Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Grant Miller.
Grant is the co founder of Replicated, a service that solves the problem for companies who want to install and deploy a SaaS application inside their own firewall.
Previously, he was the co founder of look IO, a mobile live chat platform that was acquired by Live Person after just nine months.
In this episode we talk about how to go about finding a great technical co founder.
How the co founders of Look IO came up with the idea for that business, how they raised money when they had no customers, how they sold Look IO for millions within just nine months, and the billion dollar vision the team now has for their new business.
So with that, let's bring on Grant.
Grant, welcome to the show.
Grant Miller (01:17.050)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (01:18.960)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who's Grant when he's not working?
Grant Miller (01:26.400)
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, I grew up in the Midwest.
I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio.
I spent the first 25 years of my life there, you know, high school, college, and then at some point I was working for another startup and I just had the opportunity to kind of live wherever I wanted and I decided to, you know, move out to la.
My brother was living here at the time and so I've become a. I've adopted California and Los Angeles as my new home.
I think I'm here to stay.
I love LA because it's a place where you can just, you know, be very focused on work and there's a lot to do.
But then the other two hours a day that you're not working, it's very easy to get outside and get some sunshine and be active and go for a trail run or a hike or a surf.
So.
So that's what you find me doing when I'm not working.
Omer (02:17.160)
Why did you choose LA instead of going to the Bay Area or the Valley?
What's the tech scene like down there?
Grant Miller (02:25.960)
Yeah, I think you can build a great business anywhere.
I think being in a big market helps.
I think that the tech scene's strong.
My closest friends are all entrepreneurs, so I think that's a really important piece in terms of having a strong network of people that support you and know what you're going through.
So, you know, I was able to find that Here and make it a home.
And I think, you know, I get up to the Bay Area a lot.
It's an hour flight.
You know, I can fly there in San Jose or find sf, fly into Oakland.
And so we get to spend a lot of time there.
I get to spend a lot of time in New York.
But I can have my home be someplace that I feel very relaxed and very comfortable.
Omer (03:10.100)
Now we'd like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Grant Miller (03:17.860)
Yeah, so I sort of have two and they're a little bit different.
The first one sort of helped drive me when I was building look IO and that's a quote from.
He's a Cincinnati born entrepreneur named Carl Lindner.
And he loved these quotes.
So he had these little cards made up that had all his quotes.
And it's the harder I work, the luckier I get.
And I just think it really kind of encapsulates the idea of you sort of make your own luck.
And then the other one is sort of a much more famous quote by Steve Jobs.
And I won't go into the whole thing, but it basically is.
It's from his speech at Stanford where he basically tells the audience that the world around you was created by people who are no smarter than you.
And it sort of goes on to help people understand that you sort of need to make the world that you're in.
And that quote is really what has driven me more recently because I think it sort of opens your eyes up to the idea that like the whole world that we know was created by people who have far less knowledge than us.
And we have like the world's information at our fingertips.
So now you have just vast more opportunities to change things and make things how they really should be.
And I think that it's a much broader and bigger vision than I originally had when I was building IO.
Omer (04:45.630)
That's a good one.
I love listening to that speech.
And every once in a while I'll go back and listen to that.
And it just kind of pumps you up again.
Grant Miller (04:55.310)
Yeah, it really does.
Omer (04:58.880)
Okay, so let's talk about.
We'll talk a little bit about Look I.O.
and the journey you took there.
And then we'll get into your latest business replicated.
But tell me a little bit about what you were doing before you started look IO.
Grant Miller (05:17.040)
Sure.
So in college I went to the University of Cincinnati and they had this great program where you sort of co op, so you spend half your time in class and half your time working for a company.
So I joined this sort of startup called SparkPeople, which had been founded by Chris Downey, who's an entrepreneur who had sold his first company to ebay and then started SparkPeople as a way to help other people achieve their goals.
And it was a really interesting place to kind of grow and learn because we were figuring out the business the whole time.
And I basically ran customer acquisition there for about all throughout college.
So four years in college and then three years after for about seven years total.
And I just learned all about the Internet.
It's kind of like I got to be an understudy from guys who had been there and done it in the early days and really built something amazing.
And I got to test a lot of my theories out and it was a great place to learn.
And then while I was still working with them, I actually moved to California and worked remotely for a few years and then eventually met up with another entrepreneur from Ohio, this guy Will Schroeder.
And he was building this sort of handful of web properties in all sorts of different areas and had sold a few companies previously, was really amazingly hard worker, and he asked me to come on as a CMO.
So I worked with Will for about 18 months and then I was kind of spending a lot of nights and weekends hacking on side projects and spending time in a co working space in Santa Monica where I met my co founder from both for both Look IO and replicated Mark Campbell.
And you know, Mark and I were both working on separate side projects and we just sort of recognized, you know, we were both the guys who were who were at this co working space from, you know, 7:00pm until midnight, five nights a week, and there on the weekends.
And we're really focused and we just had a lot of very complementary skills and just became kind of buddies.
And then Mark had the idea for look IO.
He and our other co founder, Joe, basically built it in a weekend at a startup weekend.
And it got some attention.
So I left my job with Will the next day, sort of started to like go raise some money for us so that, you know, Mark could have a salary and Joe could have a salary, you know, while we were building out the product and just sort of continued to network our way and to build our, you know, build our team of advisors and investors, you know, to the point where we could actually build a business.
Omer (08:11.980)
So I want to find out a little bit more about how you guys decided that you were going to become co founders.
You know, I hear, I talk To a lot of founders who, you know, either have a really hard time finding the right co founder or the other situation is they kind of regret the person that they brought on as a co founder.
So how long did you guys sort of know each other before you knew this was the, you know, that, that Mark was the right person for, for you to sort of launch a business with?
Grant Miller (08:48.250)
Yeah, I mean it is, it's such a important piece, right?
I don't think there's a more important thing than finding the right co founder.
And I had, you know, like I said, I've been working on all these other side projects prior to Mark.
And I tried to start probably 10 businesses throughout college and after college and While working at SparkPeople, you know, I was always kind of doing things on the side.
I think the most important things that I did.
So, you know, I'm a. I was always on the marketing and customer acquisition side.
So, you know, the year or two prior to working with Mark, I actually taught myself how to code, right.
So I watched videos from Harvard, like CS50TV and CS75TV.
There's classes that they put all the content online and I taught, I sort of watched those and learned more about programming sort of soup to nuts and got the, the full history from binary to assembly and how that all worked up to being able to prototype stuff in PHP and MySQL and JavaScript and being sort of what I like to say, just dangerous enough to prototype.
And I think just that action of really investing a lot of time to become more competent earned me a lot of respect in Mark's eyes.
And he's an amazingly talented engineer who can pick up a language in a week and be a master of it.
And he's a little bit older.
He's actually about seven or eight years older than I am.
And so he's built up this amazing breadth of skills and knowledge from all of his experiences.
And I think that the fact that I was this marketing, customer acquisition, businessy guy who actually could understand the logic behind the things he was building and really appreciate how amazing he was, really allowed us to hit it off.
Oftentimes my biggest advice to business co founders is just go teach yourself how to code.
There's a million resources around, it's freely available on the Internet and by doing so you can one, spot really amazing technical co founders and two, you'll understand them more.
You know, you'll understand what you can and can't build.
So I think for me it was, it was being able to know that and see Mark.
And then the other piece was just we had this very aligned work ethic.
Right.
I mentioned that we would both be at the co working space from 7pm to midnight, you know, four nights a week and there on the weekends.
And I think when you recognize that the person you're going to go into business with is as committed as you are to really put everything they have into it, you're just much better aligned.
Omer (12:03.520)
Tell me more about where the idea for lookio came from.
By the way, how old are you now?
Grant Miller (12:12.240)
I'm 32.
Omer (12:14.240)
You've done a lot in the last 10 years.
Amazing.
Yeah, tell me more about that idea.
Grant Miller (12:21.520)
Yeah, I mean, so just with everything that we do, basically, Mark's ideas, he was a mobile engineer for a company called Tiger Text and he was experiencing the pain of developing mobile applications and then sending them off for testing, beta testers and just not being able to get the feedback and not understanding the experiences that were, that his users were having.
So he was like, I want to build a library, a plugin for mobile apps to be able to view the screen of the user while they're using the application.
So that was sort of the first concept around it.
And so he and our other co founder, Joe, sort of like built this prototype out.
And it's funny, when they told me the idea, I was like, I sort of thought about it for a minute.
I was like, okay, so it's kind of like Live Person for mobile.
And he was like, sure.
He was like, but what's Live Person?
I was like, oh, it's kind of this live chat thing, right?
So I kind of just like suggested that they add in a text chat feature that would go alongside of this screen sharing.
And so they added that in and built this little prototype that the wow factor was the fact that you could literally screen share and you at a computer could click into the screen of a mobile user and tap around and show them what to do.
And then the text chat that overlaid was sort of like this afterthought that we added in.
It's just like, well, it might be nice to show them a message.
Omer (14:01.940)
So that's interesting.
So you already sort of, once you heard the idea, you already kind of made the connection with Live Person, but you weren't kind of thinking about that company or Mark wasn't thinking about that company when that sort of idea evolved.
Grant Miller (14:17.950)
Yeah, he definitely wasn't thinking about the live chat aspect of it.
I think he was more thinking about screen share and the ability to experience what your user's experiencing and really see what they're seeing, which is why we called it look.
But at the same time that idea was still fairly like, it was fairly iterative, right?
Like live chat had worked on the web, you know, and like screen sharing had worked on the web.
So there just wasn't.
Just didn't exist on mobile.
And I think it was, you know, I don't claim that it was like this amazing, you know, transformational technology that we built.
It was sort of a fairly like next step.
And, you know, people were trying to build it.
We just built it in a very clean and simple way with a great experience, which is what made us different.
Omer (15:07.490)
Okay, and then did you say you, you decided to go and raise money once you guys had sort of a, sort of, I guess an MVP built?
Grant Miller (15:17.010)
Yeah, so we.
Yeah, exactly.
We had just a demo and this was 2011, so, you know, and Mark and I were first time entrepreneurs.
So we, we decided it would be really helpful if we had some amount of capital to pay.
Well, I paid myself like $24,000.
We paid Mark like 60 grand.
And he has a family with two kids, so very below market salaries.
But we needed some money to pay those nonetheless and to travel up to SF and over to New York and all over the place and try to get customers.
So yes, we raised basically the way we raised money was we didn't really know any investors, right, but we did know a few other entrepreneurs.
So we showed our product to another entrepreneur who was in the mobile space that I had met through Will, the guy who I'd worked with previously.
And we were like, hey, here's the technology we're building.
What do you think?
And this guy Dustin, who was the founder of a company called Pose, he was like, oh, this is really cool.
Let me introduce you to some of my investors, right?
And through basically a series of meetings and then introductions and then the next guys, we found a group of amazing investors, right, who all threw in anywhere from 25 to 50k.
And we only needed a few of those guys.
We raised $200,000 and off we went.
Mark was able to leave his job.
He was actually kind of in the process of leaving at that point.
So he was, you know, winding down his full time gig at TigerText.
Nobody was.
He was the principal engineer.
So they needed like a solid, you know, six weeks of transition.
So it was during that time that I raised the money.
Omer (17:06.340)
So I.
Did you have any customers at that point?
Grant Miller (17:10.420)
No, no.
I mean we.
Omer (17:13.060)
So it was just the idea and the demo product that you had?
Grant Miller (17:16.380)
Yeah.
And one of our investors who was actually the first guy that committed, this guy Tom McInerney, he's a fairly prominent angel investor in LA.
He saw what we were doing, and in the comment that he made, he was like.
He saw that we had engineering velocity, so we were just building amazing stuff constantly.
The product was changing dramatically from one week to the next because Mark and Joe were putting so much effort into building something great.
I think that's what really spurred him to take a little bit of a risk on us.
Omer (17:53.560)
Okay, all right, so you've got the money.
How long did it take you guys to.
To get to a point where you.
I mean, did you go out and sort of launch right away, or did you keep working on the product for a little longer before you kind of went out there?
Grant Miller (18:10.440)
No, we definitely.
I mean, we were like, we had a website from day one.
We were out there showing the technology to people and specifically showing it to targeted entrepreneurs who might be interested in using it in their products and showing them where we were today and getting their feedback on the product and really building it to meet their needs and to make sure that this was something that they would want to use in the future.
So it's kind of the idea of finding early design partners or design customers that can help give you feedback on your product.
Omer (18:43.890)
Were you charging for the product from day one?
Grant Miller (18:47.250)
No, no.
For look IO, we actually never charged anyone.
So until.
Until we were acquired and part of Live Person, we didn't have any revenue.
Omer (18:54.770)
Got it, Got it.
Okay, so how long did it take you to get the first, I guess, user or customer up and running?
Grant Miller (19:08.290)
So, you know, we were sort of experimenting with a few of our friends and putting it inside of their apps.
You know, they were just like other guys out of the co working space, and it was helpful for them.
But I think the first customer that was really, really helpful and we'd basically been introduced through a VC is HotelTonight.
So I had been introduced their CEO, Sam Schenck, through this VC who actually never even invested in Look IO, but this guy Sar from Charles River Ventures, and he had introduced us to Sam Schenck, who we then spent time showing the product to, and he kind of gave us advice, and then eventually he decided that, like, yes, this is something we want to move forward with.
And I think they went live in, like, February or March timeframe.
And we had started the company in August, so it took that long to really get a customer live.
Okay.
Omer (20:07.810)
And were you doing anything else to go and Acquire customers or was it just really going and just as you said, sort of these focused sort of conversations with other entrepreneurs who are likely to use the product.
Would you do anything else?
Grant Miller (20:22.530)
I mean, I think.
And this is, this is definitely carried forward in the replicated as well, which is when you're building enterprise software, which both of these companies are, you basically have to be constantly trying to get feedback from the best possible customers.
Right.
You don't just want anybody using it and it's sort of like because you sort of get locked into their use case, you want to find a customer who you think is a thought leader in the space that you're trying to go after and then you basically want to partner with them to build the features that would make them more successful.
You basically just focus all of your effort on listening to their feedback, understanding their use cases, and you try to get maybe two or three of these design partners so that you have a couple different points of reference.
And you're not building just the thing for one customer, but you're building something that has the feedback from a few customers in a similar space so that you're really solving the problem that then can apply to a bigger audience.
Omer (21:33.120)
So I'm curious, why did you decide to target enterprise customers?
I mean, you could have easily just sort of gone for the millions of app developers out there who could use this kind of functionality.
Grant Miller (21:48.210)
Yeah.
So the idea is that you needed to figure out who needs your product the most.
Right.
And for look IO we realized that like the thing that we helped out with was allowing you to engage with your customers.
And the people that want to engage with their customers on mobile are probably doing mobile commerce.
So I bought this magazine from Internet retailer called the Mobile Commerce 500.
And it basically is a ranking of the top companies who are doing the most total revenue over mobile.
And that was like my bible carried that thing around me all the time.
It was actually at that point they didn't even have an Internet version, like a paper copy.
So it would be with me on planes and everywhere else I went.
And I knew who the biggest companies were in mobile and I tried to reach them and tried to show them what we were doing.
Because my thought was that one, mobile commerce was going to grow.
Right.
It was like that was going to be the way that people purchased in the future.
So if we could target companies who were thought leaders in mobile commerce, then we would sort of inherently get this halo effect of being the technology of preference for mobile commerce thought leaders, which would then allow us to get A broader appeal and get more companies using it.
Okay,
Omer (23:18.650)
how did the acquisition with Live Person come about?
Did you go out and at some point, did that become part of your exit strategy or was it kind of more something that happened by accident?
Grant Miller (23:37.600)
Yeah.
So about six months in, you know, we started to get a little press from the launch with HotelTonight.
And, you know, we were part of this accelerator in LA called Amplify.
So we got a little press because of them as well.
And we basically, you know, we were out sort of at this point.
We, you know, we knew our fundraising of 200k was only going to last so long, so we were what I call soft circling the next round.
We were talking to investors who might be interested in investing.
I think we were going to raise a million and a half in the next round.
So we were kind of getting guys lining people up to come into the next round.
And during that time we actually just got a phone call to my cell phone, which was the phone number that was listed on the website at the time from the head of mobile@liveperson.
And he's like, hey, you know, just want to talk about what you guys are doing, you know, and if there's an opportunity to partner.
And so we able to.
We were able to really kind of establish a bit of a connection, but it was really, you know, we didn't go to like, try to shop the company around or shop the offer around.
We made a connection with the CEO at Live Person, this guy Rob Locasio, who was the original founder.
And we loved their cfo.
We just loved the team there and thought that they shared the vision for Live Chat to drive mobile commerce and they would be a great home for us.
So ultimately it took about three months of negotiation.
All the while we were sort of on this dual path of soft circling our next round.
But eventually the offer came through and we signed the deal and they wired the money and we were Live Person Mobile.
Omer (25:25.760)
How much did you sell the business for?
I know you're not going to tell me, but I'm sure people are going to be curious about that.
So I have to ask.
Grant Miller (25:36.160)
It was never disclosed publicly, so we haven't been able to share it, but it was in the millions of dollars.
So it was a great outcome for Mark and I and our team as well as for our investors.
Omer (25:51.040)
So looking back at that experience and it's an incredible journey to go on for just nine months, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Grant Miller (26:08.320)
Well, I mean, so during those nine months, I always like to say, like, now sort of looking at how I'm running my business versus then how I ran our business?
And at that point, it was.
Look, IO, it was like, if I was in the.
It was in the ocean.
I was just not drowning, right?
Like, we weren't going anywhere, but we weren't drowning.
And it took all the effort to just not drown.
And now I think with Replicated, having been there before and having had a lot more experience at Live Person, I think we're really swimming, so we're making an effort to go in a specific direction, and we have a vision where we want to be.
So it's hard to know if that's really a big mistake, because we just didn't know any better, but it was definitely the struggle.
Omer (26:58.360)
Can you give me an example of maybe a specific situation which you're handling very differently now with Replicated than you were when you were working on look IO?
Grant Miller (27:10.040)
Sure.
There's a really funny example which was we were in New York, and we were soft circling this round, and we didn't know how to value our business.
So we were talking to investor, and we were like, yeah, I think we're gonna raise one on four, right?
So a million dollars on a $4 million valuation.
And he's like, that's great.
He's like, I'm in.
I'll take it all.
And I was like.
I was taken aback.
I was like, oh, well, you know, like, maybe it's a little bit higher now.
It's really kind of a.
It's kind of a moving target.
And so, you know, I think that that was a.
That was sort of realizing that maybe we had set our price a bit too low and I needed to raise it up.
But I tried to do it to the same guy who had just agreed to take the deal.
It was just one of these, like, very amateur mistakes.
Omer (28:02.380)
And did you have.
Have you raised money for Replicated as well?
Grant Miller (28:06.060)
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we just raised one and a half million, you know, from.
From a lot of the same guys who had invested in, you know, in look IO's advisory round, as well as guys that were really, you know, hoping to get into the next round, but never did because we were sold.
So.
Omer (28:24.540)
So I guess it was a lot easier this time because, one, you have, you know, you're a lot more experienced with that process and raising money.
And then also you have a great track record now, which probably makes it a lot easier as well, I guess.
Grant Miller (28:38.790)
Yeah, it definitely helps a lot.
Still amazing, though.
Like, you know, despite our success, raising money from people that I didn't know was just about as hard as, you know, as it was the first time.
You know, pretty much all of our investors I've known for at least a year, maybe longer, right?
Maybe three or four or in one case, I've known the guy for eight years.
So it's in a lot of the new.
Lot of the folks that we just met or got introduced to during the fundraise just didn't trust us enough.
Omer (29:18.700)
Looking back, what do you think was one of the hardest things about building the Look IO business?
I mean, in many ways it sounds like super easy, right?
I'm sure it wasn't, but it kind of, you know, comes like that.
You came up with this idea, you built this product, you got a couple of hundred thousand dollars and the company was sold for, you know, millions of dollars within nine months.
What, what do you wish if you could go back to the day you started on that journey with that business and you could tell yourself or give yourself some advice, what do you wish you had known better about building that business?
Grant Miller (30:02.880)
That's a great question.
I think for us it was really, it was just a great growth experience.
Right.
When we started that business, we, we weren't really thinking about building a multi billion dollar business, right?
We were thinking we'd seen multimillion dollar companies built, right.
We were a part of them.
We had like contributed, you know, Mark and I each had contributed millions of dollars in value to the companies we'd worked at.
So I think we initially set off with the vision of like, let's build a multimillion dollar business, right?
And, and that's just different than what you need to do in order to really create billions of dollars in value.
But at the same time it's like, I don't think that I should have gone and tried to build billions of dollars in value that first time because I really need the experience of building millions in value personally before I could try to tackle billions.
So it's all about stages and understanding what the next step is.
And, and for us, it was a really amazing learning experience and I probably wouldn't have done it any differently.
Omer (31:16.080)
Okay, so let's talk about replicated very different business.
Not in the mobile space.
Where did the idea for that come from?
Grant Miller (31:27.200)
Yeah, so once again, Mark was leading a lot of the technology innovation at Life first and, and we've just seen that not just at Live Person, but many other SaaS companies we talked to, we're still getting these requests from big customers to sell them an installable version, something that a big Fortune 50 company could host behind their firewall or put in their own data center and have control over instead of using the cloud version.
And the opportunities for this to sell that as a cloud company are actually quite difficult.
You can either sort of physically provision appliances and send them to a customer through snail mail or UPS to rack and stack, as they say, into their data center.
And that's a nightmare.
Or the sort of more cutting edge solution at the time was to sort of create a secondary product that you could wrap in a VM in a virtual machine and then send that VM to be like run inside of a data center, private cloud.
And Mark's recognition was just that know, okay, neither of those are really perfect.
But what's interesting is he saw that containers, right?
So a lot of people probably heard about Docker.
And containers allow you to go from a developer's machine to a staging environment to a production environment and keep all of the application dependencies with the application, right?
So it's kind of referred to as developer defined architecture or where you're not really using a script to provision a VM or a box before you apply your or before you deploy your application, it sort of all happens inside of the container.
So that same application portability that allows you to go vertically in the stack from a developer's machine to a staging environment to production environment, Mark just recognized that like, hey, you can leverage that same app portability to put it into somebody else's data center or put it into somebody else's private cloud.
So Mark had that recognition around the time that our earn up was out at Live Person.
And we knew that more SaaS companies would sort of adopt that as a way to ship their cloud product into the data center.
So we sort of just set off to say, okay, well if SaaS companies start to make that decision, what are going to be the things that they're all going to have to build, right?
What are they going to have to do to make that possible?
And we looked at sort of the company that was had best gone from cloud to installable and had two different products to do that, which is GitHub, right?
So GitHub started as GitHub.com with a cloud based source control.
And then about two years into that existing, they introduced GitHub Enterprise, which has become wildly successful.
Thousands of customers, all the biggest companies in the world using GitHub Enterprise, which is a virtual machine that you deploy behind your firewall and you manage and you update your IT team manages and updates.
So we just studied GitHub Enterprise and really figured out what made IT work well and what was better about that experience than most other installable software.
And then we said, okay, well, how can we make it better even?
So we sort of decided to take what they've had, what they had and sort of be inspired by a lot of their features, but also add things in that we thought would make it even easier for an IT administrator to install and update and manage.
And then we just put those services together and offer them as replicated so that now you, as a SaaS application developer can deploy the same product to the cloud that you then can deploy through replicated.
And then we wrap these enterprise sort of enabling features around and then give to your biggest customers for them to put in their data center.
Omer (36:21.220)
How big of a market or opportunity do you think this is?
Because in, you know, I mean, I obviously, I spent a long time in an enterprise environment, and so I get it in terms of a lot of those companies are just not comfortable with their applications and data being hosted outside of their own data centers.
But at the same time, I would say that you could have made the same argument with things like CRM software 10 years ago where those companies would have said, hey, you know, we don't want to host this outside of our data center.
This is, you know, proprietary information about our customers, our clients.
And that pretty much changed with companies like Salesforce.
And most enterprises seem to be a lot more comfortable hosting these apps elsewhere.
So do you.
Grant Miller (37:30.950)
What.
Omer (37:31.270)
What's your take on this?
Do you think that.
I mean, obviously you guys are making a bet that it's going to be a big opportunity, but I'm just wondering about how are you seeing the future?
Grant Miller (37:42.070)
Yeah, so, yeah, that's a great.
That's great.
And Mark and I really believe in a future with a much more decentralized and distributed Internet.
Right.
So we think that there shouldn't be this centralized place where all the world's information is controlled by one company or a handful of companies.
So the fact that all of our email sits in Gmail and they can provide backdoors to whoever they want to get into your information or their employees can access.
It just doesn't feel right.
It just doesn't feel like the spirit of the Internet that we want to have and that I think was originally set out to be created.
The Internet was originally designed to be decentralized and distributed.
So we just think that decentralization can start in the enterprise.
Right.
Where applications can be run anywhere and people can control their data and the updates and the access as they wish and make, you know, governments come to the front door and ask for information instead of, you know, going behind your back.
And it's not just governments, but it's, you know, it's everybody.
So that's like the very broad vision.
And in terms of market size, you know, what we see is that all the best software is being developed in the cloud.
Right.
This is where all the innovation happens.
The consumerization of it is something that's talked about a lot, yet there's still this huge amount of spend.
370 billion a year is spent to deploy software in the installable version in the enterprise.
370 billion.
Compare that to the 30 billion a year spent on cloud and you have a, an order of magnitude more money spent for installable software.
And the problem is that's just not moving to cloud fast enough.
So what we think we can do is enable cloud companies to capture that market much faster than they are doing today by sort of meeting that demand somewhere in the middle, right where it's their cloud technology.
It's sort of deployed through a little bit more modern technologies, but it's controlled by the buyer.
So we really think we're defining a new paradigm that's not full on prem, it's not full cloud.
It's sort of this.
We don't really like the term hybrid, but it's this combination.
Omer (40:22.290)
What stages are you at with replicated?
When did you guys launch that business?
Grant Miller (40:29.660)
So we launched, we started it in September and you know, and really just have been heads down building product for the last eight months.
All during that time, we spent a lot of time in front of customers, showing them what we have, getting feedback, understanding their needs.
Right.
And we think about the software vendors as our customers here.
And so now we have three early customers who are all incredibly excited about what we're doing and how we're helping them reach more enterprises.
And we haven't announced who those customers are yet, but we'll probably be announcing who they are pretty soon and really focusing on bringing more customers on board.
Omer (41:20.130)
So it sounds like you probably have like two types of potential customers.
One is somebody who already has a SaaS product and is seeing growing demand for, you know, enterprise customers to host within their own data centers.
I guess the other one I'd kind of think of as well is that there are, you know, there are a bunch of companies out there who, you know, maybe have a client version of software right now, would love to get into a SaaS model, but haven't been able to do that because their customers expect this software to be installed within the data centers.
And so that might open up a new path for those type of players as well.
Grant Miller (42:13.140)
I guess potentially we really see it as like we're serving SaaS companies and pretty much SaaS companies alone.
Sometimes they have already created a beta version that's installable, but generally it's like helping them go from 0 to 1 and bringing their SaaS product on Prem and I guess eventually the other customer.
We do help serve two customers.
One is the SaaS vendor and the other is the IT buyer who wants to have access to amazing software behind the firewall.
And they don't want to be stuck with the thing that was developed 15 years ago.
They want to use the latest and greatest stuff that's only available on the cloud.
So we just help bring that cloud tech to them much faster.
Got it.
Omer (43:02.640)
Do you think about an exit and an acquisition with this business?
Are you guys already thinking about that or hoping that it happens, or do you have a sort of a different mindset to the way you've approached this new business?
Grant Miller (43:17.800)
Yeah, we have a much different mindset.
Right.
I think we recognized while working at Live Person and working with some of LivePerson's biggest customers that these multi billion dollar organizations are really run by people who are not any smarter than we are.
Right.
And a lot of times they make decisions to keep keep their jobs, not to create amazing amounts of value.
So we think that we're very capable of running a multi billion dollar business and that's what we want to see this become.
Plus, we just love building stuff.
Right?
So we want to build this and make this the place that we want to spend all of our time.
So we don't want to go work for somebody else.
Cool.
Omer (44:09.110)
It's a very inspirational story and I am really looking forward to seeing what you guys are going to do with this business.
All right, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Grant Miller (44:26.670)
All right, let's do it.
Omer (44:27.990)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Grant Miller (44:33.200)
Think less, do more.
Omer (44:35.520)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Grant Miller (44:39.520)
Oh, Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
Omer (44:43.360)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Grant Miller (44:50.160)
I call it the ability to grind, which means to go just constantly doing work that nobody else wants to do.
And just produced producing value for 15, 16 hours straight.
Omer (45:03.810)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Grant Miller (45:08.930)
So very relevant.
The thing that I love to do is actually listen to podcasts while I go for like a nice, you know, six or eight mile run and just sort of, you know, not at full speed, just sort of at, you know, maybe a eight mile an hour pace.
Thinking about the things that I'm hearing and deconstructing.
The entrepreneur that's being interviewed or the business that's being talked about.
Omer (45:35.990)
Very cool.
And I think when we talked earlier, you'd said that that was something you used to do even before you started look IO in terms of trying to listen to other stories, deconstruct them, and sort of figure out a plan for yourself.
Grant Miller (45:50.960)
Yeah, it's been a really important thing for me.
I like to reverse engineer things.
So when I can hear stories about other people's success, it allows me to take little tidbits from here and there and then construct my own sort of vision for success and formula for success.
Omer (46:11.280)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business or problem would you go out and solve?
Maybe in another words, I would say, what were some of the other ideas that got you excited when you and Mark were talking about replicated?
Grant Miller (46:23.960)
Okay.
Yeah, because I was going to say, well, of course I want to build replicated.
There's stuff that's related to the distributed Internet.
Right.
Like Mark and I really believe in sort of this concept of like peer to peer technology and enabling an Internet that doesn't go through the carriers, but actually is carried from device to device and sort of the.
I think we'll start to see that evolve over the next five or 10 years.
Omer (46:48.900)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Grant Miller (46:53.780)
Oh, let's see here.
I'll go.
This is always a hard one.
Let's say that there's this rumor, there's this little myth that it's impossible to eat six crackers in under a minute.
And I figured out in college that is a complete myth.
All you have to do is bite crackers into little shards and then swallow the shards and you can eat 10 crackers in a minute.
So I've won many of those dry mouth competitions with that technique.
Omer (47:32.690)
There you go.
Maybe there's a business opportunity there as
Grant Miller (47:35.450)
well in the future.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Sideshow pays very well.
Omer (47:40.060)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Grant Miller (47:43.980)
Yeah, I just love being active.
So I think I like to, I call it commune with nature, right?
So get up in the Santa Monica Mountains and go for a mountain bike ride or a trail run or get in the ocean and swim or paddle board and just sort of really be surrounded by a natural environment.
So that's what makes me happy outside of work.
Omer (48:05.650)
Great answers, Grant.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
If folks want to find out more about Replicated they can go to replicated.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Grant Miller (48:24.210)
Yeah, you know Twitter's great.
Just rantm or LinkedIn.
That's always the easiest ways to find me.
Omer (48:33.820)
Awesome Grant.
Thanks again.
I wish you continued success.
Grant Miller (48:36.780)
Omar, thank you so much.
Omer (48:38.220)
Cheers.
