Motion: Redefining How Work Gets Done

Key Takeaways

[Music] I'm excited to welcome uh the Motion team here. They're fresh off the news of closing their series B and series C at a $550 million valuation. Teams been on fire. So, welcome Motion. Thank you for joining. First, maybe why don't you give everybody an idea of what Motion does? >> We build work management software for small and mediumsiz businesses. Uh most of them in the middle of America. Think about like construction companies, marketing agencies, design agencies, lots of services kind of businesses, law firms, etc. And we do like team project management, knowledge management, documents, wikis. We're kind of this all-in-one work suite for them uh that they can come to basically for all of their work management needs. And what's very exciting over the last year is we have been building agents for them such that we're not just managing their work, but we're actually doing work for them. >> It didn't start like that though. So take us back to the early days and and maybe first how you guys first got connected and even decided that you wanted to work on a startup together. >> Maybe a little bit about how we got connected. Omi and I were high school friends. So we did um high school math olympiad. We were both I actually think and I were the first two kids uh in our school's third year history to ever make it to USA math olympiad. Uh we both scored a 14 on it. And then you know Ethan was um one of my best friend from college. Uh we went to school together. that we both studied computer science and um and yeah and that's that's how we met. >> So you knew each other uh early on in life from high school days and college days. At what point did you decide that you guys should all start a company together? >> We were kind of just talking and um Omi and I were catching up. Omi was actually trying to apply for a quantum trading job and Ethan and I we we were both quantum traders uh after college you know just like a lot of uh my friends back in high school did math Olympias like you know just like go to trading jobs right was actually asking for my help on how to get into um trading and I was like hey why don't we just do this startup thing together and you know that's uh that's that's how it came about >> that's almost an unusual move because you guys were making a lot of money at the were you not >> like talk a little bit about what you actually had to sacrifice and give up in order to start this company. I mean as like 21 22 year olds sometimes you're making like you know seven figures which is a lot of money right like none of us came from a very rich background definitely in the beginning like we Harry and I we were both traders straight out of college and I think in the beginning uh it satisfies this like competitive itch like it's very intellectually stimulating you're competing with other traders in the market and it's like pretty fun but after having done it for a couple of years uh at least for me personally I was it was pretty clear like this wasn't something I was passionate about. It was something I would like put in the hours and then after work I would turn my brain off and not want to think about it anymore because there wasn't really any purpose to what I was doing. Every day it was like we're going to try to make money. Okay, tomorrow is a new day. We're going to try to make more money and we're going to try to make more money. But like there wasn't like something that like we were building that was like compounding that like we could say like we are building this endeavor that uh so basically around the same time 2019 I was talking to Harry about it and he was thinking about starting the company. I was at the same time looking for my next uh potential career move. >> Talk about what that conversation was like. I mean, you both had to give up seven figure salaries to go back to zero with a startup to start a startup nobody had ever heard of, you know, like what was that conversation and decision-making process like for both of you? >> We we actually got into YC I think around July of 2019. We end up delaying the batch until the the winter, but we basically had to quit our jobs in August. If you know how trading works, you don't get any bonus until the following year. Even if you quit like you know like in August of the year you are basically forfeiting like a month of salary which is like of bonus which is like you know something close to a million dollars. But yeah my parents definitely thought it was crazy. Definitely heavily recommended against it. They were like oh yeah you should accumulate 5 to 10 years of wealth before you do any kind of this stuff. But I'm a big risk taker. I I I think we all believe in ourselves. So I think we take huge risk huge reward right that comes from trading too. So yeah, decided to take a very big risk on ourselves. >> I had a similar story with my parents. Not only was I giving up the finance job, I was also sitting on a offer to go to Stanford Business School. And so they wanted me to either do the finance job or get my MBA. And that's like very traditional uh like I guess like Asian Asian parent uh mentality. But I really wanted to bet on myself and like I knew even like even though there was like a short-term loss like really betting on myself and uh seeing where how far I can push this new entrepreneurship could uh win out in the long run. >> Yeah, I love that. I mean you guys went from a day job that you weren't excited about but was all about making bets and taking risk and stuff and you just decided to bet on yourselves and hopefully your parents are are happy with it now. Yeah, I am. >> Think think you made the right call. >> YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at y combinator.com/apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. >> Talk about uh the early days. So, you guys applied to IC, you got in. Um talk about like going through the batch and and how you kind of evolved throughout um that process. Yeah. So we initially got into YC with a completely different idea. It was like you know in sports betting and um we will soon realize there's a lot of regulations a lot of that. We uh started pivoting YC helped a lot with that. You know both you and Michael our group partners help a lot with that process. And uh during YC itself we basically built like a calendaring application um that you know like helps you track your time and help you like basically manage your time. And we kept building more and more on top of that. The moment we found um you know the earliest prom market fit, the B1 prom market fit one when we built this thing that would basically just like automatically schedule your entire calendar for you back then. It sounds like a pretty crazy like who who would ever want a machine to like you know schedule your time for you, right? And quite a few people do and I did for myself, right? And basically the moment we launched that uh like we were at like very close to zero revenue for a while and as soon as we launched that you know like uh automatic smart AI calendaring um it jumped to like a million AR very quickly in like you know two months and then that went on for like you know one to two years uh we got to you know 10 15 million of AR um I think we got close to 20 million of AR uh with that and then what happened is you know like we we we had a office hour with uh with Michael And that was an interesting office hour because we were like, hey, we're building this like, you know, like consumer proumer product. It's like growing pretty well. Um, you know, you got to like, you know, 15 20 million of AR, which is pretty good, right? Medical is basically like, yeah, you guys are And the reason for that is basically like you can become a very profitable 20 million a year probably making like if you stop growing like 5 to 10 million a year business but you are never going to make a billion of AR and there's a lot of reasons for that you know like uh uh this kind of product is generally not a must have for consumers or consumers generally these kind of productivity tools a lot of them uh are you know nice to haves so uh that means like retention sometimes not great uh you never see like you know anything close to the 100% % dollar retention you see on B2B products and we were very much building a very nice to have but I think there were very few users who was like oh this is absolutely a must have right um it's like their their life their business they don't absolutely depend on it and basically that's when we realized hey if we truly want to build like a billion revenue business this is not it and I think that was a tough moment and we had to figure out okay you know what do we do now we started getting a lot of interest on integrating with like you know a Monday or a Jira or like a sauna or a Trello we look at these platforms and we're like they're not that good and we can build a much better version of them knowing what we already know about you know time management and you know like uh uh uh like team productivity and we have we have accumulated a couple years of expertise in this area let's go build the best work management tool for SMBs and midm market which is you know a lot of where a lot of our consumers came from. So we basically talked to a bunch of them, figured out their pain points, our own painoint using these tools and we just pivoted from consumer proumer to you know like B2B and that was pretty hard because building a B2B product for businesses to trust you like you need to build a lot of feature parity stuff and not only do you need to be build feature parody you have to build like what is your unique value proposition that makes yourself 10 times better than alternatives in a single dimension. So how to do that as well and that is our main business going forward. I I think what's so interesting about that is you know you pivoted you found something that worked you grew it to 15 20 million ARR many people would be thrilled at that and you looked at the future that you wanted to build this you know multi-billion dollar company and recognized that this was not actually going to be the thing that got you there and you made a really difficult decision that we can't continue to fully focus on this thing. We got to find the next thing that's going to get us from the 15, 20 million to 100, 200, 500 million ARR. And that involves starting over from scratch in some ways. Like maybe you can reuse parts of the product, but you have to go find a totally different customer type. Talk about like your thought process behind that. I see some people that get to that position, they have that same epiphany and they go, "Oh no, like I'm stuck. I don't want to go back and like spin up a new thing from scratch with a new customer type and a new go to market motion. Maybe I should just find an acquirer and get out while I can kind of thing. But you guys were down for the journey again to keep going and push to that much larger exit. What was your thought process as you were going through that? >> I think we really just want to build a lasting business and I think at the end of the day like it's just this team really wanted to win. >> Where does that come from for each of you? your like desire to win, you know, I can see it in in the arc of your stories, you know, doing um the competitions at an earlier age and you know, giving up money because you want to win and go for the bigger prize. Where's the motivation come from for each of you for that? >> Yeah, so I think for me um I think it was part of being a first generation immigrant to the United States. I came here when I was really young and had to uh learn the language like assimilate myself and I didn't come from like really wealthy family or anything and had to prove myself going through like the public school system trying to become number one in order to graduate at the top of my class and then try to like get to a good school and just making sure that the investment that my parents made in me uh really panned out. >> No, I I I think I I wish I had selfreflected enough. It just feels like uh the shame of of not of of not making it of of of of motion not working out is just like it's too much to bear like you know it's the best option. It's the most comfortable option is to actually make things work even if that's extremely hard. I hear that a lot from founders which is it's not even so much about winning sometimes it's about not losing and you know the not giving up and yeah that's interesting >> for all of us there there's a there's a giant chip on our shoulder right and I think part of that came from actually YC demo day we were in the winter 20 batch it was a co batch was really hard to fundra >> shut down two weeks before your demo day >> investors were scared to put money into anything right markets were tanking yeah that was a crazy time >> yeah exactly so like you know We we got rejected by hundred and around 150 investors after zoom calls like you should have seen my investor CRM was like o over 500 and you know got onto calls with like around a third of them basically got rejected by like you know 98% of them and we we were trying to raise our seat for like three months we ended up only raising like you know a couple hundred grand. First of all, the investors that invested, you know, not a lot invested in in the early days. And I remember being on calls with you around demo day and like what are the magic words I need to say to get people to invest? And it's always so interesting to look back at at things like this now a few years out where things have played out a little bit. And a couple people took a bet on you, but most didn't. And the ones that didn't, I'm sure regretting it right now. And the ones that did have to be feeling pretty good about their like counterintuitive investment that actually has ended up working out here, right? >> Yeah. So, if I'm being completely honest, we have not won yet. Like, we're nowhere close to winning. So, we still got to reinvent oursself probably more than once to in order to have a chance of winning. >> Yeah. You have to continue to refine product market fit, getting bigger and bigger and bigger along the way. What does that look for you like for you guys going forward? You know, you you have mid eight figures revenue now. It's been growing quickly. You know, you're on a good trajectory. It feels like the opportunity is there for you to go take it and get to a billion plus. What does the future look like for you? >> Yeah, I I actually think we're in a very lucky position because we have built a suite of work management tools that we are now basically building embedding AI agents on top of them. There are a few things here, right? Like one is we are now not just managing work for our customers. you know the SMBs in the middle of America, but we're actually doing work for them. They can create projects and just assign some of the tasks directly to AI like what we call AI employees. The AI employees can't do everything. They can do a small portion of task now and that portion will go get bigger and bigger each year. And what our platform offers is a way to manage hundreds or thousands of agents at scale um because we're already a work management platform. And the second thing it offers is I don't think it makes any sense for a company to manage human tasks and agent tasks separate from each other, right? Like they share a lot of the same context. Um you know a lot of task you got to finish the agent task and a human has to take over. Like it doesn't make sense for there to be separate systems. And because we have our work management project management product, we can seamlessly um you know transition from oh agent just finished something. Okay, now human you take over next because we have over the years built out this human work and project management system and we launched that you know agentic product a few months ago. It basically like blew a lot of things out expectation. the businesses who are using us like clearly see value in that and we went from something like you know basically zero revenue in the agent product when we launched like early this year to over 10 million of AR on the like you know AI agent like product basically within a few months and you know we're continue to see that kind of explosive growth uh inside you know especially our B2B customers at this point everyone knows that for agent to work really well it needs access to a lot of context and we are also in a lucky position because we have our over the years we have built our own entire platform our entire work suite as well as the data for our customers. Uh so we basically have a lot of context about their business um you know like uh their internal knowledge base uh their projects their task their like time like everything and that enables us to basically be able to build the best agent in the market for these small and medium businesses we are serving that platform and data um and that context that is one of the biggest reasons why our agents are performing a lot better than you know some of the uh maybe perhaps independent agents who perhaps not have their uh underlying platform or data. >> You guys are hiring. So uh way as you're looking for people to join the team, what's the profile of somebody that you're looking for? >> I think we're looking for people who are really driven, really passionate. They're not looking for a 9 to5, but they're looking for uh I guess it's the same chip on their shoulder. They want to prove that they have like a really high potential and motion is the place for them to unlock all that potential. Maybe they've been limited in a role before and they want to take greater and bigger responsibilities. uh we will take that bet on them and uh have them uh give their hardest effort and uh see how far they can go. >> I think the um the ultimate determining factor of the success of a company starts with the founders and I think one of my takeaways from you know talking with you guys and hearing your story is just how much you're driven to win. And so I think for anybody that's looking to join a company that's like the number one thing they could they could look at is how much do these founders want to win? And I think you know that really comes through here and how you guys are thinking about the business and once you get to a billion ARR which I know you guys are going to do it that's not going to be good enough and you're how do we get to two how do we get to five and and you're not going to stop. So it's been awesome to hear your story. Thank you guys so much for joining and uh yeah excited for you to to announce all the fundraisers and all the success you've been having. >> Yeah. Thanks for being on this journey with us.