Will Bodewes, Phonely: Phonely CEO and PhD AI researcher

Welcome to another Wise Wisdom pod. We have Will Botteriis with us today, CEO at Phone Lee, PhD AI researcher. Last time we spoke to talk about the his crazy mountain biking adventures and everything that he's been up to.

Yeah, Will, how's Phone Lee doing? How are you doing on your side? Yeah, things have been going really well.

We just raised our series A and we've been really growing out the team, scaling it a lot. Seeing a ton of attraction attraction traction in the market and a lot of adoption. So, it's been a really really good time for us.

16 mil series A, that's a pretty fat series A. Probably one of the biggest one in your space. What are you going to do with that 16?

Yeah, good question. We are aggressively hiring in a lot of different areas. I think for us it's a lot on the growth side, so we've had really good product market fit.

You know, we we really took the advice of build a product that a few people love and and we've you know, we've kind of differentiated ourselves in the space there and and now we're just scaling it out and and hiring the team to become top of mind for a lot of different businesses. Right. So, there's been a lot of AI phone companies in the latest YC batch who are the leading one I guess right now.

Like what have you done differently from the the rest of the pack? Yeah, realistically we've been working on it for a long time. I think that's something that people discount is you know, we've been working on this for like two two and a half years which maybe doesn't sound like a long time to a lot of people, but for the voice AI space like we started working on it before it was even called voice AI, right?

That wasn't a term. And so, we have had a lot of time to build and that means we've had the ability to solve more of the complicated problems than other people are solving. So, where a lot of our competitors are building you know, chatbots that talk, we've been able to build that two years ago and now we build AI agents that are optimized better than any other agent.

So, when customers use us, they get a better outcomes for their customers that's statistically shown. So, example if you're trying to book appointments with voice AI, we will outperform any other voice AI on the market because we've got AB testing, automatic improvement, you know, we work really well on latency, stability, all that type of stuff. Is that due to your AI background?

Like who's in charge of building the the full back end and I guess it's not just a Neura Labs integration at this point. Yeah, definitely very different than that. We yeah, we've got a pretty good size team of engineers that works on that.

Everything from voice infrastructure all the way to you know, machine learning model training, stuff like that. We've started working on the building our own models which has been really fun and helping us like get lower latency, but also just like have better conversations. What's your day-to-day as a CEO nowadays?

Is it mostly recruiting, mostly hopping on big new client sales calls? What does it look like? For for me it's it's usually a lot of recruiting.

I've been I was doing most of the sales up until this point and I'm very happy to have starting to build out like a really solid team of account executives to help bring some of those deals in, push them across the line and then myself just jump in whenever whenever is needed. My focus right now is just like yeah, recruiting, growth, putting the right people in the right places which is a lot easier said than done, for sure. Right.

And what are the top roles you're recruiting for nowadays? Yep, we're hiring for account executives, it's a big focus for us. We're looking for also people on the growth and the marketing side.

So, if you're somebody that is looking for a position and is really good at capturing attention, we want to talk to you. We're also hiring for a few engineering roles. We have quite a few folks in late stage on some of these, but we're definitely always hiring and then we have a fun role which is like bring your own role which is we look for talented people that maybe we don't have a positioning opening for them yet, but they you know, we can find some place to make them fit in what we're building.

Tell me about your dog food strategy. So, do you use Phone Lee to take inbound calls? Do you do some outbound campaigns as well to sign up new clients?

We don't do outbound campaigns just because of the regulations around that. So, outbound calling has significant you know, legal implications to it where you can get in a lot of trouble especially in the US, but inbound yes of course obviously. We have a button on our website you can press, you can talk to Phone Lee and that's how you know, people learn about the product as one way.

The other way that we do is we do a lot of self-serve sign up for our customers. So, if you're business you're business and you're looking to adopt Phone Lee, we will help you build it out and then we use that information to improve the product experience going forward. So, if there's serious legal implications, you push the outbound call product to companies outside the US or what?

Not necessarily, so there's a specific compliance standard that you have to follow for that and so, we're not going to be the ones that's like uploading a lead list and calling a bunch of data cold calling them to use our product. Realistically, we if a lot of customers example like appointment reminders, if you have that in your type of business, placing an outbound call is a good use case of that, but since that's not really how we get our leads, then we don't you really use our outbound calling product that much. For the fund raise, I guess you were the main person accountable for that 16 which is pretty impressive.

How did you end up raising so much? >> [snorts] >> And so fast. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, yeah.

I think a lot of it was you just always focus on building a really good product, building relationships and you know, our customers had really really good things to say about us. I think four of our customers invested in the round because they believed in the product and what we were building so much. And so, I think a lot of it what it came down to was our customer our investors looked at the traction that we had, the the growth not only from a revenue standpoint, but from a usage standpoint and then they talked to our customers and then saw that they were willing to invest as well and so, I think that they realized that this there's really something here.

Right. Hmm, so strategic partners sort of. What are fundraising tips for other YC founders that are raising?

Is it just building a great product, having the revenue to back it up, some urgency, some FOMO, some deadline, like any tips? Depends on what stage you're at. I mean realistically, I'm always a fan of like build a good product that people like and people love.

[snorts] You know, like realistically, you can get all in the fancy like oh, here's your strategy this strategy that, right? But it's like build something that people actually like to use and when you have something that people like to use and is growing and you get to that point, fundraising is not a challenge, right? Fundraising is something that just comes naturally and so, I think that that doesn't mean necessarily oh, you need to spend all your days writing code and you know, being in the product and not listening to users.

Like the real thing is like talk to your users, see what they have. If you don't have any users, go find some users and then understand what they like and then build a product that they really love to use and that they're happy to pay more. So, a lot of our customers will start on a small contract.

Like we have customers that have expanded to 20x, 30x, 40x, you know, just because of the way that the product works. So, that's that's always my advice is like build something that's really good. There's no shortcuts.

It's not like raising money is like your way out. Raising money is just it's just a a stair step in in the path to where you want to go. Got it.

As a guy that you know, studied AI and I don't know, could be making two to five million at Open AI or Anthropic, like don't don't you feel that like Phone Lee is sort of below you like building campaigns with AI calls vs. like working on frontier AI stuff? No, I I don't.

Why? Um I think that the opportunity for what we're building is significantly greater. I mean yeah, like sure if you Financially sure, but yet like intellectually as well.

Like isn't your brain like a moonshot cracker? I think the value in what I'm doing now is I get to have a lot of say and a lot of control into the way that a certain piece of information gets distributed in the world. And for me that is an incredibly valuable and fulfilling experience and on the top of the fact that like we are building our own models.

Like I do get to be intellectually stimulated. I do and I do get to understand the real problem and not just like be stuck in some AI research lab understand like listening to what somebody else does. I get to be on the forefront and I get to decide and steer steer the ownership in the direction and that's what I wanted to do.

Like that's why I'm here is like I wanted to solve real problems for real businesses and I feel like this is the way in which I can be the closest of the forefront of actually doing that. You have a master plan to do something with all the data that you're accumulating? Yeah, like like I said I think a couple times already is that we're you know, we are using some of obviously the the opt-in from our customers to be able to build our own models.

And building your own models, what would that mean for the end customer? The biggest problem right now is in voice is the LLM is where 90% of the problem is. It's where 70% of latency is and it's where 60% of the cost is, right?

So, it's all around the LLM. And we spent most of our time figuring out ways to create solutions to that to get these AI models to talk more like people, to follow instructions more accurately, and to respond quickly. We spent a lot of time on that.

And so, for us, what we see is like if we can come up with a model that solves all three of those problems at once and it's maybe not a great general model. Like it's not going to be generally good at most things, but if it's really, really good at voice AI, it's going to be super valuable for the market, right? Because that's a big use case right now.

And so, that's that's kind of what we see as the opportunity ahead of us. What surprising insights have you got from like all this data that you have about EQ humans and how they interact over the phone vs. how they interact in real life or via text message or yeah, emails for example?

I mean, I think that the the thing that the thing that I've learned more so than anything else is that like over the phone is a real-time communication pipeline. And so, a lot of the methods that these LLMs have been built for are not real-time. Like you can wait 5 seconds to get the information back.

On the phone, you can't wait 5 seconds. You can wait a second and that's it. And so, the way that we solve the problem becomes fundamentally different than the way that we're solving in other ways.

And so, what does that mean? Well, it's like thinking doesn't exist in the phone. Like you have to asynchronously figure out ways to have models do intelligence, look up tools, do all that stuff.

And so, that's the thing that people don't realize about what voice AI is is it's realistically like, yeah, you can create a wrapper and you can maybe schedule an appointment or something like that, but to really get in and to like really solve the problem, you have to solve this problem of like how do I make my models intelligent? How do I make my models think in real-time? And so, that's what we try to solve.

And if you crack that and you're already cracking it, a bunch of enterprises would want to get in on the action and that's a multi-billion dollar market. Yeah, absolutely. Um I think that like, you know, the software that we build ourselves, like the platform, is the easiest way to build voice agents.

So, we have that going for us already. But realistically, you know, we all we kind of feel like you brought this up in the beginning of the podcast. You said there's a lot of people that are building this, right?

And it really bothers us it really bothers me personally that people are like, oh, you're just doing the same thing as everybody else. Because when we started this, we were the only people that were doing this. Like we were one of two or three companies that were working on the problem this way.

And we have a lot of battle scars as to like what works and what doesn't work. And so, you know, I think that like if you just look at it at face value with like not a lot of context, you just see like the same thing. But like when you really get in and understand and like what like we're really good for businesses that like are at scale and really want to solve this problem.

We're not looking for like small, medium businesses that are like, okay, well, we don't really care how the performance is. Like we're looking for the like type of businesses that really care about that. And so, we're building our own models because we understand so much context about this so much more than most of the other people in the space that we want to say, hey, how's the way that we can differentiate ourselves while also solving our own problems?

And that's why we're doing what we're doing. Yeah, a bunch of wrappers in this space. By the way, I can I come into this with more context than just like face value.

I tried Phone Lee against a bunch of other apps. I think last time we spoke, I didn't stick for some reason. I owned a call center with 200 employees about 4 years ago or something.

I'm deeply bullish on what you're building for the record though. Have you looked into like random tangent, have you looked into Bordy? Do you think that this could be like a model of the future in which you have an AI agent that you can call, it can call other people and I don't know, generate sales or crack investment checks for you?

I actually haven't looked into Bordy. What what are they doing? bordy.ai.

It's on WhatsApp right now, so you can chat with it and it's going to call you sometimes. So, it's like WhatsApp API. It's a bit confused a model.

It's free, but they offer like a 10K per month package for Bordy to be your CEO, which I think is an extremely weak offer, but I'm very bullish on their technology and the fact that they're building an AI agent with a personality sort of like a human, right? Um yeah, I don't know. I haven't I haven't looked at them.

I'd have to get some more context before I could kind of really give a good deep dive on that. What's next for you this year now that you've raised your your focus on hiring, you're focusing on on sales. I do think you're yeah, obviously instrumental to the the strategy and the road map.

What's next for you and how do you balance that out with like what your co-founder does? Yeah, for us, it's you know, we're we're looking to bring on a lot of people and figuring out like first step is going to be hiring those people. And then the second step is going to be all the problems that arise because we hired all these people, right?

So, I foresee the next part of my my year just being like dealing with people problems and sorting all of this stuff out so that the, you know, Phone Lee continues to run as this like smooth machine, right? Feel like for the first part of our journey, we were hey, like how do we make this work? Like just kind of scrambling around to make this work.

And now we're like, okay, we got it working. How do we make this scale? And so, a lot of my time is spent on like how do I build anti-fragility in the organization?

Um so that the organization continues to strive, you know, without me needing to be around and in control of it everywhere. Does that make sense? From a first principle perspective, how do you recruit anti-fragile people?

What are your criteria? Yeah. There's like one one thing to be said on the like on the just general positions that you hire, right?

Where it's like if I have one person in one department and that person gets sick or leaves or whatever, right? That is very fragile because then we have to have myself or somebody else step into that, right? So, it's like, okay, well, how do we create teams of people >> hire healthy people with good immune system.

You get there with data and That's it. No, but it's like how do you hire the how do you hire good people that um that that, you know, can can wear multiple hats, can do different things, you know? And like how do you build an organization that people understand that they can step into different roles.

I'm very, very, very, very picky on the people that we hire. There's a huge component of it that's like culture. And part of that's like because I believe that, you know, in in a certain type like I have a mental model of the person that I believe does a good job and is what kind of what we're looking for.

And I think the other part of it is like I am going to spend a long time working on this. I want to surround myself with people that inspire me and that I like to be around. And I think that those those two things become very important to me when we're when we're hiring.

Any endurance events on the map for this year on the personal level? Do you still have time for this? We are riding our bike to LA this weekend.

So, our team is doing a ride to LA from San Francisco. So, it's like 500 miles. How much?

500 miles. >> 200 miles. 500.

>> 500. Holy Any breaks in between or We're rotating. So, like first we'll do a section and then somebody else will do a section and somebody else will do a section.

So, I think we'll end up doing like probably like 80 miles a person or something like that between I don't know, four or five of us. That'll be fun. Four five, yeah.

So, I guess that's like a criteria, right? Like check if they have endurance, if they can tolerate pain while being intellectual. Thanks for your time, Will.

Where can people find out more about you, Phone Lee AI? Yeah, phonelee.ai. You can also check us out on LinkedIn or Instagram or I think we're getting TikTok set up.

So, those places, but yeah, probably phonelee.ai is the best place. That was Will and Charles.