Erik Braund Podcast Transcript
Erik Braund joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Erik Braund. Erik Braund is the founder and CEO of Katmai, the virtual office platform built for one singular mission to delete your effing meetings before launching a war on back-to-back calendar chaos.
Erik spent years running a music and video production company and playing in Alaska’s most grungy of underground grunge bands. Delmag, a band whose name is permanently tattooed on no less than three fans’ bodies. Erik and the team, built Katmai to bring back the spontaneity, speed and actual humanity of working together. Got a full calendar of nonsense. He’ll shred it while you pretend not to enjoy it. Well, good afternoon, Eric. Welcome to the show.
Erik Braund: Hey, thanks for having me, Brian. I appreciate being here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I really appreciate it. You’re in New York. I’m in Kansas City. We’re just an hour apart time zone wise, so I appreciate you making the time today.
And Erik, I’m jumping right into your first question. Your past in music and video production seems quite far from software engineering. How did your experience running production projects and working in creative media inform the founding of Katmai? And were there lessons from that early life, like touring, producing, creativity under constraints that translate directly into the startup life.
Erik Braund: You know, that’s a great question. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it just like that, but I love it from a young age. I was a tinkerer. I was building computers when I was 10 and 12, you know, may have, uh, installed a CPU in wrong once and burned that thing up and had to buy a new one. Hard lesson learned there as a youngster, shoveling in driveways to make money.
But, uh, you know, I learned enough. Programming. It started with HTML to make a website and then, you know, it would just tinker over the years. And then I went to grad school for kind of this interactive telecommunications program at NYU. Learned some processing, got to make hardware and software, talked to each other.
Dropped out of that program because I was distracted by other things. But I did learn an appreciation for what goes into software development and code and, and kind of, you know, it’s not so simple as like. You gotta really think through what the result is. And I learned a good appreciation for it, and I learned that I know just enough to be dangerous, just enough to know that I didn’t wanna be a software engineer professionally or even as a hobbyist moving forward in my life.
I’ve always been really attracted to hardware and so this is actually a really interesting result where we wound up with Katmai. The journey was, I was in audio video production. I’ve, you know, toured in bands, spent a lot of time in studios that evolved to video production and broadcast. So, kind of like, I’d say 2010 through 2020 were mostly spent doing video productions.
And that was anything from music to, you know, large scale productions for multinational companies, whether they’re banks or you know, food Network, New York Times. Just lots of interesting dynamic projects. What that was, was a big mix of people, tight timelines, uh, lots of hardware, lots of lighting, and then post-production, a hundred percent of software.
So, it was like a hardware start and a software finish, kind of, if you will, for those types of projects. And that came to a grinding halt during COVID. And I found myself in a position of, oh boy, what are we gonna do? These clients that I work with have a new challenge. They can’t be together anymore. What are we gonna do?
Uh, and it turned to things like we’re using now. There’re tools like Zoom teams. I remember telling a bank, Hey, have you ever heard of a, a tool called Zoom? And it was like, well, no, we’ve never heard of Zoom. And isn’t that crazy, Brian, that there was a time where, Zoom wasn’t normal. Do, do you remember that time?
Brian Thomas: Oh, absolutely.
Erik Braund: I mean, it kept the world moving, thank God, and so did Teams and meet and WebEx and you know, every video conferencing tool as we know it kept the global economy moving. I was in a unique position where I’m now having left New York City, living upstate with my, you know, my wife and children and dogs and cats and all these things, and trying to figure out what’s next.
Because we, we thought, oh boy, probably gonna be a while till we’re in closed rooms doing audio video productions together again. And I, I wound up connecting with some really brilliant individuals just over the internet. Software engineer, graphics folks, you know, film directors, just kind of like, like-minded people looking for something to do.
And this concept came together of we could be together in a virtual space. Now listen, that’s a video game. People have been doing that for 20 and 30 years. However, we decided that you could take your video camera and map it to your avatar. And now you are you in a virtual space. You’re not an avatar, you’re not avatar.
Cartoon representation. You’re not building a character, you’re not trying to make a 3D model look like yourself. It’s not facial recognition. It’s like, it’s like so simple. It’s like a head, it’s a forehead, slapper, like, ah. It’s like, it’s so obvious. It’s right there. Why hasn’t this been done? Well, it turns out it was really hard to do, Brian.
It took us years and tens of millions of dollars to build it and have it work really well and and make sure it could work on billions of devices that, uh, exist. So. That was a very long-winded way of saying, you know, I think the, the dynamic start and stop, push and pull immediate problems to solve on the fly lifestyle of audio, video production, music, touring, all of those things.
I think it actually kind of poised me pretty well to be now at the helm of a, of a software company. ’cause at the end of the day, what we’re delivering is a better human experience. We are in, we are delivering. A better interaction with people, not with robots, not with ai, not with avatars. Our goal is to have a, a more enriched connection with people that are on the other side of the screen, or the Wi-Fi connection, or the tablet or whatever it is.
So it’s a very people forward business and we’re solving this kind of connection problem with software. And it’s it, Brian. It’s pretty damn cool.
Brian Thomas: I love that. Really do because there’s, I know we’ve, we had to, uh, you know, adapt right, and innovate really quickly during the pandemic, as you talked about that challenge.
But, uh, now we’ve got some more time and things have evolved. Uh, people like you creating platforms like Katmai are making a world of difference. Um, and of course I loved your backstory. Uh, you know, a lot of people start out in tech in some way. You had that curiosity, that desire initially in the software, but then flipped it to hardware and, and the rest was history.
So I appreciate that. And Erik, Katmai was born during the pandemic, as you mentioned, out of frustration with existing tools for remote work. What was the prototype or spark that made you think this could be something better than Zoom plus meetings? What were the early technical or product decisions that set Katmai apart?
Erik Braund: Oh yeah. So, um, the early technical days, if you fired up a Katmai, on a $5,000 computer, your fan would kick on. After about 10 seconds, your computer would be really sluggish. Your frame rate would drop and you’d be like, boy. What a cool experience. If we could ever make this work, this will really be special.
And, and I mean, literally one of our board members, I had to buy him a new laptop. I, we, I remember the first time meeting him in person. Uh, we, we put Katmai up on his MacBook Pro. Now granted it was an older MacBook Pro, but I’d say within about five minutes of being on a meeting. His laptop heated up. It’s, I, in my memory, it probably levitated off the table and then, uh, it turned black and it wouldn’t turn back on.
So, these are the early days of software development, research and development, creating something new, marrying, you know, audio and video and a high frame rate, high quality 3D environment in a way that just isn’t the norm hasn’t been done. And, and what’s spectacular about it is. We’re actually rendering it on your machine.
We’re not doing it in the cloud, thank God, because we’d be competing with open AI and everyone else for GPU space. So good decision we made five years ago, but also it made us work really damn hard to. Optimize, optimize, optimize to make sure it could work and look incredible on a desktop computer with a dedicated graphics card, but also be highly functional for, you know, an $800 HP corporate issued average laptop.
Right? So to get to that point from where I melted a board member’s laptop, to where I now have enterprise customers using it on average hardware, that was a long road and we were. You know, I like working in a virtual garage. ’cause, ‘cause our entire company was built on Katmai. We’ve never had a physical office.
We only use our, our office, our software, our everything to communicate with each other. And so we learned the byproduct of, of by spending so much time together in this virtual platform. For on demand conversations in a place together, but with features that make it feel like a physical space, doors that close, sound zones, privacy, visibility, all of these things.
Um, we were able to build Katmai in Katmai, which is a really incredible thing. Um, I’ve now spent five years inside of Katmai, which is kind of a crazy statistic. I don’t know if I have been in Katmai more or out of Katmai more in the last five years, but. I think to bring it back to like the technical hurdles and choices we had to make, um, one of which was, you know, we could render in the cloud, it’d be more expensive, it’d be a different thing.
We could be pixel streaming down to back to your computer like some gaming does, or we could render on your machine. We chose the harder path render on your machine. We also said. You know, there was a path of do we build this on the back of Unity or Unreal and, you know, some third party, uh, 3D engine. Do we use something like a Twilio to process all of our audio and video streams off, you know, off the shelf and pay them?
Again, we chose the much harder route, which was no, let’s build our own. So we have, you know, we call it the Katmai engine, and we really have built it from the ground up. You know, granted there’s open-source stuff involved too, but we built this thing from the ground up so we are able to really be in control of what we deliver and how we deliver it.
Um, that probably took us an extra year or two to really master that, I suppose. So, there was a heavy investment of time and money and r and d upfront. But on that same token, you know, we’ve invented something new. We have over 50 patents on this technology at this point, and now we’re in the very, very exciting phase of our company.
Go to market. We have customers. We’re no longer building in the dark with what we think people want. Our entire product roadmap now is customer driven, and that’s just a really fantastic place to be.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you for, uh, impacting all that. Um, a lot went into RD obviously, and uh, you gave some examples of some of the failures.
Uh, but again, failure is what creates success in the long term. Uh, I appreciate that you’re outta that now and you’re in the go-to-market stage. I think that’s pretty amazing. And Erik, how do you, uh, articulate Katmai value versus established tools? You know, we talked about Zoom, team, slack, et cetera.
What’s your positioning strategy in a crowded or remote work? Virtual office space?
Erik Braund: Yeah. Uh, great question. Uh, I get this one all the time, and now we actually have user data to back this up and tell a whole new story, which is pretty exciting. So, let’s take one step back and say we all used to go to the office.
And agreed upon time, Monday through Friday, nine to five. There was no cameras on, cameras off, we were just together. Occasionally the New York office and the LA office would do a, you know, a conference call or something, or New York and London had to get on some sort of video conference. Um. The point of being in the office together was because you could work when I, when an idea strikes, you could, you could follow that through conversations just begin in real time.
Not every 30 and 60 minute window of available time is booked for a meeting with someone anywhere in the world. So in a way. Like infinite access of Zoom and teams has totally just clogged our calendars because there’s this kind of demand, whether you’re in the office or not. Now, in a post COVID world, you’re still on video calls all day long.
So the magic of the physical office was you’re just there together. Culture is built through osmosis, literally by being in the same room, relationships form by hallway interactions and, and running into someone and the, Hey, can I bug you? Do you have two minutes? That is the value of the office being across the hall from a colleague like that is ultimately the collaborative value.
Right? On the other end of the spectrum, what happened was the entire world shifted to a meeting by appointment culture 30 minutes or 60 minutes, or some companies are 25 minutes and 55 minutes, but still, your entire life now is in these 30 and 60 minute blocks, right? And it’s like, okay, we have to have a conversation.
You know what? Geo geography is agnostic. What does that mean? Oh, God, now we have 10 hours of time zones we may have to cover. So it, it became very normal to straddle a lot of time zones and to fill up calendars. And before you know it, your entire calendar is just full. Before you know, you haven’t even had gotten time to work.
You’re just in meetings. So what Katmai is, is it’s a virtual place to log in and be around people. Now, some of our, you know, there are still some, um. Scheduled meetings in Katmai, right? But most of what happens is spontaneity. And we have a statistic that says, so our customers spend an average of 24 hours per week in Katmai.
What does that mean? They’ve got their home set up, they’re at the office, whatever, they fire up a browser window, and they have their virtual office open and they’re parked in a sound zone, uh, of room that is theirs, and they’re now available to their team. By being available to your team, we have found that 90% of the meetings that happen in Kamai are spontaneous.
10% are scheduled, so we’ve like unfurled ourselves from the scheduled meeting. Next thing that happens is the average meeting length in Kamai is 14 minutes. So by being available, you can have a shorter meeting. The average meeting length on Zoom is 54 minutes. The average meeting length on teams is 45 minutes.
We have shrunk that down to 14 minutes. Um, also the average time a Zoom company spends in Zoom meetings like a company that uses Zoom, spends in Zoom meetings per week, 17 hours a week are on a Zoom meeting teams 12 hours a week on teams meetings, Katai. By being available, we shrink that 17 hours to 2.3 hours.
So what we find is by being available, by being virtually across the hall from your colleague in this like open floor plan thing, you can have a quicker conversation and then you can have more frequent, shorter meetings. But the statistic that really drives it home for me is the average number of meeting participants.
So when a conversation strikes and you have a meeting in Katmai. Two and a half people is the average. Obviously it’s not a half a person, but you know, it’s, it’s somewhere between two and three, let’s say Zoom and teams both clock in at seven people. So if you take a big step back, if you know you’re, you’re looking at productivity and collaboration and these sorts of things, a Zoom company spends 17 hours a week with an average of seven people in meetings.
That is an expensive meeting schedule, very expensive meeting schedule. Count my companies two and a half people, 2.3 hours a week. So it’s frequency, it’s collaboration. It’s like you can have the face-to-face conversation when, when it sparks. And so that’s just like statistics. Let’s get to something that’s a little harder to track.
It’s culture and it’s feel. It’s like how do people feel and, and what effect is remote work in these tools having on our culture? And so. The feeling thing is really interesting. When we log onto another Zoom meeting or teams meeting or whatever, just let’s call it traditional video conferencing. I’m not singling out Zoom or teams.
It’s like when we log onto another video call as we know it, we’re looking at the Brady Bunch squares. Couple people are cameras off, someone’s on their phone, half the people are distracted. Someone is doing another else. You know something else. It’s like. There’s not a lot of face-to-face feeling here.
It’s just like a very utilitarian, yes, we’re connected technically, but are we connected? No, we’re not. It just doesn’t happen. Everyone is burned out and tired of the, the squares and the faces and the schedules. So, we’ve found by providing. A foreground, a background, you know, a scene, whether it’s like a mountain range or the city that you’re in, um, branding that matches the company’s look and feel, you know, whether it’s, you know, a bright orange thing or a bright yellow thing, or some subtle tones, but it like, oh, this feels like our company’s physical office feels, oh, we have some identity here.
So we get this feedback a lot that. You know, I don’t remember my Zoom and Teams meetings, but I remember my cat, my conversations, and the conversation word is really interesting because most of our environments are built around like nice round tables and the meetings happen around the table, and there’s something about like the table as this central thing.
We have cool screen shares and lots of bells and whistles and all the chat features that you could need, but there’s something about seeing your colleagues live on video around a table grounded to the same environment. This kind of place that sets a tone for the conversation. It’s just more relaxed, it’s more natural.
Those are words that we get from customers, feels more relaxed, conversation feels more natural to the point where this one really sums it up. Katmai turn’s next week’s meeting. Into 30, sorry, cap my turns. Next week’s, 30 minute meeting into today’s five minute conversation. And that’s so powerful because next week you gotta schedule it.
30 minutes long time meeting, oh God, today is, now let’s go five minutes conversation. Wouldn’t it be great to have conversations with each other again instead of endless meetings? And so it’s just like this totally different paradigm. So that was a real long-winded way to say like, what’s different? In Katmai, you kind of start your work together.
You start your day together and you’re available. And it isn’t just like a meetings by appointment thing. You have access to your team, but you can be anywhere because you’re in a shared space. And what we’ve lost with video conferencing is any concept of shared space. We are all physical beings sitting in places or standing or walking in places.
We need a place. You know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll button it up with even Zoom and the CEO of Zoom called everyone back to the office in a leaked memo that said you can’t have company called, I’m paraphrasing. You can’t have collaboration and culture on remote video conferencing everybody back to the office. And that was my moment of like, boy, oh boy, do I disagree?
Do I know it? Do we know it? And now our customers know it. And so that’s really a, so, so we are, if, if the physical office is one end of the spectrum and video conferencing as we’ve known it for the last 20 years, ’cause it really hasn’t evolved much since Skype. Honestly. That’s the other end of the spectrum, Katmai, we’re gonna occupy the 95% in between. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Lots of impact there, you know, but you are putting that people’s connection back into the workday even virtually. Um, it is a virtual place to log in and be around people. Uh, what I really liked was the stats.
You know, um, 90% of Cat MES meetings are spontaneous, 10% are scheduled. An average 14 minutes on a Katmai call, it’s just amazing ’cause we’re bogged down in literally 5, 6, 7 meetings per day that are an hour long, which is crazy. And the last question, Erik, if you could, it’s a lightning question. Briefly, share as remote hybrid work evolve.
What do you see changing in how we think about collaboration tools, presence and meetings themselves? Do you see these meetings being phased out? Maybe what features or tech systems like ai, maybe virtual reality, do you believe will shift the paradigm further? Are you preparing for that?
Erik Braund: Great question. I can hit that in a lot of ways.
So, here’s an interesting one. A year ago when we were in our beta phase, we got the question a lot of, uh, can we record the meetings in Katmai? And the answer was no. We hadn’t built a meeting recording feature at the time, and we had leaned pretty heavily into. We’re not storing your audio and video, they’re not stored in the cloud.
This is real time communication and it’s, it’s gone when, when the conversation’s over. Right. Um, part of that is we have an early customer base in Europe and their approach to data and privacy in Europe is very different than America. You know, in Europe it’s. I’m gonna, I’m gonna really summarize here, but it’s don’t keep track of anything about me, ever.
And in America, we are the product, and every company knows everything about us, and we’ve all accepted that, you know, I’m being a little crass here, but like, that’s a generalization we could make. So, we leaned into, okay, we’re not gonna store things as an early, early-stage thing. Uh, we recently dusted off, they’re like, Hey, should we pick up this video recording project on our roadmap?
And we realized something. No one has requested that in like nine months. We, we went into, we got into the market officially in February of this year. No one has requested can I have video meetings maybe once or twice. Um, why is that the widespread adoption of basic AI tools, and when I say basic ai, I mean meeting summarization, meeting notes.
Everybody in their, in their brother and sister has some sort of tool at this point, whether it’s Otter on their phone or GPT or whatever they’re doing. Everyone’s got a tool to summarize meeting notes. And so now the request has been, oh no, we don’t need a recording of the meeting. Can we get a transcript and a summary of the meeting notes?
It’s like, God, what a thing. In one year’s time, the artifact went from being, I need a real time audio video record. Of the meeting, which to me, I don’t, I don’t know, Brian, if you’ve ever had to like rewatch a meeting, you missed, it’s painful. I’ll do it on like two or three x. It’s, it’s a tough task to have to do.
That entire paradigm has shifted to, oh no, we just need like an AI generated transcript. It doesn’t have to be perfect. And a summary, and we’re good. And that was only in one year’s time. So it’s pretty wild. How, how, you know how fast. Patterns and habits can shift that way. Um, that’s not to say we won’t build the video recording for specific things, but just very interesting.
As you know, we’re still a startup. We have to prioritize all the things and what’s the most important, um, is it a feature or is it a security request from a massive company or, you know, all these things. That’s to say, so to step back one more time, you haven’t, for people that have never seen Katmai, um, it’s browser based.
It works on billions of devices that you all already own, and that was what we set out to do. When I started this thing, it just so happened six or 12 months later, Facebook turned into meta. Mark Zuckerberg said they were gonna spend $20 billion per year to strap this monstrosity to everyone’s face. It was gonna be the future of work.
Metaverse was the thing. You’re gonna be a cartoon of you, I’m gonna be a cartoon of me, but somehow we’re gonna spend all day, uh, in these devices. And I thought that was a dystopian hellscape and said, no way. A, let’s embrace this notion of face-to-face. The thing that we agree on, on the underpinning of a virtual world, a virtual space that has foregrounds, backgrounds, rooms, vistas, you know, the things we agree on that.
Um, I always thought the headset for work was really a solution chasing a problem. Um, I’m not sure if you’ve had headset experience. I’ve bought all of ’em. I get motion sick. I can’t do it for more than 20 or 30 minutes. Even as a game, but I’ll be damned if, if that was ever gonna be the norm for remote work and collaboration.
Like that just felt crazy to me. Um, not to mention, the only statistic I could find was Meta Horizons at its peak had a thousand people a day and like, maybe that’s wrong. That’s just what I found on the internet. But you’re like, wow, at this point they must have spent 40 or $50 billion on this whole thing.
It didn’t take off. Um. We wanted to solve a very different problem. We wanted to, to connect people in the most like life and human way, with the least technological barriers to entry. And that’s what Katmai is, is that’s why Katmai is special. It works on your device and it provides a whole new experience that you have never had on your device.
Uh, and so that’s just super exciting. Um, you know, I, I actually logged into our office on the Apple Vision Pro. I did the 3D scan of my face. I logged in and didn’t tell anyone and I went walking around the office and people were like, I think that’s Eric, but this feels creepy. I don’t like it. You know, like, and sure.
I took a side by side photo of the real me in Katmai, and the virtual me in Katmai, it was just so off, and all it did was reinforce people first. What is important to make the human connection and the collaboration more lifelike, more honest, more sincere. More, more just. Just natural. And so that’s, that’s at the end of the day, that’s everything we’re trying to do.
Uh, it just so happens that, you know, we have a customer and, and one of the guys is in Finland and the team is in Germany. And he told us the other day, you know, we’re only across the hall from each other, like maybe once or twice a year. I’ve been across the hall from these guys five days a week now.
Like, that’s, that’s amazing.
Brian Thomas: Wow. That, that is amazing. I appreciate Erik, you, uh, sharing all your insights and, and how things are gonna transform. But at the end of the day, um, you’re making it right. You’re getting people back together. You are the people connector and, in my eyes using your technology.
So I really appreciate that and Erik, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Erik Braund: Hey, Brian, really appreciate the opportunity and, uh, the thoughtful questions. Uh, thank you very much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Erik Braund Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
