SPEAKER_00 0:18

And welcome to the Info Tech Podcast, the podcast that discusses the intersection of business and technology. I'm your host, Jimmy Huber. And if you're a longtime listener, you know that sometimes I tend to punch above my weight when I get guests on this podcast. And today is no exception to that. My guest today is Richard Titus with Kimono. Now, some of you might know Richard from his past life. So I'm going to give him the floor here to tell a little bit about his background and um kind of how he he got to start kimono. But we really appreciate your time and welcome to the show, Titus.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Thanks, Jimmy. Uh yeah. When people ask me to briefly describe my career, I never know what to say. So I started as a young man growing up in, I was actually born near Disneyland. And uh um I grew up in Southern California in surf culture and the punk music scene and metal music scene and surfing, but also my dad uh was officially a defense contractor, but probably worked in the clandestine services. And we had an internet connection and computers way before most people knew what those things were. This is in the 70s, right? And uh so computers were my playground. And because I was a musical, uh, the marriage of MIDI, which is a musical instrument digital interface, and computers like meant I just spent hours and hours and hours either hacking in systems connecting to the internet, which is not a good thing, or writing sequencers and synthesizers to make music. Um, and that called me up very nicely for, and I'm skipping a bunch of parts. I I spent a bunch of time in the music business. I was signed as an artist. Uh, I did a brief tour. I actually toured the world with the Beach Boys as a sound engineer and as a front of house in Roadie.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

And then mixed their I'm sorry, did you say you you you were the sound guy for the Beach Boys?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Yeah, no, not only that, Keith Wexler and I recorded what became their very last major recording album called Summer in Paradise. Um, on the first album that I know of recorded on Pro Tools. So we were like featured in magazines, you know, it was a big deal. Um wow, that's cool. An interesting side note, at that time, many reporters and magazines were like Titus and Wexler ruined music because now you just push a button, the album records itself. And I thought to myself, this was beta software, it barely worked, it crashed all the time. Like it was way harder to do this the way we did it if we just put a tape machine and pressed record. Like, but you know, uh that that intersection of tech and music, or you know, tech, art, and the future is sort of where I've lived most of my life.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Got it. Yeah. So you I didn't know we talked before this, and I did not know any of that. So I'm I'm learning today along along with the audience. So yeah, you're a pretty big deal. Um, I've had people on here that go back into the 80s, but not the 70s, doing MIDI before computers were even a thing in mainstream. I was a kid. So that's a step beyond.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

I I was a kid. I started my first startup, if you'll call it that, uh, which was a BBS in Orange County when I was 12 years old, stringing phone lines to my neighbors' houses to steal uh fax lines so I could have more dial-in. If you know what a BBS is, sort of pre-AOL, you people would dial into my computer, and my mom didn't know anything about uh computers, but she knew about a lot about 12-year-old boys. So she's like, you could do anything you want, but no porn. So when you log in my BBS, it said, you know, welcome to the 818, no porn in like giant font. Now, the thing is, as a kid, I didn't know that 90% of the world's pornography at that time was made in the area code of the 818. So everyone thought I was like the super snarky hacker, but I didn't actually know that. It was just my mom said I had to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good on mom. Well, what that meant is that kids whose parents, you know, this is by the way, they had to mail me coins or a check in an envelope to join the BBS. There's no e-commerce yet, right? That parents were like, okay, no porn, like I'll pay for this. And so they would send their, you know, $12 or $20 a month in check form, which I would deposit in a bank account my cousin and I set up in a in our business name. And I made a not insignificant amount of money doing this. My major expertise was removing the encryption from software so people could evaluate it for purchase. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Doesn't uh Steve Jobs have a parallel story to this? It's very funny.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Like I didn't know that until very recently. Someone I met him once, that comes up later in the story, but I met him once and he both I loved him and it terrified me, right? Like I I yeah, and then this person said, you know, you guys have a lot more in common, like a terrifying not, I don't want to compare myself to Steve Jobs, but like sure. I I sort of having brushed by him in the universe of life, I felt a kindred spirit and also like a deep fear of like, wow, that man, he's different than the rest of them, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah, oh a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

I don't know if anyone feels that about me, but if they do, look, I'm really gentle and nice, I'm not dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yeah, yeah. No, I think uh to be a wild success, you have to be different, right? You're you're you're definitely status quo, but then your personality comes into play, and I think he had he had quite the personality of uh so both those sides. Yeah, yeah. Um, but that's that's fascinating. So so bring us then from those days up until now. I mean, I know you've had you don't have to go into everything, but there's a there's still quite a big gap there.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

I'll do some like just a little sketching. So I spent some time in the music business. Um, and I I've talked a bit about being sober, so I'll I'm very transparent about it. I've been sober uh from drugs and alcohol for 34 years this July 5th. Wow, good for you. It's a really big deal. But that that moment of choosing life over death um kind of gave me a right turn in life. Because up till then I'd been in the music business, I was moderately successful. Um, you know, I I consumed most of my money in the form of drugs and alcohol, but at least I sort of I had a sort of reciprocal link on my own. And when I got sober, I couldn't do the music thing anymore because in those days, sobriety was not supported by the industry. And so I had one fungable skill that was not related to drugs and alcohol, and that was computers. And so I started building at first I started putting people's computers on the internet. This is like a very interesting time where the browser had just sort of been launched by Mark Anderson at the University of uh Illinois. And so I got paid sometimes in records, sometimes in cash, sometimes in other things. But like people would pay me to come into their office and circumvent their IT department to put their computer on the internet so they could see what this whole thing was. Um and I actually made it hacker. Yeah, like I that's how I started making money. And I eventually realized like this web thing was kind of a big deal. So I started a company, and I'm skipping some parts. I still spent some time in movies and video games. You can Google me and find that stuff. But I I I started spending time um working with a couple guys I'd met through the video game space building websites. We built a website for a company called Centropolis, uh, a guy named Dean Devlin, who's been part of my career for a long time, he's a great guy. Uh, he made at that time Stargate, and he was working on a film called Independence Day. And his visual effects producer, who later became my wife, and I just started dating. We then built NASA's website. Um, yes, that's right. And uh that was sort of a moment getting a government contract when you're like 22 to do something that important kind of changed our vector. And before, you know, two years later, we'd sold the company to Omnicom in a bidding war. We were rolled up in a company called Razorfish. That company went public on paper for a brief period of time. I was very wealthy. The dot-com crash happened, I suddenly was less wealthy, but still had a little bit of money. Um, I then started a couple years later, uh, I bought an agency out of bankruptcies. A friend of mine had a company who was in some financial trouble. So I bought half the company out of from the bank and we turned it around and we renamed it Schematic and we built that up. And we sold that a few years later to WPP. And then the time of doing that transaction with WPP, my first wife and I, Tavin, who mentioned before, we'd started making movies. We made about 20 film and television shows. Um, a lot, a few really famous films like Who Killed the Electric Car, and then lots and lots of bad sci-fi films that made a lot of money. And we moved to Romania for three years during that time to make movies. Um, while I was we still was running schematic remotely as a as a as a board member. And two things happened at the same time. Um, our film company collapsed in there was a financial crisis uh where the pound, the euro, and the dollar all went crazy. George Soros probably caused it, and we lost. Yeah, I went from living in Romania, being very rich, making movies, trying to you know, like retire, get rich guy, rich Doc Homer, to we're bankrupt, we call it bankrupt in Bucharest. Like we were bankrupt. Like we literally like woke up in Romania with my mother-in-law with our kids, and like yeah, I need a job. Like wow. So we moved to London like kind of because it was the the fastest, cheapest place to find work. The movies were sort of dead. We rented a house. I got a job. Uh, a guy named Eric Huggers, uh, who's an old client of mine from Microsoft, had just joined the BBC as like the chief information officer. His title is uh group controller. And he hired me first as a contractor and then as an employee. And he was basically like, hey, you just got to turn this place around, help me fix this. And so he gave me three tasks on day one. Ask one was hey, can you fix the website? It's a hot mess. Um, there's this kid named Matthew Postgate, and he's got this mobile idea. I think it's crazy, but can you manage him? I think there's something there. And I know you a lot about a lot about video, I knew a lot about video systems because schematic was the world leader in VOD UI on cable systems and airplanes and cars. And so we the company I'd founded was very big in that space. And he's like, I know you know a lot about VOD. I want to put BBC television on the internet. But yeah, that was about as as long as the brief got at that time. It was like, could you fix this? There's some guys on the third floor, they got some like cool tech. The cool tech wasn't really cool teching, but I was like, hey, BBC is kind of interesting. We own all the rights, so unlike every other client I've had, I don't have any rights issues. We own it all. So I could put every piece of BBC content on the internet today. Like, no one can stop me.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Ah, and so that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

There were a few projects kneeling around the BBC, and there was a guy named Anthony Rose. There's actually a podcast right up dropping right after yours, uh, where we talk about this. Where we basically, you know, we hired Anthony and like six other crazy all people who went on to do crazy amazing things, and we built the first streaming service before Hulu, before anything else, called BBC iPhone. And when we launched it on Christmas Day, it changed the world. Like suddenly, you could watch the last seven days of television for free on streaming services. We even had a mobile client, which is bonkers. When I think about it today, like the fact that we had a mobile client then, there was this is whap, right? There's no mobile browser, there's no iPhone yet. Like this was crazy. And you know, those are the things.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

This was like late 90s or what are we talking about?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

I'm just calculating, we'll come to that later. I'm very nervous, so I don't I can't tell you name names and dates, like or street numbers or no, that's all good.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

I'm just trying to place this in in timeline.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

So think about this. Jason Killar from Hulu came to visit and see what we were doing and copied a shit ton of our technical architecture. And we didn't care because BBC could only operate in the B in Britain. Like we couldn't actually, we didn't have the rights on CBC. Yeah, yeah. So we were like, Yeah, sure, copy us.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

So you we're 11 minutes into this, and I think I have more content than all my other episodes combined. You can chop it up to a nutshell, yeah. So you've had a lot of easy come, easy go, maybe. Like you've had peaks and values.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

I've been rich, I've been poor. Rich is better, but yeah, I've I've experienced both several times.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

And you and you came out the other side. You you figured out that you're the music industry, unless you're you're not sober, there's not much there. You pivoted into tech. You went to the BBC because you could do things there that you you couldn't other places.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

So I'm starting to. And you're bankrupt, yeah. So if I didn't if I wasn't bankrupt, I wouldn't take that job. That's it's a very funny thing, but I I think back on that many times. Like desperation makes you make the right choice when all other options are not available.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Yeah, I think that scales all the way down to small business and pretty much when you've got pressure that that's gonna make it. So so you I would say though, most people in your that have your experience would spiral. I think that would be more of the tendency. They, you know, especially with the the mental health issues of today, I think a lot of people couldn't handle that. Not only did you handle it, but it seems like you've come out on the other side, and now you're you know, you're promoting a new company, a new startup after all that. So um I want to talk about, I mean, we're supposed to talk about kimono here. That's the point of this episode with you, but I I want to get into like how how did that happen? How what what brought you out of that into a good place? Because I don't think that's that's pretty common. I mean, I think I think it's very rare.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

So look, I I you know uh the best of times of the worst of times I've experienced a lot. Um, three years ago, I had a traumatic brain injury, and and that ties directly into the Kimoto story, trust me, which is um I was attacked by two men in the streets of San Francisco. It was covered on national news, they beat me almost to death. And I had this crack still and I came to LA because it was close. I'm I'm in the middle of actually just finished getting divorced from my second wife, and it was a very high conflict divorce. So I needed to be somewhere that my daughter could come visit me. At that time, I couldn't drive or fly, but I couldn't tell anyone I couldn't drive or fly because I would have lost custody. So I had to like pretend like everything was fine and everything was most definitely not fine. And so, as part of my recovery, my neurologist is like, hey, you need to do things to expand and retain your neuroplasticity. So I had this, and I'm not joking, a dropbox folder of text files because I think sometimes minimum structure and and I would just like free form write in them ideas, like business ideas. So, like one was called blah, blah, blah. But the one that Kimono came from was called the cleaner. And it was basically, I tried to buy Plaxo, if you remember that social network back in the day. It was basically a contact cleaning app. And I tried to buy it with a private equity firm in the in the early 90s and failed. But I was always passionate about this idea because I'm neurodiverse, so I can never remember people's phone numbers. I always kip them in uh uh and some sort of computing device. And so I started grinding away on all these documents. I eventually showed this text, literally the text file to a guy named Rotiman Kaforji, who at the time was head of product at Yahoo, and he quit his job and we started the company. And then we went through a few technical leaders uh and iterated a few times before we got to where Komono is today. And Komono is very basically its core premise. Contacts, that's like if you know phone number, email, and contacts, like the knowledge around that graph, are the most used data type in the world. Every computing device held by a human, or even most of the ones that aren't, have some form of contacts on them, contacts and contacts. And yet the systems for storing, retrieving, you know, managing, they are stuck in a 20-year-old architecture that has it's abandoned where it has not evolved in the slightest. And so anything you want to build on the service layer on top of this is a fail. And so the premise was basically start fixed contacts. If we start, if we can either do this tops down, we've got to raise $50 million, or we do it bottoms up when we start with you know consumers and direct to direct to users, we call it, because they're really prosumers. Like, you know, my mom's not gonna pay me 10 or 30 bucks a month, but like business users, people who are outbound will. Sure. Yeah. Fix the phone book, you know, on your mobile device today. I guarantee you have between five and 15 contact databases, you know, WhatsApp, Telegram, email, Gmail, iCloud, Microsoft. The only thing I know for sure is you don't know who you know, you don't know which ones are the same people. You can never figure out how to email someone when you need to reach them, and it's utterly broken. So we decided to fix that. And with the rise of AI, I had some intuitions. And look, I'm very technical and very smart, but I'm not I'm no engineer by any means. Like that's my my head of AI makes fun of me. Like, I I am not a CTO and I'm not a programmer. I can do some wicked by coding. And I did write HTML back in the day, a little JavaScript, but I'm not an engineer.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

But I thought same same with Steve Jobs there too. I'm not trying to make a comparison, but there is a correlation then. He did all right. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

When you plug an LLM in the early days, it was just one, into contact data in a privacy-first, secure, sovereign way, and you start to think about this. We had an aha moment, which is like this is way bigger than cleaning up your contacts. Because all these agentic systems, whether it's co-work, open claw, perplexity, but also other systems that are being built and and architected today, they all share the same issue. There is no contact and no context layer between them that is centered on the user. So if I load all my contacts into Chat GPT, that's not only a violation of uh privacy law, it's also like it doesn't work. Yeah. Because it doesn't know anything about them, right? It doesn't have the cross cross-network device and system graph. And so we today support Microsoft, Google, Apple, Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage. LinkedIn. LinkedIn, of course, everyone does that. We download and upload. I'm hoping we get fire hose access, but we don't have it today. Um everything in a legal, uh, privacy-first, secure way. And that's really, really important because you're not going to give all that to someone who takes ownership of it. You know, we don't try to. Oh, yeah, it's critical info. Sure. We never share without your instruction, not just consent. We try and build revocability into every share. And that's the business, right? And so we right now, today, if you go to go.getkomono.com, you can sign up for our beta. If you're nice and send me, you know, some Bitcoin, I'll put you on at the head of the list. There's currently 6,000 people in climbing waiting to get in the software. We've got about 100,000 users. We are aiming to be in the app store this summer. Um the we just shipped a new, we call it homunculus. It's a new AI harness that wraps around Gemini, Claw, Nova, and three frontier models. And there's some. It's called Humunculus? Yeah, pretty cool, huh? Hilarious. Humunculus, actually. What's great about it is we really we're not trying to compete with OpenClaw or Claw Cowork, but we are doing a thing, which is like we call it the rich man's open claw. So it's like if you're a go-to-market person who travels a lot, building a suite of services with an agentic system and built on context and contexts, and then supplying that as an MCP to people who have AI agents already. And then the third one is really starting to go deep on how to make this into the most important layer in the system. And that's really what we're focused on right now. Right. And so we're launched, um, you know, we we just had our first, we're having our first customer conversations as we speak. It's a super, super exciting time. And if people in your audience, you know, have large contact databases themselves as individuals, or we've had a lot of e-commerce companies come to us and ask for enrichment assistance. Um, we if you know what enrichment is, like you give me a phone number, an email, uh, and a name, and I give you back a bunch of other data. So I had a bunch of e-commerce people see me do the demo. Um, and they're like, Can you give me all my all my users' Instagrams? And I'm like, Yeah, a quarter of record. And they're like, Done. Wow. That's awesome. The market is a buck to two bucks for that same data. I can actually do it for far less, but right now I built in some margin so we can build some more people.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

Well, sure, you gotta make some some money. So let me back up Yeah, yeah. Let me back up a little bit because there's a ton of info in there. So I think I'm probably one of your target users. And I remember when when you demoed it for me, here is my perspective on this. So I've dealt with contact problems my whole career. I probably have two, three thousand just in my iPhone alone. There's duplicates everywhere, it's a complete mess. I use the search function to do anything, any any functionality from anywhere. And you're right. If I have something in my phone and then I go to Outlook and I try to find the email, it it's not there because they don't talk. It's a it's a disaster. So, you know, there's other companies that have tried to kind of mess with this. Like I was a dot card user back in the day, you know, and you go to an event and where's your business card? Oh no, here's here's the dot card, you know. But I had to manually put in all of my info and then hope he had it on the same side. Like it was very clunky, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

And nothing recorded. This is really important. Computer D, which is our digital business card product, it knows where you met, the physical location, it captures from your computer, you're at such and such conference, it meta tags, it says, Hey, you met him at an AO conference at on the floor of the conference. He's probably an AI.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

We're gonna so you have an equivalent to that. I didn't know that either. Oh, that's sweet.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah, yeah. I'll send you a screen grab you can throw into the podcast. Oh, yeah, for sure. People can connect with me. And actually, that's the the best way, the best way to try the product is that thing. I'll send that to you shortly.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah. Um, I I can vouch for it. I mean, I've I've gone through the demo a little bit and started syncing things in or whatnot. And the amount of of intelligent data. So uh most of our users probably know what open claw is an agentic AI, but basically to dilute that down just in case you're not familiar, it's not only giving you prompts, but it is it is doing the work for you. So it's not just like a regular LLM where you have to really kind of know what you're doing. Um, it's stepping in and gathering a lot of that data and doing the heavy lifting for you. So it makes it uh, I think, exponentially more valuable for people that want to just get in, get what they need, and and get out. And the fact that you can do all that securely is huge because the one thing you don't want people to have, I mean, if you're if you leave a job and go somewhere else, the only thing you care about is keeping your contacts. Like it's the one thing, and that's that's the thing that people don't don't get the security piece right. So um is that pretty much it in a nutshell?

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Yeah, that's it. I mean, basically the idea is many, many things are broken today, right? And in when users, um when users you yeah, when you go meet people at conferences, it was a thing we we started thinking about like and and to be clear, when we started building the enricher, it was it cost us like two bucks a record. So we were like, Don't do don't enrich a lot of contacts. Like we we've done a lot of heavy lifting to get it cheap. But one of the things we were talking about in that time is how do we trickle in contacts to tune the enricher while Doing it. And so we just built this. Frankly, it was for me. Like it was literally, we just built a little QR. I mean, we literally copied, like, you know, all the digital business card things and just and we just with little twists, right? And then people started signing up to our wait list from this thing. And I was like, well, that's kind of interesting. Like people would text me and be like, hey, how do I join? And so we like built a little thing where it gives you a little flow to sign up. Um, and we have 400 people who got into the wait list from this mechanism, which is we did not, that was not intentional, right? But then I started realizing like you go to a conference, if you're like me, I'll meet a few hundred people in a three-day period, especially if I'm speaking on the panel. I don't know who those people are. I don't know how important they are. It turns out one of them wants to put money in my company, and one of them some guy who wants a job. And there's really, really hard to parse all that data. So why don't we like build some intelligence, analyze, scan who they are, enrich their content, and tag the ones for follow-up. And actually, now I can do a thing where I say, you know, we you scan my card, I say, hey, send Jimmy the. I did this with you on the phone. I said, Hey Jimmy, send Jimmy the deck and the safe note to invest in the company and an invite to the alpha to cut the queue. And boom, yeah, 10 minutes later, he got the link. And it blew his mind. It blows it up.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

I got a I got a whole email that I could not tell was AI, and I get AI crap all the time, right? It had the enriched, I mean, I used it to prep for this meeting. I went back and found that and went through. I'm like, oh yeah, here we go. Um and you you literally did that live from a voice prompt in 10 seconds.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Yeah, like we are shipping. So this week, and I'll be honest, right now, and you know, look, we're in bet we're in alpha and beta, we just moved to beta. Sure. You know, the thing we tell people is it will break it periods of time because we're tuning.

unknown 23:54

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Uh, we basically tore out the AI harness that was managing all the AIs and rebuilt it from the ground up. It's 10x faster, it's 10x smarter. But to this morning, it doesn't quite touch all the tools. Like it doesn't know how to like do certain things. So uh it'll ship later this week, and then as soon as it ships, we're gonna turn on uh about another couple hundred invites and uh and get people in the system. And you know, we are gunning for an app store mid-summer um and then a big fundraise in the fall. So, but we're you know, we are we are fundraising, we are actively running it, you know, the business. It's super this is like the most exciting company I've had in a long time. It's also the first company where I use our product. Like when our product's down, I'm like, give me back my product. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Well, you got to eat your own dog food. And I I think you you've touched on my next question here a little bit, but you know, you're basically a startup. You you literally are building things from scratch on purpose, right? Yeah. So what given your background and all your success, to go from there to to basically building something from nothing up, what what have been your struggles? I mean, you you've got so many resources, your your idea stack, because I'm I'm same similar, right? Visionary 3000, right? My team has to like say, okay, wait, we have to implement some of these things, right? So I I get what you're where you're coming from. Um what what is your struggle today as you launch?

SPEAKER_01 25:20

Well, it's a great question. So my uh a quick a quick high-level answer. My career has sort of swung between two extremes. Like, like any good entrepreneur, I I have ADHD, I have Dyscalculate, like I have all these disabilities, but I have these superpowers too, right? And the same thing goes in my career arc. Like it's been an even balance of big jobs like being CEO of the Daily Mail, founding a company that became part of Razorfish, you know, running digital the digital platforms in the BBC and Samsung. And then over here, starting companies, more than half of which completely shit the bed. Like, like let's just like, you know, there were some that were spectacular bed shitters, and there were some others that were kind of base hits, but you know, it's like, look, let's just call us bade a spade. Like that is that's the game, right? Entrepreneurs are made differently. We can't help ourselves. You see a problem and you obsess about it. Like I got up this morning at 5 a.m. because I was thinking about, but we're working on uh it's so it's a really nerdy thing, but it's kind of interesting. So I'm writing, I wrote a daily prompt for myself that like says, hey, tell me about my meetings, prep me for all the people. And I realized with a few tweaks to the prompt, I can make it a validation prompt that tests our harness so the engineers can use it because I can call every I know what all the tools are, so I can call the tools in my daily prompt. And so I woke up last night with that idea this morning at 5 a.m. I got up and I spent an hour tuning my own prompt to be a validation prompt. Like, that's not a thing a normal CEO does. I guarantee you, you know, said Satya at Microsoft did not do that. He has other obsessions, but like that's what makes entrepreneurs different.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

You got laser focus, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Laser focus on a thing that has massive impact from a small amount of effort from us. Um the but to be honest, the hardest thing for Kimono, and there's three of them. The first one has been startup financing, particularly venture financing, is very targeted at 24 to 34 year old white males. And and that is a thing I've heard said before and laughed at until I, as a man over 50, went out to fundraise and found like even though I've had all the success, it's very hard. People are very uninterested in meeting a 50, you know, a 50-something-year-old entrepreneur, even with the killer process. The second thing I would so fundraising has been not impossible, but much harder than I expected. The second thing, and this one is new, right? So when I was doing in the web businesses and streaming businesses and internet and interactive television businesses, like all those things, I was riding a wave of surf. But it was very easy for me, given my history, to see where the wave was going. And so I'd always catch the curve. I could like cut up the face. I don't know if you surf, I'm a big surfer. So, like AI in the last year, more than half the days I woke up after I did a little grinding on a project and I opened up like Substack or the news, I would see some piece of news that made me worry that some company had just destroyed my business while I was asleep the night before. It hasn't happened yet that they actually destroyed it, but there's been a lot of sloppy press releases. And this is the first time that an industry is moving so fast that I find myself exhausted just from reading the news. That has never happened to me before. And maybe the first one or the second one are related to. I don't think so, though. I think we are in a period of rapid innovation and evolution that is amazing and exhausting, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, the iteration just in the 2000s, 2010s was pretty quick, right? Yeah. Uh cybersecurity, all the things that people just, ah, that's the nice thing. AI, though, that compression of cycles is it is scary. And it's it, I don't think you should fear everything, right? Like you have to filter it. I think there's a lot of good tools and ways to get ahead, but you're right. People can do so much more with so much less resources these days, it's almost unfair. It's like leveling the playing field in some areas. Um, and you're right. Yeah, for the entrepreneur that's that's you know got the ideas and is working on executing that, uh, it can be kind of weird.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

We we a year ago, before OpenClaw or a Claude Cowork or any of those products existed, that was what we were targeting is that plus this contact and context, right? And so we did a lot of work building a chatbot that did a whole bunch of things like check stock prices and book travel that is utterly meaningless now, right? Like, yeah, and that's not our fault. We were correct in the vision. Sure. He just did not know some dude in his underpants was gonna build open claw in January. And and I actually know him, he's a great guy, and changed the world, right? Like he did a simpler version of what we were doing for himself and moved the needle in a massive way. And that that that rapid pace of sort of he went from you know no one knowing it to you know changing the world of computing. One thing I want to mention is uh because you just because of your security background, I think it'd be interesting. So um I have two, I have a co-founder and a and our head of AI, who are like are my two key guys in the company. And Alec is the the co-founder, is 19, almost 20 years old now. And it's so funny to meet a young me, right? That's I see him that he is so smart. The guy, like we have a conversation, and a day later, a thing is manifested, and that it's like yeah, but also he built a CRM at 15 for a realtor, right? So he really understands, he's passionate about the space, he's been deep, deep there. His name is Alec Kursik. And then Sutta Kamal, our head of AI, you know, he uses uh the computers, you know, he uses agentic systems to build code at scale. And like there are moments where and on the security side, we spend a lot of time talking about this. Because like here's an example. If you send me an email with a malicious piece of code and try and trick our AI into accepting that as its purpose or instructions, there's a shit ton of vulnerabilities there, right? So we spend probably 20% of our compute and engineering time thinking about those risks and and counteracting them because it's a big deal. And it's you know, we're just starting sort of looking at this Octo compliance, we're cost of two certified, like you know, we're we're we are very we're all big security guys, right? But oh yeah, it's an interesting puzzle is in the time of AI, so much innovation has outstripped the sort of safety harnesses of traditional business, but there's no putting this genie back in the bottle, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah, yeah. So and I think what what is your message then to entrepreneurs that that are experiencing some of the same things you are, right? Like we even see that in our own MSP. Like, our industry is changing. The way to go to market, sales and marketing is completely different. Our customers want less, you know, things like our our average deal size in our industry is half what it was just a few years ago. Like there's this this constant need to catch up, I feel like. Uh what do you how do you handle that?

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Oh, it's very so many questions in there. So the first one is this is the AI and the revenue per seat model is has drastically changed, right? Yeah, but so has labor. You know, we at our peak were six people doing the work of 20. Right. And that is like I I still so the co-cono story I was gonna tell you on that is a really funny one. So, you know, I founded Razorfish, one of the biggest website builders in the world, right? And our minimum for a website, even when we were earliest startup company, was like 20 to 50 grand, right? So I looked at Komono's website that our former head of uh product had built like in a weekend, one weekend, and had not touched, and it still talked about the chat bot of the future, and like it was all off-brand, like it was all wrong. And I was like, I'm gonna just like try and fix this. So, like I opened up perplexity and cloud code, and in eight hours at about $200 of compute, I built the website that people can go see at kimono.inc. I built the whole thing, like that's wild. And and just to be clear, I looked at this site at the end and I was like, I would have paid some guy in the Philippines five grand to do what I just did, and it would have been less good because this was me straight from my brain on the paper. And then I I was like, I don't know what to do with this. Like, how how in a decade have we gone from a twenty to fifty thousand dollar piece of work to two hundred dollars of compute and a few hours of a technically facile founder with the clear vision and mission? Like that forcing function is not well distributed yet, but it is you know, it is the lever that is, you know, that is the fulcrum that is going to move the world in really odd, some good, some bad ways. But like I my my co-founders all make, you know, they're they they're like, Yeah, of course you could do this. But I was like, this is that the CEO of a company could just get a buck up his ass about a website and not hire a guy or a girl, not like I just did it in a weekend.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Yeah. I mean, I think of my kids who are growing up in the in the age of AI. Like I grew up in the 90s, right? So it wasn't 70s, but it was you know the IBM 286 and computer personal computers were the next thing. But that took you were pre-windows.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

You were pre-Windows, you were DOS, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I've seen that, and like I'm learning as fast as I can AI for our own business, but like my 15-year-old is making websites already. He has no idea what code is, he's just typing what he wants and refining it. And I'm like, this isn't fair. Also, he will be probably more successful than I will by himself just natively learning this stuff, you know, when you're when your brain is young. So I think there's there's definitely winners that that are made, but but yeah, you you have to be um willing to change and adapt. I mean, the the farmer that feared the combine when he had two horses and a plow, you know, was left behind. It's not that the combine was bad, it's just you gotta you know get on board.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

So my last like little anecdote about the beach boys, because I just love dropping it. And I think that's from them sometimes. You're like, why quit name dropping us? I'm like, no, it's so much fun. You know, I love it. And actually, Bruce, one of the Beach Boys, he loves it. So um, when we did that record, so the reason we chose Pro Tools, which was alpha software at the time, was the Beach Boys' trick to making hits was they tape splice the chorus, so it would be the same chorus over and over and over. So it would like your ear love the repetition, and you know, as is that cool. That's actually a cool story. And so, you know, as they're I was touring with them and they're like, hey, we want you to work in this studio. And then Keith and I talked, and he was the engineer. And I quickly understood what they wanted me to do was razor blade edit. And I was like, I'm not doing that. It's like that's a lot of work. I'm lazy. So I was like, I just wanted to use the computer to do the editing, which is a very reasonable, you know, minimum viable, iterative experiment in a new technology. So I showed a couple of the Beach Boys this, and the momentum of this idea got way ahead of our skis. And before I know it, we're sitting at a restaurant at Ilfernado in Palo Alto with a guy named Steve Jobs and a bunch of Apple executives. Because in order to use the the uh the 12 or the 16-track version of Pro Tools, we have to have Alpha's hardware from Apple. And before we knew it, we were doing a thing we should definitely not have been doing, right? But we did it and we recorded the record. We mastered, we mixed it down in Martha's Vineyard, we mastered it doing a digital. Like when we plugged the digital cable from the system into the mastering system, no one in the world had ever done that before. Theoretically, the specs said it would work, but we weren't sure. We were like, this could not work. Like you're pioneers. Oh, yeah. But the key thing is we finished all this, we put the record out. It wasn't a very good record, by the way. It was, you know, it was decently recorded, but it had a lot of issues. But all the recording, the recording engineer world pilloried us. They were like, this is gonna destroy music, tape, and you know, it was like all these things. And I and most of those people are not working anymore, right? Yeah, like that wave of change changed everything, and it changed it so fast. Like, I challenge you to find a recording studio that doesn't have Pro Tools in it today. You won't use that.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Yeah, well, it's like Napster. They said the same thing about that, and now there's Spotify and everything else. You yeah, to be an innovator and a um uh a deal maker, you you gotta make waves, or else nothing changes. Absolutely. I I think that's a huge plus. Yeah, absolutely. Titus, this has been really fascinating. Um, I hope our listeners kind of get a glimpse of from your story and and are motivated uh to go and and chase those ideas that they have rattling around. Yeah, because if they say ideas, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

Yeah, I was gonna say I'm very accessible. If anyone wants to contact me, best way is either on Instagram uh at rxdxt. That's my handle in most places. On Twitter, bizarrely, it's at Richard Titus. Uh uh someone else has the other one, but um at rxdxt or at Richard Titus is how you reach me personally. And kimono is go.getkomono.com.

SPEAKER_00 38:19

I will add all that to the show notes. Yeah, you beat me to the to the next question because yeah, I I will say for a fact, he he is legit. Um, I he reached out through an email funnel from us. And Titus, you've been very down to earth and accessible um the whole time. So I really appreciate that. I think people relate to that as well. Um, I'm definitely going to be a user of kimono. I think it's got huge potential. Um, so yeah, if uh if you like what you hear, check out the show notes. Um, we'll link everything so that you guys can get a demo. Um, and yeah, Titus, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for for being on today. Really appreciate it. Take care.