Episode 396 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO & Founder of Teikametrics.
It’s another repeat guest! I think I’m up to 5 repeat guests on The VentureFizz Podcast and just like the 5-times club on Saturday Night Live, I might have to start thinking about getting some custom jackets made up for our repeat guests because they must be on to something special!
Take Alasdair, who… five years ago, back on Episode 153, shared some predictions around eCommerce that were mostly spot on. So, I was eager to get his point of view on what’s next especially in this radically evolving world of AI which we discuss at the beginning of our interview.
He has an interesting perspective as he was one of the first third-party sellers on Amazon and his company, Teikametrics, has a front row seat as the AI marketplace optimization platform for leading brands.
There’s a lot that we had to catch up on like their new patented GenAI technology that has the opportunity to shake up how brands scale on platforms like Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and Shopify.
He also recently brought on Sandie Hawkins, the former Head of TikTok Shop as the company’s President to help scale to the next level.
We cover all of these topics and more!
Transcript
Keith Cline (01:23)
Alasdair, thanks so much for joining us.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (01:25)
Thank you, Keith. Good to see you.
Keith Cline (01:28)
Good to catch up. So I’m excited because you are one of the handful of second guests of the Venture Fizz podcast. So I’ve been running this podcast, I think seven years. I don’t know if that’s an accurate statement because it’s been so long, but I am inching up to 400 episodes. So I’m starting to have this reconnection conversations with people and.
I don’t know if you watch Saturday Night Live, but they have their five time host club with Steve Martin and Martin Short and so many others. So I’m gonna like maybe get jackets for people like you that are my second time guests. Like.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (02:03)
my gosh. Well, I’m absolutely
honoured, Keith. I really am. well, congratulations. You know, it’s a fantastic show. I’m honoured to be here for round two.
Keith Cline (02:16)
or five years ago, I’m gonna put you on the spot a little bit here. So you were a guest five years ago and you talked at the end of the interview about the future of e-commerce. And I gotta tell you, you actually were pretty accurate. So what you said is, five years ago, Instagram wasn’t really monetizing people shopping through that app. So you basically said something to the effect that like, yeah, I see Facebook, they’ve saturated the market as far as user growth. So what else are they gonna do?
So you thought Instagram was gonna be their channel for revenue growth there. ⁓ And then you said, obviously Amazon is the juggernaut too and things like autonomous vehicles and robotics for delivery, which we’re not there, but I think it’s not too far off. So anyways, I wanted to get your take on e-commerce and what you see, because so much has changed in five years, what you’re seeing may be predictions for the future of that next chapter.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (03:13)
Yeah, wow, I’m glad I was somewhat right. ⁓ But seriously, yes, I mean, I think what’s interesting is how things have evolved around walled gardens and… ⁓
I mean, I think right now as we’re talking, it feels like, you know, the large tech companies are more dominant and more powerful than ever before. And I think what we’re seeing there is they’re the ones that are able to capture the economics. know, Amazon in the world of e-commerce was, was really the first to show that playbook, right? This idea that, you know, as I was one of the first third party sellers, I remember talking about that on, on the first podcast.
And, you know, they, you when I first signed up, was 15 % of your sales to go to Amazon. seemed really high. Now it’s.
as high as 50 % blended, including advertising. so obviously Amazon’s done an amazing job of really capturing the consumer, but monetizing through a long tail of brands. I think you see that now playing out in other channels. And what’s exciting and really the way we think about the future is those walled gardens are going to get stronger and stronger. And those walled gardens are going to need the
They’re going to need the sellers. And in many cases, those are long tail sellers, mid market sellers. They’re not, you know, a handful of large brands. There are thousands, if not millions of long tail brands. And so you can look to, you know, different markets around the world, like Taobao and Tmall, which is Alibaba in China, or Flipkart in India, or Mercado Libre in South America. And you can start to see it playing out here with, you know, we’re working a lot with Walmart. That looks very similar to Amazon, TikTok.
Top Shop is Red Hot and that looks very similar. And so I think these walled gardens are really in a way, you know, they’re aligning with the strength of these big tech players and they own the consumer. And so e-commerce is then going to naturally be in those channels.
Keith Cline (05:20)
Yeah, it’s gonna be fascinating just to see how it plays out. And we’re gonna talk a lot about your business and how you’ve been leveraging AI and the current state of the state. But ⁓ if folks haven’t listened to episode 153, there is a full background story that we dove into as far as your history. But I thought it would be so good to kind of do it like in case people haven’t listened to that episode five years ago, that there is a little bit about your background and history.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (05:48)
Yeah.
It’s almost embarrassing to talk about that too much. But yeah, I mean, I feel fortunate, you know, coming over to the US as a student, coming into college and honestly starting to sell stuff out of necessity to pay for college, know, textbooks and just living expenses and was able to build an e-commerce business that ⁓ really attracted very early on Amazon’s desire to build a marketplace beyond books. And so I was able to become one of the first third party sellers on
all the way back in the early 2000s. I still have a fax from Amazon from some interesting, you know, Amazon startup project saying, hey, would you like to become a third party seller? And I mean, that’s how it all started. So I’ve been in the space for very long time. And it’s really important actually, because at the end of the day for our company, Takemetrics.
We’re focused on the customer that is the seller or the brand. And Amazon famously is for the consumer, lowest prices, maximum selection and convenience. And they’ve done such an amazing job, clearly, very, very consumer centric. But if you’re a seller and you’re a brand owner, and I see it today with all of our customers, it’s tough. It’s a love hate relationship and Amazon’s just taking more and more and more. And so there has to be someone on the other side of the table.
especially in the world of AI where the big tech companies have all of the AI firepower. We love Amazon, we love Walmart, we love TikTok, we love those big platforms. I want to be super clear, but it’s our mission to empower the seller. And I think in particular now empower the seller across different channels. And so in a way, I’m here 22 plus years later, kind of talking to customers just like I was. mean, they’re a lot bigger.
and they’ve got much more impressive backgrounds and they’re building brands and I was doing more reselling but again it’s fun it’s talking to the customers.
Keith Cline (07:56)
And what was it like being one of the first sellers ⁓ or third party sellers on Amazon? And was it very obvious to you? Like, wow, this is a massive opportunity, obviously for Amazon, but for sellers.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (08:11)
No, was crickets. was like, well, I’m making all the money selling directly on the website. And so it was Google organic. It was just before Google shopping. In fact, the early Google shopping was called Frugal, which is an interesting name at the time. yeah, there was barely any Google ads. were actually, in fact, weren’t many Google ads for e-commerce. And so I was very profitable. I was using my own
fulfillment, ⁓ getting customers practically for free due to search engine optimization. And then the other play was eBay. And so the Amazon platform wasn’t really that obvious. And actually it’s a very important question because today a lot of brands
are questioning new channels. We do a lot of work with Walmart and Walmart isn’t incredibly performing right now. In certain areas it is and it is growing very quickly. But a lot of brands are like, well, I’m not doing as much volume as Amazon or on TikTok shop and they haven’t quite cracked the code. And I think e-commerce is all about evolution and moving on to the new frontier. yeah, Amazon at the beginning was absolutely very
very ⁓ low volume. ⁓ Not surprisingly, it was all about books, not brands. It had done a project with Toys R Us and then ⁓ interestingly Target was embedded as a tab within Amazon.com, if you can believe that. so no one was going to Amazon thinking I want to buy products and that took many years. So yeah, and it just shows you I think just why I like
the story of things not necessarily working out in the beginning because it gives us opportunity. Look, at the end of the day, if all these channels just became super successful day one, we wouldn’t have a job. And I like to say to our team, we’re like Sherpas going ahead, figuring it out, and then bringing that back with technology and helping.
Keith Cline (10:20)
Because I remember the toys RS because didn’t Amazon power their whole e-commerce like soup to nuts from storefront to delivery
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (10:26)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was a long time ago and I’ve had, you know, been able to talk to a few of the really senior people at Amazon. Actually the first person I ever met from Amazon in person. ⁓ and this would have been right around the time we got access to the Amazon ads API was ⁓ a really impressive guy called Paul Kotis who’s still on the Amazon S team. He joined Bezos in 1996. He bought donuts for the first six sellers on Amazon. And I, I, I literally, you know, not making this story.
happen
anyway. I’d never met anyone from Amazon physically in person from 2003 to 2017 even though I had built a business myself as a seller and actually started taking metrics a few years before 2017 but you know Metpool
And yeah, mean, it’s ⁓ an interesting journey to see how long it took for them to get traction. mean, obviously now these types of things are intuitive. It’s like, you know, you can’t believe that Amazon wasn’t a good place to sell, but it wasn’t the case back in the early 2000s, I can assure you.
Keith Cline (11:40)
All right, so at what point did you recognize like, okay, there’s an opportunity for you to build techometrics into like, there’s more to it than just being a third party seller.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (11:50)
Yeah, I have, and this sort of does go into sort of my sort of story in a way because I actually ended up exiting and building my own e-commerce business up to a decent size. A lot of my friends in college went off and did real jobs, so to speak, and went off to Wall Street, became doctors or lawyers or law school or medical school respectively. And ⁓ I was still e-commerce selling, which really wasn’t
It was unclear what that really meant back then in 2005 by the time I graduated. But I did end up building that business up to a decent size, ended up selling it. And after selling that business, a friend of mine suggested, isn’t the software, the tools that you’ve built. And so Taker comes from a Japanese word really literally meaning decide value. I studied econometrics in school and really wanted to see if there are other people out there that wanted the product.
initially being a side hustle. I was still selling on Amazon, selling different types of products after exiting the first business and just really wanted to get into this idea of using data. This was way before AI was hot and cool, but it effectively had similar elements of we’re gonna really be behind the scenes. We’re gonna be using the data because what really shifted was from a transaction standpoint,
transactions are handled by the Amazon interface. So the only thing that gives you the competitive advantage is the data optimization and your own product. Prior to that, different websites had different designs, conversion rate optimization, even sort of the design of the website mattered. Amazon completely took that out and it’s all about price selection and in that world data is king and it’s just got bigger and bigger and bigger and of course
we’re now in an entirely new era of data and AI, which is exciting.
Keith Cline (13:56)
How did you get those early adopters?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (14:00)
⁓ well, this may also sound like an unbelievable story, but I was, on a bus back from New York to Boston. ⁓ those listeners may remember, these different buses you could get, they were super cheap. That kind of dates me a bit. And I was, ⁓ on the wifi on the bus and I, I was thinking about what should I call this side hustle? Came up with the name Taker, Taker Metrics, and then set up a landing page, ran some Google ads and, ⁓ literally before
first lead I ever got, no exaggeration. There wasn’t a handful of leads and then I closed one. The first ever person that came through, she was a former Amazon employee who left Amazon and was selling toys. Her name’s Adrian. I called up Adrian and said, Hey, I’ve built the software to do some pricing optimization. Would you like to try it? She became a customer day one. And so that was just super exciting. And then it kind of felt.
Well at that time it was sort of that story of it and then it’s history because we just kept selling more and more of them on the side. These days it’s harder to you know maintain growth off a much larger base but yeah there was always that demand. mean look product market fit is so important as you know Keith and anyone listening to this who’s tried to build a new venture and I think what was exciting at least in the beginning I established product market fit day one because I built the product for myself and so this was
wasn’t one of those startup ideas where you’re trying to find the market. And I think that’s one of the most important things. I just got back from a conference and I’m talking to sellers and as long as sellers exist, there’s the market and you just have to solve for them. have to put yourself in their shoes.
Keith Cline (15:53)
Yeah, I mean, I obviously have interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs and I always find the ones that lived the problem and are solving it versus someone that was just like you said, like just an idea, like on a whiteboard, like I think people might need this, but when you experience it, you can go deep and obviously have a lot of success hopefully solving it. Now, but you’re not really a technical person. So how did you go about the initial build of the platform? Cause it’s sophisticated.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (16:20)
Yeah, true. I mean, I do have, you know, I would definitely not claim to be a developer, but I’ve always had an interest in.
sort of the data side of things. I studied economics as an example and what I found really cool about what we do is it’s like pretty much the most applied economics that you can do, right? You’ve got, you know, this supply and demand modeling challenge around this interface, which is Amazon where it’s got all the demand. And so I’ve enjoyed that aspect. I’ve really enjoyed the product design part of it. And I continue to…
Actually, I’m leading the product team here at Take Metrics now as our CEO, and that’s been exciting. So I’ve always really enjoyed, to your point, not necessarily getting into the weeds of the coding side. There’s way smarter people that we have and have had, especially now with AI. But I have really enjoyed the problem solving and the user interface side and some of the basic modeling. But to your point, as a technically a non-technical founder,
I was fortunate enough to have started ⁓ another company that I sold, which was more of a, and back then it was called Web 2.0. It was a fitness website. I was able to have a CTO who was really talented. He was sort of almost the founding CTO of Takemetrics. And what was great about that relationship was the ability to move really quickly. And it was fun back then because we were building our own product for us.
and you could just move so quickly. And so I think that comes back to that question. mean, if you know how to solve the problem and you’ve got someone who’s passionate there with you, which I did, we were able to move really, really quickly. And I think that was a great partnership. And those are the things that we try and replicate today with the relationship with the product team and the engineering team.
Keith Cline (18:28)
Well, you mentioned the fitness
app, which I remember in our first conversation you talked about that. So it’s like a early to market run keeper Strava type of app, if my memory is correct.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (18:38)
Yeah, yeah. I remember that era. mean, there were some really good success stories. I met the founders of Fitbit. I remember Runkeeper as well. And it was really interesting at that point. was, we launched, it was called Traneo. We did that right before iOS and the app store opened. And I remember feeling…
We were just a little bit too early. And if it was a mobile app, you you saw these great success stories with map my run or map my fitness going over to being sold to Under Armour and then RunKeeper being sold to ASICS, I think. And yeah, that was a really exciting ⁓ era. it was really, you know, again, what was called the Web 2.0 era, which I’m sure you remember where it was, there was a sort of a world of like dynamic websites that were
being built and you know it was interesting and Traneo is the name of it it was it it taught me a lot about
You know, think product market fit, ⁓ we, we had a lot of interest, a lot of signups, but it was really hard to monetize. And we ended up selling that to a larger company, ⁓ which was a good, good outcome, but, ⁓ not easy because you kept feeling like you would add new features. And the next feature was going to be the one that changed, changed it. But when we did the take, when I did take a metrics, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the first customer just paid 500 bucks.
and it was just like, you kind of know when you’ve got it and I think a lot of entrepreneurs, it’s really tough obviously because you’ve got this, you know, you’ve got this sort of never give up mindset, always keep going, and then sometimes it’s just easy when you’ve got something and it’s probably like, you know, starting a restaurant or whatever, right? You you just know when it’s good. I mean, people just keep coming back and they love the food.
Keith Cline (20:44)
Alright, so Tech-O-Metrics, you had the early adopter customers platform. did product market fit? How did you scale, start to really grow the business and customers and then get to the point where you decide to raise your initial round of capital?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (20:59)
Yeah, so it was difficult, very difficult in the beginning because it was a side hustle and then got to a certain scale. What was the most interesting was just some interest from venture capital that I really hadn’t had much exposure to. So I was actually able to meet with some really top investors who ended up passing and that triggered this sort of thought, wow.
If I got them that far, this is big. And I sort of listened to what they said I was missing. And a lot of that was around the team. And then I just made a decision to be like, wow, isn’t, wouldn’t it be cooler to provide the tools for other sellers? It’s, it’s back to that sort of shovels in a gold rush type mindset. And that led me to just have a go. You know, actually you remember being in the room very vividly with Scott Galloway.
who’s obviously pretty famous in the podcast world himself now, and say the least, and Stefan Stambach, the founder of Demandware, and then Larry Bone from General Castle List. And those were the folks that were interested. And I was like, wow, these are legendary entrepreneurs and investors. If they’re interested in this, then this thing has legs. And so that ended up triggering this effort to say, okay, I’m going to actually build a software company versus a side hustle.
And I was a lot of luck involved actually, which goes back to being able to meet Paul Kotis. Paul said, hey, you guys are pinging the API. We’re going to do something called Amazon ads. ⁓
we’re going to start running ads on the Amazon platform. Would you like to have the API? then I then that was a huge moment to actually take the risk to build. Amazon ads has gone up to, you know, $50 billion plus business. It’s arguably eaten into Google, eaten into matter today. But in 2017, it really wasn’t. And that’s what that product for us took our business from zero to 40 plus million in six years. And so that was the big influx.
inflection
point. So the product market fit prior to that was there, but it was that next big inflection point, that next big bet.
Keith Cline (23:24)
And what was the go-to-market strategy? Was it going direct to these third-party sellers and, you know?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (23:30)
Yeah, it’s always been going directly to the third party sellers. That’s who our customers. It is very, very important for us obviously to have the relationship with Walmart, ⁓ or whoever we’re working with. And as I said earlier, those are the walled gardens and actually that’s the relationship. That’s the opportunity to…
I mean, these companies are so big. We’re literally like the little fish that clean the gills of the whales and they need us. know, Amazon, it was quite hard to raise money in the beginning because at that time Amazon was eating everything and disintermediating everything. mean, they still are, you know, thought of as that company that, will try and remove the middleman, so to speak. ⁓
But they can’t because they can’t build the ultimate trust of the seller. And now we’ve got multi-channel, meaning Amazon isn’t the only place to sell. What if you want to sell on Walmart? What if you want to sell on TikTok shop? And so there’s a lot of value in the trust. I think it comes back to trust and the seller’s trust is the most important thing. And building that relationship with the seller is the number one thing for us.
Keith Cline (24:47)
All right, so you went on and raised multiple rounds of venture funding through the years. At what point did you decide, okay, Amazon, this has been core to our business, but there’s an opportunity to expand to Walmart, because that was the next platform that you expanded to.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (25:01)
Yeah,
yeah, look, I mean, that’s why I’m so excited to have a chance to talk to you about what we’re doing now because
It is is speeding up. It is a multi-channel world. We were able to get in really early with Walmart because of our credibility with Amazon. I’ve had opportunities to meet with the CEO of Walmart, which is quite an amazing. It feels really exciting as an entrepreneur to get a chance to meet the CEO of the world’s largest company by revenue. Obviously one of the most incredible companies ever in America. know, 90 percent of
of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. listening to, getting a chance to meet with the CEO of Walmart asking, what should we do to help sellers? And we were able to build a relationship with them. I’ve actually just got back from a third year of Walmart’s Let’s Grow Conference. It was in San Diego. We are the leading partner to help Walmart sellers. We’re growing really, really quickly. And we’re adding a lot of value because Walmart wants to be
channel that’s really taken seriously. It’s not quite there yet, but neither was Amazon in 2003. And so I really liked that. And so Walmart was big for us. obviously now TikTok shop is big for us. I’m excited about a whole lot of new things that are coming, know, chat, GPT, getting into e-commerce and, you know, that that’s going to be a place where you’re going to close the loop on the transaction as well. So it’s all happening and the future is really bright.
All right.
Keith Cline (26:41)
There’s so much going on that’s changing so rapidly. mean, it’s like things have just accelerated over the past two years, especially it’s just been absolutely, absolutely crazy.
All right, let’s bring our audience up to speed on techometrics and what you’re up, like the platform today, like what does it do?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (27:01)
Well, you can think of it as ⁓ a sort of brain for a seller, a brand, trying to maximize their potential on all the most important channels. And if you think about ⁓ on a small scale, an Uber driver that needs to drive on Uber or Lyft at the same time, what if there was ⁓ an app that allowed that user, that driver to always make the best decision, make the next best decision of
where to go. And that’s what we do across thousands of products, typically from brands. We’ve got hundreds of millions of products in our platform and thousands of customers. So we’re pairing about 15 billion of e-commerce across Amazon, Walmart, and now TikTok. And we’re the brain. We’re the brain that has data that Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok don’t have. We’re helping them make better decisions on where to put their dollars from ads, inventory, and the really exciting thing that I think can create that second
or maybe I should say third inning for our company and take us to the next level towards an IPO is our Gen.ai product. And this is something that I feel is the most important thing that we’ve ever developed because it’s taking us beyond ads. It’s literally taking the IP, the intellectual property of these brand owners and helping write the content that should be ideal for each channel, which is really at the essence of the multi-channel journey.
And so if you’re an Amazon seller trying to go to Walmart, if you’re on Shopify, you’re trying to go on Walmart. If you’re trying to go on each one of those channels, we’ve got the ability to use generative AI and we’ve actually got a pattern on this. And we actually released it a few days before this ⁓ podcast and it’s just so hot. It has the feeling of that product market fit. It’s really delightful. And you know, that’s the thing that’s driving the company forward. And it works with ads too.
because it’s this flywheel of better content, better expansion onto other channels, and now you’ve got the ads problem as well. In a way, it’s better listings, better ads, better content, better ads, and getting better and better. So it’s super exciting.
Keith Cline (29:19)
Is there a customer type that you have in terms of volume of sales or is it just a broad spectrum?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (29:26)
Well, that’s another thing that’s interesting about the timing of our podcast, Keith, because five years ago when we spoke, that would have been, I suppose, right before COVID, right? And the e-commerce world exploded in COVID 2021, 2022. There was that huge tailwind. And now we’re in this sort of interesting, arguably reset in terms of e-commerce. And that has impacted a lot of customers.
been so much, especially in the pure Amazon space with the likes of the Thoracios and Purchase that raised billions of dollars to aggregate Amazon brands. And those folks were really coming off the back of the capital environment, but the tailwind of e-commerce. And that’s changed. And so as Take Metrics, I’m proud for us to have raised money in 2021, but have been
really ⁓ disciplined about our deployment of our capital and we’ve had to evolve.
And we’ve had to think about a customer that has more sustainability. And what we’re really looking at now, especially with a generative AI product is a brand, a brand owner, a seller that is across multiple channels. And that’s a brand that is less about being successful on just Amazon. And so we’re tapping into the DTC Shopify base. We’re looking at the IP that’s typically required to be successful on TikTok, which
is less about price, it’s more about brand and kind of innovation. And in a way, it’s ⁓ really tough. mean, if you’re a brand in a commoditized space, and Amazon’s a reason for this, I mean, you’re going to get your margins compressed. And so we are moving carefully up market into kind of a place that has more IP.
Keith Cline (31:28)
Yeah, because I just thought it’d be helpful to kind of like a user use case, right? So if I’m got my own brand of sunglasses, right, I’m going to try to sell across all the different platforms, Amazon, Walmart, TikTok. Your new Gen.ai product will allow me to write descriptions that are obviously going to be optimized for the sales of my sunglasses. Is that the right way to phrase it? Yeah.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (31:54)
That’s exactly right. I mean,
it’s a real headache for you to do that. And it’s, you know, we couldn’t have.
Keith Cline (32:01)
Is there AB testing? Is there AB testing too? do you?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (32:04)
Yeah, there is. mean, that’s, that’s at the essence of our company. You know, we’re using real time metrics and AI and we’ve been doing that for ads for many years. We’re doing it for inventory, but with the Gen. AI tool, what’s so important is the content and the way that you present your products on Amazon isn’t necessarily what you’re going to do on Walmart. And so what I’ve enjoyed as we’ve talked to sellers is they are motivated to use
AI, obviously everyone saying AI needs to be at the forefront. And so we have a fantastic tailwind here because what we’re talking to the customers about is they’re using tools to look up what their content should be, what are the keywords that should be in the listings if you’re selling those sunglasses, for example, ⁓ mirrored or polarized or some form of attribute and you’re trying to research what those are, what are the best keywords to represent that from some tool. You may even be
chat GPT and then you’re trying to get that and you’re trying to paste that into your listing and then you might might try and do that on a regular basis but what’s so exciting about what we’ve got is we’ve already got your data we’ve already got your ads
we’ve already got your transactions in your inventory and we know all about what you should be selling and who your market is. And so we’ve been able to automate that in a very ⁓ verticalized generative AI place. And so if you look at the AI ⁓ sort of industry in general and the gen AI industry, I mean, obviously there are these incredible ⁓ LLM models, huge amounts of money being poured into open AI, cetera, et cetera. We represent a more verticalized
use case where we’ve got your understanding of what you need to do in your particular market but we’re deploying that same AI ⁓ LLM strength and we’ve actually filed a pattern for exactly this and it’s all about the orchestration layer. Think of it as ⁓ you know when you’re using Chatch EBT or a tool like that it’s only as good as the prompts.
And if you think about it from an e-commerce perspective, we have the data, we have ⁓ sort of really strong mapping of what those prompts should be because we know what those marketplaces should look like. And it’s a really elegant use of it. And what’s cool about it is it gets better and better and we’re able to attribute it back to conversion. We’re able to it back. In fact, we’re able to get stronger attribution than even our ads product.
which is very gratifying because I think the customers are able to see what we’re doing in a way that feels very empowering to us. It’s a direct relationship with us and the brand.
Keith Cline (34:59)
Well, that’s a good segue into something else that I was thinking about. So Brian Stempek is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Evertoon. He’s a recent guest on the podcast. And what his company is doing is helping brands identify how Gen.ai is ⁓ using their results. So let’s just go to sunglasses, Ray Bandham. How does your brand, is ChatGPT recommending your brand?
or are they recommending the competitors, right? So because everything’s so new in terms of how these Gen.AI platforms are absorbing content, the brands don’t know, I, you know, because everyone thought about SEO and ranking in the first 10 results of Google, that would be awesome, right? So you’re constantly thinking about that, but with Gen.AI, it’s a whole new frontier. And the results are different.
based on how many like you’re not going to get the same answer every time like you do with Google. So that’s another thing that they’re running, you know, hundreds of thousands of searches with the different LLM models to figure out what how is your brand, you know, represented.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (36:09)
Yeah, I mean, that’s a fantastic use case again of AI. There is just so much potential.
Obviously, one of the challenges is that every company appears to be an AI company, somewhat overnight, and there’s a lot of interest in maybe incentive to brand yourself as an AI company. We have to do very little in terms of trying to change the perception of our company because we were always on the backend running AI models several years ago. But to be able to truly innovate
at a level with a pattern for Gen.ai has been really exciting.
you know, even taking the use cases further with images. And we’re already changing the images. And so you can imagine, Keith, that you could be a brand owner and we could change the images based on the seasons or maybe even holiday. Let’s say it’s a Mother’s Day product. Coming into Mother’s Day, the scene inside of Amazon or Walmart, when you go to the product page, depicts something that really improves conversion for Mother’s Day. Over the weekend, obviously, when Mother’s
days gone, we shift back to ⁓ really more of a slightly more generic season. Or you could see a world with the depiction of human models, like different models in different geographies or A B testing. And so we’ve even started doing doing that with their patent. And so when you look at how much that costs, let’s use the sunglasses example. If you’re a mid market brand and you are launching an emerging brand,
you know, ⁓ a contender brand that’s going to go and try and unseat like Luxottica or whatever, the cost of doing those photoshoots is so high.
Now we can empower them with AI to do that and then do these tests at really high frequency. We’re also doing it with video. And so that’s coming. And then even on the TikTok side, avatars. And so the cost of finding the creators is super high. You have to trust these creators with your brand. You have to work with them with the scripts. We really do honestly believe that we can do it all with ⁓ artificial intelligence and generative AI.
And so the patent that we’re working with, the first product is called SmartPages. And what SmartPages is doing, and it’s out now, you know, we’re seeing tremendous traction and it’s working with text. We’re going to be iterating that with images, video and avatars. We’re going to be using SmartPages to move the inventory off to other channels as well. That’s really powerful. There’s nothing like this in terms of timing because you couldn’t build
piece of software to do this five years ago. When I spoke to you last and I was last on this podcast, the LLMs weren’t available and the technology wasn’t there. So I’m really excited about taking something that, you know, we didn’t invent LLMs obviously, but taking something that is just matured in the market enough to make it valuable for e-commerce sellers and then finding a use case to deploy it.
Keith Cline (39:37)
All right, well, building the right team is obviously very critical to the success of a company. And ⁓ you announced a hire not too, too long ago, Sandy Hawkins as the company’s president, who has, when I saw her background, I was like, wow. It was a wow moment, So I thought it’d be good to talk about how you go about thinking of hiring for the team, especially the executive team, and how you were able to. ⁓
have Sandy join.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (40:08)
Yeah, well I’ll tell you how I met her and…
I think at the end of the day, it’s about taking risks and making bets on what’s going to drive your business forward. every year we are invited and it is, it is a bit ridiculous. We’re invited to the south of France for an event called Cannes Lions. Originally it was more about large advertisers and sort of the madman era of advertising, but every year it gets more and more into towards technology because obviously technology is driving
the dollars and because of our relationship powering billions of dollars of ad spend for Amazon, billions of dollars of ad spend for Walmart, we’re invited. Typically our customers are smaller, so I’m less time with customers but more time with partners like Amazon and Walmart. And I’ve always wanted to find the next frontier on behalf of our customers. What’s that next green field? Going all the way back to 2003, selling on eBay, selling online, know, dot com.
but was not on Amazon and open-mindedly signed up to sell on Amazon. you know, that’s the job, especially as the founder CEO, to get to that next frontier. And to me, it was TikTok being crucial.
And so I had no previous relationship with Sandy. I was able to cold email someone at TikTok and find out that there was a big leader, the head of e-commerce at TikTok at Cannes. And TikTok goes big there. They have the biggest activation. They rent out the Carlton Hotel, is the kind of like the epicenter. They put on the biggest party that I mean, it’s a cool brand in that setting. Everything’s about creativity and.
TikTok’s really dominant in that area. And so I was able to meet Sandy very briefly, but made an impact. And for some reason I remember…
actually just wanting to follow up and try and get her contact information and build a relationship, got back to the US and was able to spend more time with her. She became an advisor to Takemetrics. What was interesting and it relates to the 2021 to now.
You know, for Tachymatrix to be really fulfill its mission, we’ve got to do something bigger than just be the Amazon ads guys.
or even the Amazon and Walmart ads guys. And I sat down with Sandy and said, look, I want your help. I want to go big. Let’s do it. And I’m willing to restructure the company. I’m willing to really take the classic phrase of, you know, what got you there won’t get you to the next level. And so Sandy joined about nine months ago and it’s been an amazing ride. I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s a fantastic leader. She’s brought a ton of talent in.
And, you know, here we are. And I think we’re in this… We’re really well poised to just start growing gangbusters now, but with a new vision, a bigger vision.
Keith Cline (43:22)
All right, through the journey of building the company, what have been the biggest lessons learned?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (43:28)
Well, I mean, think it is that coming back to people, you know, when I was very early on at, know, sub 50 people, honestly, when I sort of read about stories or listen to pod amazing podcasts, like the show, you, you, hear a lot of entrepreneurs say it’s the people, it’s the people. I think, you know, getting to that kind of inflection point where you’re over a hundred people and, and, know, there is in fact, ⁓ a theory over 150 people, the Dunbar number, you know,
things start to get really important to build the leadership team. And that’s been really challenging for me because I love being hands on. I love building a product. not a founder CEO that spends all their time at events in the south of France per se. And so I think the biggest thing has been thinking about how to build a sustainable team. And it’s really, really difficult. And so when you look at success stories and
very
early on in this journey and I think there’s a lot more to go. I look at companies of much larger size and I’m really impressed at how they’ve been able to build leadership teams and scale. And so that’s probably the biggest learning of, and then the tough decisions. mean, the toughest part, the toughest part honestly is some of the folks that got you from A to B and not the folks that are going to get you from B to C or C to D.
And that’s actually very difficult because it’s, you you want to reward loyalty, you want to build relationships, you build trust with folks.
and to have the commitment to what’s best for the company to build into the next era. I hope that everyone I’ve worked with who have lots of success stories of folks that have left the company or come back or communicated and you keep those relationships. You hope you can do it in a way where you can maintain those relationships. And I would say that’s the biggest learning, like getting the stages of the
company, the stage of the company and the different people and being able to move. mean, look, most of the time, many times they outgrows the CEO. And I think you have to be conscious of that outgrowing the CEO and founder. I mean, it’s not natural for the someone who’s good at zero to five to be good at 50 to a hundred.
Keith Cline (45:58)
Very, very true. That was the second time, side note, second time Dunbar’s number came up. So I’m like, wow, that’s like a thing today for whatever reason. ⁓ I digress. So what’s the size of the company now and what are the plans as far as hiring ahead and which functional areas?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (46:10)
good.
Yeah, we have about 250 employees around that. We’ve got a fantastic global team. You we’re a fully remote company or I should say remote first because we do have offices in Boston. That, you know, which is where I’m based and most of the leadership team’s based here, but we are a remote first company where there’s no requirement to be in an office. It’s allowed us to scale pretty quickly. We’ve got a team in China, India, across the U S and, you know, around the world.
I think for us, what’s interesting as well is just this balance around efficiency. It is not the same era around… ⁓
You know, we’ve never been a company that’s kind of like burn, burn, burn, grow, grow, grow. ⁓ but there is a really interesting position that we’re in because we’re in between a startup that, know, is tiny and we still have this kind of paranoia of needing to survive, but we’ve, we’ve got to a decent size, but we’re not Amazon or TikTok. And so that’s a really challenging zone to be in right now. ⁓
And so what’s really important for us is to get control of own destiny.
Control our own destiny in terms of capital, close our own, control our own destiny in terms of the ability to execute the product, build the team. And that’s challenging because, you know, as many companies that raise money with venture capital, you know, your mindset was, okay, we can raise the next round. So we’ve raised two series, series A, series B, series A was 2018, series B was 21. And I actually, we’ve got a,
ton of interest with the GEN.ai product. so without sort of over sharing too much, I think we’re going to be in a very good position with how well this product’s tracking. And I think it’s going to create this inflection point within the business. And, you know, we’re going to move that valuation to the next level. And I’ll be very proud of us if we can kind of show that next product market fit with the GEN.ai product. And that is exactly what we’re seeing from our customers. So it’s all
it’s right in front of us.
Keith Cline (48:33)
Very, very cool.
I’m thinking optimistic large growth round ahead, so we’ll see. All right, three apps you can’t live without. It can’t be Slack, email, or your calendar.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (48:39)
Thank you so much.
I’m glad you didn’t say chat GPT because I’m really hot on that right now. I was actually on a holiday in the UK and with my dad joined us and he was blown away by the voice. We were literally going around the English countryside in the car, getting talking to chat GPT, chat GPT five. And so that’s hot on my list right now.
yeah, well, I’ve actually say that on the vibe coding side. So, you, you, asked me non-technical, ⁓ co-founder, but I like the user interface stuff. I’ve been playing around with the lovable. don’t know if you or any of, I’m sure listeners. Yeah. And,
Keith Cline (49:24)
yeah, I play around with lovable.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (49:26)
Yeah, and I’m sort of like, wow, the world is, you know, at our fingertips. so if that counts as an app, I’m going to put that one down. So chat to CHEVC. Yeah, I’m trying to think of other, I mean.
I think there’s just a whole array and I’ll put into the chat, I’m just really hot on the LLM side right now, all the image creation tools. The very recently released Google iteration of the nano banana code word, is basically the image creation tool that can preserve the images. Chat GBT and ⁓ open AI have some challenges of if you try
and
render an image, you try and do the sunglasses example and say show me these sunglasses on an example person, the sunglasses will be distorted and so I’ve been doing a lot of work with experimenting with these new LLM models and the Google ones Red Heart, the new Gemini for images, so that would be my third.
Keith Cline (50:40)
How about a book or podcast recommendation for entrepreneurs?
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (50:44)
I’ll just be honest about the book I read over quite recently, Kitchen Confidentials by Anthony Bourdain. I don’t know how I ended up reading that book. It’s got very little to do with technology, but…
I think it’s got to do a lot with just being open-minded, craft, people working and dealing with challenges. And I just thought it was really well narrated obviously by the late Anthony Bourdain. So I thought it was a good refreshing antidote to challenging work in our company, but this is all about technology. And, and you know, I think it’s just a story of,
well, just a journey of life, basically, is, I think, good to have that open-mindedness. So I enjoyed that. That’s honestly the book that I’ve enjoyed in the last six months.
Keith Cline (51:42)
What do you like to do for fun outside of work? mean, so just for, people haven’t listened to the first podcast, Alistair was the captain of the Harvard track team, right? You ran the 800 meter.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (51:53)
Yes, I did. I did. I did. yeah, so actually, shortly after, well, not shortly after I got really into on the sports side, I’ve got really into ⁓ rowing, but not real rowing, ⁓ erging, so stationary rowing. It may sound boring to some, but I totally get why folks that are into crew.
You know, I didn’t do any of this before until quite recently. So I’ve really enjoyed that. It, you know, it’s been enabling me to stay fit without the injuries of running and ultimately push myself in a way that I can only remember doing when I was training at a very high level for track. you know, I’ve now got three kids. ⁓ so five years ago I only had two. So.
You know, I’m to give the classic answer that I’m just working in with the kids a lot. But we’ve done a lot of traveling this year with the family and we did, we just travel as a family. I, and I really think that I, you know, it’s hard to do that as a founder CEO going through transition with our leadership team. But every time I travel, ⁓ even, you know, even with the family, can be stressful, but you just come back really open-minded. And so that’s kind of what I.
like to do.
Keith Cline (53:13)
And I’m not a rower, I’ve, so I had the founder of Hydro on the podcast, Bruce Smith, and he explained why it’s so good for your body, your joints, your muscles. It’s not the heavy pounding of running on a treadmill or outside or even cycling. ⁓ yeah, no, it’s a smart.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (53:20)
yeah.
Mmm.
Yeah.
Well, and a really practical
one that, actually my dad mentioned this and it really made sense to me. So if you, if you try and watch like a Netflix show or a TV on a treadmill or elliptical, it’s really quite distracting because your head’s going up and down. If you’re rowing, your head’s pretty stationary. So it’s actually.
Keith Cline (53:47)
Mm-hmm.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (53:52)
almost very therapeutic and if you want to can watch stuff. And so I’ve got a ⁓ boring daily routine where I’m rowing 10K in the morning watching TV. And I just feel like that kind of combines just the working out with just sort of catching up with stuff. so I think that’s actually way better than running on a treadmill. You just get, you can do it,
going up and down. I think that’s another bonus of the stationary row machine.
Keith Cline (54:29)
Alasdair, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through more about your company and what you guys are up to. And yeah, it’s very bright future ahead with Gen.ai and all the different things you guys have going on. So kudos to you and the team.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman (54:43)
Thank you so much, Keith. And it’s an honor to be back again and keep up the good work, 400 episodes. I’m really honored to get a second chance to come back. ⁓ So grateful for that. Thank you.
