Building an AI company without a data science background — Tomer Garzberg's path

# Revenue Reimagine Podcast Transcript

And I think it was at that point where you start to go, "Oh, what are we going to do here? We're kind of running out of cash. How do we work out where we fit in this world?" And I think it really came down to this relentless pursuit of not giving up.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine podcast. I am stoked we have a very special guest with us today. It's not often we get to have someone on the show who not only is just a great human being, but is someone who we've had a chance to work with. That guest today is Toer Garberg, the CEO and co-founder of WBot. We'll talk about what WBot is doing. Not only is Toer the CEO and co-founder, but he also is a TED speaker, someone who's super passionate about AI, and gets the privilege of working with me every day and has to kind of put up with Dale every day too. Thanks for joining the show, man.

Sorry about Dale.

It's great to be here. No, this is fun. Welcome to the show, and I'm glad that you get the good side of us, which is me.

So we like to chat with our founders about why they started the company to begin with. What's that emotional connection? What was the origin story of WBot?

Yeah, so I'm going to take it right back. I came to Australia when I was six. I moved from Israel, and I didn't know a word of English. But obviously when I did, I developed the Aussie accent.

It's what closes the deals.

Exactly, exactly. But I felt very isolated growing up. And you know, I think I just put myself in a situation where I would kind of look to the future, and I was like kind of obsessed with technology and the future of technology. And you know, I knew that I would go into that at some point. I just became super obsessed with technology. I went through schooling and whatever, and ended up being quite rebellious. I couldn't work for anybody when I left school. You know, there's no one could tell me what to do. So I just started to try to wrap my head around what does the future look like.

I started in, believe it or not, marketing—kind of data-driven marketing. And when we started to close bigger customers, the focus became on data science and machine learning. So that was beyond my capabilities. I had hired people that knew how to do those things. Eventually, that turned into doing machine learning work and solving really big problems for Enterprise customers, which is where I met my current co-founder, Dimmer.

We ended up doing a project for the Australian government, and that obviously involved elements of AI and automation. And then yeah, that became the genesis of WBot. So I would say the rocket fuel for it was trying to not fit in and just go, "You know, AI—I can probably work this thing out." And you know, I mean, I was the first ever speaker to go on the TED stage on ted.com stage that didn't have a background in data science or machine learning or anything like that.

Which is pretty impressive.

So I was pretty obsessed with it. Do you have like a TED shirt or like something to commemorate being there?

No, but I do have a guess a claim to fame there. So you're not allowed to wear red on the TED stage because the platform you stand on is red, and sometimes the background is red. So you don't want to just blend into it. But for some reason, the way that they set this up—they were set up in Australia for the first time ever—they set up the stage in a way that the background wasn't red. And so I was the first person that was allowed to wear red. I wore a red blazer.

Nice. So that's pretty much my claim to fame.

You and Dale with the blazers. I very rarely wear a blazer. I'm going to an event tomorrow and I'm thinking of sporting a blazer. We'll see. I doubt it.

That's it. It's an Austin thing, yeah, fair enough.

So I actually want to go off script a little bit. One of the things that I don't think that we talk about with our founders enough is co-founders. And you know, Dale and I obviously have our story of working together and being co-founders. But I think it's different in our realm than like in what I'll call the tech world. We're not tech, and we've both been a part of startups that have some great co-founders that really get along well and have built great things, and some co-founders that you don't want to put in the same room, my friend.

Talk to me a little bit about that journey with Dimmer pre-WBot and what made you say, "He's the one," or conversely, what made him say, "You're the one"? Like this is someone I want to arguably be married to.

Yeah, and I think marriage is the right analogy, you know? It really does feel like that sometimes. But when I met—that's why Dale calls me Pooky.

Oh boy.

That's funny. It's probably a story for like the R-rated version of this.

No, no, no, no, no, no. There's no story, trust me.

To it's in Adam's head.

I met Dimmer at a meetup. It was like a startup meetup, and I was doing a talk there. And he was there. I didn't even know he was there. I didn't know who he was. But he was working for a tech company at the time called Seeing Machines. And so Dimmer's background is computer science, and he's doing his PhD in natural language processing. So he's kind of inclined that way. He's always been in some kind of AI-related field. And this is again back in the day when no one was really talking about it. It was pretty hard to sell that stuff.

And so yes, he was currently working there. We needed some help delivering on some projects, at least some guidance from somebody. And you know, most data scientists that you meet—let alone, I would say, AI experts or machine learning guys—are academic in nature. They're not necessarily pure execution in a way that makes sense for an organization to scale with. It's not just like running an experiment and validating something and writing a thesis on it. You know, back then it was pretty difficult to find people who truly know how to execute like an engineer for the types of problems that we were trying to solve.

And so yeah, Dimmer became kind of really instrumental in that era of essentially doing projects for big Enterprise. But what we didn't know, and I guess what we grew into, was this desire to build a company together. And we knew that doing projects for organizations on and off wasn't actually going to scale. That's just not something that scales. So we spent a lot of time doing projects for like financial services orgs and government and all of that, trying to identify a seed of a product that would make sense to build into a tech company and scale.

And you know, I guess that was when WBot was born. At that moment, we did the project for the Australian government. We understood that we had this unique piece of technology, which was at the time not voice—it was essentially like an AI front end with an automation backend that would interact with software. But you know, we kind of put our heads down and started developing it for a couple of years.

And you know, that relationship really matured. I think it went from being colleagues at the beginning, pre-WBot, to—I would say yeah, like a marriage. It's kind of like you get to a point where you realize that one person's—each person's strengths—you can't really live without that. It's an irreplaceable element of the business, and it becomes your foundation.

And you know, I famously say this to everybody: I never lose sleep over product and technology because I know that Dimmer is in control of that, and that remains true to this day. I've never lost sleep over that, man.

I wish I had a co-founder that I—I'm kidding, I'm kidding. It's a—Dimmer is a unique blend, man. There's not a lot of engineers that I find that not only are wickedly smart but like have a sense of humor and could actually hold their own. And you don't see that at first. And we've talked about this like, but once you get to know him, like he comes out with these one-liners that like, dude, like who are you? That was funny.

That's right, that's right. But when things get serious too, like he's got the one-line directness that just drives the point home.

Yeah, yeah. This kind of directness that you really want, which is really refreshing. It kind of sets the tone for our culture.

It's kind of like you have to check in with him every once in a while, say like, "Dimmer, what are you feeling?" And then like he zings it and you're like, "Okay, well, okay. You put the pin in that one."

Yeah, it is great to have a co-founder like you do. You lean on each other, right? You have this evolution that ends up happening, and like there's parts of the business that you have to just...

Let control kind of flow through, or else you'll drop everything. So it's important to have those trust elements and transparency through the process.

Well, yeah, and again, I know I think that there's some really interesting elements. For example, I would imagine that the way that DIMMA operates has contributed to the fabric of how we run other parts of the business too—this kind of real data-driven, highly transparent way. I would say the way that I do things has proliferated through that side as well. We've become, you know, I would say a lot more human and a lot more—you know, it really does feel like we have this really high-performance team that we really value. And everyone says the same thing about it—they feel trusted and nurtured and protected. But at the same time, they're expected to perform and deliver every single day. It's kind of beautiful.

Yeah, you can't micromanage it. So it must be—as you guys were thinking about moving the business or starting to get funding and moving to the US, there must have been a lot of challenges or assumptions people were giving to you: do this, don't do that. What's one of the challenges that you guys looked at and said, you know what, this doesn't make sense for our business, and kind of went the other way from that piece of advice? And what kind of advice would you give to founders that are listening to this—to be like, go with your gut versus listening to what all the important people have to say—just in terms of fundraising, anything, anything as you're growing through the business?

Yeah, it's interesting. I can start with the fundraising aspect. So, you know, growing up in Australia, it's a pretty incredible country—very wealthy. You know, it's a very safe country. But the population is less than 10% the size of the US. Because of that, there are certain challenges to building a business there. And, you know, when we first tried to start looking at raising capital, we did explore some Australian funds. But what we discovered in Australia was that a lot of the funds there really want to play it safe. There's not really a lot of appetite for risk in terms of, you know, they wanted a startup that had capital and revenue already. They wanted all these things. Whereas, you know, the minute we started pitching in the US, it changed everything. Where I would say investors looked at the caliber of the founders and the potential of the product and kind of backed the founder versus, like, does this company have any traction yet? And, you know, of course, you have to then deliver on that. But I think the biggest thing was if you're a tech founder anywhere else in the world, the US is definitely the place to come and make it happen because you'll definitely find that right. You know, that's probably like the biggest takeaway from the fundraising aspect.

As far as doing things the way that we do it, you know, you get advice a lot. A lot of people give you advice about everything. And I think early days, you take it on because you feel like, well, this person knows. But it turns out you're going to get so much advice thrown at you that it's kind of impossible to organize it. And there's this thing that I've done a lot, which is someone might sit with you and give you a lecture on whatever it is that they've got advice to give on. And it's almost like eating a fruit—you grab the fruit, you peel the peel away, you eat the bits that you think are pretty good, and you throw the rest out. Rather than kind of following advice blindly, it's been really good because essentially it either backs up what you originally thought or whatever hypotheses you're trying to make, or it's kind of nonsense, or it doesn't work for you, or whatever. Maybe not at this stage, even. So that's probably another thing where we listen to a lot of people early on, and now we're very selective with who we listen to.

Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because there is so much noise and so much advice out there, and a lot of it, candidly, is bad advice. So you do have to become really selective about who you listen to and that inner circle. I think that's one of the reasons why, certainly for me when I was going out on my own, what appealed to me about working with Dale and now Jake is having someone trusted that I could rely on versus everyone else in the space who isn't necessarily great at what they do.

As you're building and scaling—and we have the privilege of being part of this with you—but as you're building and scaling, like, there's a lot of setbacks, right? It's not like we wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to start a startup, and then you hit a hundred K in revenue and then five hundred K and then a million. It's not like this great straight journey of rainbows and unicorns. A lot of people think it is. Talk to me about, you know, since WBot's inception to now—what's one thing, and maybe a couple things—that just didn't go as planned? Where it's like, man, if we don't fix this, WBot might not exist. What happened there, and how did you overcome that?

I would say that there's probably several things, and it evolves in time. Like, the challenges become different in time.

Yeah, I would say at the beginning, when we were first raising our pre-seed, it was a concept, you know? It was a concept back then. And you know, you raise from friends and family, and they go, I back you. I feel like my money is safe with you. Then you raise it, you get that money in, and then you go, wow, I better do something with this. Don't squander this away.

Absolutely. And it's funny, I guess, you know, we've always been pretty good with burn. Like, burn's always been kind of very well managed. But I would say we had many pivots at the beginning to try and define what this product actually is or what it should be right, because what was interesting is when you're building WBot, we've built essentially something that is horizontally scalable—it's multi-industry—but there's a focus right now on obviously healthcare. But historically, we didn't know where we fit. So we're kind of building up this tech, and the biggest challenges were working out how to talk about it. Because when you're doing discovery work on identifying where you might fit, there's this—you're basically kind of pitching it in the way that you think, without really much understanding of who your ideal target customer is. So you're basically pitching to anyone—you're trying to get a deal with, trying to get a meeting with someone from a small business to, you know, a Fortune 500 company and everywhere in between—and you're pitching to all these different people. And you're telling them, here's what we've got, what would you do with it? And it was, I guess, that was kind of the first thing—working out how do we even talk about ourselves? Like, what are we? We knew what we did, but like, how does one buy it? Like, would they come on this journey with us?

And I would say this discovery work was happening during the first maybe one and a half to two years while we were building the product out. And I think once we got to certain opportunities where someone was prepared to put a little bit of money down to help us configure what we have and make it fit for their industry, you kind of go down this path. And you know, some of these customers were huge. You know, they're just big, big Fortune 500 companies. And you're going down this journey with them, and you think to yourself, this whole time, we've got a whale. We put a spear in with a line and we caught a whale. But you don't realize that you're not taking the whale on the journey—it's the whale taking you on that journey.

Yeah, and you know, a three-month project turns into a year, and there's so much bureaucracy that nothing moves. And you're left basically going, what happened there? You know, you basically put all this effort and time into it, and it can be quite frustrating because you basically go, we got this big company, this is going to happen, they're already paying us a little bit, this is going to be so good. And then, yeah, you realize that you weren't in control at any given time. You know, any—they could have the whole organization could essentially be ripped up or cleaned up, and the people that you were trying to sell to were no longer at the company. There's so many of these kind of factors. And I think it was at that point where you start to go, oh, oh, like, what?

Are we going to do here? We're kind of running out of cash. How do we work out where we fit in this world? And I think it really came down to this relentless pursuit of not giving up. There's this kind of gritty factor where you're not going to die. Like, you're going to do whatever it takes to prove this out.

And then, you know, sometimes you just have to open up as many doors as possible and just not be so attached to the outcome, right? You don't pray that this is the customer or this one is. You just relentlessly open up every door and let go of the outcome. And that's essentially how we discovered the home healthcare angle.

I think that's probably the biggest thing for us. It was finding our first home where not only would the customer be prepared to pay for it, which would make a pretty big impact in their industry, but then they would continue to pay you moving forward. And so that was one.

I think the second one is hiring people. It's interesting when you don't know who to hire and when you've never hired somebody into a particular role before. You go by what the standard is—they worked for a big company, they did whatever—without really being educated about what skill sets someone would need in order to excel at that particular role. They could be a great person, but they're just not in the right position.

I think that's also a hard lesson to learn. They're expensive lessons to learn, and they cost you time and money. Time is the one thing you don't have. I mean, they're both, right? You're burning your runway.

I think this is something we talked to founders a lot about. It goes back to the advice thing. Be careful of who you're taking advice from and what the advice is. Really make sure that you have that fit and you get the backing from other people that yes, what you're trying to accomplish—these people can help you accomplish it. Just because you were able to sell at a big company or run something at a big company, the startup world is a totally different world. So make sure the people that you're trying to bring in have done it at that level and can help you do the same things that you're doing.

One of the things I wanted to say that you said super interestingly—I don't think a lot of founders hear this—your first customer was one of the best customers that I've ever had the privilege of working with. Adam and I say this all the time: your first customer as a design partner. I think a lot of founders getting into this should understand that having a design partner is an amazing thing when they see the value and they have as much passion, empathy, and execution on the marketplace that you have. It's a game changer. When you have a great design partner, they help have conversations with any prospects and speak the language and speak the ROI that they're generating just as good and probably better than you can when we have a conversation.

I want founders to really realize that. You know, that's sometimes luck, but you can obviously make your own luck. Bash enough doors down and you'll find that person. But we're extremely privileged to have that design customer with us. It really did set the tone because I would say there is not one sales pitch or any kind of pitch that a founder could give that's better than a paying customer could give. There is just no way in the world. I can pitch to raise money, I could pitch to sell as well, but there's just the acceleration that an incredible design partner who's passionate, who's a peer of the person you're trying to sell to—we can't beat it. That's it. It's game over. 100%.

One of the things that I think a lot of founders struggle with, and you talked about it a little bit, is balancing growth versus sustainability, right? You talked a little bit about always being good with burn, but every investor says, "Grow faster, grow faster. You know, we got to get the revenue in. We just had this conversation the other day: we got to get the revenue in, we got to get the revenue in now." But you can't just go hire 100 people to do that. How do you balance that need for growth and rapid growth but also do it sustainably?

It's an interesting mix. I think it goes back to when Dimma and I founded this company, the thread of how we operate kind of seeded how we see the world. You know, there's no point in hiring ten okay people when you've got two or three that are rock stars. And that really does mean that sometimes you just have to fire a lot of people until you get there.

The other time is like, you've got to be pretty smart with where you hire. For example, how do we burn low? Most of our engineering team is in Europe. You know, you can get an engineer that's probably going to be worth about a quarter of a million here in the US that is maybe a third of that in Europe. And I guess that is probably one of the biggest things: how do you get the best value for your money in terms of people? But also, sometimes that's not enough either. You've got to make them so passionate about the product and what they're contributing to that it just makes a lot of sense.

I would say there's that component. The second one is I think it's really easy to just blow money early. For example, I don't know marketing and all of that. I know it's important, but there are so many ways to get the word out and get really high-qualified customers without just getting billboards and stuff. I think a lot of the techniques that we've done in terms of the way that we've partnered with platforms and with industry bodies and almost enabled our customers to hero our product into things has really helped. I looked at it the other day and I think our CAC is about $250, and the average size of a customer is almost ten times that with B2B. So there are definitely ways to do it. Now, is it fast? No. But at the same time, we definitely have a bit more of a high-touch approach to onboarding these customers, especially now since we've really only been genuinely selling for maybe the last eight to nine months. But obviously there's room to scale that.

But I feel like there's a point at which the revenue you're bringing in justifies your need for growth, and then you either raise more and scale that team out or you just keep going at this pace without raising money. And you know, it doesn't take very long, especially with our business model, to get to a point where your revenue per headcount is going to be pretty monstrous.

That's really insightful. I think founders should rewind that a little bit and listen through that process because I think your process is really good in that space.

All right, rapid fire. I'm going to take Adam's line just because he took my last question. Okay, the rules are only one or two words.

If you weren't in tech, what profession would you be in?

I don't even know if I wasn't in tech I'd still be an entrepreneur of some kind, but not in tech. I think something to do with surfboards or something chill, something to do with koalas or something. You know what I mean?

Early bird or night owl?

Early bird.

What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning?

Actually, I meditate first. So I use Insight Timer first, and then I check WhatsApp after my meditation.

What's your favorite guilty pleasure snack?

I love ice cream. There's this ice cream called Halo Top, which is 300-something calories for a whole tub. So I can get a full-calorie tub and open it up, and it just never going to last.

I gotta get the low-calorie tub. And then at least if I smash it all, I'm not gonna feel so guilty. And we know you like barbecue because we have some great barbecue in Texas.

Yes, that's right. Yes, barbecue for sure. That's not a guilty pleasure though. I feel like I could eat that every day.

Okay, last one. Last one. Where's your dream vacation destination?

Dream vacation destination. That's a good one. I would say anywhere in the Mediterranean. Anywhere in the Mediterranean is kind of like, you know, it's my vibe place. So nice there. There are many places there. Nice. I love it.

Tom, it is a pleasure. It's not often we get to shoot for half an hour and not talk about work or talk about growing business. For anyone in the Home Health Care space, if you have clinicians who are struggling with a ton of documentation and work and they just can't focus on seeing patients, YBT AI. Shameless plug. Go check it out.

Tom, thanks for joining us, man. You guys are amazing.

Thanks very much. Appreciate it.