Alan Zhao, Warmly: Co-founder at Warmly

and we are live another founder wisdom pod with Alan Zoup he has a very interesting background let's hope that I didn't write in the live Alan Zhang let's hope that I think I copy paste so it should be Zhao and if I did pardon my French uh but I'll modify it Alan I'm really glad to have you on Alan's a fun guy uh he's into multiple things as a very odd background like myself we're gonna discuss that today and he's a co-founder of one of the favorite tools that I use shout out to warmly uh warmly is this thing that you see behind us uh I really like the idea it's super simple I love zoom apps I'm really bullish on zoom apps and the marketplace it's the only reason I'm keeping Zoom right now because a lot of podcasters they record their podcasts on riverside.fm because it's high quality but me I'm like yeah very bullish on Zoom because of the apps so we're gonna talk about AI today we're going to talk about sales we're going to talk about marketing we're going to talk about podcasting because Al is about to start his own and yeah that is brought to you bypire.com my podcasting company if you want to start scale or get invited to nice podcast get great guests like Alan here get subscribers uh get insights from great guests like Alan again get leads get even clients I close 10 of folks that come on this podcast no pressure on you online um can you introduce yourself tell us a bit more about you and warmly that's good great introduction um yeah I'm one of the co-founders I uh I start off as the first person building the product and then I became CTO and then very recently became head of marketing so it's a recent thing to move into the space and as for warmly we've actually built many different products one of which you see right here that's the name tax product that Charles mentioned um and we also have another product that is more of a lead gen tool it's account based orchestration and the idea here is we plug into your systems and then we figure out who the target accounts are we figure out their their behaviors on our website and then we personalize help to personalize the Outreach uh working accordingly with your sales and marketing team to make sure that they have the right uh buyer experience the right stage in the journey love it dude you have such an interesting background you started at gpmorgan Chase one of my favorite company oddly enough study GP Morgan very cool company so he started in banking right so what happened there like did you got tired of banking what were you like yo that's not for me uh I want to travel and live my life and start my companies because that's what you did later on yeah I think what happened was when I was younger I read this book by Tony Shea called delivering happiness was really bought into that idea my man Tony yeah he's great um rest in peace that's exactly right rest in peace I visited Las Vegas recently and there were murals of him everywhere so a big fan of him and his work and what he built I called up Zappos a couple different times and I tried staying on the phone because they had no limit on how long their customer support rep was gonna stay on there with you and so that proved to be true and I thought it was just so inspiring that whenever someone asked me what I wanted to do I said I wanted to build something like with Tony bill and uh didn't matter what it was it could have been a hot dog stand and it worse comes the worst we we'd be very good at creating and making hot dogs um but then I entered University and I went to UVA uh majored in math uh and it's the it's the typical career funnels recruiting path where it funnels you into these traditional paths like Consulting Banking and trading and so the first path I went down was the trading route so I spent about two years on the trading floor uh it was actually a lot of fun um but what I could see more and more often that you know one of the things in training you could do is you kind of see a little bit ahead of what's going to happen next potentially and this whole AI was starting to pick up technology was trying to pick up I could see that wasn't quite the place where I wanted to be the next five to six years so I started planning and making my transition over to Tech right and that's the first one I want to talk about x dot AI I think Elon actually bought the domain did he yeah he did he bought the domain I actually asked the the founders of what happened to that but um by that point it had already been sold to bizugu and so you know I guess they cleared it with visible and uh yeah we all had a laugh about it I went to a wedding recently and yeah and exot AI for those that don't know is like this AI assistant uh I think it was made before its time I remember trying the product was quite fun tell us a bit more about your growth role there yeah so I start off as an analyst and it was uh at the time I didn't really have too many marketable skills in Tech I actually before this traveled to SF multiple times and nobody would take me because I didn't know SQL I never heard of SQL before and I started picking it up on my own reached out to many different companies and had a lot of conversation with Founders um eventually one company did give me a chance x dot AI so I started from the bottom worked my way up picked up programming along the way python SQL all this stuff built some of their Data Systems and then uh helped to create the data system that drove some of the growth within their consumer product love it and then you went on to start a Vietnamese restaurant like any sound minded founderwood yeah that was an interesting experience so as you can probably imagine after the hype of AI like you said it was a little bit ahead of its time um my friend called me up he was my close friend from high school so we spent a lot of time together and he's a really sharp dude he decided he wanted to start a restaurant and he said he just asked me because he's like you're the finance guy so does this make sense the restaurant had 500 000 in Revenue 200 000 purchase price 100 000 net income the payback appeared to be two years and so after two years we thought we would just operate the restaurant it would be cash flow positive and then we can go build our apps on the side and uh restaurants had many problems and it was really intriguing because I felt like not many people thought about restaurants at least owning and operating one while trying to solve restaurant problems so this was foolish me going into this industry bright-eyed bushy-tailed knowing a little bit of programming um and starting this restaurant but uh it was simultaneous the most exciting thing and and the hardest thing I've had to do so far stop yeah I think Fair assessment said that this one failed but how how was your experience what did you learn from it uh it's interesting restaurants are not that different from uh from software as I found there's a front end there's a front and there's a back the front is beautiful and we make sure people think you know we make sure we present it well uh all the the food is served well and in the back is is always a mess so restaurants and startups there's many similarities it's very frantic you're always moving you never stop uh and there's always something breaking so I can't remember I can't tell you how many times I had to wake up early in the morning to go get jalapeno peppers because we just ran out and uh the staff would message me so that means we can't make certain dishes and you need all the ingredients so very fast paced and the other thing is you can't always control the outcome of the restaurant sometimes it's about timing sometimes it's about location we serve Vietnamese hot soup in the middle of Dallas Texas we could have chosen our Market a little bit better so made all of our sales in the winter and none of it during the summer we're just losing money my God that's so interesting then you met your co-founder at on deck and you went to start up warmly and was accepted into YC that's right yeah so um went through this program called On Deck I met Max there and it was very hackathon and so in the first week of on Deck hackathon um we were all splitting up the groups I came back max was like Hey I want to pitch you this idea do you have a group yeah I said no I just got some water and he said we're gonna try to make Justin.tv where the viewer votes and what the live streamer does um and it's going to be kind of like black mirror so we call the control life so we hacked on that we built it overnight and then we started streaming Max walking around San Francisco basically doing a bunch of dares that people on the internet on Reddit were saying you should do but we made sure to have it administrator so it doesn't issue um and we ran that for about an hour we had 300 people voting on we just posted on Reddit honestly 300 people voting what you should do next it was very successful we found we were very compatible in many ways both hackers and then we started uh started warmly and four products later here we are why why am I not surprised that you did that um and what what was like the problem that you faced because Justin taught TV Super Famous experiments um that did not um go super well yet Justin learned so much from that experience what did you learn uh from actually doing it on your side yeah it's really hard to be uh engaging for long periods of time I think Justin also talks about this too he uh he's a very interesting guy really funny and he even he had trouble being interesting at all hours of the day and so one of the things Max said is and Max is a is a really interesting guy himself but he even said that maybe we need someone with even a bigger personality than me uh to run this or to run this product so we uh we decided to move into something else and then we built this product called Push Pull uh dot community and the whole idea was it would be more authentic version of LinkedIn and Linkedin tells you what you've done where you've been but it doesn't tell you where you want to go and so we got the idea looking at on Deck because the Aston offer section on decas's community of Founders everyone's really legit people have done a lot of things with their lives and they have a lot to offer and they have a lot of things that they're looking for too and so we wanted to make this page where it showed these are all your pushes things that you're willing to give and these are all your polls things that you're looking for and then just making that really transparent to facilitate like a favorite Marketplace another one of our failed experiments actually [Music] I would describe you as like this open-minded positive guy how would you describe yourself yeah I I think that's right um I need to give this a little bit more thought but I guess all throughout life I've always had this deep well of optimism that things are just going to work out if you try hard enough we're in it for the long game and uh yeah just deep well of confidence that maybe it started with myself I mean from a young age I did this thing called wushu which is a sport that no one's ever heard of before and I've done that for I guess 20 years and at one point basically I just kept doing it and it got pretty good at it and that gave me a lot of confidence um and uh and yeah after switching careers multiple times and finding my footing I Feel Like Anything is Possible so wushu for those that don't know um it's like yeah juggling with um nunchakus and and doing like impressive flips and stuff is that it yeah that's what Jet Li and Jackie Chan did before they went to Hollywood movie making so it's really fast-paced acrobatic moves that preserve the Marshall application of the movements it's beautiful honestly it's if you if you guys have an opportunity to check it out I definitely will take a look on YouTube some of the movements that they do are wild and so they'd be doing 720s flips basically ripping across the floor so it's exciting yeah love these two guys um one came after the other was inspired by the other for those that yeah gently you know flow like water and ironically he died from the lack of water from not having the lands in this um underarm not sure if you knew that but he died of overheating in Hong Kong in his lap because he had uh his gland sweats removed which is odd not sure why listeners need to know that but Jackie Chan my favorite um actor most probably or my top five or ten you know rush hour classic style so glad that you also grew up on that wushu seems really impressive I'm gonna check a video after we're done here um that brings us to warmly do you enjoy working at warmly like what are you guys trying to build nowadays how was that fulfilled that need of yours to be a co-founder and really Express Yourself oh well this is a really fun question to answer absolutely love working out warmly I can't say enough good things um it's it's honestly the happiest time of of my life getting to work with such amazing people Max Karina uh it's an interesting story because we all didn't really know each other that well and after just a couple weeks of meeting each other we live together in uh in Tech Stars when we're going through Tech Stars in Boulder on top of one another and by the end we became basically best friends and um what's cool is that we complement each other really well Max is like this you know like shoot from the hip Razzle Dazzle dog and pony show he can basically you know sell snow deck to Inuits and then Karina is a very structured thinker so she can basically build palaces um and then for myself I sort of plug in different holes where I think it's it's it's needed um and it's given a lot of uh agency to basically accomplish what you want to do it's a very unique position where very few people I feel like have this opportunity to be in the seat of try things and actually care about if they're going to work or not and you don't have a boss to answer to and um the idea is you know just just seek the truth Elon Musk talks about the first principles try to find what is actually true and it's not what people say it's actually trying to find the truth of it and if you can find the truth and you build off that foundation and then that's what allows you to eventually hopefully build a meaningful business well you guys look like a really cool Bunch you know I saw your Retreats and looks pretty fun um I want to talk about yeah what you're doing nowadays after work sort of I've pretty much sure are fair to assume say that you spend most of your days working on warmly but you also dance you also serve and you do a bunch of other things so how is that important to you to do creative activities in your off time yeah I'd say it's I didn't realize how important it was um I think there needs to be a balance for sure because if you work too much then you might not stick around long enough for the Long Haul and this is the long game just stay in the game stay in the game long enough do not burn out I'm trying to remember who said this uh may have been Paul Graham but startups they don't die they commit suicide and so if if you don't want to continue then that's how the syrup dies and if you want to make this thing work then you will find a way to make it work if you're like on your last couple days you need funding you will find a way to to get that money and so for me um finally I feel like I'm starting to find that balance picking up different Hobbies um finding Latin dances actually changed my perspective about how to live life it's really engaging it's very fun I'm a big salsa but shout out to Enthusiast now uh I do a lot of traveling and uh wherever I go I can always find a community and it's a very playful fun art self-expression of being able to share a connection with another person and I just think that everyone should do it I think people would be would be very happy if they could if they could if they can dance salsa and bachata right the need of skill I think you know because when you go all in all the time and you're not happy and doing what you do and if you have a sense of of self and you constantly are not being that ideal self and you're aiming for the impossible and your sense of self is is into that then you will burn out so I think it's important that you do a bunch of things you can still go semi-all in you know like and then burn your boats and and still go hard in the startup realm while still doing some extra activities um you can you can burn your boat and have plan B's you know because if you burn your boats then what's the plan B you know do you swim or you you jump on a dolphin's back until you reach an island or some um so yeah like it's been fun having you Allen where where are you guys headed for this year's there's four months remaining to this year so what are your goals yeah so it's really interesting we uh you know we've built a bunch of products this is one of them um the name tags I mean and the the one that we're really focused on the one that what warmly is is going to be known for we hope is this account based orchestration platform and so for the next couple months it's about really defining what that means for us where do we sit who our customer is the classic problem of who is the customer why should they care why do we exist making sure that it's very clearly known and distilled into the most uncleared form of language represented in our landing page our messaging everywhere and um if we do if we do press on it we'll do press on it if we do content if we do blog posts if we like I mentioned we do podcasts that we can just have a very consistent messaging this is exactly who we are what we do and why people who our customers should care bias cool and where can people find out more about warmly you go to warmly.ai our website and Allen Zhao on LinkedIn I am Charles Cormier your host that was another founder