How Typeform Reached $70M ARR at a $935M Valuation in 2022 (Interview with Co-Founder David Okuniev)

Intro and David's return

Nathan Latka

00:00hey folks my guest today is david okanyev if you listen to the show you know we've had type 41

00:04many times last time david and i spoke he was launching typeform's official second product video asked he's now onto

00:10something more exciting we're going to talk about it today david are you ready to take us to the top

00:14all right so you're just like you just like going from zero to one right you're like once it breaks

David Okuniev

00:17a million revenue you get bored you move on to the next well a bit further than that but yeah

00:22i like the early stage of of product building and being a small team uh it's where the juice is

Nathan Latka

00:29so pick up where we left off with video asking we'll dive into the new product so when you came

VideoAsk status and handoff

Nathan Latka

00:33on last you were just launching the paywall i think you broke 1.2 million maybe an aor but what's the

David Okuniev

00:38status of that today how's it going well the the products around 3 million in in arr and so i

00:44stepped away from it around six months ago because i'm uh basically i run a very small r d team

00:51and we sped up new products and videos was one of those new products and then we built up the

00:56team around that and then i handed that over to the product team in type form and now i'm working

01:01on a new product with just me and another developer and yeah we're actually about to release it well start

01:07to beta release it with a few people so um yeah exciting this is this is okay there's a bunch

Nathan Latka

01:13of stuff to unpack here so so i guess first off you left video ask when it broke three million

01:18in revenue didn't anything changed something yeah and so what did you i mean how did you know it was

01:25ready to sort of pass off and that it wouldn't just crash and burn if you stopped focusing on well

Exploring the async audio space

Nathan Latka

01:30it was more of a case that you know i there was another idea coming up and i wanted to

David Okuniev

01:35explore the audio and meeting space the voice let's say async audio and meeting space and it's kind of quite

01:44a hot space now so i wanted to jump into that and so i think it was time to move

Nathan Latka

01:48on yeah you're seeing sort of slack ad in the bottom left hey use use audio to send messages or

David Okuniev

01:54do a do a walkie-talkie style sort of thing this is this yeah there's a bunch of products on the

01:59market doing async audio and also meeting insights we're trying to combine the two like acing conversations for less so

02:08that you have less meetings and then using ai to enhance actual meetings and then actually even combining the two

02:15imagine starting a conversation async by a voice then jumping into a meeting and then doing the follow-ups with uh

Introducing Relayed

Nathan Latka

02:23with with voice as well in an async well async essentially so what's the name of the product it's called

02:29relayed or relayed however you want to spell it sorry pronounce it r e l a y e d dot

David Okuniev

02:37ai and uh and yeah the promises is fewer better meetings essentially and we're just about to start letting people

Nathan Latka

02:46into the beta so just head off to the website and and register and we'll let you in soon how

David Okuniev

02:52many how what's on the how many on the beta list right now uh well we we re i just

02:58the only thing we've done so far is i did a linkedin post like last month there so hopefully now

03:04we'll we'll get a few more people in and typhoon will promote it as well so we'll start pushing it

03:09but it's been it's been pretty much under wraps up till now so i think what's interesting here for anyone

Series C and valuation

Nathan Latka

03:14listening is right you guys are not i mean this is not a small company right i mean you guys

03:18i believe you i mean you did 135 million series c at a 935 million valuation right yeah that was

03:24pre-money or post post money evaluation okay post so flirting with sort of unicornish status and last time he came

03:31on the show i mean you said ar was right around 48 million in aor ice what you guys are

03:35like 70 now a bit bit more than that a bit more so like the fact that you've sort of

03:41and you were one of the original founders yeah yeah we're two co-founders oh what's going on there youtube good

David Okuniev

03:49to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took

03:54all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well

04:00we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you

04:07how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your

04:11valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation

Nathan Latka

04:18this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're

04:24going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the

04:29way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a

04:36vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's

04:41different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover

04:46over right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if

04:52you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again

04:58you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with

05:04us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in

05:11here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well

05:17here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and

05:23you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down

05:28what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data

05:36set of sas valuations and what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it

05:41to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you

05:44want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out

05:48for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if

05:57you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up

06:03to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you

06:09there all right let's jump back into the interview so the fact that you've been able to sort of create

06:13this little niche instead of a much larger company where you are able to stay very nimble and flexible and

06:18and basically be the r d team i think is really interesting to learn about so what is the team

The two-person R and D team

David Okuniev

06:23today right so like the r d team you're leading what name name the roles of the people on that

Nathan Latka

06:27team it's just two people really just you and engineering so i act as product manager designer and and now

06:35i'm doing front-end development as well and then i work with a guy called neil uh who's just a fantastic

06:43like product person super rounded back end front end just also you know great product ideas and we just we

David Okuniev

06:50make a duo basically in the company and and yeah we're splitting up these new products i mean just just

06:57to go back to why this is happening i think we're kind of repeating what what what we did in

07:04the beginning with type 4 we were just you know product designers trying to solve a problem and then we

07:10had to become managers and you know ceos i was co-ceo with my co-founder and eventually that you know that

07:20had its uh its date on it and we we we grew tired of that and we wanted to get

07:26back to product my co-founder eventually left the company but i carried on with the premise of being able to

07:33spin up new products and explore innovation within the vision of typeform and that's basically what i'm doing so i

07:40did typeform then i did video ask and now i'm doing relayed it's very interesting so how do you let's

Scaling resources for new products

Nathan Latka

07:46say you launch the paywall here in a couple weeks you know it starts to go off you need more

David Okuniev

07:50resources how do you get more resources you know engineers whatever on the on this product outside of the main

07:55company well we're not going to pay well in two weeks but if we if we were and we needed

08:01scale up the team i with video ask we didn't hire too much uh internally we just we just gradually

08:08put people in the team um honestly like i'm a big believer you don't need that many people to launch

08:14a product and actually sometimes the more the more people you add to it the sometimes the slower you go

08:20so you know we'll do a beta now it's just the two of us we'll probably add another engineer just

08:26to give us a little bit more grunt and then we'll need to build the paywall and all that stuff

08:31maybe add an extra engine in and then beyond that we've got to see how it goes but i do

08:36want to keep things nimble because i think you can move really fast if you have the right people and

08:40what's driving this sort of r d road map is it really wherever your whatever you're curious about or do

Nathan Latka

08:45you have some systematic way to capture feedback from your user base and that's what's driving nothing systematic just the

David Okuniev

08:50same way that typeform was built and video asked was built we just wanted to make more human around data

08:58collection so that's type form and and video ask relay goes a bit of a tangent to that because it's

09:06not purely data collection it's more about messaging and conversation but but typeform is all about helping businesses have better

09:14relationships internally externally so we think of a purely conversation conversate conversational talk would be really useful um plus you

09:24know we have our day-to-day lives in at work is a lot of conversations and sometimes they can be really

09:31efficient they can take a lot of time so we're trying to make it as as helpful as possible uh

Relayed vision for meetings

David Okuniev

09:38to try and help save people time so they can do more of their best work and if relayed takes

09:44off and and works out perfectly what does the world look like in two to three years in terms of

09:51well if everyone's using relay right let's say your vision of what it should be works and gets adopted what

09:55does the world look like obviously that would be great i mean that means that people are not jumping into

10:01meetings immediately whenever they have something they want to say they can actually resolve a lot of things very quickly

10:08just by hearing each other's voices and then also because part of the product is is very much about capturing

10:15meetings from zoom analyzing them splitting them into chapters uh getting insights so we really want to help people that

10:23might miss a meeting to catch up very quickly or to share meetings with other people so they can get

10:29get the insight and and and go through really quickly i mean i don't know how many times you've been

10:34shared a zoom recording of of a meeting and you you can't sit there watching the whole zoom recording you

10:39want to just be able to just get the nuggets out and really quickly you know try to zoom in

10:45on certain sections so what we've built is basically an inbox for all those kind of for that kind of

10:51communications to your zoom meetings later or be other types of meetings as well but right now we're focusing on

10:58zoom also the inbox will will be able to handle the async conversations with just audio messages as well so

Nathan Latka

11:05it's yeah it's something to try it's something quite new so so it's quite exciting to be able to put

Why build inside Typeform

David Okuniev

11:12something a bit away from pure data collection and and david i mean you're selling this people are getting excited

11:17listening maybe a question they're thinking is wait why is david buildings inside a type form why not spin it

11:21out as its own thing uh why is that all right i'm loyal i don't know uh one good thing

11:30about being able to do it inside inside the company is that there's not the same pressures that founders have

11:36when they start a new product in terms of being able to get it funded and you know running out

11:41of funding etc so it's quite a comfortable situation for me and i'm free to really explore without without too

11:48much pressure obviously like you know i'm trying to deliver products and they they might not all work but there

Customer count and reinvesting

Nathan Latka

11:54is a space to be able to experiment and and see what sticks yep and how many customers across the

11:59whole company say i think last time it came on you guys were breaking a hundred i had to have

12:05the latest numbers on top of me uh you know must be 130 40 i'm not sure that the latest

12:12numbers 130 that's great and then um you're very proud last time i came on still profitable it's gonna be

12:19hard to say profit when you raise 135 million oh actually we've actually started investing a lot more in growing

12:25the team we're not we're we're nearing 500 people we are you know we flirted with being profitable and then

12:31we've reinvested now you know just trying to get onto a new growth curve you know next stage of type

David Okuniev

12:38form trying to bring in you know more enterprise features but as well trying to make type 4 more relevant

12:44in in people's processes right not just being a form but being like you know really embedded inside people's day-to-day

12:52businesses yeah we're a customer we feed all our typeform data directly into our airtable which is like our marketing

12:58database right for our team so we we are very dependent on typeform and our user flows and we love

Secondary in the round

David Okuniev

13:03it of 135 million how much that was i'm i i can't disclose can you give a more or less

13:14than 50 percent can even range well it was it was much less than 50 much less than 50.

13:20and then strategically why is it i mean you've been around since 2011 so there are first employees sitting on

13:25options that with like no ability to like cash in obviously you want to release that pressure valve a little

13:30bit right what was the importance of doing something did that in the last round before we didn't actually do

13:34this on on on this round ah okay so secondary in terms of this round is more like early investors

Nathan Latka

13:43selling their stake or you founders taking some money off the table there's a combination of both yeah yeah yeah

David Okuniev

13:48okay but just because the series b you did back in 2017 you said yes secondary we did allow uh

13:55employees to sell if i remember up to 50 of what they what they actually had so there was quite

14:00quite a bit to take off the table it was much earlier yeah in terms of inter when you say

14:05what they had what what they bet what they had already invested right yeah what they had invested we could

IPO question and timing the raise

David Okuniev

14:10sell up to fifty percent yeah i think quite remember but yeah and what's next step i mean uh you

14:17say you know i guess we look at this elon news private is the new public i guess but do

14:21you want to run or help run a publicly traded sas company the next two or three years or no

14:25that's not my ambition but you know let's see let's see where typeform goes i mean you know in the

14:33next two three years we're definitely going to be looking be in that area of considering it so so let's

14:38see but who knows i mean everything's kind of trending down so not a great time to do to be

Nathan Latka

14:44thinking about an ipo or well definitely not doing one so let's see did you guys have term sheets before

David Okuniev

14:51sort of the downturn above a billion dollar evaluation the timing was quite good i have to say for the

14:59timing was good for them or for for for us for us you know we yeah it happened just before

15:07the downturn okay so what i was asking is you didn't have term sheets for like a billion five and

15:11raising 135 million and then they they took them back and gave you a lower valuation you timed it perfectly

15:16oh well what i'd say is that if we were raising today would be harder to get those valuations because

15:23the multiples have gone down now obviously yeah yeah that's great any strategic partners in the round as in like

15:32smaller angels who led who led the 135. which is a belgian a company i'm actually from belgium so it's

Nathan Latka

15:41quite funny that they they end up leading but we also brought in some some other us investors uh also

15:49our current investors we invested as well so yeah that's great all right so 490-ish approaching 500 on the team

David Okuniev

15:55uh nice little r d outfit going here hoping to change the way teams work by building again data collection

16:00interactions etc seems like really asynchronous if relay works there's only about a lot more asynchronous communication less watching zoom

Nathan Latka

16:08videos searching for key moments right it's all going to be organized data yeah i mean what we're hoping to

David Okuniev

16:13do is that you can start a com i think i mentioned this but start a conversation prepare people for

16:18a meeting async jump into the meeting get all the insights and then if there's any follow-ups after you can

16:25just package that all into one conversation which will probably be um so let's see and last question on this

Build versus buy decision

Nathan Latka

16:32before we wrap up why not go buy a tool that already has some traction in the space and build

David Okuniev

16:37on that no that's just not something we've considered i think it's also because this is a bit of a

16:46moon shot and it was not something strategic that we said like we need to look in this area it's

16:51just something that i'm needing so you know i think we can do it our way probably have a better

16:56result no technical debt to deal with no customer transitions none of that stuff yeah all right david let's wrap

Famous five and wrap-up

Nathan Latka

17:03up here with famous five number one what's the last book that you read humankind number two is there a

17:10ceo you're following or studying no they're not studying anyone number number three what's your favorite online tool for building

David Okuniev

17:19uh what we'll do well we just use just coding really i use figment to design and uh coding in

17:30react and a bunch of other technologies and number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night at

17:36the moment not too bad like seven that's pretty good and what situation married single kids i'm married got kids

17:44still three kids three kids but uh two from previous marriage yeah one is it's not my my my is

17:53not from this marriage uh my wife has another kid as well so three kiddos that's great and did you

17:59celebrate our birthday are you 40 45 now or still 44 30 um 45 yeah 45 very good last question

Nathan Latka

18:06something you wish you when you were 20 sorry something you wish you knew back when you were 20.

David Okuniev

18:15something that i wish i knew when i was i probably answered this the same way before because i think

18:21you asked me everything's going to be okay you're remarkably consistent figma was the same i'm done with having more

18:33kids that's for sure fair enough guys are you here to david co-founder of typeform launched in 2011 broke a

Nathan Latka

18:38million dollars in revenue back in caught 2014. now up above 70 million bucks in ar just raised 135 bar

David Okuniev

18:45very small portion of that was secondary at a 935 million post money evaluation but now working on a very

18:50cool new tool called relay just him and another engineer inside of type form uh they're launching the beta here

18:55shortly after david post about it on linkedin and built a pre uh sort of beta list of a couple

18:59hundred folks we'll see what happens david thanks for taking us to the top okay thanks one more thing before

19:06you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas

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