Motion: Redefining How Work Gets Done

1. 0:00 – 1:20

   Intro

   1. AEAaron Epstein0:00

      [upbeat music] I'm excited to welcome, uh, the Motion team here. They're fresh off the news of closing their Series B and Series C at a $550 million valuation. Team's been on fire. So welcome, Motion. Thank you for joining. First, maybe why don't you give everybody an idea of what Motion does?

   2. SPSpeaker0:21

      We build work management software for small and medium-sized businesses, uh, most of them in the middle of America. Think about like construction companies, marketing agencies, design agencies, lots of services kind businesses, law firms, et cetera. And we do like team project management, knowledge management, documents, wikis. We're kinda this all-in-one work suite for them, uh, that they can come to basically for all of their work management needs. And what's very exciting over last year is we have been building agents for them such that we're not just managing their work, but we're actually doing work for them.

   3. AEAaron Epstein0:54

      It didn't start like that, though.

   4. SPSpeaker0:55

      [laughs]

   5. AEAaron Epstein0:55

      So take us back to the early days and, and maybe first how you guys first got connected and even decided that you wanted to work on a startup together.

   6. SPSpeaker1:03

      Maybe a little bit about how we got connected. Omid and I were high school friends. So we did, um, high school Math Olympiad. We were both... I, I actually think Omid and I were the first two kids, uh, in our school's 30-year history to ever make it to a USA Math Olympiad. Uh, we both scored a 14 on it. And then, you know,

2. 1:20 – 2:40

   What Motion Does Today

   1. SPSpeaker1:20

      Ethan was, um, one of my best friends from college. Uh, we went to school together. We both studied computer science. And, um, and yeah, and that's, that's how we met.

   2. AEAaron Epstein1:29

      So you knew each other, uh, early on in life from high school days and college days. At what point did you decide that you guys should all start a company together?

   3. SPSpeaker1:36

      We were kinda just talking and, um, uh, Omid and I were catching up. Omid was actually trying to apply for a quant trading job, and Ethan and I, we, we were both quant traders. Uh, after college, you know, just like a lot of, uh, my friends back in high school did Ma- Math Olympiads, like, you know, just, like go to trading jobs, right? Omid was actually asking for my help on how to get into, um, uh, trading, and I was like, "Hey, why don't we just do the startup thing together?" And, you know, that's, uh, that's, that's how it came about.

   4. AEAaron Epstein2:06

      I... That's almost an unusual move because you guys were making a lot of money at the time [laughs] , were you not?

   5. SPSpeaker2:12

      [laughs] Yeah.

   6. AEAaron Epstein2:12

      Like, talk a little bit about what you actually had to sacrifice and give up in order to start this company.

   7. SPSpeaker2:17

      I mean, I was like 21, 22 year olds. Sometimes you're making like, you know, seven figures, which is a lot of money, right? Like, n- none of us came from a very rich background.

   8. SPSpeaker2:27

      Definitely in the beginning, like we- Harry and I, we were both traders straight out of college. And I think in the beginning, uh, it satisfies this, like competitive itch. Like, it's very intellectually stimulating. You're competing with other traders in the market,

3. 2:40 – 5:00

   From Math Olympiad to Startups

   1. SPSpeaker2:40

      and it's like pretty fun. But after having done it for a couple of years, uh, at least for me personally, I was... It was pretty clear, like this wasn't something I was passionate about. It was something I would like put in the hours, and then after work, I would turn my brain off and not wanna think about it anymore, because there wasn't really any purpose to what I was doing. Every day it was like, "We're gonna try to make money. Okay, tomorrow is a new day. We're gonna try to make more money."

   2. SPSpeaker3:02

      [laughs]

   3. SPSpeaker3:02

      "Now we're gonna try to make more money." But like, there wasn't like something that, like we were building that was like compounding that, like you- we could say like, we are building this endeavor that, uh... Uh, so basically around the same time, 2019, uh, I was talking to Harry about it, and he was thinking about starting the company, while I was at the same time looking for my next, uh, potential career move.

   4. AEAaron Epstein3:25

      Talk about what that conversation was like. I mean, you both had to give up seven-figure salaries to go back to zero with a startup, to start a startup nobody had ever heard of. You know, like what was that conversation and decision-making process like for both of you?

   5. SPSpeaker3:38

      We, we actually got into YC I think around July of 2019. We ended up delaying the batch until the, the winter. But we basically had to quit our jobs in August. If you know how trading works, you, you don't get any bonus until the following year. Even if you quit like, you know, in like in August of the year, you are basically forfeiting like a month of salary, which is like, of bonus, which is like, you know, something close to a million dollars. But yeah, uh, my parents definitely thought I was crazy. Definitely heavily recommended against it. They were like, "Oh, yeah, you should accumulate five to 10 years of wealth before you do any kind of this stuff." But I'm a big risk-taker. I, I, I think we all believe in ourselves, so I think we take huge risk, huge reward, right? That comes from trading, too. So yeah, decided to take a very big risk on ourselves.

   6. SPSpeaker4:20

      I had a similar story with my parents. Not only was I giving up the finance job, I was also sitting on a offer to go to Stanford Business School. And so they wanted me to either do the finance job or get my MBA, and that's like very traditional, uh, like I guess like Asian, Asian parent, uh, mentality. But I really wanted to bet on myself and like I knew even, like even though there was like a short-term loss, like really betting on myself and, uh, seeing where, how far I can push this new entrepreneurship could, uh, win out in the long run.

   7. AEAaron Epstein4:54

      Yeah, I love that. I mean, you guys went from a day job that you weren't excited about but was all about

4. 5:00 – 7:30

   Leaving 7-Figure Salaries

   1. AEAaron Epstein5:00

      making bets and taking risk and stuff.

   2. SPSpeaker5:02

      [laughs]

   3. AEAaron Epstein5:03

      And you just decided to bet on yourselves, and hopefully your parents are, are happy with it now, but-

   4. SPSpeaker5:08

      [laughs] Yeah, yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker5:10

      [laughs] Yeah.

   6. AEAaron Epstein5:11

      Think, think you made the right call.

   7. SPSpeaker5:12

      YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.

   8. AEAaron Epstein5:26

      Talk about, uh, the early days. So you guys applied to YC. You got in. Um, talk about like going through the batch and, and how you kind of evolved throughout, um, that process.

   9. SPSpeaker5:36

      Yeah, so we initially got into YC with a complete different idea. It was like, you know, in sports betting. And, um, we will soon realize there's a lot of regulations, a lot of that. We, uh, started pivoting. YC helped a lot with that. You know, both you and Michael are group partners, uh, helped a lot with that process. And, uh, during YC itself, we basically built like a calendaring application, um, that, you know, like helps you track your time and help you like basically manage your time, and we kept building more and more on top of that.The moment we found, um, uh, you know, the earliest product market fit, the V1 product market fit, when we built this thing, that would basically just, like, automatically schedule your entire calendar for you. Back then, it sounds like a pretty cra- like, who, who would ever want a machine to, like, you know, schedule your time for you, right? And so quite a few people do, and, uh, I did m- for myself, right? And basically, the moment we launched that, uh, like, we were at, like, very close to zero revenue for a while, and as soon as we launched that, you know, like, uh, automatic smart AI calendaring, um, it jumped to, like, a million ARR very quickly in, like, you know, two months. And then that went on for, like, you know, one to two years. Uh, we got to, you know, 10, 15 million of ARR. Um, I think we got close to 20 mil of ARR, uh, with that. And then what happened is, you know, like, we, we, we had a office hour with, uh, with Michael, and that was a interesting office hour because we're like, "Hey, we're building this, like, you know, like, uh, consumer, prosumer product. It's, like, growing pretty well." Um, you know, "We got to, like, you know, 15, 20 mil of ARR, which is, eh, pr- pretty good, right?" Michael was basically like, "Yeah, you guys are fucked." And the reason for that is basically, like, you can become a very profitable, 20 million a year, probably making, like, if you stop growing, like, 5 to 10 million a year business, but you are never gonna make a billion of ARR. And there's a, a lot of reasons for that. You know, like, uh, uh,

5. 7:30 – 9:15

   YC and the First Pivots

   1. SPSpeaker7:30

      this kind of product is generally not a must-have for consumers or prosumers. Generally, these kind of productivity tools, a lot of them, uh, are, you know, nice-to-haves, so, uh, that means, like, retention sometimes is not great. Uh, you never see, like, you know, anything close to the 100% dollar retention you see on B2B products. And we were very much building a very nice to have, but I think there were very few users who was like, "Oh, this is absolutely a must-have," right? Um, it's like their, their life, their business, they don't absolutely depend on it. And basically, that's when we realized, hey, if we truly wanna build, like, a billion revenue business, this is not it. And I think that was a tough moment, and we had to figure out, okay, you know, what do we do now? We started getting a lot of interest on integrating with, like, you know, a Monday or a Jira or, like, Asana or Trello. We look at these platforms, and we're like, "They're not that good," and we can build a much better version of them knowing what we already know about, you know, time management and, you know, like, uh, uh, uh, like, team productivity, and we have, uh, we have, we have accumulated a couple years of expertise in this area. Like, let's go build the best work management tool for SMBs and mid-market, which is, you know, a lot of where a lot of our prosumers came from. So we basically talked to a bunch of them, figured out their pain points, our own pain point using these tools, and we just pivoted from consumer, prosumer to, you know, like, B2B. And that was pretty hard because building a B2B product for businesses to trust you, like, you need to build a lot of feature parity stuff. And not only do you need to bu- build feature parity, you have to build, like, what is your unique value proposition that makes yourself 10 times

6. 9:15 – 12:00

   Breakthrough with Smart Calendaring

   1. SPSpeaker9:15

      better than alternatives in a single dimension. So had to do that as well, and that is our main business going forward.

   2. AEAaron Epstein9:21

      I, I think what's so interesting about that is, you know, you pivoted. You found something that worked. You grew it to 15, 20 million ARR. Many people would be thrilled at that, and you looked at the future that you wanted to build, this, you know, multi-billion dollar company, and recognized that this was not actually gonna be the thing that got you there. And you made a really difficult decision that we can't continue to fully focus on this thing. We gotta find the next thing that's gonna get us from the 15, 20 million to 100, 200, 500 million ARR, and that involves starting over from scratch in some ways. Like, maybe you can reuse parts of the product, but you have to s- go find a totally different customer type. Talk about, like, your thought process behind that. I see some people that get to that position. They have that same epiphany, and they go, "Oh, no," like, "I'm stuck. I don't wanna go back and, like, spin up a new thing from scratch with a new customer type and a new go-to-market motion. Maybe I should just find an acquirer and get out while I can," kinda thing, but you guys were down for the journey again to keep going and push to that much larger exit. W- what was your thought process as you were going through that?

   3. SPSpeaker10:29

      I think we really just wanna build a lasting business, and I think at the end of the day, like, it's just this team really wanted to win.

   4. AEAaron Epstein10:37

      Where does that come from for each of you, your, like, desire to win? You know, I can see it in, in the arc of your stories, you know, doing, um, the competitions at an earlier age and, you know, giving up money because you wanna win and go for the bigger prize. Where does the motivation come from for each of you for that?

   5. SPSpeaker10:57

      Yeah, so I think for me, um, I think it was part of being a i- first-generation immigrant to the United States. I came here when I was really young and had to, uh, learn the language, like, assimilate myself, and I didn't come from, like, a really wealthy family or anything and had to prove myself going through, like, the public school system, trying to become number one in order to graduate at the top of my class and then try to, like, get to a good school, and just making sure that the investment that my parents made in me, uh, really panned out.

   6. SPSpeaker11:27

      No, I, I, I think I, I wish I had self-reflected enough. It just feels like, uh, the shame of, of not, of, of not making it, of, of, of, of Motion not working out is just, like, it's too much to bear. Like, you know, it's, so it's, uh, it's the best option. It's the most comfortable option is to actually make things work, even if that's extremely hard.

   7. AEAaron Epstein11:44

      I hear that a lot from founders, which is it's not even so much about winning sometimes. It's about not losing, and [laughs] you know, the not giving up, and, yeah, that's interesting.

   8. SPSpeaker11:52

      For all of us, there, there's a, there's a giant chip on our shoulder, right? And I think part of that came from actually YC Demo Day. We were in the Winter

7. 12:00 – 14:30

   Why Consumer Tools Don’t Scale

   1. SPSpeaker12:00

      '20 batch. It was the COVID batch. It was really hard to fundraise.

   2. AEAaron Epstein12:03

      Shut down two weeks before your Demo Day.

   3. SPSpeaker12:05

      [laughs] Yeah, YC was like-

   4. AEAaron Epstein12:06

      Investors were scared to put money into anything, right? Markets were tanking. Yeah, that was a crazy time.

   5. SPSpeaker12:11

      Yeah, exactly. So, like, you know, we-We got rejected by 100 and- around 150 investors after Zoom calls. Like, you should have seen my investor CRM was, like, o- over 500, and, you know, got onto calls with, like, uh, around a third of them. Basically got rejected by, like, you know, 98% of them, and we, we were trying to raise our seed for, like, three month. We ended up only raising, like, you know, a couple hundred grand.

   6. AEAaron Epstein12:37

      First of all, the investors that invested, you know, not a lot invested in, in the early days, and I remember being on calls with you around [laughs] Demo Day, and-

   7. SPSpeaker12:45

      [laughs]

   8. AEAaron Epstein12:45

      ... like, "What are the magic words I need to say to get people to invest?" And it's always so interesting to look back at, at things like this now a few years out, where things have played out a little bit. And couple people took a bet on you, but most didn't, and the ones that didn't, I'm sure are regretting it right now. And the ones that did have to be feeling pretty good about their, like, counterintuitive investment that actually has ended up working out here, right?

   9. SPSpeaker13:08

      Yeah, so if I'm being completely honest, we have not won yet. Like, we're nowhere close to winning, so we still gotta reinvent ourself probably more than once to- in order to have a chance of winning.

   10. AEAaron Epstein13:20

       Yeah. You have to continue to refine product market fit, getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger along the way. What does that look for you, like, for you guys going forward, you know? You- you've mid eight figures revenue now. It's been growing quickly. You know, you're on a good trajectory. It feels like the opportunity is there for you to go take it and get to a billion plus. What does the future look like for you?

   11. SPSpeaker13:40

       Yeah. I, I actually think we're in a very lucky position because we have built a suite of work management tools that we are now basically building, embedding AI agents on top of them. There are a few things here, right? Like, one is we are now not just managing work for our customers, you know, the SMBs in the middle of America, but we're actually doing work for them. They can create projects and just assign some of the tasks directly to AI, like, what we call AI employees.

   12. AEAaron Epstein14:10

       Mm.

   13. SPSpeaker14:10

       The AI employees can't do everything. They can do a small portion of the task now, and that portion will go get bigger and bigger each year. And what our platform offers is a way to manage hundreds or thousands of agents at scale, um, because we're already a work management platform. And the second thing it offers is I don't think it makes any sense

8. 14:30 – 17:20

   Pivoting to B2B Work Management

   1. SPSpeaker14:30

      for a company to manage human tasks and agent tasks separate from each other, right? Like, they share a lot of the same context. Um, you know, a, a lot of tasks you gotta finish the agent tasks and the human has to take over. Like, it doesn't make sense for there to be separate systems. Um, because we have our work management and project management product, we can seamlessly, um, you know, transition from, oh, agent just finished something. Okay, now human, you take over next, because we have over the years built out this human work and project management system. And we launched that, you know, agentic product a few month ago. It basically, like, blew a lot of things out expectation. The businesses who are using us, like, clearly see value in that, and we went from something like, you know, basically zero revenue in the agentic product when we launched, like, earlier this year, to over 10 million of ARR on the, like, you know, AI agent, like, product, basically within a few months. And, you know, we're continuing to see that kinda explosive growth, uh, inside, you know, especially our B2B customers. At this point, everyone knows that for a agent to work really well, it needs access to a lot of context. And we're also in a lucky position because we have our... Over the years, we have built our own entire platform, our entire work suite, as well as the data for our customers. Uh, so we basically have a lot of context about their business, um, you know, like, uh, their internal knowledge base, uh, their projects, their tasks, their, like, time, like, everything. And that enables us to basically be able to build the best agent in the market for these small and medium businesses we are serving. That platform and data, um, uh, and that context, that is one of the biggest reasons why our agents are performing a lot better than, you know, some of the, uh, maybe perhaps independent agents who perhaps don't have their, uh, underlying platform or data.

   2. AEAaron Epstein16:21

      You guys are hiring, so, uh, when you're looking for people to join the team, what's the profile of somebody that you're looking for?

   3. SPSpeaker16:26

      I think we're looking for people who are really driven, really passionate. They're not looking for a nine-to-five, but they're looking for, uh, uh, I guess just the same chip on their shoulder. They wanna prove that they have, like, a really high potential, and Motion is the place for them to unlock all that potential. Maybe they've been limited in a role before, and they wanna take greater and bigger responsibilities. Uh, we will take that bet on them and, uh, have them, uh, give their hardest effort and, uh, see how far they can go.

   4. AEAaron Epstein16:55

      I think the, um, the ultimate determining factor of the success of a company starts with the founders, and I think one of my takeaways from, you know, talking with you guys and hearing your story is just how much you're driven to win. And so I think for anybody that's looking to join a company, that's, like, the number one thing they could, they could look at is how much do these founders wanna win? And I think, you know, that really comes through here in how you guys are thinking about the business. And once you

9. 17:20 – 20:30

   The Drive to Win

   1. AEAaron Epstein17:20

      get to a billion ARR, which I know you guys are gonna do, it- that's not gonna be good enough.

   2. SPSpeaker17:24

      [laughs]

   3. AEAaron Epstein17:24

      And you're gonna be, "How do we get to two? How do we get to five?" And, and you're not gonna stop. So it's been awesome to hear your story. Thank you guys so much for joining, and, uh, yeah, excited for you to, to announce all the fundraisers and all the success you've been having.

   4. SPSpeaker17:37

      Yeah. Thanks for-

   5. SPSpeaker17:38

      Thanks so much, Aaron

   6. SPSpeaker17:38

      ... being on this journey with us.

   7. SPSpeaker17:40

      Thanks, Aaron. [outro music]

Episode duration: 17:49