Joel: [00:00:00] What phrase do you find yourself repeating often within the company? And can you, uh, match it up to a phrase that you hear from your customers all the time?

Erik: So the one that I find myself repeating all the time is,

f*********k.

But that’s, that’s mostly because that’s, that’s mostly because we’re a small company trying to do huge things with. Limited resources.

Joel: My name’s Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few others that started with different letters. I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst.

Thankfully, somebody in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good,” and that’s spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. Today, I help technical people learn how to

get noticed,

get remembered,

and get [00:01:00] results.

On Nerds That Talk Good,

I wanna help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works.

Today’s guest nerd is Erik Braund, founder and CEO of Katmai, the virtual office platform on a mission to delete your fucking meetings. Before declaring war on calendar chaos.

Erik was a music and video producer working with everyone from Sting to Greta Gerwig, and before that, he was thrashing it out in Alaskan grunge. Now he’s here to talk about bringing back spontaneity, speed and humanity in the third place — we’ll get into that — and experiencing a new kind of together.

Erik, thanks for joining, man.

 Man, what a, what? An introduction. I couldn’t have written it better myself. Did I? Did I write it? I might have.

Joel: I got bits and pieces from, uh, from, from stuff I found on on PodMatch.

Erik: No, that’s great.

Joel: I, I’d love to start with, you gave me a, a, a demo of Katmai earlier, and I definitely wanna dig into the technology and what you’re building there, but I want to, I want to run the tape back a [00:02:00] little bit a, as we say, and start with the nerd origin story.

Uh, ’cause I think it’s fascinating where, where you’ve come from and then we’ll get into where you, how you came up with this and what Katmai is doing for, for business and communications in general.

Erik: Yeah, nerd origin story. Uh, so I’m gonna send you a photo after this and you can hopefully cut it in. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, uh, pre, pre-internet. You know, I remember getting my first 14.4 dial up modem, and that was like, oh, wow, the world is bigger than Anchorage, Alaska. That was my first window, and I had just gotten an electric guitar, and I, I wanna say my first search was Kurt Cobain because it was like, and I was getting into drums and it was like Nirvana.

It was all just like Nirvana stuff. There’s this, like we, we grew up commercial fishing, and we spent our summers on an island with no electricity, no running water. It was just boats, fireworks, you know? Uh, just, just like Alaskan wilderness stuff. There’s a great photo that my, my father has, and it’s my brother who’s five years older than me, [00:03:00] so he’s probably like 12 at the time, and he’s just like in all of his fishing gear, just pulling in salmon and nets and just, you can tell like, oh, this is a kid that is like born for commercial fishing and I’m 40, so he’s 45, 46.

He’s still a commercial fisherman. He became that. For his whole life. And in my photo, I’m in like, like a pink rollerblader hat or something, and I’ve got a Game boy, and I’m like, clutching it for dear life. And we’re on this island with no electricity and it’s just like, God, how long can these AA batteries last?

You know? And it was such a like perfect, like, oh, where did, where were these two boys going and where did they go? And it’s like, well, they just followed that. And so I kind of became that teenager that built computers and, you know, ruined a few along the way. And I, you know, learned a few hard lessons and before you know it, I’m like building computers for my dad’s office and then building computers for the law firm down the hall and then building computers down here.

And I was kinda like, oh, okay, I’m, you should probably buy your computers from Dell. Not the 14-year-old, but like, sure, I’ll figure it out.

Joel: Right.

Erik: And I just, I’ve always [00:04:00] been a nerd. I’ve always loved electronics. I’ve loved screens. I love hardware, I’ve loved software. I like, you know, figuring out how to make a, here’s a, a perfect example.

I think at 12 I traded Nirvana bootlegs, and that was, I was like big into music and, and guitar and grunge and that was like, okay, I need a website. I have to figure out how to make a website. I need to. List the VHS tapes and audio tapes, and at this point, maybe a few CD-Rs of concerts that I’ve found. And then you find people on the internet and then you buy high quality V, you know, VCRs and have two of them in dub tapes.

So it was just like this funny like ecosystem of internet tape trading back in the like late nineties, early two thousands that I was in. And so I still have probably 200 VHS tapes in my dad’s basement of like all these really shitty, degraded like eighth generation concerts from Handy cams of Nirvana stuff.

But what I realized during the pandemic is, oh my God, all of this is on YouTube now. Like everything I, I’ve spent [00:05:00] years building is all on YouTube and it’s primo quality. So that’s like such an awesome thing as a music nerd. But, sorry, I could, I’m getting off track here probably, but the nerd origin story goes back to Anchorage, Alaska, and

being very isolated from the rest of the world, especially at a time when there wasn’t internet and just being like, I know there’s more out there. There’s music and there’s like movies and theaters, and there’s different, there’s more stuff. So the internet became so vital for like a young Erik at that age.

Joel: Yeah, my, my family’s from Nebraska and uh, and I remember visiting one, one Summer, uh, or one Winter and I think it was right when Tombstone had come out. The movie and they’re like, Hey, we’re gonna, we’re gonna go to the movies and we’re gonna see this brand new movie just came out. And the movie theater was the back room of the video rental store. And it was like, you know, I was like, man, I’m so, my dad was in the Air Force. I’m like, so I’m so glad Dad got, uh, you know, you know, I was, I think I was in [00:06:00] Texas at the time, which is, you know, it’s not that much different than the Midwest. But, uh,

I, I love that story because I think, you know, that that probably had a big shaping factor. To your feeling of connection. Um, and, and I want to talk about Katmai and, and and what that is. Um, can you just describe Katmai for, for us and, and, uh, um, you gave me a demo and I’ll, I’ll cut to a little while you’re talking, some, some video, but

I’d love to know, um, what you’ve built, but where the idea of it came from.

Erik: So we have built what we call immersive video conferencing. We don’t call it the metaverse. To me that’s a a four letter word and, and is a reaction to similar problems, but with a different solution set. So if you take, if you take the idea of the headset, that’s like everybody’s in a headset, you’re disconnected from reality and you’re interacting with other human beings, maybe.

It’s kind of a cartoon avatar version of those people. So it kind of says, okay, in order [00:07:00] to interact with someone, I have to disconnect from reality, and I have to accept that you’re gonna look like a cartoon version of yourself, and I’m gonna look like a cartoon version of myself. I think that is cool and entertaining and fun, and I think it’s insanely dystopian to think that an entire society is going to subscribe to that as a way of work and as a new normal.

That terrifies me. I think it’s kind of shown that’s probably not happening based on the tens of billions of dollars that have been invested and that kind of now all of a sudden isn’t even being talked about. And the daily active users was never high, and it just, so I always stayed away from this idea of the 

Joel: ours in a box right here, right behind me, so,

Erik: I mean, I, I’m totally embarrassed. I’m, I’m horribly embarrassed, but like I have. You know this, is this a very nice travel pillow? No. It’s a $3,500 headset that is insanely cool. And I have it, ’cause I’m a nerd. But if you’re telling me, A, I’ve gotta take my glasses off to even do this thing, and then I can’t really see that well. If you’re telling me like, [00:08:00] this is how we’re all gonna interact.

Joel: Yeah.

Erik: I think you’re fucking crazy. 

Joel: Yeah. Yeah. 

Erik: I think you’re just like, no, thank you. And personally, after 15 minutes, I’d go outside and throw up, like that’s what it does to me. I’m like, I get seasick from the thing. I’d rather be on a boat. Okay, so set all that aside.

I’ve described what we aren’t. Now I’ll describe what we are. Traditional video conferencing, essentially what you and I are doing now, a meeting at a future date. And you’re a square. And I’m a square, and here we are. I’m actually embarrassingly looking at myself like half the time I’m trying to look at you, but because I’m being presented as this big thing, I’m like looking at myself too and being okay constantly meeting by appointment.

It’s great. It’s working. I have a, we have a sense of each other, but. It creates fatigue and it creates a lack of attention paying to, to what’s going on. And nine times outta 10 you join a meeting and half the cameras are off and people are doing two or three other things. And it’s like, it’s not a meeting.

Like if you and I were meeting each other in real life, like I wouldn’t be able [00:09:00] to do four other things and not pay attention to you. It be rude.

Joel: You’re right.

Erik: Why are we even doing this meeting? Why am I doing this? Um, so I, I, I saw a new problem to solve, which was. Like, yes, digital interaction has saved the world in a tough pandemic time when we all had to be home.

So meetings this worked. But then everyone kind of got sick of it and everyone kind of was like meeting fatigue. Everyone’s calendars are totally full. Even companies that are back in the office, they’re totally full. You’re, you’re back in the office to be on video meetings. Like now, it’s the worst of both worlds.

Like that’s the new norm, right, for these big companies back in the office. So what we did is we said, what if there’s a more dynamic way to interact using the hardware we all all already own, so we all, there’s billions of computers and iPads and phones. We don’t have to buy this. We don’t have to invest in this new idea.

Let’s build something that works for everybody. That is what we call immersive video conferencing. What’s immersive about it? In a [00:10:00] web browser, so nothing to install in a web browser. You fire up a really high quality 3D environment, and by high quality, I mean it looks nice, you know, there’s nice, it’s, it’s a shiny 3D environment.

It’s high, it’s high tech, you know, PS four, PS five type level. And in that you can move around, but you’re not an avatar, you’re yourself. So we take your webcam and we take your microphone and we assign that to you and, and that is what people see. It’s in a disc, it’s in a circular disc. It’s kind of head and shoulders just like this.

But now you’re like, oh, I’m, I’m not in a meeting. I’m in a place, but I’m represented as me. I’m not represented as a cartoon of me. And this leans business centric because. Businesses generally aren’t building trust and doing deals and working on projects together as cartoon avatars, that’s insanely distracting.

It’s not really professional. You wouldn’t, if you’re a, a finance executive and trying to sell something worth $10 million, you’re not gonna show up dressed as a cartoon of yourself. I think that would work against you. 

Joel: And even the [00:11:00] Apple avatars, you know, it’s the uncanny valley is just, it, it’s, it’s off putting.

Erik: I actually bought this specifically. ’cause, ’cause we would, um, and, and you’ve seen it, so I’ve gotten the question a lot of times of like, have you ever thought about like, you know, integrating VR headsets? And I was like, boy, have I, and the answer is a hard pass. And no, that eliminates the whole thing that we’re doing here because I did that, I, I did the 3D scan of myself.

It was creepy.

Joel: Yeah.

Erik: And I went into the office that way and I didn’t tell anyone. And I, I was in my headset and it was just like, I tried talking to a few people and it took, I like, what the hell is going? Ugh. The general reaction was just like, Ugh.

Joel: And, and I think that speaks to what’s necessary for, for trust and building communication is that human connection.

And, you know, it, it, there, there are, even in this technological world, we’ve got biological drivers, we’ve got this caveman brain that I talk an awful lot about. When I, when I work with clients, tech clients, I’m like, you can’t [00:12:00] neglect the biological driver. Connection. And I think that’s what a lot of this technology does. So, so Katmai I really is. And I, I listened to another interview of yours where you talk about the third space.

Can you introduce the concept of the third space? ’cause I think that’s gonna be crucial. 

Erik: So it, there’s a sociologist in the seventies, I wanna say Ray Oldenberg and. He pointed out this like we have, we have home and the office and then like people need somewhere else. And so the third place was this idea of, it could be it’s church, it’s a park. It’s a cafe, but it’s like another place to kind of congregate as like, what do people need?

Like you said, there’s biological drivers. Like, we wanna spend time with each other. We wanna be around people. We, we, we wanna interact. Like we’re all social beings in some way. Even the antisocial person. Is still like, there’s still there where you, you wanna be around people on some level or have access to people and uh, Starbucks actually is, is the company that [00:13:00] grabbed onto that with the cafe and they made the cafe the third place and they turned it into an international phenomenon. And they really are credited, especially in North AmErika with driving this like, Hey, meet here. And now a bit of that has been lost over the years of with, you know, online ordering.

And like, you don’t have to interact with a barista, you just go show up, grab your coffee and leave. Like, that’s a whole separate kind of conversation where technology has shifted the use of their third place. And I, I think they’re trying to get back to that honestly. 

Joel: I just saw a video about that this morning. They were saying 70% of their, their traffic is app orders or, or drive through. And they are trying to, trying to reclaim that. I, I worked at a coffee shop pre Starbucks at, at a mall in high school, and I miss the coffee shop of the nineties. Uh, that’s what I think. I, I think, you know, we want to get back to.

Erik: So my, my kind of proposal here is we’ve created a digital third place and like, we’re, this is not a new idea that we’ve come up [00:14:00] with in terms of like, listen, people have been using online games as a place to be and compete and chat and talk shit and socialize and make friends. And I have a friend who met his now wife on World of Warcraft 15 years ago.

Like they, they’re, they’re dip it together 15 years because they’ve met as strangers on World of Warcraft. Like, so virtual places for all of these things is not a new idea. Um. The virtual place as a, as a place to have a central hub of doing business and providing inclusive experiences in a more and more remote world is starting to be a new idea that’s slowly starting to be accepted, which is the pandemic really changed things forever and we’re not gonna come back from it.

And what I mean by that is a millions of people were given freedoms to go home. Millions of people were promised that was they could stay home. Millions of people relocated to different cities and countries. And then some of those people have now been pulled back and then, you know, it’s either you’re fired or I quit, or, okay, I’ll come [00:15:00] back.

Or can I go to a different regional hub? You know, I might’ve been hired in Washington, but can I, can I go back In Philadelphia, you’ve got an office there. So now you’re seeing even the return to office companies. The teams are fragmented in a way they weren’t before the pandemic. And I, I look at all of this as like.

A lot of remote work and return to office and this still push and pull is being measured through two options. Use Zoom or come back to the office and then when people go back to the office, they’re still just using Zoom all the time anyway. So I’m kind of like there is an opportunity to rethink return to office and rethink remote work and rethink work from home slash work from anywhere.

There’s an opportunity to rethink all of this and our, our product, this virtual office that’s out now, uh, we put out really into the market February of this year. It was born out of, there was a problem to solve, which is we can’t be together anymore, and there’s gotta be a better way than just this meeting.

Just gotta be a better [00:16:00] way. So the concept around, okay, what about a virtual place? But what if we can grab your camera and your microphone? And what about if we can add permissions and create, you cross this threshold. Now you’re in a meeting and now your audio is connected and you leave this threshold and now you can’t hear each other.

Oh, that’s interesting. That’s kinda like an office. So the early team in 2020 that did this, we were in New York, we’re in Florida, we’re in the Netherlands, we’re in Alaska. It was like a ragtag group early on, funded out of my checking account and then my savings account until both were depleted and they both still are depleted.

Um, that really was us like accidentally building an office while we were working on this cool technology. And it was kind of like we realized one day it was like, well on, we’re just in a virtual office. We just have this unparalleled access to each other on demand. If we agree by one set of rules, which is we’re gonna be in this third place at the same time, we don’t have to talk to each other the whole time.

But like, so my early pandemic was like, I talked to people all day long and it [00:17:00] was a wildly creative time and a wildly socially satisfying time. And I had a very different experience than many, many people. And I didn’t meet half of these folks until like two years after working together.

And really it was like we had spent so much time casually interacting that the only new thing was like, oh, tall guy. Oh, short guy. You know? It was just like, you’re a foot taller than I thought you were. We already like knew each other’s mannerisms because you said there’s these biological drivers around interacting and we just now have turned interaction into something spontaneous, and casual and less forced than like, we have a meeting with these five people next Tuesday at 3:30 PM. And now before you know it, everything is driven around fitting that meeting into that time with those people and nothing can change. And so we have this statistic back to like, delete your fucking meetings.

We, we’ve looked at scheduled meetings versus unscheduled meetings. We’ve analyzed data from customers and a data. We basically have learned that when you have access to [00:18:00] people in a virtual environment, a third place where you can literally walk across the hall, you don’t have to have as many scheduled meetings. You just don’t because you can just have a conversation.

So we have a customer and their anecdote is ” Katmai turns next week’s 30-minute meeting into today’s five minute conversation.” So we’ve already made it more casual. It’s not a meeting, it’s a conversation. It’s not 30 minutes next week that I’m stressing out about or worrying about or whatever. It’s just a conversation right now today.

‘ cause there’s even these norms where. I dunno about you, but with a lot of people I’m in business with, or even personally, it’s like I text them before I call them is, do you have time to talk?

Even, you just can’t even like pick up the phone anymore, let alone walk down the hall. And people that have gone back to the office, the things that we hear all the time is, oh yeah, I’m in the office today, but no one else is here.

Everyone’s remote. And it’s like, well, what the fuck are you even doing? What is the point? What, what’s the point? And maybe you wanted to get outta your house. I understand that. We all need to do that. Sometimes you’re in your shed in the yard. I’m under the garage. There’s a car parked above me, which I’m always like, [00:19:00] I really hope this is sturdy.

I think I just give you a very long-winded rambling. We, the thing that we changed over, like it’s a virtual place to be together, we said. We’re not leaning into avatars, we’re not leaning into 3D versions of you. We’re not leaning into characters, nothing fantastic, fantastical, nothing fictional, no filters, none of this stuff.

It’s you and it’s me. And now it’s like unfettered, raw people in a virtual space. And there’s actually something really refreshing about that. And, and like, uh, I don’t, I don’t know. Every time I’m on a different platform, I feel like I’m taking three steps backwards.

Joel: Yeah, Getting back to kind of the, the, the cognitive load of all the technology and the things that we have to do, you know, there are chat platforms like, like. Teams chat and Slack tried to do the same thing, but that was the, just this constant scroll of text that you’re either not watching and then you’ve got, you know, like, I [00:20:00] missed, I, I think I missed something. Or the, you know, cognitive translation between your, your reading and your understanding when you’re able to, to just talk spontaneously. You know, I, I, I think communication gets a lot better. Um, I, I wanna talk a little bit about how you’re, how you’ve introduced this you know, this new paradigm or this, this approach to your paradigm, uh, to investors.

So now you’re, you’re, you’re venture backed, you’ve got some funding, the company’s growing. I, I heard in an interview that you did where very early on you had no pitch deck and I, I advise a lot of startups and founders and I work on their pitch decks. I have a love hate. Relationship with the pitch deck.

But I have the same experience with a lot of companies where they’re like, you know, if I could just show it to somebody, if someone would just see it and experience it, they would get it and get excited about it. But there’s a, there’s a threshold you have to engage somebody and get them [00:21:00] over to get them to see it. Um, how did you overcome that?

Erik: I think I’m, I’m still overcoming it every single day because you, like, even you asked me to describe it and I think I was like, can I just show it to you instead? Like, even before this call, it’s like, it’s just the, can I show it to you? So, um, you know, you could do the thing where you’re like normalize it against something like Zoom or Teams and just say, but it’s the next one.

And you’ve really gotta see it to understand it, right? It’s like we’re taking what traditional video conferencing has done and succeeded and we’re pushing it quite literally another dimension. Um, and the, the applicability. Yes, there’s a virtual office and it makes a lot of sense. But what these guys Katmai have done is, is build technology.

We now have over 50 patents on the technology. This isn’t just like some fly by the seat of our pants. Maybe this is a cool idea. No, it’s like we very, while Meta was out there saying, we’re gonna invest $20 billion a year to put a headset on everyone. I didn’t have a [00:22:00] website and we were just building technology.

‘Cause I was like, okay, interesting. There’s got a company optimizing for selling hardware and then, and then adopting this like, and you can be in a virtual place with someone, but the first step is selling hardware. And I was like, well I think we could just make this work on billions of devices if we do this right.

And at first we worked probably on thousands of devices. There’s a, you know, one, the first time I met one of our now board We were in a conference room in New York City. He turned his older MacBook Pro around. We logged, logged in, and in about three minutes it entirely bricked this machine, it went black and turned off.

I was just like, oh, dear God, I think I’m gonna owe you a computer. And, uh, well, it was probably the last time I ever see you, you know, and he’s been on our board for many years now, and thankfully it was a, you know, I’ve, I’ve developed a lot of technology over the years. I understand these things 

Joel: I needed a new laptop anyway, so…

Erik: Well, and then we ultimately did get him one, but it was for different reasons. Um. So I, I’d say like the simplest way to explain it is, [00:23:00] is, um, you know, there’s on one end of the spectrum you’ve got meeting in person, which is preferred. I would, I’d like to meet you, I’d like to sit across the table and have a 90 minute lunch or something.

Right? Um, but, but that means we both have to fly, we both have to sacrifice lots of other things, schedules. It becomes our entire day to do that. And the other end of the spectrum is let’s have a meeting by appointment, which says. Okay, we’re gonna carve out 30 minutes at a specific time that I think is gonna work, but I have no idea what life is gonna throw me that day and that time.

And I might be late or, I might be sick, or my kid might be screaming ’cause they’re home and whatever. We are the space in between. We’re trying to occupy the space that’s in between those two things. ’cause they’re both imperfect solutions with a, with benefits. But we think there’s an a third way of thinking about life, and that’s kind of what this software is facilitating.

So we built a technology, we didn’t build it on the back of Unreal or Unity, so we’re not on someone else’s 3D architecture. We’ve really built our own engine and our own technology. That was hard, [00:24:00] expensive, and slow. And to then take that technology and productize. It was also kind of a lot of learnings along the way because we, at a certain point as a company, we’re about the least user empathetic people you could imagine, because we’d spent two or three years living inside this software, knowing all the quirks, knowing the limitations, knowing how to do things, and becoming very comfortable with five steps to get something simple done. And then we had to all grow up and myself included, and just be realize, I’m not the user, you’re not, none of us are the user anymore.

Like we’re the super users who are totally jaded and like, so, so we spent 2024 learning about the user. Running beta programs, getting some customers along the way, figuring out where are the rough edges that need to be solved to make this not weird and to make it seem natural and make it somewhat intuitive.

And the, the kinda last piece of that is, okay, the product today is a virtual office, but we can do a lot of things with this because [00:25:00] it’s unlimited customizable real estate that puts people in a in real time audio video together. And it works in a web browser on whatever, you know, computer you’re on or tablet or device like Mo, like most of them.

And that’s cool. And so that’s one of our challenges. And my challenges specifically as kind of CEO founder here that’s guiding the ship is stay focused. Don’t try and do everything all at once. Um, we have deviated and we’ve done some brand experience kind of marketing experiences for Starbucks actually, and we had millions of people join these worlds and we’ve made creative immersive environments and like, that’s awesome.

But we also like the goal from day one has to build and release this virtual office product that can change the way companies are, are working. And so that’s where we are in this journey now.

Joel: That’s just phenomenal. Um, but I think it’s a very typical tech founder story, which is I saw a problem. I over-engineered it and, and built it to the best of my ability and, and [00:26:00] I think the right decision not to build on somebody else’s platform. We’re seeing a lot of platforms collapsing and

being devalued, um, and then getting it in front of a, a, a. Customers and finding out, well, that wasn’t really exactly, they weren’t not using it the way that I, I was gonna use it or the way that I thought they would use it.

Um, and having the, the humility to, you know, to be open to that perspective. I see a lot of tech founders who are just like, well, you know that the market just doesn’t understand me. That’s the wrong way to look at this. You know, I, I think, I think growing. From a, as a, as a, as a perspective to that. Alright, I can do anything.

What do I need to do right now?

Um, I do a thing with, with, uh, um, with my clients. So I, I’ve, I’ve designed a card game that I use as a, uh, uh, a workshop tool. But you know, it, it kind of gets back to, to what we’ve been [00:27:00] talking about, which is, you know, engaging emotionally first, really being able to connect and lean in before you start developing like the goods and the technicals, and then building that, that credibility and connection.

So what I’d love to do is do a little bit of Message Therapy.

With you. I’m gonna throw one of these cards at you, uh, from, from each of the levels of the deck,

uh, and just see what comes to mind. This is the, you know, so this is kind of putting you on the spot a little bit.

Erik: I love it.

Joel: We’ll get right back to my conversation with Erik, which was incredible. I had such a good time with this. It’s been a long time coming and getting this episode cut together, so definitely go check out Katmai. I’ll also ask you to go over to Amazon or to your favorite retailer and check out my book,

Be a Nerd That Talks Good.

Everything that I talk about in this next section, talking about the Message Therapy, you get information in this book. It’s full color. There’s, there’s a whole lot here. It’s awesome. It’s how to run your own Messaging Therapy workshop, or I offer a free 15- minute Message therapy session if you head [00:28:00] on over to NerdThatTalksGood.com. I can’t wait to hear from you guys, and if you do buy the book, please, please, please leave a review. That’s what helps out the most. You can also review this podcast. Let’s get back to my conversation with Erik, shall we?

This is always fun. So again, I ripped off Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, talking about, you know, biological drivers. Um, and we’re gonna work our way down. What I’d like to just ask about the idea, the future, what’s different in your future that you see than where everybody else is? What’s your, what’s your picture for Katmai or communications in the future?

Yeah. I think that what’s different in our future at Katmai is we can break down some barriers, give some flexibility back to people. Um, I, I always look at like, visibility is a two way street. Like. Especially with a company, managers feel like they’ve lost view into what people are doing and people are kind like, Hey, I’m doing my work, but also.[00:29:00] 

In a remote work environment, it’s kind of hard to work your way up and be seen. So like people want to see, but people also want to be seen. And those are some of the problems with remote work as as defined today. And I think that it doesn’t have to be work from home. I think it can be work from anywhere.

So I showed you our virtual office, which is where, you know, 25, 30 of us every day are. And it doesn’t matter where I am in the world, I travel an ungodly amount, especially for a guy that runs a video conferencing company. But I’ve found in order to kind of raise money and get in front of customers and tell the story and show what we see the vision as being, it really helps to get in front of people and make a personal connection.

Once you’ve made that personal connection, once even in person, it totally alters your, your virtual communications from then on out because you have a baseline of like, we’ve met. So I just see the future of Katmai enabling a bit more freedom, uh, for just for people. Because right [00:30:00] now we are shackled to nine to five squares of video, whether you’re at home or the office and you’re expected to jump to him on your phone and you know.

People that are using our way of work. It’s not like you have to come in for nine hours or 10 hours a day. It’s just choose your, choose your, pick your poison. Here, it’s like maybe it’s three, three days a week, three hours at a time that everybody’s kind of together, and then you feel like, oh, you’ve gotten what you need out of culture and people and you’ve, your, your needs have been met in terms of I’m seeing and I’ve been seen, 

Yeah, 

Erik: and that is something different.

Joel: Seeing and being seen. That’s awesome.

Uh, so contextualizing with a story, I like to talk about the bad guy, the villain. So right now, status quo, what’s a name to the industry? Bad guy that nobody’s talking about.

Erik: Um, is it, is it a, do I have to name a person or can I name a, a, a 

Joel: Let, let, let, let’s make up a name so you know, if I’m a [00:31:00] sock, if I’m a a a soap company, I talk about the Stinky Sock Problem.

The Stinky Sock Problem. So what’s, what is Katmai Stinky Sock Problem?

Erik: I’d say when you have, um, a global leader that’s tied to the old ways of doing things, that’s like, there’s, like I said earlier, there’s only two options. You come back to the office or you’re fired. And like that is, that’s happened that we are, we are not a three day return to office. We’re a five day return to office company.

So here’s a funny anecdote. The CEO of Zoom about a year ago said everybody back to the office. You can’t run a company on Zoom. And that was leaked. I love that one. I would agree with him. You really can’t run a company on Zoom because it’s like it’s meeting by appointment and before you know it, all your life is, is appointments and no one gets any work done.

There’s no time to get any work 

Joel: Yeah. 

Erik: And so. If, if the structure is you’re glued to endless scheduled [00:32:00] structured meetings or you have to go back to the office, I think those are kind of the. The false narratives. These are like the, the boogeymen here. And so here’s what you know, Jamie Diamond of JP Morgan has said, everyone back to the office, uh, you need to know what your people are doing.

No one’s doing their work. And you know, the other one is like, and no new hires can ever work their way up in a company. And I call bullshit to all of that, even as big as they are because we have other massive global companies that have taken a look at Cap. Might have said, oh. We wanna use that. Oh, uh, video conferencing, or even in the office at separate offices.

Those are exclusive. And I use the word exclusive in a negative light, as in they are excluding, because if you’re not invited to the meeting, you don’t exist. If you’re in the Chicago office, you don’t matter to the Los Angeles conversation. It’s, you don’t exist the same way. And for those back to office things, and we’re like kind of.

We are shrinking the global ecosystem. We’re making you closer. We’re making it like, I can work with you in London and I’m in New York and it we’re [00:33:00] across the hall. That’s remarkable. Like that is fucking remarkable. And it happened on accident because the first engineer Katmai was in the Netherlands and the first guys in the 3D creative team were in Florida and we had another engineer in Alaska and I’m in upstate New York.

Uh, like actually the way that I got the, the, the guy in the Netherlands to join up and do this with me as a stranger around the internet that we’d never met was I said, I got, he told me I would feel, I would probably feel lonely if I left my job that he’d been at for 10 plus years in the Netherlands.

He’s like, I probably would miss my colleagues. We don’t know when this pandemic’s gonna be over, you know? And so I. I challenged him and I said, I’ll tell you what, let’s pick a time next week. You open cap mine. I open cap mine. It wasn’t even call cap mine at the time. This is just like software that barely ran at this point.

You open it, I’ll open it, we’ll be a little divider line across the hall. I’ll be in my little office. You be in your office and I can come talk to you and we’ll just see what happens. And I [00:34:00] completely staged and I just invited like 15 people in that day. And it was like, Hey, you wanna meet this guy in the Netherlands?

And they’re like, what is this? What’s going on? Who’s this guy? But I barraged him with so much social interaction that the next day he relented and he is like, fine, I’ll do it. Like, okay, I see how this, this could work. And at the end of the day, I got kind of a, and will you please leave me alone so I can get some work done?

Joel: Yeah.

Erik: So I think the boogeyman is this, like, we’ve gotta do it this way. ’cause that’s the way it’s always been done. I just think, come on, it’s 2025. You’re telling me the best we’ve got is like a grid, like it basically Skype plus a little more like gimme a break.

Joel: Choose, choose. Uh, it’s, it’s the, uh, uh, the choice that you don’t want to want to have to make. It’s like, it’s a, it’s an impossible choice.

 Awesome. I am looking for a, the, a great follow-up card to that, and I think the best one for that is the superpower.

So how do you empower your customers? [00:35:00] What, so if, if the, if the, the villain is being chained to a bad choice or being chained to the status quo,

Erik: Yeah.

Joel: is the, what’s the superpower?

What’s the enablement?

Erik: Oh man. We, we enable people to be more efficient, to drive culture in a way that has become stagnant, uh, to. Level, the playing field a bit more between who’s in the office and who’s not. Um, you know, we have a, this, there’s a perfect anecdote here. A customer in Norway, they’re, they’ve been a customer for a couple years now.

They actually acquired another company. ’cause one day I was like, oh, you guys have, did you hire 12 new people? Oh no, we acquired a company and now everyone’s on the platform. Love this. They are all over Norway and two of the people were in the same city and what I loved is they don’t sit in a conference room in Katmai together on one computer.

They go to different offices. So everyone’s in the same bubble and everyone’s on the same playing field. It, it like [00:36:00] levels this see and be seen thing and it’s not that awkward like, hey, there’s three of us here in the conference room and everyone’s trying to like figure that out and it feels disconnected.

They have a policy like, oh, we would never do that. No, no. We all just go into this thing. So I think there’s like an equalizer. That’s nice.

Joel: I love that. Equalizing the playing field. What phrase do you find yourself repeating often within the company? And can you, uh, match it up to a phrase that you hear from your customers all the time?

Erik: So the one that I find myself repeating all the time is, f*********k But that’s, that’s mostly because that’s, that’s mostly because we’re a small company trying to do huge things with. Limited resources,

Joel: Yeah.

Erik: right? Whether they be time, a number of people, expertise, money, you name it. Those are the constant jugglers.

So, so me as the, all my eggs are in the Katmai basket, that’s my, pretty much my inner monologue all the time.

Joel: But your, [00:37:00] your, your customers probably are feeling the same thing within their own companies. They’re just like, fuck, we, why can’t, why can’t we do this? Why can’t we get

this done? Why did this take 45 minutes?

You know? And I 

Erik: So the, the thing, here’s what customers tell us is we’ve, we’ve helped provide a way to be more inclusive. And that’s where I like that as the opposite of exclusive, like exclusive usually means like, oh good, it’s so exclusive. It’s like, no, it’s excluding people. So we’re, we’re giving it a, a way to be more inclusive in a remote environment or hybrid environment.

We are saving time. We are allowing people to declutter their calendars. We are, and that anecdote from the customer that says it, it turns next week’s, 30 minute meeting into today’s five minute conversation, he expands on that by saying, now I’ve gotten that done. That’s unblocked. I don’t have to think about it next week.

And I can get back to what’s important, which is like selling right? Or like, you know, generating revenues, like I get back to work. So it frees us up to focus on the things that are more important. Um.

Joel: You, you, [00:38:00] you just answered the next card, which is, uh, the testimonial. Talking about yourself is weird. So what do people say about you? And, and I think that is, that’s the most, most powerful thing, is when you

Erik: I mean, what do they say about me? They say, who? Look at that ginger. That looks like O’Brien. That’s what they say about me, but.

Joel: The company, the company. But when you can find somebody who can turn, I, I, I use this in my, in my workshops, I say, you know, oh, we’ve reduced your, your man hours by 46%. Or a customer saying, I no longer have to double staff my shifts.

It’s the exact same outcome, but one is bringing into a, uh, a story or connecting on a human level.

So.

Erik: I’m so happy to stop talking about us and let other people talk about us. Uh, and, and it took us a while to get there, right? And to even get clearance for, to say these things. But here’s what, in fact, Katmais virtual office helps this six person company save $3,000 a month. They got rid of their office, they got rid of their lease.

Uh, being [00:39:00] together in Katmai’s virtual office allows for deeper connections, realtime collaboration, spontaneous spontaneity and fun that wasn’t pre previously achievable in our remote workflow. That’s a big marketing company. 

Joel: Yeah. They sounds like a marketing company.

Erik: right? Yeah. Couldn’t even read it. Uh, we’ve got, Katmai has led to a paradigm shift in how we connect and communicate.

It has become the key communication tool in our company globally. After discovering cap immersive virtual office, there is no going back. These guys have another one. This company said, I got an email from the founder. They’re a customer service company, so they have a, they have a couple of offices and a lot of customer service agencies that are, or agents that are distributed.

And maybe like two years ago I was like, Hey, I, I think I asked him could I use a quote. He is like, you can use any quote you want. You just helped me get a 1 million Euro deal. I was like, how did I do that? He goes, oh, we, we handled a new business meeting in our virtual office that’s branded for our company and like.

This is while we were still in beta. So some of these things were still a little clunky for first time 

Joel: Yeah. [00:40:00] 

Erik: He was like, it was a little goofy the first five minutes, but it actually helped us bond with the people and we got the deal and like the virtual office helped us close the deal. ’cause it showed we are working in a different way and we’re thinking outside the 

Joel: Wow, 

Erik: I was like, man, I love that. So if we’re saving money, we’re helping you earn money, we’re driving deeper connections, real time collaboration. Now I need to like get a hundred more of those and turn that into like scientific data at some point. But we do have the anecdotal stuff that’s like, we can help you delete a lot of your meetings on your calendar.

So I have, personally, I have zero standing meetings. I have none. I do not have an internal standing meeting. I have an open door policy. If I’m in the office and the door is literally open, come and talk to me. Do people sometimes, but like for example, I need to talk to our chief product officer. Dan. We need to talk all the time.

He and I must be aligned all the time at the phase of the company we’re in as this product is out and we’re still helping it mature and, and listen to all the user feedback. And [00:41:00] what are the things that are gonna help grow adoption in a small company? Well, it turns out they’re way different than a big company and like the needs are very different even regionally.

He and I probably talk 15 times a day for 30 seconds, five seconds or 30 minutes just doesn’t matter. But we don’t have a scheduled meeting, and I don’t with anyone for that reason. It’s like, well, why do we need to do that? We, we have this incredible tool. He asked me maybe like a year ago, well, would happen to our company if we didn’t have Katmai, and before he could finish the sentence, I was like, oh, we would be instantly so much worse of a company just like.

I don’t know how I would do what we do without this tool. Like, uh, it would be impossible to just like shift our, we would lose all, any sense of culture that we have. We’d all become Slack warriors. Here’s a perfect, you brought up Slack earlier and like the endless scroll, perfect anecdote. Dan and I are at the future of work conference in New York City this summer.

Uh, a trade show about the future of work. It’s mostly HR related and we gave, we gave a 20 minute talk about the virtual office, [00:42:00] showed it to people and had a booth for a day or two. During this time we had been scoping a feature which was requested, which was a Slack integration and ’cause we, we use one other tool, we’re Katmai and Slack because we’re distributed.

We still have to chat and share some things and there’s still asynchronous work that happens. I really prefer the synchronous work because it was a perfect anecdote. We realized if in Slack you’re like even one or two degrees off alignment, before you know it, you can be 45 degrees off alignment really fast because people are coming back to messages, they’re distracted, they’re reading it.

You’re losing this context of voice and anything personal misinterpreting. And we were gone for a couple of hours and there was a lot of discussions happening on Slack while we were gone. And it was like, oh shit, we’re so out of alignment on the Slack integration because of fucking Slack. Like you can’t make this shit up.

And so it goes back to that customer service company. They have a rule and their rule [00:43:00] is, uh, he, this, the founder says, I am absolutely allergic to email. And I hate Slack. And their rule is when something gets off the rails, even a little bit on Slack, they go, this is a cap. My conversation. And what that means is like, this is a conversation that has to happen in person, around a table, in a calm, equal way.

Not we’re gonna endlessly write on Slack, so,

Joel: Man, “This is a Katmai Conversation”. Put that on the T-shirts.

Erik: I know.

Joel: Last one. And this is this, this is kind of a gimme. Um, what’s the learning curve? You know, what kind of support and training programs do you need? And, and I might answer this one for you, which is probably none. ’cause we know how to talk to each other.

Erik: Right, right. You know, I’d say the one thing that we always have to drive home so far is someone’s gotta be the stakeholder and own. How are we gonna use this? And that’s different at different sized companies, but someone has to say, we’ve got this [00:44:00] tool. It can’t just be, we registered your account and you can go into the office.

Because what happens is someone logs into the office, there’s no one there, they don’t know what they’re supposed to do, and then they leave.

Joel: Yeah.

Erik: And you don’t have your, like, even now, it’s a, it’s a problem we’re solving with, with our trial, which is, um, if you go start a trial and you load your office by yourself the first time you have experienced nothing, like there’s no point yet because you’re not.

Engaged with anyone. You haven’t had anything spontaneous. You haven’t found the value. You haven’t achieved the value yet, and so you need to be in there with someone else. And there’s this economy that happens, like the more people that get in it, it’s not frantic, it’s, it’s like a great kind of busy, it’s like, holy shit, look at all the people I have access to right now.

And what happens is like, oh. A conversation, inspiration or something even reactive of like, did you see that feedback come through? Let’s talk about that for a second. And you look across the hall and the product person’s there, and then the experienced person’s there and the, you know, the 3D oh, before you know it, you’re having a meeting, responding super quickly [00:45:00] in a way that is unstructured, but is structured and is just beautiful.

Like, it’s just, it’s so excellent. So learning curve for a company, adopting it, it also depends on the size. So something we didn’t think was gonna happen, uh, as quickly as it did was. Enterprise interest. So we thought this product would make a lot of sense to small companies, medium sized companies, fully remote companies, tech startups, you know, younger tech savvy like it, where it’s a no brainer and we just market to them.

They’d find it, see the value, sign up and start using it. Now that has happened. What we didn’t expect was that massive international companies with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees would look at this and say, oh, this could potentially solve some problems that we’re having at our organization.

And they’re different. Those problems are much different than the 20 person company, and the way of adoption is much different. So we have this new feature rolling out called Office Hours, and it’s primarily where. All the people can be in a virtual office space, like, and you’ve got a leader or [00:46:00] anyone that schedules office hours and you can join their queue and get in it, and it’s like, oh no, I didn’t have to like go through this whole like, uh, you know, Hey John John’s my boss that I don’t talk to very often or whatever reason.

Hey John. Um, I’d really like to get some time with you, and then that can already become awkward. It’s like, well, is there a problem? What’s the problem? Do we need to talk now? Should we schedule time in two weeks when I have 30 minutes free? And then that can lead to its own strange feelings before that whole thing.

And now it’s like, Hey, I have office hours. Jump in the queue. Let me unblock you. I am making myself available to everyone. Get in the queue and we’ll have our conversation. And the cool thing about that one is while everyone’s in the queue, everyone’s still in a virtual office and has access to each other.

So this is a feature that’s being really, that’s very exciting to some of these larger enterprise companies. We’re also trying to facilitate offsites in a way that’s like, Hey, when the mandate comes down of like, you gotta save millions of dollars on the budget, well, the offsite that was gonna cost $800,000, like maybe we do it virtually this year, [00:47:00] but.

An offsite on Zoom. No, thank you. That’s not an offsite, that’s just another meeting. But when, when you have agency, when you can move throughout an environment, it’s a different feeling. And so maybe in one of these cards is how does your, how does this, how does your product make people feel would be an interesting one.

And you might have it, you probably have it, but the, the one piece of feedback we get all the time that I don’t know how to quantify is it just feels more natural. Like I’m in Katmai. I’ve had a discussion with someone and it felt more natural and I, I think that that has a lot to do with, it wasn’t so overly scheduled, but there’s a foreground and there’s a background and like, it’s weird, if you and I were sitting at a table and we were locked eyes to eye for 60 minutes, that’d be the strangest lunch we’d ever had.

Joel: Right.

Erik: Like one of us would walk away being like, that guy’s a serial killer. Um. We need to look around at the environment. We need to appreciate a shared environment. You and I don’t have a shared environment right now. There’s no environment to the thing we’re talking about. [00:48:00] There’s just a background, but we don’t have anything in common.

And when you underpin a conversation with a shared environment, something psychological happens, like one of the customers has said, I don’t remember my Zoom meetings, but I remember every conversation in Cat Eye and, and there’s socio sociological studies around the brain and feelings and memory in place.

And how those all affect a memory in, in a conversation. And I don’t know. I think it’s just really interesting to like throw environment into it.

Joel: Yeah, that it’s fascinating. I mean, I’m, I’m, I’ve, I’ve fully enjoyed our conversation. I think if we could have recorded the podcast in Katmai, would’ve been, uh, that would’ve been like a, that’s a, that’s a feature request we should

Erik: We, I mean, honestly, we, we we can, we could, we could. And we can and we should next time.

Joel: I’d love to.

Um, I, I’d love to sort just sort of wrap up with, now that you’re at the position you are and you’re still growing and, and and whatnot, um, what advice would you have to be for somebody who is, they’ve got something they, they maybe are struggling to [00:49:00] communicate it.

I mean, you’re still in that space of, of discovery, um, but getting your first advocate on board, um. An advice for a for founder or a techie or a nerd.

Erik: It’s interesting. Just don’t give up. So, I mean, I know that’s like really simple advice, but. I’ve raised a ton of money. It’s been really hard, and I’ve been told no so many different ways. Never have I ever been told no in so many ways, whether explicit or being ghosted. You know, I’m like, I’ve been married for over 10 years.

I haven’t been ghosted in a long time. I get ghosted all the time now. I’m like, what the, like, huh. This is how the world works. Um. I’d say it’s this. Don’t give up. And if the money’s there, take it. ’cause it can change so quickly And like, don’t overthink, don’t overthink it. Like I’ve had to, you know, Bob and weave in very interesting financial climates.

I’ve also spent every last cent that my family [00:50:00] had that we had made in our lives to do this thing. So we’re like so all in on cat buy. Uh, it has consumed my family for the last five years too. I mean, my daughters were two. Four, and now they’re seven and nine. And I’m just like, how did that happen? And they, they, they know, they like OD in Katmai and they, they just think this is normal.

It’s, it’s pretty funny, but, uh, it’s, don’t give up. And if the money’s there, take it.

Joel: So wrapping up, how do you unplug? So maybe this is a, a question kind of about, you know, I’m in my office, my shed, I walk into my house like I am where I work as a consultant.

I’m always at work

and, and even now, you know, I have problems unplugging my wife works for Canadian company in our guest room upstairs.

It’s just, it’s our reality.

Um, how do we unplug? How do you do it?

Erik: So there’s gotta be a, I’ll tell you how people do it and how I do it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna [00:51:00] steal a phrase from one of our employees, Michael, and there’s gotta be a better way to say this. Because we don’t use the word metaverse, but he’s like, you know what it is. On Friday I unplugged from the metaverse and I go back to the meat verse.

But it’s, it’s, it is funny because there’s a feeling that capite gives you of a start and stop to the workday. And it was an unintended benefit, but it’s a benefit because. My work day is I wake up, make the kids breakfast, get ’em out to school or camp, have a gazillion shots of espresso, finally make my way downstairs with the dogs and like, you know, by like 9, 9:30, I’m down under the garage in my office where I’m now and.

I’ll do some email, I’ll catch up on some slack and I’ll actually do a few clErikal things before I go to work because going to work for me means opening the Katmai browser window and logging into my office. ’cause, ’cause I, I, and I have the feeling of I’m going somewhere and when you get there, all of a sudden [00:52:00] it’s like, there might be three people and there might be 20 people because I don’t who’s gotten there first.

And we don’t have a hard and fast thing. We just operate on East Coast time and people are kind of expected to be around ish. More often than not, you wanna be around. ’cause if you’re not there, you’re not part of the conversation. And so we’ve like moved to the conversation. And so on Fridays, I, I try and make a point to like, if anyone’s left in the office when I’m leaving and be like, Hey, how’s it going?

How, what are you doing this weekend? Like you can have that weird, nonsensical, non-important conversation that actually is important to have because otherwise no one knows anything about each other. And it’s just like. Culture is small talk culture is bullshitting about the weather. Honestly. It’s like those are little things that I think are really important to like fabric of culture and, and then when I close my Katmai office, honestly, there’s like, I don’t, I don’t know if like relief is the right, right word, but there’s like a, a release of I’ve left.

I’m not in that place anymore. I don’t have to have that conversation anymore. Now I’m [00:53:00] unique in that like as the founder. You don’t ever get to stop because I have a cap table full of investors that have questions. We’re raising money. I’m also basically like operations. I do like too many jobs of too many things, so it never stops.

But I do, I play music, so I’m a, I’m a grunge musician and so like all this was my former life. This is all like my recording studio stuff. Studio stuff. That’s the real survival plan is if it really, shit really hits the fan, I’ll sell all that stuff and we can pay the mortgage a little while longer. But no, I play music, I play drums.

I play guitar. I have two Pomeranians that give me a nice, pleasant, cute distraction, you know, and I, but unplugging doesn’t happen too often ’cause I also have small kids, so,

Joel: Yeah, well, I mean that’s, that’s the, that’s the stage of life.

Um, I’ll include links to Katmai, obviously in the, in the show notes. I like to leave my listeners

with homework ’cause nerds love homework. Um, so any. Recommendations, any way to, to connect with you? Um, who [00:54:00] are you listening to nowadays? Just like, let’s give them some, some juicy links to, to follow along with.

Erik: Yeah. Uh, Katmai tech.com. K-A-T-M-A-I-T-E-C-H. Uh, the name comes from, I grew up in Alaska. Katmai is a national park, volcano, mountainous, big, beautiful region. That was a kind of a cool word, and, and it connects to the, the views in Katmai. I like to make them extreme. Have an office at the top of a mountain where you could like never have an office.

And you can, all, every office has a corner view with a nice, you know, corner, corner office with a nice view sort of, sort of thing. Um, uh, you know, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m not super active. I, I try, I, I read stuff once or twice a week if I can, but I’m like in this constant, like, we’re working with customers, we’re selling into some big, big companies and doing investment and so I’m just like, how many things can I keep up with at once?

Um. And who am I listening to? I, I’m not listening to any podcast. I’m listening. I’m very excited about the new Deftones album that’s [00:55:00] coming out in a couple weeks. So they’ve got two singles out that I’m enjoying so far.

Joel: Awesome. Well, Erik, thanks so much for joining. This has been, uh, totally cool, and I will, uh, absolutely be pushing people to check out Katmai because I, I, I’ve, you showed it to me. Product-led growth. That’s what it’s all about. And

I, I, I really believe that, that, uh, you’re onto something here.

Erik: Joel. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, and I’m, I’m gonna send you a couple nerdy pictures of me.

Joel: Awesome. Thanks so much, man.

Erik: Cool.

Thank you.

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a Message Therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.