Waikit Lau has founded 2 machine learning-based companies that were acquired and he helped take one public. He has been on both VC and founding/operating side.
We Talk About
What was it like to go to Harvard Business School?
How should one think of Business school in general?
How was the journey from starting a company to growing it to over 600 people before taking it public?
What is your screening process to investing in deals?
Connect with Waikit
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/waikit-lau-89129/
Website https://www.remotehq.com/
CONNECT WITH SHAWN
- Shawn Flynn’s LinkedIn Account
- Silicon Valley LinkedIn Group Account
- Shawn Flynn’s Facebook Account
- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast.
Shawn Flynn 0:02
On today’s show, we sit down with Waikit Lau who was founded to machine learning based companies that were acquired. And he helped take one public and he has been on both the venture capitalists and funding operating side. On today’s show, we talked about what was it like to go to Harvard Business School? How should one think of business school in general? How was the journey from starting a company to grown it to over 600 employees before taking it public? And what is your screening process to invest in deals? This is much more today’s episode. And don’t forget to write a review on iTunes and share amongst your network. It helps us and encourages us to create great content like this in the future. All right, now let’s start the show. Enjoy.
Announcer 0:47
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:04
Waikit, thank you for taking the time today to be on the Silicon Valley podcast. I’m super excited about this episode. For all listeners at home. Jeff, stay on who was a guest on one of our earlier episodes of the Silicon Valley podcast. I believe it was around Episode 20 or so he talked about outsourcing and engineers, he made this introduction. So with that, Waikit can you give a little background on your career up to this point for our audience?
Waikit Lau 1:29
I grew up in Malaysia. born there I came in for college. First time I saw snow was in Boston, Malaysia is 100 degrees 100% humidity, every single day of the year, I thought I would enjoy snow until the first snowfall. And then the first month of snowfall. I thought do four years of Boston and then go back to Malaysia. Since then I’ve been in Boston for the last 20 plus years. And over the course of that plus 20 plus years, I’ve been mostly in technology, mostly in Boston for except for a few years in New York City and Atlanta. I have spent time in big companies in venture capital, have started three companies. Two got acquired and one was taken public. In the intervening years, I’ve done some angel investing here and there as well. So I feel like I’ve seen sort of the, the boom in Boston back in the route 128 days for most people, actually, for some people who actually know what that was. Most people don’t do what 28. But that was the first boom back in the 90s. That drought in Boston tech scene in the early 2000s. And then now the resurgence, if you will, in the last 510 years. But that’s kind of my background in a nutshell.
Shawn Flynn 2:42
Just for our listeners, you’re one of those elite Harvard Business School graduates, can you give us a little bit of information on that experience? And when someone does get an MBA or goes to business school, what should they be thinking about that process? What should they try to get out of it?
Waikit Lau 2:59
I don’t recommend Business School for everyone. In fact, I was one of the few guys who will probably offense when I got in. I think I was browbeaten by a lot of people when I told them that I got in, and I’m thinking not, I’m thinking about not going. Ultimately, I decided to go because I felt like, you know, I was in my late 20s I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, you know, in the next 5 10 years, you know, do I want to work in small companies, big companies, maybe get out of tech altogether and, and be on the investing side. So I thought, you know, the two years would be great to kind of figure it out. I learned a lot met a lot of interesting people, I had a good time, my liver was very well trained. And that two years, I see being an agent I get I used to get Asian flushes very easily one beer, I’m good to go now. But it was good. So I think for people who are considering business school, I think, you know, if you don’t, it really comes down to this. If you don’t have a conviction or a good sense of what you really want to be doing 5 10 years plus down the road and business school is a great place to spend two years to figure it out. I generally don’t advise people to go to business school to learn about, you know, accounting, and the life because, again, all those things you can learn on your own. You can learn on the cheap. You can take online classes you don’t need, you know, fancy, fancy, expensive Business School for that. I think Business School is great in terms of opening up respected and meeting people you otherwise would not have met.
Shawn Flynn 4:37
I mean, your classmates are the most elite of the elite. Can you share some stories about maybe some of the achievements that some of your classmates went on to do or some of your classmates in general if you’re okay with sharing that
Waikit Lau 4:53
Harvard Business School is a big class. Most people don’t realize that it’s 900 students a year but it’s almost like college, right? Most business school classes are 100 200 300, maybe it’s very much more intimate. So HBS is like going back to college. And because of the large class size, they can afford to really stretch and defeat people from all walks of life and all manner of experiences a fascinating experience in terms of again, meeting people that I would not have met in my prior life. So I my current lives, so I’ve met, I’ve got classmates who work for literally directly for presidents. Right before we were an aide to the President of the United States, right before Business School, I’ve had classmates who were started very successful nonprofits, and certainly others that have started and exited very successful companies. But you also have folks who kind of come from nontraditional backgrounds. I’ve had a few classmates that come from the nonprofit world, but also entertainment or Hollywood, there are a number of them had a very direct hand in some of the all face movies that we all would know. So it’s really cool. Right? I think the other thing that was also cool is just the geographic diversity, you know, with 900 people you get to meet I mean, people from pretty much every country by folks have grown up there and have come here when they were younger, Mates were very lively discussions, and in a lot of the classes, and that, I would say, going back to your earlier question, I actually think, and maybe this is me, me being older, right. And as I get older, I look back to you know, the business school experience, I always think that the stuff that are transactional, right learning about counting, learning about finance, again, all those things you can learn on your own, and the unique opportunities and your experiences to share experiences with these individuals, you can almost put a price tag on that, right? Because those are experiences that are hard to replicate
Shawn Flynn 6:57
your classmates from Harvard, are you still in contact with most of them, or after you graduated? Everyone went on their own way?
Waikit Lau 7:05
still in touch with a number of them, although a small percent I know friends of mine classmates of mine, who are much more extroverted and are keeping in touch with more people. You know, I’d say I keep in touch with 10 20. folks in the entire 900. Right, I talk to them on a regular basis enough, the chance that I always look forward to is the five year reunions, right? We just had one. Well, we were supposed to have one this past year, because it’s our 15th year reunion in 2020. But it was cancelled, unfortunately, due to COVID. So but I’ve been to every fifth year reunion and alumni network is so large, even within the class that when I’ve time to keep in touch and get up to speed on people’s lives, it’s always fun. I think it’s always interesting to kind of see how people’s family lives and careers have kind of, you know, where it’s taken them.
Shawn Flynn 7:57
And I could just imagine those conversations where people are going, I took this company public I took you know, I did this, I’m working with this President, I just haven’t been in the room with those conversations must be amazing. Now, after Harvard Business School, I believe you took a company public from zero to 600 people, is that correct? Could you tell us about that journey.
Waikit Lau 8:20
I was a young guy in a hurry. And one of the things I wanted to do was to start a company, I started my second company back then I thought that business school was not going to help long story short, either go to business school, because I decided, you know, I could use the two years to kind of think through the idea. After business school, I spent a small stint at a larger company that was acquired by Cisco. And then I left shortly within the year to go start this other company called scan scout and what it was, it was so this is circa 2005 2006. It was a platform that indexes online videos so that advertisers could match, or content owners or advertisers who buy as content owners could match ads relevant ads into the right content. So for people who understand who knows Google AdSense, right, when you are reading a page on some webpage, or reading that page, and you see some ads from Google, usually it’s relevant to the page that you’re reading. So we’re trying to create the video equivalent for that, right. So we’ll bill all these crawlers would crawl online videos, use machine learning to understand them and inject relevant ads into it. Now, we got really lucky from a timing standpoint, that was when YouTube and a number of other content creators started investing heavily in pushing content online, online videos. So we timed it in hindsight really, really well. So we grew the company from zero in 2006 to about 18 20 million in revenue in four years in late 2010. We then very quickly, we were approached by a number of buyers at acquirers, we ended up merging with another private company in the space with the hope of one plus one equals five, we would essentially combine the company and grow much faster ticket public, which we did three years after the merger. That was in late 2013. So then we took basically took the combined revenues to about hundred and 120 million in 2013. and ended up taking it public in July 2013. In New York Stock Exchange,
Shawn Flynn 10:35
how much of it was a push from the internal team going, guys, I think if we partnered with this company combined with them, there’s all this synergy, how much of it was the investors going, Hey, we want you to grow as fast as possible do this, we want our exit
Waikit Lau 10:52
From the investors not so much an exit it was that deal did not allow them to exit because the other company was private. So from the investor standpoint, what they really wanted was, you know, again, we’re doing about 20 million a year, we’re trending, well, we’re doubling every year. And the way they thought about it is that accelerate that even more, we have a good relationship with this larger company that we ended up merging with had very complementary strengths, we had really good technology, a small but growing sales team, they had bigger, much bigger sales team really good sales team, and sales management, they have a big bank role that just raised about 40 50 million dollars in the bank. And if we did not merge with them, we probably would then go raise a bigger round like no 20 30 40 million dollars, and do essentially do the same thing. So then that calculus ultimately was that we felt that by combining we could grow much faster, and our slice of the pie would grow much faster. Now, that being said, there was you know, in hindsight being 2020, when you’re in the pilot seat at the point, right, there are a lot of ifs, right, a lot of hoops to jump through, to kind of check box. And to get to that end point, we had just survived the 2008 crisis, I think we were out six months away from closing shop, because we were out raising money at the peak of the crisis, everyone is kind of bad. Luckily, we managed to raise around. So with that still fresh in our head. And we basically said, you know, we need to make sure that the balance sheet of the combined company out really strong. So it took us about three years to get it to a really strong shape before we can present it to the public market. So end to end from two guys. And the idea on the napkin to like us ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange floor is about what is it seven to eight years, which is I guess, pretty out like average for venture funded companies that ended up going public. And sometimes, you know, these days, companies are taking a little bit longer, because they want to a very interesting experience, I would say, you know, going public is not for everyone or every type of company, because there are a lot of pros and cons. I mean, you know, a lot of people don’t realize that, you know, as a public company, revenue visibility is really important. Right? So we had to spend a lot of time that intervening three years after merger and before going public to really address the fact that we can build a pipeline that has a very high quality, revenue visibility. Because without that, you just can’t you’re flying blind, the public markets and you get punished, right?
Shawn Flynn 13:30
You got to go into more detail. Now. I mean, you said the positives, and the negatives of going public. Yeah, you got to hit both.
Waikit Lau 13:38
We were in the app market. So I’ll give you an example. We had to pivot our business model before going public or a few years before going public. We’re very much in the ad network business. So ad networks are essentially brokers of buyers and sell is about right. So the way it works is if you have CNN and you want to sell your ad slots that your sales team did not sell, you could come to us, our sales team would essentially sell those ad slots into ad agencies and fill it for you so you actually make money out of it versus it being a perishable Good. All right, that was the original business, the original business model for both the companies three combination, and post combination as a private company, that’s a fine business model. But as a public company, that’s a tough business model, because ad agencies can cancel anytime. So even if you book a million dollars from PNG, PNG could turn around like next week and say, Hey, you know what, we’ve spent 20,000 of the million dollars, we’re going to cancel the remainder and then they can do that and this industry standard. They can do that do that without recourse shift their budget. And so by virtue of that, there’s really very little revenue visibility because anyone can cancel. So what we did was that at any we started building this even before the merger was and we realized this even before we decided that we could, you know potentially take this public was we needed to move from that model into more of a SasS business model, alright. So which is instead of taking a cut or an arbitrage of the buyers and sellers, the ads, we would essentially license our app serving an ad targeting platform, to both advertising agencies and publishers like CNN. And we would initially take a hit on the amount that we can make. But we exchange we essentially trade off top line revenue, with better quality revenue, or better visibility, revenue with better visibility. So it took us about three years and more actually to do some of the pivot. When we went public. We were still at the tail end of that, if it does, or there was a little bit of and we will go in public, there was a little bit of consternation, just in terms of do we wait a few more quarters? Or do we go out now, because we’re not quite fully a full SAS company, because we still have this other business. So fast forward a few number of years. And this after I left, it actually, it turns out, it took a few years longer than we anticipated. So fast forward a few more years, they ended up shrinking the network business to enough of a size that they ended up spinning it out selling that entirely. So the company rebranded after that, and it merged with recently as of this earlier this year with another company called Rubicon and now the combined company is on NASDAQ is called macknight. On any good days, about 800 million in market cap to a billion-dollar market cap is one of the remaining market leaders in all sort of ad serving at targeting space
Shawn Flynn 16:34
in this process, as you’re growing this company, I mean, he did take it from you know, a small team to 600 people. Were there any events that happened that could have just decimated the company? Or was it just smooth sailing the whole?
Waikit Lau 16:48
Well, no way. I feel like Yeah, no, we definitely had some events with a capital E, probably, I’d say the scariest events where we got hacked, and our bank account got drained, a meaningful amount of money got drained. And those are interesting. You know, in hindsight, that was an interesting experience in the sense that we had a front row seat in terms of how hackers could just socially engineer, they don’t even need to do heart hacking. So essentially, we someone in our finance department fell victim to a phishing attack, phishing as in pH, she clicked on an email that was made to look like an email that came from into it. So we use into it as a counting platform back then that email is none of these, like your scam email that you get as a spam from so called Nigerian prince with misspellings. Everything is done perfectly, you can tell the difference. She clicked on it. And it was, and this is what’s fascinating. This is done by very sophisticated folks, right. And they certainly have done this before, they time that email to be late on Friday, email them that around like 4pm, all finance person logged in to that fixed site with her credentials, at around 4:30. Friday, everything is you know, people leave early at five, the adversary then logged into the account, the bank account, and very quickly, in an hours or late afternoon transferred out 850 thousand dollars. And here’s the reason why they timed it that way. Because obviously in the weekend, our finance team don’t check the bank accounts. By the time Monday rolls around, they check the bank account and it was too late. those moneys have been transferred to five banks around the world and then re transferred to a number of other banks. And this is something that we learned as part of the investigation is, you know, different banks in different countries have no, there’s no standard banking contract, meaning that if you get hacked, and the amount of money gets transferred, you know, three banks over, you’re really at the mercy of the final receiving bank to believe you and to return the money. And most wouldn’t, because chances are you’re not a customer. The person who is a recipient of that bank is a customer, he ended up involving the FBI, and they kind of help push the investigation along but you know, they were very transparent from the first call. And they’re like, Look, we asked him, what are the chances of people who bring a dime in hacks like this? I mean, they basically say, you know, 90% of the time, you don’t see a dime back. And for precisely the reason these guys who hack you they know what they’re doing. By the time you discover it a few days later, it’s moved far long enough that there’s no recourse. So what ended up happening, we got lucky. Three out of the five banks actually returned the money. And that even that surprise, FBI contact was assigned to us. And then the last two bags, they wouldn’t return the money. We ended up what ended up happening is this is the benefits of raising money from a big VC. One of the two banks, we ended up twisting the arm, big VC actually twisted their arm they returned the money the last bank, they just basically say go pound sand What ended up happening was the VC then would go to our bank where we got hacked. And partly it was their fault as well, because they have a limit. So we set the limit at $150,000. And you Why am on 150 to $1000, you get an alert, right? Or you need approval, what ends up happening is that, it turns out, there’s a loophole, you can wire multiple hundred and $50,000 within a day. So what good is that limit? So I’m injured from end up going to the bank, and that bank ended up making us whole, so we ended up actually make being made all which is, yeah, super surprising. I mean, we were writing it off. And I mean, we basically said like this could deal a mortal blow, and we were prepping to go and raise more money. Because of this, you know, the happy ending. But I learned a lot about how these guys work and what not to do and never trust, you got to look twice for four emails that come in that purport to be a bank.
Shawn Flynn 20:53
chalk that up for another benefit of working with the right VC, right, your strong arm in the bank. That’s incredible. Now, let’s go back to the IPO. When the company went public, there had been a lot of employees there thinking, Okay, this is my big payday. As soon as I’m able to liquidate my shares, I’m gonna go off in the sunset, were you worried at all with that IPO, that we’re going to lose our top talent when this gets done, or what was kind of happening at the company that
Waikit Lau 21:23
it’s a common concern. And this is especially true for employees who have been there for a number of years, right? So that folks who have been there who are will be there more than four years, and they’re fully vested and you know, may want to go do something else, we were very generous in re upping folks in terms of their restricted stock units, ones who had public, but to be honest, even then a number of folks that leave within a year of going six to 12 months out, you’re going public, folks, we’ve been there for like six, seven years. So from like early, early days, my philosophy and our philosophy at that point was we have to prep for it out of the IPO. The good thing about being an IPO is in of itself is a marketing event. So in of itself, it actually helps you recruiting and helps you a number of things. So we basically use that to basically push our growth a little bit more in terms of staffing, in anticipation of folks leaving. So we want to make sure that there’s a good amount of overlap between like new blood coming in sitting next to the old blood, who may be leaving within like 6 12 months, we run a bunch of scenarios like on spreadsheets to kind of figure out okay, we do not want to be short stuff like you know, 6 12 months after we go public, and then that, in turn impacts the top line growth.
Shawn Flynn 22:33
That’s interesting. I never thought about the Excel sheet model of thinking, Okay, these people might leave, who’d replace them? How do we prep for this and the people planning, I always think about products or services.
Waikit Lau 22:47
this is especially true for sales, I think the group that we were most concerned about was sales in the ad world, rightly or wrongly, the way the advertising world works, stick a microscope into an ad sales team at Facebook, Google anywhere else is very relationship driven. Those guys that sell to the big brands that are big agencies, I mean, these are folks who have just been in this in the world years, and sometimes decades. So the thing that we fear most was a salesperson who was a top performing salesperson, leaving in a jiffy. Like just, you know, here’s my two weeks, I’m gone. And that impacting you know, that person’s quota that for that month is, you know, multi million dollars and something is not fully closed yet. Kim or her leaving now would essentially have some big impacts on that revenue on that top line. So that was a big piece. But we worry a lot also about across the board marketing product, especially kind of key initiatives and things like that.
Shawn Flynn 23:44
Well, to dive deeper into that, how did you go about then incentivizing the sales people, so you knew more approximately, when they would leave? Or if they would stay?
Waikit Lau 23:55
Ahead of sales, we had a really good head of sales, who was a great manager. And I think one of two things, right? He had very explicit conversations with folks about that. And you would ask in the partner Lee review, before we went out, whether, Hey, are you committed to at least staying for a few more quarters? Right? Are you going to jagtar? At some point soon, he was pretty blunt about it, and just, you know, just basically communicating the folks that like, Hey, if you’re leaving, that’s okay. But give me enough heads up. I think that’s just setting the tone to make sure that don’t leave us hanging given within the first 12 months of going public. So we set an expectation is that do what you want to do, but do it give us enough heads up? I think that helps. I think the other piece was also I think, within sort of your first question, right, which is one has to do with the number of bodies but the other one is just sort of motivation, making sure that you know people kind of look at their stock value, but we need to make sure that people are still hungry or and motivated as part of a public company. We actually read it the comp plan the sales comp plan a little bit It’d be a little bit more generous because now we’re a public company, we want to incent people more, we tweaked accelerators, which is, you know, once you hit 100% of your quota, and you go above your quota, but you ought to be very handsomely even more so rewarded for going way above quota, we treat that just to make sure that people still have the financial incentives, even more so.
Shawn Flynn 25:22
after the company went public, when was it your time that you decided, Okay, I’m going to step away from this and go on to your next venture.
Waikit Lau 25:29
I love within the year. I talked to the board a while back before that, just in terms of my timing, because when we merged a company three years prior to that, I was pretty open with them in terms of if we do have some sort of exit event, whether we get acquired, or we go public, all else being equal, I’ll probably stay a few months to a year, if you need me to, I’ll be flexible. If you don’t need me to, you know, I may stay a little bit shorter time period, when it came time, my group has grown enough that they actually didn’t really need me, the group was self-sufficient. And I think it was better to even have another person to kind of edit with a different, potentially a different lens or perspective. So I stayed a few months after it went public, once all the transition was planned. By that time, I spent about seven, eight years on those. And I was pretty burnt out. Honestly, this is on top of the long hours. For that seven years, I was spending pretty much every week, at least one or two days on the excellent between Boston and New York, I didn’t mention was in the early years of the company, I think a year end of the first year or at least a second year, we decided to start a New York office. So Boston was great for recruiting tech talent. But for business talent that had good exposure to the ad market, you have to be in New York, it was really hard to hire in Boston. So very quickly, we were forced to open up an office in New York. So for a long time, Boston and New York was sort of the two centers of you know, the sort of the mothership Boston was where the product was built, New York was where the product was sold and marketed, I would be among the CTO, the senior team, the CTO, me and a few other folks, I would be on the train like every week, I would often I would take the first train out, I lived in the city in Boston, you know, just 15 minutes’ walk to the train station, I catch the 5:40am train gets me in at 8:30. And then I’ll be there until I think the last train back at 7pm. Sometimes I’ll stay overnight. So I did that for a good six years to seven years. And I gained a lot of Amtrak points. I think at some point I like, like more than I know like high 10s three trips on them. Amtrak, I gave it away as a Christmas gift kind of draws on you quite a bit. So I was very looking forward to just not traveling, not being on the train.
Shawn Flynn 27:52
And then afterwards, you did a couple of angel investments from I understand 20 to 30 startups in that process, kind of what was your screen in to decide whether to invest in a deal or not?
Waikit Lau 28:05
I probably did not screen the way I should have. I think a lot of these were ex colleagues or folks that I know it was essentially a way for me to support what they were doing. And you know, a lot of them were folks that I highly respected. I was of the mindset that doesn’t really matter what they do. Like they could be building garbage bins for I care. These guys are capable and smart enough that I trust them enough that support them by investing a small amount. And in the course of that I got lucky a number of times. And certainly I wouldn’t say it was through design. I think it was more through luck. These are the folks that I’ve known for a while and you know, guys that I would invest in in a heartbeat regardless what they’re doing.
Shawn Flynn 28:51
Can you share a couple of stories maybe, or at least a story that impacted you of one of the companies that you invested in?
Waikit Lau 28:58
Again, one that I know business investing in a company called ginkgo bioworks is a synthetic biology company in Boston. And what they do is this, they apply to the bunch of computer scientists from MIT was started by among a few co-founders, it was the main co-founder, the main founder is Tom Knight. Calm was for a long time, Principal Investigator researcher, and the sometime professor at MIT. And Tom’s reputation precedes me Is he has mentored and advise a lot of PhD students. In fact, I have an interesting story to tell about Tom in a second lifetime. But Tom is one of these big brand names that no matter what Tom does, right, whatever he does, it’s going to be really groundbreaking. I didn’t really know Tom well, I was acquainted with Tom but one of my ex-co-founders, my first company knows Tom really well. So in 2014, my friend calls me on it says, Hey, you know, I’m thinking of investing in Tom’s new thing. And it’s in biology. And I’m like, what’s Tom doing in biology is I don’t know. Tom has spent the last 10 years you know; he was bored by Computer Science and Electrical Engineering has spent the last 10 years taking all the classes in chemistry and biology at MIT and Harvard. And now, he basically is on a mission to do business of, you know, how do you hack biology? Why can’t you do genetic engineering the way you build software? So he did a lot of seminal work in terms of some of the mechanics of large-scale genetics, large scale mechanics of how do you not just not just genetically engineer a yeast cell? For example, let’s say you genetically engineer you sell to produce rose oil. Okay, great. How do you then produce a huge quantity of rose oil, right, so this can be economically viable. So when he started, well, the company’s been around for five years survived on DLD funding. And then they were attracted to become the first biotech company in Y Combinator, 2013 2000. And then they were raising the first round, I talked to my friend, I’m like, if Tom is doing it, I man it doesn’t really matter what it is. I don’t know what synthetic biology is. But I’m in in the last what, six, seven years have grown to become a behemoth. They are at one point, I’m not sure if it still is, it was the highest valued private company in Massachusetts, I think the last round put them pegged them at about $5 billion in valuation. Now, of course, my check size is fine. I wish it was not so tiny in hindsight.
Shawn Flynn 31:28
Now, you’d mention MIT there, you have a little bit of connection as well with MIT with the boot camps, can you share what you’ve done and some of the takeaways that our listeners could learn from those boot camps that you held?
Waikit Lau 31:41
My last company after going public, you know, oh, 14, I took a little bit of time off, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just had my first child. And the view of my wife was, I can’t do any startups for the next n number of years until like, kids a little bit older, right? So no more like 18-hour days. So I said, Great. Okay, you know, I’ll advise I’ll do some angel investing, as I was still hooked into deeply involved in the MIT community, I was mentoring companies and the like. And I got pulled into someone who had donated money to start this Entrepreneurial Center at MIT a number of years before. And so they have this building where it was this cross interdisciplinary department, if you will, of entrepreneurship. And they were doing a lot of seminars, a lot of classes, not full for credit classes. But these are sort of like, you know, Boot Camps here and there. Professor bill, all that, who was a professor at Sloan School was the one who was doing a lot of these boot camps, in conjunction with a number of folks out of the MIT Office of Digital Learning. I got roped in to mentor and to teach a couple of the classes. And they started off basically saying, Hey, can we do a week long two-week long boot camp, as the capstone is in person class for the MIT online learning classes. So MIT, and Harvard has this online learning class for the last 10 years called edX example. So in edX every season, I think there’s about 10,000 plus 10,000. folks take those online classes. So what they wanted to do was at the end of the two to three months online class, you allow people to apply for an in-person class for a week, and you have to pay right and half of them, you know, you apply for scholarships, and the other half you have to pay, and then you show up at MIT, you know, we run you through a week long worth of how do you start a company? How do you finance a company? How do you recruit? How do you grow? How do you think about business models and things like that? This is very much startup frameworks. 101, they started that in 2012 2013, when I started helping out it was 2014 2015. And the like, so did it in Boston, and then they start replicating it in a few other countries. And they started doing it in Korea, and Australia, in Turkey, and the like. So I did it for a couple of years. And it was fascinating. It’s probably one of the best gigs I’ve ever had, just from a learning perspective. I do remember this. There was the last session I had it was in Korea. So they admit about 70 to 100 students from around the world to fly there. I remember this distinctly though we’re one there was one guy from Syria, from Aleppo. And I’m like, and this is before it got really bad. It was just the beginning, the rebel forces and then the Syrian government so he could still leave. I remember having this conversation with him, but he’s like, I’m like, wow. And I can’t remember you own. I think he owned a number of cell phone repair shops in Aleppo. I was asking him, wow, how dangerous is it now I keep, you know, seeing things escalating what you know, like people accidentally get shelled, like most people will die. And he’s like, yeah, it’s like, you know, but what can I do? He’s, I’m like, you’re going back when I say yeah, I’ve got family there. I’ve got extended family there and most people do so you know, you just can’t pack up and leave. And I’ve always said that for that year, I’ve thought about him and thought about, you know, sort of his family, and like how he is they’ve done hopefully, they’ve been saved all these years. Yeah. So you meet all these really interesting people for whom we have our brand of entrepreneurship in the US, right? Very tech centric, where he, you know, as you talk to folks from other parts of the world, you know, the brand of entrepreneurship can be very different, like here is all VC funded at other places in the world, and equally as valuable. And it could be, you know, someone might own a fleet of taxis and do very well. And it’s a different form of entrepreneurship, and you’re not innovation per se, as we understand it, but, but innovation nonetheless, I enjoyed that a lot. That was really cool. I really like the global perspective on that program. So yeah, so I was doing that until last couple of years, until I started my recent company.
Shawn Flynn 35:47
Okay, so obviously, you couldn’t take a break, you need to start a new company. Can you tell
Waikit Lau 35:53
I think a few years
Shawn Flynn 35:55
Tell it, you got to tell us what this new company does. Your vision for it and all the possibilities.
Waikit Lau 36:01
In my last company, we grew to, as you mentioned, hundreds of people 13 offices around the world, I spent a lot of time on trains, other people spent a lot of time on planes. What I love the company, one of the things that I as I kind of fought back was, you know, it was so silly, our travel and entertainment expenses was so high, not just flying people to see clients, but also flying people so that, you know, people can get in a room and brainstorm and do work together that you can’t do remotely, in my head is, you know, 2017 I was thinking about this problem again, I said, this is so silly. You know, here we are in 2017, what is the best that people can do? Again, video conference, and we can slack certainly. But if you want something more immersive the most immersive methodologies, you can video conference, and you can screen share. And I think about it, that’s a 30-year-old invention. I like nothing about video conferencing and screen share has been innovated upon for the last 30 years, right? Since the 90s. The quality has gotten better, you can fit more people in it, right? zoom definitely did push on a little alongside you know even more, but used to be less reliable. And that was a lot more reliable, great, but still very much all about communication. You think about all the things you can do in the physical space in the physical office with your colleagues and being able to see each other and hear each other and see what’s on each screen is a small percent of all the collaboration modalities you can do. So we basically said it’s got to be a better solution. So let’s reimagine and redesign what people could do virtually that just like they could do in real life. So when we started building a platform in late 2017, early 2018, we call it remote HQ. You can check it out at remote HQ.COMM and the idea is really we call it the virtual office, right? We’re building essentially what is a virtual office, and obviously, this pre COVID, right? Our world, I mean, our thesis was, as more and more companies go remote, and we were seeing a lot of this in the last few years before COVID small and medium sized companies in all the major metropolitan hops, they find that they can, especially tech companies, they can no longer compete in terms of hiring with the Facebooks and Googles of the world, because they’re paying too much. And they you know, startups campaign off, they have to go where the talent is where the equally, if not better talent, but cheaper in the Midwest, in smaller metro areas are internationally. So when they do that, and the stack that the technology stack that most people use is hot now adequate, they need a brand new stack that replicates all the things they could do. They were in the same office. So that’s where we fit in, right, we build a platform that allows them to stay in touch and collaborate deeply, being able to you know, and we have video conferencing embedded in it as well and with screen share. But the more exciting things is that we allow people to collaborate in deeper ways that you can’t just with video conferencing. So we allow people to whiteboard to take notes together to collaborate. You know, we can turn any web application instantly collaborative, people can actually control a single application. Yeah, they’re on the same room. Got an hour. That’s kind of my day job today.
Shawn Flynn 39:04
Okay, and with that, before we wrap up in your whole journey, how do you look at problems and with problems? Have they changed over the years as you’ve had more experienced growing companies, as those companies have scaled
Waikit Lau 39:18
pace of innovation has accelerated over the years? I think there are certain themes that over the last 15 years I think, have gotten stronger, which is I think one theme is I think COVID is accelerating. I certainly think that it was there even before COVID, which is Silicon Valley, while still important and still a hotbed of innovation is not going to be the only game in town. I think as you look not just across the US across the world. There are some very interesting companies and very interesting technologies and very interesting research being done. In some of the least likely of places, not your usual college Research University towns or cities, certain other sort of cities, but with somehow that form a core group of talents. So I think we’re going to continue to see that we’re going to continue to see the decoupling between what people work on, and where they want to live, where they work versus where they want to live, which I think until COVID came along, I think it was not as socially acceptable. But now with COVID. Now that people have tasted the fact that look, if I’m going to be working from home every single day, and I’m okay with that, and the company is okay with that. Why should I? Why do I need to be in Burlingame? I can be in Montana, better standards of living cheaper, more space? Why not? We’ve seen that before. I think that’s going to accelerate even more. I was certainly seeing that on a daily basis now.
Shawn Flynn 40:45
If anyone wants to find out more about you your new company what’s the best way of going about doing it.
Waikit Lau 40:52
Yeah so, the best way is. Go to a website www.remotehq.com you can find me on LinkedIn feel free to drop me an invite drop me a message on LinkedIn if you want to reach out that’s probably the best way.
Shawn Flynn 41:08
Great were gonna have all that information on the show notes and once again Waikit thank you for your time today to be on the Silicon Valley podcast and I also want to thank Geoff Seon once again for this great introduction that allowed this episode to take place and for all of our listeners, please share go on iTunes write a review it encourages us to make more great content like this on the future so once again Waikit thank you for your time today to be on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Waikit Lau 41:31
Thanks everyone thanks Shawn thanks for having me.
Announcer 41:37
Thank you for listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleypodcast.com and follow our hosts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at Shawn Flynn SV. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
