What’s the deal with Artificial Intelligence? Guest Slater Victoroff – David VS Goliath – E46

Speaker 3:

Coming up today on David Vs Goliath.

Adam Degraide:

We’re going to talk mushrooms.

Slater Victoroff:

Oh, my favorite subject.

Adam Degraide:

I have no idea what NLP means and what that all means, but we’re going to find out together.

Speaker 3:

Welcome to today’s episode of David Vs Goliath. A podcast dedicated to helping small businesses leverage technology to not only help them compete against their large competitors, but win. Your host is currently the CEO of Anthem Business Software. A three time Inc 500 recipient and a serial entrepreneur with a passion to help small businesses everywhere find, serve and keep more customers profitable. Please join me in welcoming your host, Adam Degraide.

Adam Degraide:

Hey everyone, it’s Adam degraide with another amazing episode of the David Vs Goliath podcast. Today, I’m going to have a gentleman by the name of Slater Victoroff. He’s the founder and CTO of Indico Data Solutions, which is an Enterprise AI solution for unstructured content, with an emphasis on text and NLP. I have no idea what NLP means and what that all means, but we’re going to find out together when Slater joins me in a few minutes. Today’s episode is brought to you by Anthem Software, where you can find, serve, and keep more customers profitably with their all in one solution of CRM software, marketing services in a training lab built specifically for small businesses to help you get results. That’s right, take the 120 second video tour at anthemsoftware.com. Every business has a song, let their software and marketing system sing yours.

Adam Degraide:

You can also visit us online at David Vs Goliath podcast. Then you can subscribe to receive our newsletters and apply to be on the podcast. You submit the application, my team gets it, they vet it, and then if we feel great about it, and we think it’s going to add value to our watchers and our listeners, you get to get on. And that’s exactly what’s happening today with Slater. Well, I’ve also been talking to you the last few weeks about some musical projects that I’ve been working on over the last several months. I released my solo album called Adam Degraide, The Calm, a picture of it right now on the screen. And what was so cool about that project, is it was me on acoustic piano, acoustic guitar and a world class string quartet. It’s all instrumental, designed to help you relax. Well, I’ve also been working on a hard rock project.

Adam Degraide:

It’s called the A.D.A.M Project, A period, D period, A period, M period Project. It stands for artist, developing, astonishing, music. And when I decided to make the rock album, I didn’t really have anything to say anything I needed to say seriously. And so, I said, “Well, what can I do that would be fun for me and then I think people would actually enjoy and get a kick out of?” And so, I’m a big gamer and I play this game called Apex Legends, which is a world class battle royal game. And they have amazing characters in the game.

Adam Degraide:

And I said, “You know what, honey, I’m going to make the album about the characters in the game. I’m going to let them inspire these songs.” And that’s exactly what has happened. Over the last couple of episodes, I’ve showed you several of them during the second quarter all stars. But this is one that I haven’t shared with you yet. I’m going to start it from the beginning and go through the first chorus. It’s about a character Wraith, who is an inter dimensional skirmisher. That’s right. And this song is called Into The Void inspired by Wraith from Apex Legends. Enjoy.

Adam Degraide:

(Singing).

Adam Degraide:

And as you can tell, that is not Adam Degraide, The Calm that is the A.D.A.M Project, which should be out today if not yet, anytime soon. Check on Apple and Spotify. Well with no further ado, let’s get right into it today with Slater Victoroff. Slater, welcome to the David Vs Goliath podcast.

Slater Victoroff:

Thanks so much for having me Adam.

Adam Degraide:

It’s great to have you. I was reading in the intro, which you weren’t privy to, because I did it prior to you actually being on here. I actually said you’re the founder and CTO of Indico Data Solutions, an Enterprise AI solution for unstructured content with an emphasis on text and NLP. And I said to my watchers, listeners, what the heck does that mean?

Slater Victoroff:

Well, that’s a million dollar question, right?

Adam Degraide:

Yeah, exactly. So I think it would be good because I mean, we’re always hearing, everyone always throws the word around AI. AI this, AI that. There was a movie made AI. And I think there’s a lot of not only misconceptions and misinformation in regards to AI, but I think a lot of people don’t even understand conceptually what it is. So why don’t you talk little bit about that and then we’ll go from there and talk about your business.

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. And the first thing I’ll say at the highest level, is AI is such a broad space, frankly, I was just talking about this. I just posted this on Twitter. There’s so much cool research coming out in this space that even me, someone who is full time, just like trying to keep up with everything that’s happening, not even across the entire field, even in like my, I mean, it’s a significant segment, but it’s not a hundred percent of everything happening by any means. So that’s, maybe the first thing. Is it means a huge number of things to a huge number of people. And it’s a broad enough term, AI, that it’s kind of hard for me to say like, yes, that counts, no, that doesn’t. In the strictest form, one of the things that’s really interesting about AI, it has a definition that shifts naturally over time.

Slater Victoroff:

So very, very vaguely, AI is the act of using computers for anything that computers are not traditionally used for at that time. So back like 50 years ago, the buttons in an elevator, that was AI or like your rice cooker knowing when to turn off, like that was AI. But because now, that’s assumed that’s not AI anymore. And so, it is something that does intrinsically drift over time, which I mean, makes it confusing.

Adam Degraide:

It does make it confusing. And so, for the watchers, listeners, its artificial intelligence. So for example, years ago, when I built my first CRM software, this is years ago, back to the auto industry, there was no like logical automation. So in other words, status driven marketing at the time. So we were forging groundwork back in those days at a company called [BZ Results 00:07:36] where we built, if the person’s interested in this car, but they’re not ready, they’d go to interested, not ready and then they would get these drips and these text messages. And so that, was considered AI at the time. Now, that’s considered pretty much standard stuff. If you don’t have that in CRM, you don’t have anything. And [inaudible 00:07:51] working with people right now that are trying to create programs that intelligently proactively will know what’s coming next and people [inaudible 00:08:00].

Slater Victoroff:

Right, the next best action kind of stuff, figuring out, how do I intervene with a customer? I mean, that is tricky stuff.

Adam Degraide:

It is tricky stuff. Now, what does NLP stand for? Because, I’m not familiar with [inaudible 00:08:12]

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. So it stands for natural language processing. And there are a lot of different things that people toss under that. So you’ll also hear NLU, so natural language understanding, you’ll hear NLG, natural language generation. I define it in kind of the broadest of all possible ways. It’s anything where you’re working with text. And I think this kind of relevantly starts coming into like, okay, great we’re talking about AI. So it’s this massive thing, it’s a whole bunch of stuff. So what does, Indico actually do?

Slater Victoroff:

There’s a lot of ways of segmenting things, but we really focus on this unstructured data piece. What does that really mean, unstructured data? For us, that’s text, that’s images, that’s audio, that’s something where really importantly, the way that humans perceive the data is actually a primary kind of critical part of how you interact with it. Very different from say actuarial work, where you’ve got some specific data points that fit into a spreadsheet and you know, okay, Hey, I want to like regress against these. And I want to kind of do this balance. I mean, that’s still AI in a way. That’s still data science, you’re using ML still in that space, but it’s less the kind of stuff that we focus on.

Adam Degraide:

So when you say text, like one of the things that we’ve been working on for years, and I’m actually getting pretty close to launching as well too, is the ability to have software write intelligent text based on various topics and subjects that are also [inaudible 00:09:43].

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:09:45] So that’s, natural language generation.

Adam Degraide:

All right. So that’s, different?

Slater Victoroff:

Yes. That’s different.

Adam Degraide:

So look at that, see, you learn something new every single day, but I guess that wouldn’t be considered artificial intelligence?

Slater Victoroff:

No, I mean that would still be considered artificial intelligence. I would say there’s probably even a world in the future where Indico would probably have some more functionality around that, what I’ll say and frankly, I know a good amount about the space. So there’s an old school way of approaching that. And the way that AI is framed, these both count as AI, because in both situations you’re taking something that humans traditionally do and you’re figuring out, okay, how do I get computers to do this? So it’s kind of old school NLG that I refer to as like Madlib style. And it’s exactly like that, you’re kind of slot filling, you’re saying, “Hey, I’ve got the ticker that comes out after the game. I’m going to figure out how to turn that into an article that is just going to be a little bit easier for someone to read.”

Slater Victoroff:

That’s kind of valuable that sort of last generation, now you’ve got this stuff like GPT and GPT-3 and whatnot. And that’s kind of generating text and is much more flexible, interesting, like theoretically rich way. But I think it’s also exposing kind of this interesting question of like, how do you control it effectively? Like what’s the right way to interact with it? Because, people really like to edit, if you’re like generating parts of it, kind of going beyond maybe traditional marketing automation. And people are trying to generate almost like long form articles and stuff like that.

Adam Degraide:

Or even write a book based on a plot or a subject that they have.

Slater Victoroff:

I mean someday, someday for sure.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. It really is interesting to see how much technology has moved forward. So when you started Indigo, obviously, how long has it been going?

Slater Victoroff:

About 8, 9 years now at this point.

Adam Degraide:

Wow. That’s a long time. In the AI world, you’re like an old senior citizen.

Slater Victoroff:

I know. Yeah. I mean, it is actually one of the things that’s really surprising, we were working in transfer learning in NLP, which is this like weird thing that, back in 2013, 2014, people didn’t believe that existed. Now, you’ve got Burt, you’ve got GPT-3, which are things that like almost have even left out the AI community, like tech generically, [inaudible 00:11:57] knows about these things, which would’ve been like crazy just a couple years ago. So I mean, it’s been an incredible, amazing sea change over the course of 8, 9 years, it is just incomparable to what it was.

Adam Degraide:

For the watchers and listeners to help them understand, because we have different entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. We have people that run their own auto shop to people that run big tech companies that are worth $2 billion that listen and watch David Vs Goliath. Who is your customer and how do you make money?

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah, totally. Yeah. The most important question. So we are primarily selling into large enterprises. We say build horizontally, sell vertically. So when you look at the markets we’re in principally it’s banking, financial services, insurance, commercial real estate, capital markets, maybe a little bit more broadly. When we talk about sort of the stakeholders and really how they’re making money, which then is how we make money, because we’re a B2B software company. It all centers around the subject matter expert. So I’ll give you an example, say a loan approval process or kind of some lease process. You’ve got this river of unstructured data. Really importantly, this is not some simple like, oh, like check the box. Yeah, like there’s a logo in the upper left hand corner.

Slater Victoroff:

You’re talking like 6, 7 documents. If you signed a mortgage, these are very kind of complex things, there’s a lot of different things that you’ve got to check, a lot of nuance to that. And even a trained expert going through a document packet like that, it is probably going to take them hour to hours to get all of the relevant piece of information out. So the idea is like we slot into a process like that and we’re really sort of popping up as an AI assistant.

Slater Victoroff:

So it’s kind of first having a system of record that reflects a process, because it turns out, if you’ve got two loan agents next to each other, even if they think they’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years, they’re probably doing it in a slightly different way. So it kind of becomes this consistent system of record for like, here’s how we do it, here are kind of the ways that you should process these various examples. And then you’ve got this AI assistant that kind of pops up in the background and will automatically start kind of grabbing things, automating that data and kind of making you more efficient.

Adam Degraide:

Is that [inaudible 00:14:10] Microsoft clip guy, you remember that [inaudible 00:14:12]

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Clippy. I swear to God, like Microsoft Clippy is in some of the very first pitch decks we’ve got, but we’re way less annoying. That’s the difference.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. It’s so funny that you say that. I mean, so people from the beginning of time, because I’ve been involved this for quite some time myself, building [inaudible 00:14:30] marketing automation softwares and stuff like that. And I remember when Clippy came out, man, I thought it was the greatest idea until day two. I’m like Clippy has got to go.

Slater Victoroff:

See that’s the thing, is like really impressive tech behind it, I’m sure. But I think what a lot of people miss, is that no matter how sophisticated your AI is, if you don’t get the user experience right, if you don’t really think about how is this going to slot into someone’s workflow, day to day, you’re kind of missing the forest for the trees, in my book.

Adam Degraide:

So you’re kind of like, you’ll go into like a Bank of America or a large bank, we won’t use names and they’ll have this process like you said, that is inconsistently being operated between one employee to another, you then work with the people, the powers to be, to say, “What is the ideal process? And let’s leverage software and AI to gently and methodically help this person through the process to make sure A, it’s a good experience for the person on the other end, B the institution gets what it needs in a timely inconsistent fashion and C it helps with training cuts down on time, cuts down an inconsistencies and potential errors.” Is that right?

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. That’s all right. Yeah. That’s all correct. Let me tweak it for you just slightly though, because I think one of the things that’s really cool is that rather than having to like go up to a managerial level and be like, you must create the like record of truth. Because, it turns out a lot of the time they don’t actually know enough about the documents, because you have to get into like really, really detailed stuff of like in this format with this colon to the left of that, like which one do I want to grab? Like should I grab the last name too? They don’t really care.

Slater Victoroff:

So really for us, it’s about putting the power to do that in the people that are like processing the documents today. So it’s like, you’re the experts, we’re going to give you the power. But again, other than that, everything you said is exactly right, but then I’ll highlight one other thing that’s really cool here. Something that I really didn’t appreciate in kind of the value that we add for our customers. Audit processes. So think about a loan again, I just like this because I think it is a good example for a lot of [inaudible 00:16:34]

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:16:34] everyone does it, everyone gets it.

Slater Victoroff:

Exactly. Yeah. So traditionally, if you look inside of a CRM or something, like how much detail do you have about a loan that got processed. You’re like, “The stack of papers showed up on Sue’s desk.” [inaudible 00:16:46] great.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:16:47] here’s the PDF.

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. And it’s like, check mark. And that’s it. And so, then when it comes time to do the audit at the end of the year, well you’ve got to redo that whole process end to end, cost millions and millions of Dollars. When really there’s no reason for that. So one of the other really big benefits you get using a system like Indico is, well, you’ve got not only the like 30 records then now in your downstream system that are like the actual scheme that shows like, yes, we followed the checklist, but you can say, “Hey yeah, it’s on page three at the start of the third paragraph, here’s exactly where it is. I highlighted it in the document for you.” You can do all sorts of stuff like that.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, Slater. We got to take a break. This has actually been pretty fascinating. And when we come back, I want to talk to you a little bit about your team, your plans, your goals and things like that. So, Hey, you’re watching David Vs Goliath. I’m your host Adam Degraide. You would Slater Victoroff. I hope I’m saying that right. I think I am. You’re learning about things you’ve never learned before here on the David Vs Goliath podcast. This is a very important message from our corporate sponsor. Anthem Software. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 3:

Anthem business software system is designed to specifically help small businesses just like yours, find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. We do this by providing you with the most powerful software automations and marketing services to help your business compete and win in this ever-changing digital world. Take a short video tour at anthemsoftware.com.

Adam Degraide:

And we’re back with Slater. Slater, this has been so much fun. The shortest break in history, as you can tell. So how big is your team currently, right now that’s working with you on this project?

Slater Victoroff:

So we are just over 70 full-time and then we’ve also got a really excellent data acquisition team, that’s about another dozen folks that are primarily part-time workers.

Adam Degraide:

That’s no joke by the way. Congratulations.

Slater Victoroff:

It’s crazy. We probably went into the pandemic at about 20 folks and so most of that growth has been remote, but I just have to say, I just love my team.

Adam Degraide:

There was a pandemic?

Slater Victoroff:

There was a pandemic. It’s crazy. It like happened. So we literally went from all being based in Boston to now we’ve got folks across 15 different states. We went from being sort of interested in remote work, but really everyone was in the office basically every day. And then we kind of had to pull this hard left, [inaudible 00:19:50].

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:19:51] that to be difficult, because I remember at the time before I sold my business, I sold my business in the heat of the pandemic. I sold my business in 2020. And we had almost a hundred some odd employees and they were pretty much in the offices here in central Florida. And when we sent them home, we realized that we didn’t lose efficiency, we were actually able to do things quicker, more efficiently and even at a higher scale. And in some cases didn’t need as many as we thought we did, which was interesting as well. When you went from that model of having everyone in the office to now you’re expanding out in different states, what have been some of the opportunities you’ve recognized in some of the challenges as well?

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. So big pluses, I think it was interesting, we saw an initial big surge of productivity. One of the things though that we did find afterwards that actually I’ve now started flagging is like one of the biggest risks of remote work actually, is like a surge in burnout. I think that was one of the things that was really tough, is people figuring out how to rebalance between their home life and their work life. And it took a wild, I mean, for me, like it took me a long time before I could both be efficient at work in my office and then also like go home, be with my family.

Slater Victoroff:

And that was a very different skill. And also figuring out how you not just let people do their own work, but actually continue to like have a strong culture. So I think that there were a lot of pluses, like I love not having to commute. Like I wake up, I get to spend like a couple hours in the morning before work that I just like would not have had before. But there were definitely challenges in figuring out how to make it work.

Adam Degraide:

So what have you done? I mean, one of the things that I used pretty much, we obviously used not only the Zooms and things like that, but it really forced me to like create video libraries and video messages and automated training, which was very, very helpful. Because, once you do that, you don’t have to do it again. And I think, that’s one of the beautiful things about replicating yourself, is you only have so much time in the day and if you find yourself saying and doing the same things over and over again in your business, record a damn video.

Slater Victoroff:

Absolutely. No, I could not agree more. And that was the thing, is like once we got on the other side, I think all of the work that we did to really make a remote culture work, it paid off in spades in other ways. Everything is documented like 10 times better than it was before. We’ve had to adopt some new tools like Miro, I really like for white boarding, obviously the video calls and the Slack Huddles, that’s all really useful. Even weird stuff that I wouldn’t have anticipated, like we’ve got a monthly game night where we’ll play like some random video game or [inaudible 00:22:32] these new like [inaudible 00:22:33]

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:22:33] to know, I’m a gamer.

Slater Victoroff:

Oh yeah. So we used to play like Shell Shock IO. Did you ever know that?

Adam Degraide:

I never did. Back in my first business, BZ Results Slater, we had dedicated Call of Duty servers.

Slater Victoroff:

Oh, no way.

Adam Degraide:

We had 150 employees at lunchtime, we shut the entire company down and all 150 [inaudible 00:22:55]

Slater Victoroff:

We used to have, no joke, a room for COD zombies and a leaderboard up on the wall, like back when we had like all one office, it was like there was the COD room and then there was the nap room right next to it.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. That’s awesome. And then I have transitioned myself now recently, I’m a big Apex Legends player. I love that.

Slater Victoroff:

Oh, see, I haven’t played, but I love battle royals.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. So man, if you’ve never played Apex, it’s tough, but it’s awesome battle royal and as they say in their ads, “The legends make the difference.”

Slater Victoroff:

I’ve been playing a V Rising lately, that’s I feel like the new hot game that everyone’s picking up.

Adam Degraide:

I got to check it out. I got to check it out. I can’t help myself. I actually just need [inaudible 00:23:36]

Slater Victoroff:

It’s dangerous.

Adam Degraide:

I just made a record based on seven Apex Legends characters. So I actually have a hard rock album coming out in, actually [inaudible 00:23:47] in the episode [inaudible 00:23:48]

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:23:48] no way.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. It’s pretty cool. I wrote one on Pathfinder, Mirage, Wraith, Gibraltar, Caustic and there’s one other one I’m missing. It’ll hit me in a second. I’ll figure it out. I’ll remember it in a second, but anyway.

Slater Victoroff:

Oh, that’s awesome man.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:24:05] fun, because I had nothing to say serious. And so, I said, “I’m going to write about characters that I like.” And I made songs in regards to their lore in the Apex world. And it’s a ton of fun. [inaudible 00:24:16].

Slater Victoroff:

That’s so cool.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:24:17] as well too. See folks, what people don’t really appreciate Slater is that when they talk to tech guys and marketing guys and creatives in general, this stuff by the way, you would think would distract us. It actually helps us in our work, helps us [inaudible 00:24:32]

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:24:32] 100%.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:24:33] Because, you start to think about it as a programmer and you start to appreciate the logic in the AI that they’ve built in these games.

Slater Victoroff:

Well, let me give you how I think I started to look at it. Because, I think this is something that I struggled with a lot and I will say like, I don’t think I played video games at all from the time I was like 18 to like 24 or something like that. Or like, I don’t know, maybe for like a couple months in the summer or something like that. But like very, very little, and I didn’t understand, where does rest fit in? What is that for? What am I using this for? Is it just a distraction? And the thing that I really came away with like, rest is a part of the process. And I think it’s really important to recognize that. I think for me, one of the things that’s really powerful and like video games are a great way of doing it, because frankly, I think they’re like beautiful and they’re kind of a new artistic medium in a lot of ways. It’s just like [inaudible 00:25:30]

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:25:30]

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:25:30] Awesome. But it’s like, how else can you immediately like unplug in like a 30, 45 minute, like hour long window. It’s impossible. If I want to go rock climbing, that’s another great way of doing it. But I’m going to be out hours or if you go out to a bar with friends again, it’s like, not that there’s any problem with that, the video games I think are practically like a really effective way to unplug and actually like recharge the brain, so you can like go attack the problems that you were working on from a different [inaudible 00:26:00].

Adam Degraide:

I totally agree. And then if you had a meeting with a client that bums you out, you just go to a battle royal, take some [inaudible 00:26:06].

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:26:07] Yeah.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:26:10] That’s awesome. [inaudible 00:26:11].

Slater Victoroff:

I mean, look, you got to bounce back somehow.

Adam Degraide:

You got to bounce back somehow. So you got 70 employees. Now, when you started Indico, did you sit down and actually create a plan and a roadmap like a five year plan? Or did you just start it, kind of go for it or did you strategic think that through and how many people were part of that when you first started?

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah, so I mean, like we were a very literal dorm room company. So at the very start and I will say that the amount of planning reflects that. I think that really the very early days it was me and Alec Radford, is the name of sort of the original guy, from 5:00 PM to 5:00 AM, we were working on AI projects. We kind of had some really healthy debate going on about what was going to be sort of the most successful techniques going forward. And really, it started from this profound desire to just make this technology, deep learning specifically, more accessible.

Slater Victoroff:

And so that, really profound desire has stayed constant. And it’s really interesting. You can look at even some of our original seed decks and I’d say even today, 8, 9 years later, [inaudible 00:27:23] 30 and 50% of it still applies. And I think that art of like going and like setting your true north and being like, “What is really important to us, like what do we want to solve no matter what?” That was really important. We wouldn’t have made it this far without it. And now obviously, we’re a lot bigger, we’re a lot more successful than we were back then. But a lot of the DNA has stayed exactly the same.

Adam Degraide:

And this is something that I think people don’t appreciate as well too, because I’ve worked with programming staffs and creative individuals and artists, and many of the people that I’ve worked with that are programmers and even graphic artists are also musicians. And they have just like art running in. And so, business historically in those types of individuals is like, almost like it’s been a turnoff to them. Because, the idea that we want to create cool things that impact the world, change the world, but then business comes involved in it and you have to make money and you have investors that you’re responsible for. How have you personally, and then your partners, your dorm room mentality of where you guys are going to take on the world, we don’t care about the money type of thing, or you did care about the money, but maybe it was a little bit pure. How did you blend the two initially and how has that changed to where you are today?

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah, I think poorly, is the first answer. And then I think we do it a lot better today. But no, I mean, I really appreciate you bringing it up, because I think balancing all of those concerns and finding a situation actually where you kind of can have it all is really, really hard. And I think that structurally that’s one of the really big things about Indico that does actually differentiate us, is we have decided to attack the market in a different way, so that we are really intentionally both, we’re avoiding a lot of the biggest ethical concerns in AI. We’re setting ourselves up to work on really challenging, difficult problems so we can track the best talent in the world. But we’re also doing it in a way that’s very uniquely kind of human-centered. And so, we’ve had this very specific view on like how are we going to attract top talent? Like what is the cool problem that you come to Indico to work on. And for us, it really is this [inaudible 00:29:34]

Adam Degraide:

A lot of great programmers and creatives are not interested in the money. They’re more interested in the culture and the vision and their experience of how they’re going to be there as being a part of a team and not everyone’s motivated by money. I personally [inaudible 00:29:49]

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:29:49] to an extent. I mean, I will say, it is tough for us at times. If everyone were only motivated by money, we would not make a single hire. I think that the thing is like every single person that does work at Indico, if they were purely salary motivated, they could all make more money somewhere else, but it is equally important for us as a company to be like, look guys, we’re going to give you like consistent raises. Like we’re going to push for like better comp or we’re going to continue to make sure that you are compensated like very, very well, but we’re not like, look, it’s not going to be the top 1% of comp out there. It’s going to be like strong, like 80th percentile kind of stuff. And we’re going to have to like balance that with like making the best culture and really giving you cool stuff to work on, because what we’re never going to be able to be in that top 1% comp. So we’ve got to balance for it somehow.

Adam Degraide:

It’s interesting, over the years, I’ve had some awesome programmers that have left for the money to go somewhere else. And I would say 50% of them came back like within 6 months to 18 months, because they realized that okay, the money was there, but the project was boring [inaudible 00:31:00] all get out or their culture was so bureaucratic it became not fun anymore. So we saw that a lot too. And I’m sure you’ve probably have seen that as well too. Well, we got to take another break from another amazing sponsor. And when we come back, we’re going to talk mushrooms [inaudible 00:31:16].

Slater Victoroff:

Oh my favorite subject.

Adam Degraide:

That’s right, your favorite subject. Not what people are thinking. They’re thinking shrooms, they can get high. Maybe that is [inaudible 00:31:24], back at a second with Slater and I’m Adam Degraide and you’re watching and listening to the David Vs Goliath podcast. Here’s another important message from another great sponsor. Stay tuned.

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Adam Degraide:

And we’re back with Slater, also known as Nicolas Cage too. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie Pig with Nicholas Cage [inaudible 00:33:10]

Slater Victoroff:

I’ve heard about it. No, it’s on my list. Yeah, no, not yet.

Adam Degraide:

And so, one of the questions we have here is it’s, what do you do to relax basically and you said, you collect anything. And you said, “I forage.” I think forage is the word.

Slater Victoroff:

Forage. Yeah.

Adam Degraide:

“Forage for mushrooms.”

Slater Victoroff:

Forage for mushrooms.

Adam Degraide:

I watched that movie and I saw the relationship that Nicolas Cage had with his truffle pig. And it was such an interesting movie, because you don’t realize that’s a real thing that people forage for mushrooms. I take it for granted, I love mushrooms. I make mushrooms omelettes in the morning and I like mushrooms on my burger. And if I have a chicken dish with mushrooms on it, I’m psyched. So I didn’t realize that it was something you could do to relax. Tell us a little bit about that, that’s fascinating.

Slater Victoroff:

Well, let’s start here. Like when you’re talking about mushrooms, I’m guessing you’re talking primarily about like white button mushrooms. The Agaricus genius, if you will.

Adam Degraide:

Or truffle.

Slater Victoroff:

Okay, sure. I mean, truffles are amazing. And I will say, truffles are at like one really extreme end of the spectrum. Like people get shot over truffles, I’m not trying to mess with that.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:34:24] the Pig was [inaudible 00:34:25].

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:34:26] truffle, it’s a master truffle pig and the pig’s stolen from him and [inaudible 00:34:31].

Slater Victoroff:

Oh, I see. Yeah.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:34:33] like Liam neon’s movie where one of his kids is stolen.

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. But like with a truffle pig?

Adam Degraide:

But it was an actual pig, yeah.

Slater Victoroff:

Oh. Yeah. Okay. So here’s the thing that was amazing to me. And I think I got into mushroom foraging in a completely accidental way. I think it’s one of the interesting things where it ended up being perfectly aligned with the pandemic. I was out in Northern New Hampshire or no, I guess like central New Hampshire, with my friend, rock climbing. And it was like an amazing, amazing year. There was so much rain. And so, there were just like mushrooms everywhere. And I knew like the barest small little amount of mushrooms. So my cousin was like a PhD in mushroom science. And I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool.” I didn’t really think much about it. Because, I think growing up and in the US, I didn’t realize this, but we have a very micro phobic kind of mentality. We’re like, “Mushrooms are going to kill me.” Like those are terrifying.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:35:31] Mushrooms.

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. No, it’s like, literally that’s like my cousin showed up and literally she shows up with a mushroom and I’m like, “That’s going to kill me.” That’s my first reaction. And she was like a PhD, like very smart, so we like ate it. And that’s amazing. Not only is that like the most delicious mushroom I’ve ever had, and this was Hen-of-the-wood, but I’ve never seen anything like that. I didn’t even know mushrooms could look like that. And so that, was kind of the first taste. But then what happens like I was up in New Hampshire, it was like this amazing summer. And we found like literally 10 pounds of Hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, just growing out of the base of this Oak tree. And it was like the luckiest we ever could have got. Because, the thing is like, nothing else looks like that. I mean, this is one of the most delicious mushrooms you can find out there. And it’s [inaudible 00:36:13]

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:36:13] called, you said, just for the viewer.

Slater Victoroff:

Hen-of-the-woods

Adam Degraide:

Matter of fact, right now [inaudible 00:36:18]

Slater Victoroff:

[inaudible 00:36:18] Grifola frondosa.

Adam Degraide:

Before we continue, so Hen-of-the-wood right now, my producer is putting up for the watchers, a picture of what these things look like. So you’re looking at them right now. We’re not able to see them Slater, because this is going to come in the editing later. But he right now just showed people what Hen-of-the-woods is. I’ve never had it. So what are they [inaudible 00:36:37].

Slater Victoroff:

Probably not.

Adam Degraide:

What is the difference in like their shape, their color, their texture?

Slater Victoroff:

They’re like and if we’re going to bring up some images afterwards, I think the best example I can give here is like Lions Mane mushroom or a Bears Head Tooth. The thing is that the mushrooms that you’ve been exposed to, even if you’re talking about like everything you’ve ever seen at a supermarket, it’s such a limited portion of the whole mushroom kingdom or the fungus kingdom. Think about it like vegetables, it’s like there’s a whole kingdom of vegetables like fungi, it is a kingdom, it is like that large, it’s got that kind of diversity to it. But like you’ve only ever seen like lettuce and broccoli, that’s like the equivalent, I think of folks with their mushroom experience.

Slater Victoroff:

The taste is completely different, like there are spicy mushrooms out there, there’re smokey mushrooms out there. There are like really meaty mushrooms out there. There’s sour mushrooms out there. There’s a mushroom out there, Shrimp Russula sorry, Crab Brittlegill actually, sorry it is also called a Shrimp Russula, but like very confusingly. It’s a, it’s a crab mushroom, shrimp of the woods is a totally separate thing, but it literally, it has the taste and consistency of shrimp, like it smells fishy. And that was the most amazing thing, is my mother lived up in Northern California, which is like one of the most amazing places that you can possibly look for mushrooms.

Slater Victoroff:

And you just like go into the forest and you find, once you start looking for them, they’re just everywhere. And imagine that you could like walk into the woods and like pick up on the floor, like a top grade wagyu steak, that’s the analogy I give people. And the secret is just like, it was there. It was possible the whole time. And you never knew about it, because people are still kind of like afraid about it.

Adam Degraide:

Slater, you are clearly fired up about mushrooms.

Slater Victoroff:

I love mushrooms. They just opened a mushroom shop in Summerville actually. And like I showed up at 9:00 AM the first weekend after they opened, just because I’m like, “Oh, no one else is going to show up this early to go to the mushroom shop. So I can talk to the owner for like an hour and geek out about mushrooms.”

Adam Degraide:

I think that’s amazing. I think when people find something that gets them going, some people it’s clearly the fungi kingdom.

Slater Victoroff:

I mean, it’s [inaudible 00:38:56]

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:38:56] Other people collecting baseball ball cards, other people collecting music. And in my case I like fine art and I collect books, weird books. Like I like finding a [inaudible 00:39:05]

Slater Victoroff:

Oh no way.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:39:07] finding a rare book.

Slater Victoroff:

Tell me about some of your rare books. I actually, I love rare books.

Adam Degraide:

So my favorite book I have actually, I’ll show you guys in a second. I’ll send you a picture of it, right now on the screen. It’s the first edition copy of the British version of C.S Lewis’s book Mere Christianity. So I have before it was published in America and it was [inaudible 00:39:31] from his radio talks, people don’t realize he didn’t actually write the book. [inaudible 00:39:33]

Slater Victoroff:

I know that book actually.

Adam Degraide:

Was comprised because of his talks he gave on radio back then. And I have the very first edition, the very first printing, signed copy from C.S Lewis.

Slater Victoroff:

A signed copy. Wow.

Adam Degraide:

And that’s one of [inaudible 00:39:51]. So once a year, my wife and I try to go find rare books like that.

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah. I go with my family to the Strand, to the rare book section with my family every year, it’s like a tradition. [inaudible 00:40:03] I could spend days up there.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. It’s awesome. I think it’s fascinating when you realize that entrepreneurs that are watching this show right now and aspiring entrepreneurs, think about the things you learn about, but listen, don’t neglect to Slater’s point, the unplugging time. So he found joy in foraging for mushrooms. You can find joy in who knows maybe for you, it’s wearing Scottish kilts and playing the bagpipes. It doesn’t matter.

Slater Victoroff:

That could be fun.

Adam Degraide:

Could be a lot fun.

Slater Victoroff:

Yeah.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:40:35] I’d love to see you with bagpipes, that’d be funny. So when you decided to start Indico, what were you doing at that time?

Slater Victoroff:

I mean, I was a student. I was a student that was drinking from the fire hose in a very serious way. I mean, I was trying to do as much as I possibly could. And I think in some of the early days of Indico, it was actually the first time that I ever burnt out, like experienced what that was. And I worked 220 hour weeks back to back.

Adam Degraide:

Wow.

Slater Victoroff:

And then like we do the math, like I’m not sleeping eight hours a night. Literally like working [inaudible 00:41:12]

Adam Degraide:

You were going to school and you started Indico from 5 to 5:00 AM.

Slater Victoroff:

Well, yeah I was going to school, starting Indico two other companies. And actually working part-time all. It was too much. And then basically, like I collapsed, I burnt out really, really hard. I kind of fell back to just like, okay, like summer hit, just did like a full time job, my internship. I mean, it was great. And then I kind of focused on like, what do I really love? What is it that I want to spend my time doing? And then Indico kind of very quickly like bubbled up. I’m just like, I just love this space. I just love doing this research. I’m lucky enough that it is a very lucrative place to be right now.

Adam Degraide:

It’s very rares Slater that I talk to people on the show, that have started the way you started and have been successful out of the gate. [inaudible 00:42:04]

Slater Victoroff:

Out of the gate is a relative view.

Adam Degraide:

Well, my point is you started Indico and you were doing other things, but you’re doing, Indico, like it went from where you started, you’ve got 70 employees plus now at this point in time, clearly you have to have millions of Dollars in revenue, otherwise you wouldn’t have that many employees. So kudos to you, what gave you the courage to do it?

Slater Victoroff:

Actually, I love the exact way you framed that and I’ll tell you the moment that I realized, I think what it meant to be an entrepreneur. So when I was a sophomore, maybe even before I came up with Indico. I had this idea that I was going to create a company. I’m like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to like work all four years. And then like, when I graduate, it’ll be set up.” I’ve got this whole plan. And it was going to be like a bio tech company, to give you a sense of how well plans work. And I remember Katie Ray, who was the head of Boston Techstars at the time, she like came to the school and I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got to talk to her, I know she’s a big shot.”

Slater Victoroff:

I would love to get into Techstars, that would be my ticket to the big leagues. So I like stalk her down in the like lunch room. Literally, there’re no seats next to her. So I like sit down at the end of the table. And I was just like staring at her for like 20, 30 minutes until someone finally leaves like swoop in. And I’m like, “I’ve got a pitch for you.” And I mean, bless her heart. This was like rambling, like 10, 15 minute long, like nonsense about this thing that I wanted to build. And she sat through the whole thing, because she’s very patient and very gracious, but I’ll never forget what she said to me next. She said, “Great idea. Why haven’t you done it yet?”

Slater Victoroff:

And then walked away. And that was it. And I just remember, it’s like, I did not have an answer for that. And it helped me realize that creating a business and starting something is a lot more accessible than we like to believe. And one of the mottos that we had in the very early days of Indico was this idea, “Always escalate.” Which is the idea that, we had to run so much faster than we were comfortable to understand where the limit actually was. I mean, we didn’t want to go to our first pitch literally, we kept saying like, “Oh no, like it was a couple more weeks, it’ll be ready in another month, two more months.”

Slater Victoroff:

Our friend literally said, “No, VC’s here. You’re going to pitch in an hour or you’re going to make me look bad.” And it took that kind of forcing for us to get over the hump. But once we got there, was that realization that we were the only ones holding ourselves back. And once we stopped doing that and just said, “How big can we make this? What would happen if we put 100% of everything we had behind this.” That was when things really started moving.

Adam Degraide:

When you think about what Slater just said there folks, always escalate. I always tell people all the time, your company can only grow as big as you can see it. So it’s only going to be as big [inaudible 00:44:58] you can see it. Always escalate.

Slater Victoroff:

Always escalate.

Adam Degraide:

Because, small thinking small business, by the way, does not equal small thinking. You can have a small business and have big thinking and before you know it, that small business goes from Slater to 70 plus and millions of Dollars in revenue, but it takes courage. Good for you, man. I’m proud of you for doing that. Now, and final one last question, people right now are watching this and they might have an idea. And to your point, they haven’t done it yet, for various reasons. What would you tell them?

Slater Victoroff:

Start.

Adam Degraide:

Start.

Slater Victoroff:

Start. And if you want more than that, not that I think you necessarily need more than that.

Adam Degraide:

[inaudible 00:45:50] need more, but I think it’s probably been the best answer I’ve ever had to this question.

Slater Victoroff:

Sweet, then I’ll leave it there.

Adam Degraide:

Yeah. It’s like, have you ever seen George Costanza where he’s like, he realized that he always stays past his good line. And so, finally when people would laugh, he’d keep going and then nobody would laugh. So whenever he told [inaudible 00:46:07] they started to laugh and he’s like, “I’m out of here.” And he would leave it at high point and leave them wanting more, [inaudible 00:46:14] wanting more. The advice from Slater folks is if you’ve got an idea and you’re complaining about something at work that you think you could do better start, because that’s the word. Nothing great happens unless you believe everything worthwhile starts with believe. And the only way to do something, is to start. Now Slater, have you had fun being on DVG today?

Slater Victoroff:

I’ve had tons of fun. This has been a blast.

Adam Degraide:

Now, would you come back in 18 months so you can update us on Indico?

Slater Victoroff:

Oh, absolutely I would. Yeah. I’d tell you how much bigger we are.

Adam Degraide:

Exactly. Now, how could people find you?

Slater Victoroff:

You can find me on Twitter, SL8RV or check out my website, slater.website, which I was very happy to nab.

Adam Degraide:

Slater.website. I love it. That’s great. Slater, it’s been awesome my friend. And when you’re out foraging, you got to send me some mushrooms at some point, so I can taste some things I’ve never tried before. Make sure they don’t kill me though.

Slater Victoroff:

They will not. So actually here, I’ve got to just speak up in the defensive of mushrooms. Basically no mushrooms will kill you. It’s extraordinarily, of the I think, thousand species in North America, I believe there are three that are deadly of which like two taste terrible and you could never eat enough to kill yourself anyway. So it’s very, very rare. Like, yes, you should know what you’re doing, but there’s a lot of very safe mushrooms out there.

Adam Degraide:

So there you go guys, Slater says safe mushrooms. That is not advice that I’m giving you here. Because, I don’t know anything about mushrooms. You eat them at your own risk. Thank you so much for tuning into David Vs Goliath. It’s been awesome. What a great interview. Where else are you going to learn about mushrooms, artificial intelligence and people wearing kilts, playing the bagpipes. Nowhere else, but David Vs Goliath. Folks, thank you for tuning in. We’ll see you next week. Have an awesome day.