How Switchboard App CEO Amir Ashkenazi grew Switchboard App to $3.5M revenue with a 8 person team in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is amir ashkenazi he's the founder and ceo of switchboard his first remote only company and he's never going back he says he's a six-time entrepreneur at pioneered comparison shopping shopping.com ipo which is acquired by ebay programmatic advertising that was adapt.tv which is required by aol and ai assistance for meetings this is toki which is required by log me and emily are you ready to take us to the top ready to go let's go all right all right so you've had some success here just to be clear those three companies i just mentioned you founded all those correct yep yep so look i'm just gonna say this bluntly you're like a super rich guy you can do anything you want why get into remote cloud co-working i uh insist on doing what i love and what i love is building products that are absolutely innovative that you don't have right now and you really need so how would you describe this it's sort of a blend between what and what yeah so switchboard is a cloud co-working space it's the next generation collaboration platform it really allows people to do things together if the as if they were sitting side by side when you think about the way we collaborate right now mostly through video conferencing it's not very collaborative like we can see and hear each other maybe show a screen but when we actually want to do things together it seems to fall short mm-hmm yeah and there what's interesting is like you know we just had zeb evan's on we had eric wong on before zoom ipod so we've talked to a bunch of folks and like you know zoom just released a whiteboard and click ups trying to do this and like everyone sort of has their own version of this and i just look at all of them and i go who's going to win this space is it really going to be a technical breakthrough or it's going to be who dominates distribution or something else what's your take so let's focus for a second on the technical breakthrough so what we did is we developed cloud browsers those are essential elements that allow you to bring any tool that you already use things like google docs and figma and trello and jira and they become immediately collaborative even regular websites become immediately collaborative in this switchboard workspace and what it opens is a canvas that is completely interactive where all participants can engage with the content and not just start faces so we think technology is important but i absolutely agree with you it's just a starting point so tell me just you have to forgive my naive to naivete here what makes this a hard technical challenge why can you solve it and no one else can or or very few other people can well browsers were built as single-player applications they were basically built for one user to interact with the web they were not billed as collaborative uh applications and basically what we did is turn them to exactly that so they run in the cloud you don't need to share your screen they keep memory of your room so when you open a room in switchboard it starts exactly where you left it last time you don't have to prepare for it you don't need to summarize it because it's all in the room and uh the the difficult part is mainly around security scalability and the ux of how do you manage multiple applications within one browser tabs switchboard does not require to download anything or learn any new tools everything works in the browsers with the tools you already use very interesting okay so put this on on a roadmap for us here when did you write the first line of code for this platform so we really started two years ago it's very funny i'm a guitar player not very talented but really enjoyed that so with my guitar lessons moved to um online it was really terrible so you need tools like a metronome you need notes you need multiple videos and all i got is the instructor's face uh so that was the moment i said okay we need something else here um so that one we started it was may of 2020 uh quickly in june we started to write code for this i think it took us six months to understand that this is actually not for guitar lessons but this is the core problem that every remote and hybrid team is facing oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and this makes a lot of sense now did you were you scrappy at the beginning of this did you want to you know a lot of second time third time fourth time founders to go you know what i hated working with a co-founder the first time i'm gonna own it all at the beginning just pay everyone a lot of money what route are you taking here this is your fourth or fifth venture actually your seventh eighth venture six it's only six six okay yeah uh it's i it's all about partnerships it's all about getting people that will join your journey and that are excited about this and can contribute to it so very quickly we partnered with the right vcs to accelerate our path and with the right uh first employees to build this thing i i don't believe that you can do great things um alone in a room closed it's all about creating this human connection and inspire people to go in a direction and believe that this is the future but you're burying the punch line here which is when i when i my research team research the company and prep for this interview you're the only one listed as a founder so you were you were day one guy there's there's no co-founder i am a single founder but but it's really um i view my leadership team as absolutely essential for this and they are uh partners to every decisions that that we made along the way who was your first partner in building this so what was my first point so my first photo is actually uh daniel portola daniel potoyo was the head of talent in greylock and i knew for many years and every time i met him he gave me you know the right connections and contacts and introductions and when i read it he's starting uh sweat equity ventures now it's called the general partnership i immediately called him so let's work on this together and uh it was transformational it quickly connected me with the right recruiters and advisors and so on so we got it off the ground very quickly it still took two full years of development in stealth mode to reach the point we're in right now so amir come on i want to know how painful this was if you had to quantify how much money you spend just on development before you ship the beta into the product launch can you quantify that we talked like a million two million five million to build it about eight oh my gosh eight million interesting i would have never guessed that much so what am i what am i missing what makes it so expensive uh what you're missing is that from a technical perspective this is a really difficult uh problem to solve um and uh i'll give you an example so in two years we already have five granted panels for the work that we do oh wow it never happened to me it usually takes five six years and...