What are the biggest lessons from starting several companies? What’s different today in the fundraising environment for startups, not to mention product strategies and sensibilities today. We talk to Read.ai founder & CEO David Shim.

Key Takeaways

Here are a few key messages or insights that we gleaned from this session.

• Startups are getting more expensive. Placed was started with $300K when founder David Shim started it in the late 2000s which was enough for 4-5 engineers to build a product.
• Now it’s way more expensive for all overhead. Read.ai for example raised $10 million initially (and another $21 million recently).
• The good news is, though you need more money these days, it’s easier to get capital which is more abundant.
• Investors are also more demanding. For example, you also have to demonstrate product-market fit within 1-2 years. Shim defines product-market fit as validated demand and customers without having to push too hard to actively sell the product… people find value in it inherently.
• With that backdrop, Shim started Read.ai (after an entrepreneurial past as a founder with Placed and bringing it to two successful exits, then running Foursquare as CEO). The idea is to gather insights from workplace video calls by ingesting signals that indicate “attention metrics.”
• From there, the broader idea is an analytics platform for meetings. This can offer real-time insights on calls, but also post-meeting analytics that can reveal where things should be optimized. That means everything from topics, to meeting duration, to days/times that work best for team calls.
• Moreover, it can mine intelligence for better institutional knowledge. For example, questions from team members can be answered from the knowledge that’s indexed from past/recent calls.
• Step one was to make sure that Zoom wasn’t building this, and didn’t have the intention to do so. Otherwise, it can be very additive to Zoom as a platform.
• Now it’s all about refining the product and finding growth, which is well underway at Read.ai.

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A Serial Founder Journey: Q&A with David Shim

David Shim is one of the premier entrepreneurs in local. We’ll ask for his serial founder perspective on current trends in technology, entrepreneurship, fundraising and more.

David Shim, ReadAI