. And then there’s the vocal performance, right? And the vocal performance also takes data from multiple data sets but ultimately prioritizes the vocal affectations of the actor themselves. Right? So you’re going to get a take that is very like that actor based on how the ML model works. However, as you know, like, as folks know here, the term that’s used within AI is that, you know, the interesting thing about LLMs, the interesting thing about voice generation like us, is that, these ML models operate at kind of the edge of criticality. So you’re going to get this, you’re going to get a different take every time. we, we try to build for consistency in our approach, but it’s not unlike an actor where, you know, let’s say a movie director like David Fincher, who’s famous for 100 takes and then taking the last one when people are exhausted, you have, you have this ability to get to multiple takes, combine the takes that you want and build to, a response or a, an output that is most desired. And you get to be the director, as it were, with these voice actors and all those give and takes. It’s just not as exhausting as maybe sitting inside, a studio listening to 100 when you do it.

>> Craig Gould: You remember back in the 90s there was Moviefone, right?

>> Benjamin Dorr: Yes.

>> Craig Gould: And you call up and there was this interface where it’s actually a really interesting story if you ever dig deep into it, because it was like one guy who was utilizing the computers at different movie theaters to serve as nodes in a network and he was serving up the content from the back offices of these movie theaters. Anyway, there was one guy that was recording all these. And you know, I had a startup that was a website that was, it was going to be like the Yelp for restaurants. It was great restaurants and we were developing Food Phone. It was going to be like a. And so it was going to be just like Moviefone. And you know, one of the things that we, you know, you know, we were sitting down with the voice talent and recording, you know, not only the, the voice interface, but like these, you know, these restaurant reviews. And the thing is, that data set was just enormous. And every time a new restaurant came on board or whatever, you know, you’re adding to this data set. We eventually wound up pivoting from that. But you know, just thinking back to that execution 25 years ago, if we had had something like this, it would be a, totally different possibility in terms of what would the cost be to create these files, what would the turnaround time be? Would be exponentially easier today using Wellsaid than it would have been, you know, when we were trying it and figuring out, oh, wow, this is really a big undertaking.

>> Benjamin Dorr: Right? No, that is, that, that is what you’re talking about in terms of, what content is possible to interact with now based on kind of the cost and quality curve with regard to AI is, is impressive. And this kind of speaks to the two lanes that AI voice is developing. One is what I would call voices interface conversational AI whether that’s an agent or interacting with food phone. Right. give me the last 10 Yelp reviews on this restaurant we’re going to tonight. So I know what to order, which server to avoid or what have you read out to me. The, the Times, et cetera. And that can be, that’s very transactional content. We have the ability at that point to ignore mistakes. It’s about receiving information in real time. It is lower stakes as information understanding. Then you have content creation with regard to let’s say learning and development or content marketing, product explainer, videos, advertising itself where think about advertising. The stakes in a 30 second ad are incredibly high. Ah, that’s a very important paid position to take and you’re looking to drive a certain emotional response from a person. with an employee engagement. Not only you’re trying to get information across for safety and compliance or how to fly a plane. Right. Like we, a lot of airlines use well said technology, for their pilot training. You want to get that information over but you also want that people to stay in the moment. They’re going to know when you mispronounce an acronym that everyone knows. So you want to be able to provide an experience that folks expect and are are engaged by. Employee engagement, customer engagement. Those are two different areas. And so well said very specifically focuses on the latter. There are a lot of great companies that focus on the conversational space and that’s an informational, transactional exchange. Both are incredibly interesting. Both are going to be amazing. Markets, are and are becoming so like the growth in them is amazing. And so what I’m, you know one of the things that really excites me is that I’ve spent a lot of my career in whether it’s marketing and advertising on the software side or working with media companies, entertainment companies in terms of helping them drive value for their products, and reach. I’m interested in that. And so I don’t know whether that’s a bias in terms of how we think about building wellsaid. that’s where we go from a professional content creation standpoint.

>> Craig Gould: My wife is an L and D, she’s an instructional designer and she was working at one company where their marketing director was charged with making these instructional videos and There was the person that had the sign off on the script would always say, oh yeah, it’s not a problem. You would go and have it recorded, finished, you know, paid all the money for the voice talent, have it fully edited and present it back to, you know, the, the person in charge. And they’re like well I don’t like this. Can we change this part, this part and this part? And like well I’m going to have to go have that re recorded. And you’re like well I don’t like it. And like, but you signed off on it. And like but I don’t like it. And so now they have to go back, book more studio time, pay the talent again. And, and so, you know, when we think about that versus the ability to just edit the script, generate, insert, it’s a great value proposition. I mean that’s, that’s a real product market fit there, right?

>> Benjamin Dorr: It is, it is a, it is amazing. And it was, it was the first. What you’re describing in terms of instructional designers and the challenges they face, that was the first sort of product market fit for wellsat and drove our initial growth. It still drives it today. in terms of. We see a lot of folks expanding around that. And I will I will borrow a joke from from ah, from a, He’s not, he’s. He’s actually at a former company that I’m, that I worked with named Julian Sauvage. He said the other day something about the idea of send a draft, no comments, publish draft, you get all the comments, right? And that’s what’s happening for the instructional designers there. We were at dinner with a group of instructional designers in Seattle. A cooking class, I guess was last week. And and they were talking about the challenges they face as instructional designers with subject matter experts inside their own business. In the sense that subject matter experts obviously have all the information and know all the information that they want to get to someone. But instructional designers have this ability to know how to simplify information and know what people need at a certain point. And you can imagine that, that conflict between like, I’m the expert and I want to give all of this to you versus an instructional designer that knows the limits of human understanding and that learning is a process. Being able to navigate that in a technology like ours versus someone, rerecording, etc. That’s a huge unlock for that organization. And so that’s what we hear from instructional designers. It’s not just about making content creation easier. It’s about managing a process and managing their business outcomes with their partners. On the subject matter expert side side.

>> Craig Gould: So we’ve talked about transactional and L and D, but I guess there’s also kind of the on the marketing, advertising, media, content creation side, the technology is getting good enough that you know, it’s not just communicated. It can really emote in a way that you can trust your brand with the technology.

>> Benjamin Dorr: Yes, we are, we are hitting the quality point where you can with technology like well said, create commercially safe brand safe content. Right. Whether that is a custom voice or a voice from our marketplace that is going to be, you know, not different from a radio advertisement or a voiceover for a streaming video ad or the like product explainer videos. That level of interaction is now possible from from a quality perspective. I hesitate to say though in terms of like true entertainment purposes. While we’ve worked with podcasts before in terms of you can generate a podcast with content like that, it requires a lot of editing to make sure that emotional response is right. I don’t know, it’s really different from us having a conversation and like looking each other in the eye and, and like the person being able to think about two people thinking about this in real time. Like even when you talk about like editing and everything, there are the vocal you know, there’s the, I don’t know, the conversational macros that we have in terms of likes and ums and the, the way we say something that, that, that, that that communicates an emotional response that is, that is specific to the moment that we’re having right now. And so whether it’s conversational media like a podcast or really like something around television entertainment, I think that AI voice is a compliment supplement. It is as they did with with the Brutalist, it’s a way of improving the Hungarian slightly. It’s a, it’s, it’s a different tool than what we’re talking about right now today from, from a corporate use.

>> Craig Gould: Case perspective, do you foresee on the horizon a brand investing in its own voice like you know saying that this is this is going to be the voice that we commit to on all of our platforms and we’re able. Because you know, when I think about certain big brands, I see advertisements on visual media. I used to call it television, but you know, no, nobody consumes it on television anymore. Right. But you know, you would hear the voiceover be a ah, particular high dollar either actor or voice actor and then you hear a Spot from the same campaign on the radio. And it is a similar sounding lower paid voice talent that’s creating these individual spots. And I’m just thinking if you’re using your synthetic voice, it seems like you could then bring that voice across all the different platforms for continuity.

>> Benjamin Dorr: You’re absolutely right. So Craig, what you’re describing in terms of brand voice today I think will be no different from the way that you’ll hear about signature smells in fast food restaurants or they have audio profiles of the restaurants of guests and things like that. Like there is an element here where brand voice becomes incredibly important as voice can be more prolific and scalable. what we, we do see today we worked with a major telecom company about replicating their disclaimer voice. So they have a very good disclaimer voice for television. They want to continue that across all of their content. you think about this today. It’s not I don’t believe it’s I don’t believe it’s AI generated but you take flow from progressive, right? Who’s there, who’s in their call tree. When you call in progressive you get a voice that’s in their call tree. this is, this is where we think things are heading. And the ability to not just do what I would call static content creation but dynamic content creation, hyper targeted content creation where a brand can deliver a voiceover either in a radio ad or on top of a non synchronous video, asynchronous video. the that content can be incredibly targeted. So you can take that same voice and deliver something in a local ah way based on someone’s personal targeting etc. And you could change that voice or you could keep that voice the same across a brand experience. The next step and the question that I would have to you in this is we think about the ethics internally about that is that is there something where you end up with a haves and have nots within a vocal actor community where the work that was available for the local person who is the flow, warm, inspirational equivalent for progressive is somehow out of work when that voice actor continues and then what happens with the estate of a voice actor who passes away. These are legitimate ethical issues that we need to we still need to figure out not as just as well said alone but I think as a, as a species when it comes to these things being more more long term as it were.

>> Craig Gould: What is that relationship like with the, the voice acting community? Because that’s another community that you know, I have a little visibility of. And it feels like the jobs for a company like well Said, they’re, they’re coveted because there is a bigger job and it can have a long term benefit. But I think some people in that community feel a little threatened. What are the barriers, what are the intricacies of trying to manage that community of voice actors?

>> Benjamin Dorr: Yeah, absolutely. So, well Said is built on its relationship with its voice actors. It was a foundation of how we wanted to do business and how we believe that business is done right, in this space. So every, every voice is connected to a real person. and that person receives royalties from the revenue that generate that, that’s generated on well Said. and they, you know, for some of our top actors, some of the folks that we have exclusive relationships, we’ve also been able to extend equity to them in terms of a relationship that allows them to benefit not just from what their voice is able to produce, but the business value that we create at well Said. So it’s little things like that, but we manage that those relationships both as a group. Here’s our voice actor community as well as one on one, I, exchange emails with some of our top voice actors and talent. think about how we can better support them as it relates to their full time jobs. Right. Which may be in entertainment, which may be doing other voice work that again requires a level of precision that AI voices getting close to. But this may, may, may never. You know, it’s, you’re. We’re past the uncanny valley. But you know, let’s just say that you’re not going to like. I don’t know whether super bowl ad should be AI voice generated yet. you know, I’m sure someone will do that as a stunt. Fine. that’s a stunt. so we take that relationship really seriously. we also believe that. And this is becoming more true as it’s not just about content that’s being created inside a company, but how a company presents itself outside the performance rights of that voice and that replica of a voice. It’s very important for us to be able to provide the commercial rights to our customers. And we’re not certain that other businesses can provide that based on just the data that’s been scraped from a fair use perspective, quote unquote on the web. And so there is an element of performance rights that we believe are foundational to the commercial rights we provide our customers. And so that’s again I think the things that we do right by our voice actors, allow us to do right by the enterprises that choose us. And I don’t think everyone else can say that.

>> Craig Gould: What are the biggest hurdles that you’re facing that you’re going to have to overcome to scale the business even more than you already have?

>> Benjamin Dorr: So really good question. there are. I think that like from. For. For. Well said. There is strong winds behind us, right? The, the things that we’ve talked about in terms of the quality of AI voice getting better with each model iteration and every data set that we develop. That’s great. The cost structure coming down in terms of how we improve those models. Great wins behind us in terms of challenges. and then also I will say people are actually really excited about using these tools. Right? Like it’s not like you know, I think that there is, whether it’s the crazy growth that you see on the OpenAI side and the SORA stuff that got announced yesterday, like people are excited to use these tools. So that’s all great from an adoption and a pull perspective. From a challenge perspective is that it’s getting easier and easier for people to build software. And that sounds great too, except it does mean that there are lots of tools that pop up that I will say are wrappers. AI wrappers of other things. They are vibe coding projects. They are solutions that may not be able to serve the types of enterprise requirements that a company like, well said, can. And other companies can too for sure. but they create noise. And again my job is not just about creating the, you know, like helping like us, like build a comp. Build a technology company. Part of that is a go to market effort that has to like, we have to we have to create air cover for our sales team. We have to have marketing that breaks through from a clarity perspective. we have to have people be able to see that the differentiation that we’ve built into our relationship with our voice actors is meaningful for them and reduces their risks, long term. So there’s elements here of there’s a lot of noise in software today. That noise, creates a lot of challenges for businesses to break through it. We’re doing a great job. but we could always do better. And that’s, that’s the challenge that I face a lot in our business.

>> Craig Gould: You know, a recent guest was talking about how once they found their product market fit and they started scaling that, they started seeing a lot of competitors coming in and trying to present themselves as being the exact same Solution, but at half the price. Right. And so I’m wondering, you know, do you face sort of the same thing where you have lots of inferior competition trying to promote themselves as being comparable and you know, what is the sales process for educating your customer as to the difference?

>> Benjamin Dorr: Really, really good question. Well, I’m not gonna, I’m not going to I’m not gonna go so far as to claim any competitors are inferior. I will say that they do things differently. and not all of them and not across the board, but there are some that do things differently. what we find is that when people start using well said, they like it. And so we actually operate from a go to market perspective in more of a land and expand motion where someone might start out with two seats on a team. Two instructional designers, one instructional designer. But as people see the value of that workflow that you described earlier in terms of like some of the challenges your wife had with with editing and drafts and things like that, the collaboration features, the ability to get other people working on this, we’ll see many more people touch the audio of the content being created than the folks that actually have seats and then that just expands. People want to be a part of the well said platform and our job is to as software developers is to keep increasing that competitive moat and the features that are available to make like it’s not about AI voice specifically in these use cases, it’s about solving a customer’s pain point. Right. An instructional designer who has pronunciation that doesn’t follow what they expect. Therefore they’re losing employee engagement and or they’re losing employee reach because they’re spending too much time creating a single piece of content. Really what we need to be doing as a business is helping them solve that engagement and reach problem. Right. And so that’s what we try to do from a solutions oriented standpoint as a business. I will kind of come back and come back on the cost side which is to say that honestly when folks come in with a solution that looks somewhat similar at half the cost, there’s two things that I think one, we have to get better to justify our price. So we have to make innovations that improve that solution and we have to think about ways to get cheaper. So I honestly like, you know, that is the one, you know that’s, that’s maybe one element of late stage capitalism that’s pretty cool is the fact that we are getting these things that are pretty, that are cheaper. So like let’s do that and so as a business, there’s elements where, there are times where we’ll raise our price, there’s times where we’ll lower our price. There’s times when we have to find solutions that are maybe disruptive to our own solution in order to anticipate the needs of folks that don’t need a Cadillac and they need a, I don’t know, like a, Volkswagen. You know, it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s figuring that out from a, from a, from a product market fit perspective.

>> Craig Gould: You foresee lots of different entry points into your product. Right? And 100%. And so I mean there’s transactional good enough, you know, all the way to, to premium.

>> Benjamin Dorr: So I look, I will say like, like some of our largest customers, and these are folks with hundreds of licenses started out with this one, right? And they started out as one just like buying through the site and trying it or maybe doing a trial, being contacted by our sales team, buying a seat and then realizing this is really effective for what we do. I will say the one change that’s happened in the industry is that a lot of people are using these tools now, whereas a year ago there was a lot more people. Like, I’m going to record with Joe down the hall. He’s got a pretty good voice. He’s recording at his computer.

>> Craig Gould: I can imagine that this customer evolution just within that learning and development, you know, scenario where someone’s storyboarding a video or storyboarding a class and decided, well, you know, hey, I don’t want to invest the resources to put a voice on this or to, to pay somebody to record a voice for my storyboard. But you know, maybe I’ll just dabble with well said and put the, the audio on there and then realize you hear this all the time in like Pixar animation where the director did a fill voice for a particular character just because, you know, and then like they couldn’t imagine it being any other voice. Right. And so seems like you can get your hooks in there even at that earliest stage of these, of these projects. Right.

>> Benjamin Dorr: I think that’s, that’s a, that prototyping is a. Prototyping is a huge entry point for let’s say more professional, sort of more professional content or like we’re going to go do like the full recording studio. So you could definitely see that. What I would say is that I think more people are choosing the AI, voice at that point when they start with it that way. and that is becoming a solution that there’s good enough and then there is like where we are from an AI voice perspective today. And that has really changed over the last five, 10 years in terms of content creation. But you’re absolutely right that, that prototyping is a use case that we’ve seen done well in entertainment.

>> Craig Gould: Can we talk about your journey and how you got to wellsaid? When I look on paper at your journey, it doesn’t look like it was a straight shot, direct route to wellsaid. You’ve kind of managed all the different parts of the organization. How did you get there?

>> Benjamin Dorr: Yeah, no, that’s a really, that’s a really good question. And I have worn a lot of hats. I’ve had effectively every single role in a startup. and when I say startup, I mean a growth stage business backed by venture capital. Right. I think it has a different term these days than it, that everybody thinks about this differently. but let’s say private companies backed by venture capital of any size. and I’ve had every role, whether it’s product and engineering, which is my background or support and account management or sales, business development, marketing, you name it, and people and culture. and what I will say is that each one of those roles.

>> Benjamin Dorr: Allowed me to kind of get deep in terms of what those disciplines require in terms of leadership and strategy and then also understand a business as a complex system. So the, there’s an element of growing a business where you you can’t let one side of the organization like grow too fast because it’s going to create, you know, sort of externalities for other parts of the organization and which causes them not to grow as fast. And you have to think about this sort organic, complex system across all of these different functions and line them up in terms of relative maturity together and then grow them together as a, as a, as a, as a, as a complex system. And so I think my ability at least to know, okay, these are the challenges that marketing has with sales or products, or these are the challenges that product has with a customer success or support organization or downstream with marketing. Those elements, have allowed me to hopefully, I don’t know whether my leadership team would agree, be able to interact and think about that organic growth better. so that’s been the value that I have that, that’s come out of that. And you know, I will say, you know, stepping back to early in my career, before I did startups, I was, I was on the venture capital side. This is really young And I was like, you know, just like a junior person. And I was sitting in a board meeting and they were going around the table deciding whether they should fire their VP of sales. He had all the strategic relationships, but he couldn’t manage a lick. And I sat there in that meeting and they asked me the question, and I had no earthly idea how to answer that question. Right. I had no experience. I could pattern match on what little experience I did have, but I’d never been in the room. And maybe the one thing that I will say about coming to the CEO role, having worn all those hats, is that it was really, I left venture capital because I couldn’t answer that question. I needed to go into startups to be able to get that experience myself. I now have the experience around that. and I think maybe that was my thought process around all these different roles I had over the years was that when I got to the C suite, from a CEO perspective, I wanted to round off my rough edges and be able to help grow a business without maybe some of the human misery inflicted through the dysfunctions that I’ve seen maybe happen in the past when those edges aren’t rounded off. So I don’t know if that’s helpful.

>> Craig Gould: No, I think so. And you know, it’s, it’s interesting, something that’s come up. The last two conversations, you know, one with a, CRO and one with a CTO who both had experience in venture capital. They talked about getting to a point where they understood, you know, alignment with what the board’s motivation is. You know, your board represents your shareholders. What do they want and are you keeping your goals in alignment with what the board wants? I think there’s, there’s some kernel of that in, in what you’re describing, right?

>> Benjamin Dorr: It is, it’s a critical. What you’re describing in terms of the board relationship and management and the the ability to translate, up and down, like so translate what is required in terms of, of external stakeholders, in terms of shareholders to the company and then also translating the company to, to those stakeholders is critical in the CEO role. And maybe the venture capital, or any investing experience gives you some light on that. One of the, one of the truisms that I know or like have internalized is, you know, our product, we’re customer obsessed about providing AI voice solutions to enterprises, right? And we’re going to think about that as a business and that’s our path, dependency. And we sell that service and product and Solution. But a VC’s product who invests in us is not that product. It’s not those customers. It is. We’re a return. And so what we have to do is. And what the CEO has to do is abstract the reality of the business into an align around the return profile for your investors and meanwhile take the pressures that come from that focus on returns and translate it to the team in terms of growth and mission, et cetera. And some might view that as, I don’t know, maybe like, maybe like some sort of game. It’s not. I think there is a real translation layer in terms of building a business on behalf of many stakeholders, whether it’s customers, employees or our shareholders, and making sure those are aligned. And that is, I mean that is, that is the, that is the job. And but if you go into the CEO job thinking that your product is to the vc, to the, to your customers is the same thing it is to the VCs, it’s not. And they don’t necessarily care about the same things that you do.

>> Craig Gould: So I’m imagining that you would not communicate to your employees the same way that the board and the VC is communicating to you. Right. That you, you’re going to have to filter if ultimately they are concerned about the number. You can’t communicate your vision as just a number to your employees because that.

>> Benjamin Dorr: That can create not just that vision’s not just a number to me. Right, right, right. And so yes, you cannot do that. it is taking in the. So, you know, we think about. So wellsat has, has, has five principles that, that, that, that, that govern us. I think about them as really related to stakeholders. Right. So, we have, we have an ethical responsibility to society in terms of how we’re developing AI. We have, you know, in terms of being customer obsessed. We have a, we have a responsibility to our customers. We are driving an industry forward technologically. Sometimes that’s at odds with the ethics of an industry. we have a responsibility to our people. Right. Because that’s, it’s not. We want to create a good place for them to work, a place where they can further their careers. Like we have people who are, you know, in the beginning of their career, in the twilight of their career all along that way we have a responsibility to our people and we have a responsibility to our stakeholders, our shareholders, who are also ourselves. Right. And we are aligned whether with VCs around that share price and we align around the vision to achieve that for them. But we’re trying to achieve so much more as a business than that in our, in our day to day. And maybe some people are more concerned about the ethics, maybe some people are more concerned about the employee, employee engagement and that maybe some folks are more engaged in the technology side. And again that’s that complex system and garden as it were that I’m, I’m trying to foster and I, I don’t know, I’m just like watering that and running around, putting fertilizer here and doing a call there and hopefully, hopefully doing an okay job like removing the slugs that are coming, putting ladybugs in. I don’t know, maybe that’s the maybe that’s the right analogy.

>> Craig Gould: How do you identify the right talent? Hiring especially? You know we’re not going to call it a startup, we’ll call it a venture backed growth company. Hiring is incredibly important. How do you know you’re finding the right person? And once they’re on board, how do you identify the folks that you want to give more responsibility to?

>> Benjamin Dorr: That’s a really good, that’s a hard one. Like, like talent is, talent is a challenging situation. I will say that latter question I’m going to kind of just put it to the side which is to say you know it when you know it. you can see how someone engages but it’s based on attributes that you look for at the beginning. A high sense of duty at this stage, the ability to go high and low kind of breadth across their given discipline, so they can think strategically but they can get in the weeds. The amount of like numbers that I still run my or marketing collateral that I collaborate on in terms of writing, it’s real. In a startup you have to be able to do all the jobs in your function. So high and low matters, the ability to build for managers, high performing teams and a sense of camaraderie that’s really important to me. I actually envy our cpto, Chris Johnson who is, has built just this amazing culture that I like to just sit into and sit in and like oh wow. I want to make sure that my team works as well as this and that mentorship is incredibly important. There are two questions I’ve learned in terms of those interview questions that I think are interesting. One is what people around you, unlocks like the genius in yourself because you want to make sure in that complex system that you have that right, the right attributes around them or you can get those people in to help them and that it won’t, that won’t mess up the system. The other p The other question is something that, I learned from, from a, from an investor friend, and I’ve used it ever since. that is, who are you most proud of having mentored in your career? And I don’t, I’m not looking for a specific answer. I don’t even, I don’t even know if I can describe the answer. But you can look that, like you can kind of see the joy in someone’s eyes, when they’re describing specific individuals and their career path and what they were able to accomplish because of mentorship, etc. And I think it’s what I’ve, what I’ve looked for in my career. It’s hopefully what I’m able to foster with my teams. I don’t know that that question matters a lot to me.

>> Craig Gould: It’s something we, we talk about a lot on here is the role of advisors and mentors inside your organization, outside your organization, having advisors that don’t even know that they’re your advisor. You just like, somehow they, they wind up, talking to you for 10 to 15 minutes once a quarter, and they, they don’t realize that they’re. They’re on your own personal board. Right?

>> Benjamin Dorr: That’s right. It is very true that you have to have a very strong network of folks. My leadership team is a fantastic, sounding board for me. And, I’m, able to be honest. And I think we’ve tried to create some first team principles there. we always have work to do on that. But it is, that they’re an incredible sounding board. But you also need folks external to the organization. And, I’ve been lucky to have many individuals along my career path who have, who have, who have helped me with that. And I, I made a decision the other week that was, based on like a specific coffee conversation with a former CEO. And he told me something and I was like, oh my God. That unlocks, something that I would have never thought of that way. And that is now my, one of my guiding lights for Q4. Great. Thank you.

>> Craig Gould: Well, Ben, I really appreciate your time today. I really appreciate you being willing to. I feel like I’ve really peppered you with questions and so I appreciate you having such a great attitude in being willing to answer them all if folks wanted to keep track of the progress of you. And. Well said. And you know, maybe they’re looking for, a voice where, where’s the best place to, to find you guys?

>> Benjamin Dorr: so well said in terms of, well said. IO on the web. Also within LinkedIn, that’s where you’re going to find like announcements that we have. We have a big product release coming out on, coming out in October. there’s a, there’s a, there’s a virtual event that Chris Johnson and our product and marketing team are hosting. and that’s going to be talking about the future of our models and some of the new features that are coming within our studio application. also other news is available there. and as always, if someone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m always happy to have a conversation, and learn more about them and hopefully, folks have been able to learn a little bit about well said and myself here. So it’s been, it’s been great. Craig, this is, this is, I love podcasts. These are great.

>> Craig Gould: Funny enough, so do I. So this is awesome. I appreciate it. Ben.

>> Benjamin Dorr: Yeah, thank you.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah.