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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I'm personally very excited to learn from today's guest and fellow entrepreneur, because this is someone who is incredibly accomplished in his career and I love the business that he's building.
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I love the fact that he's taken his corporate experience and really applied it to his entrepreneurial journey to create simple but powerful solutions.
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Let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Tim Monzouris.
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Tim brings extensive experience from his 14-year tenure at Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino, california.
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As a leader in wireless hardware engineering, he contributed to iconic products that we all know and love, like the iPhone and AirPods to iconic products that we all know and love, like the iPhone and AirPods.
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Tim holds degrees in computer and electrical engineering from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, which we obviously have a great relationship with.
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We're so grateful for the team over at Wharton.
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His leadership combines deep technical knowledge with a vision for innovation, and all of that culminates in his own company called Atrove, which is an AI-powered platform that transforms how organizations handle workplace communication.
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This is something that, whether you have a full-time job, you're in the wantrepreneur bucket or you are a full-time entrepreneur.
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Workplace communication is such an area of focus that we need to make better, and that's why I'm grateful for entrepreneurs like Tim to be part of the solution.
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Atrove synthesizes information across email, chat and meetings to surface critical insights and reduce communication overhead.
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In Tim's words, he says think of it as an AI assistant that helps teams cut through information overload and focus on what matters.
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Lots of lessons that we're all going to learn today, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Tim Monzouris.
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All right, tim, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me, brian, excited to be here.
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Heck.
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Yes, I am so excited, not just for listeners to learn from you today, but I'm personally very excited to learn from all of your perspectives and experiences.
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So, first things first, kick us off right here.
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Take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Tim?
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How did you start doing all this cool work?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I've been an engineer now for about 15 years and I originally grew up in Arizona, wanted to do engineering, figured Silicon Valley was a good place to do.
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That came out here and that's where I attended Santa Clara for a couple years.
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I got scooped up into big tech right as the iPhones launching, the iPad, all those really awesome products and landed a job at Apple, which is amazing, stuck it there for a while, went from, you know, individual contributor, then eventually the manager side of things jumped into a manager of managers, had an international team.
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It was a privilege to work with some of the smartest people I've ever had meet.
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It's awesome and eventually you start to get a little itch for something different.
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I always wanted to do the entrepreneurship thing and I figured business school might be a good option to learn a little bit more about the ropes.
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And I did that right around the pandemic timeframe, which is a bit of a shift, I think, for everybody.
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But it worked out well and fast forward a couple of years.
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I had a few ideas, a few itching problems that were kind of bugging me about Apple and just big companies in general and I figured all right, let's try and fix one of those, let's try and solve one of them.
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And that's where I landed on the idea for a trove, which is really just this over communication.
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I spent more and more of my day in meetings I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that where you know your time just gets sucked up into this administrative overhead and it's kind of a necessary evil sometimes.
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But you really want to focus on what matters, meaning like decisions and action items, not necessarily just hey, it's another status update, oh, it's a Friday, let's make sure everyone's on the same page and we know what we're doing.
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That type of thing, I think, works really well with these brand new language models that everyone's talking about these days.
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So I figured all right, let's take this new technology, apply it to a problem that everybody seems to have and see what happens.
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And that's kind of where I'm at.
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Brian, it's now been about a year playing around this thing from kind of prototype-y thing, hired a couple folks Now it's more the MVP, beta type of thing and now we're looking for customers and trying to see, all right, like, what are the interesting use cases for this?
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You know, like, all right, you connect all this information.
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What can you do with it?
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Right, is it going to be just a simple dashboard?
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Is it an audio rundown, just like this podcast, something you can listen to on your way to work that gives you a personalized heads up, or is it something that actually it gets more into the agentic space where you're starting to talk about workflows?
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All right, you know like you have this information, what do you want to do with it?
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You want to create a status deck.
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You want to create another meeting or some follow-ons.
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You want to work with a couple of folks to create a bug or two that you've been talking about, or a new feature request?
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Sure, why not automate some of those processes?
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So, brian, that's in a nutshell, kind of where I'm at and where I came from.
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Yeah, I love that overview, tim, especially because I'm going to call something out that kind of slipped into the way that you articulate your backstory, and that is you said that you were thinking about a bunch of different ideas and problems that you wanted to solve, and I always argue to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs that you don't need a business idea.
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You need to figure out who it is that you want to serve and how you want to solve them based on a problem or desire that they have, and I love the fact that that was right there in your mindset and in the story that you just shared with us.
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Talk to us about that problem focused approach because, clearly, working in the world of corporate which it feels weird calling Apple corporate We'll talk about the environment there in a little bit but I want to hear about the fact that you understood all of these real life needs, having been in it yourself, identifying those problems and then figuring out.
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You know what I'm going to start a business and a solution to solve this problem.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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It's interesting, like I think there's a lot of people that come up with a solution that's in need of a problem which is a bit backwards, right.
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I think there's a lot of textbook examples of maybe.
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That isn't the right place to start, necessarily, in my case.
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You know, I was just looking at my own work life and I'll go through a little bit of a story here.
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I was fortunate enough to have a son born right in November of 2022.
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And another crazy thing happened in the world then, which was the launch of ChatsGPT, and so I actually took a couple months off, bonded with my son was incredible and then got back to work and I was realizing, as I was getting back into the swing of things at work, it's not really doable anymore for me to spend late nights and early mornings kind of bookending my day working.
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It's just, it's too much.
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I had an international team.
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I had a guy in India, china, obviously, here in California, and so there were a lot of meetings spread across the day and I was trying to figure out like, wow, this is a challenge.
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Is there something that I can do to try and address that?
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And, as I mentioned, I think the technology finally hit a point where, okay, we're now able to do some magic with words for the first time.
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Right, you're going to take these unstructured things called email and you're going to figure out all right, is there a way to actually give them some structure, some meaning and do something with them?
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And so that was kind of my hypothesis was like, wow, all right, I'm spending too much time in these meetings, maybe I could make them faster.
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Go with.
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You know, don't go to quite as many, or even on the email side of things, I don't need to spend an hour or two catching up with my email when I wake up.
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Maybe I could get a little bit of a quicker summary, rundown type thing before my day gets started, to save me some time so I can spend it with my family and, you know, hopefully then when I get to work, be a little more effective.
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So that was kind of the basic of the problem.
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Statement was like, wow, this just isn't working for me anymore.
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And I lived it.
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So that's where that came from.
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Yeah, I love that, especially because, scratching our own itch, it really is such a great source of inspiration for any of our businesses, however big or small that itch may be.
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I want to talk to you about from the tech perspective.
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Now, obviously, you work inside of Apple, and I would do want to come back to the fact that I said it feels weird calling them corporate, because the tech space we always think of all these sexy startups in Northern California.
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Obviously, you're in the hotbed of that world, and that world moves fast, tim, and by the time that we think of things, there's already a business that's popped up, especially we see how many SaaS companies launching every single day, and so, with that in mind, talk to us about the environment that you experience at Apple with regards to now.
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You're an entrepreneur, you are one of us, and so that is a more agile, more nimble way to operate as a business owner.
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What are those contrasts, what are those similarities and differences that you've experienced?
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It's a great question and it's terrifying to answer you truthfully.
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It's one of those things where you have the comfort of a large company and a team and very smart, specialized individuals.
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So, obviously, as the company grows, the roles become more specialized over time, which is amazing.
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So these companies get very good at doing certain things and sometimes that leads to almost pigeonholing, where you stay your lane and you don't necessarily do anything else.
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Well, I think entrepreneurship is the complete opposite of that.
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Everyone talks about being the jack of all trades or you're wearing many hats or whatever analogy you want to use, but I think that's something that's beautiful about it as well is you're no longer encumbered by the tech, debt, the history, the processes, the here's, the new things piece of the puzzle there.
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So I really do think that taking the plunge, while it's terrifying, it's exciting because you go from zero to one.
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Basically, it's going from this huge company that knows how to make a million widgets or whatever it is In Apple's case.
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Yes, they're very, very operationally efficient.
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They're phenomenal at making millions of devices a day that are all very similar, and I had a small part of that.
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It was incredible no-transcript when I wake up.
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Is it focusing on product.
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Is it building something?
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Is it talking to potential customers?
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Is it talking to investors?
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How's the cash flow?
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Look, do we have enough to get by for the next few months?
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None of that was on my mind when I was working at a big tech company, and I'm sure most people don't necessarily sweat those kind of details until they get to the stage where, wow, I'm actually responsible for most of this myself.
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A lot of it's on your shoulders, and when you're starting off something new, it absolutely is, which is exciting.
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Yeah, tim, I love, I really appreciate how you match or you mirror and marry both challenging and exciting.
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That right there.
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That's the entrepreneurial essence that we all face every single day.
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The other thing that stands out to me, whether it's in the messaging that you and I had before we even got together here today for this interview, or on your website, or just the way that you view your solution in general, it's following up on something that we all have come to know and expect from Apple, which is, of course, that simplicity.
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You are talking about solving some complex problems, gosh.
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Workplace communication happens across so many different channels, mediums, formats, formal, informal and every single thing in between.
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Talk to us about simplicity and how that plays into your entrepreneurial thinking, your development of the solution that you've brought to the marketplace.
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I'd love to hear your views on simplicity.
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Absolutely.
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And I mean, I drank the Kool-Aid when I was at Apple.
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So one of their key mantras is really focus and simplify.
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Right, it's like all right, let's talk about first principles, what actually matters.
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And in the case of workplace communication, to me it's like all right, let's talk about first principles, what actually matters.
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And in the case of workplace communication, to me it's like all right, you're trying to get a message across to somebody or a group of people and in that case, like all right, what actually matters, how you distill that down.
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So I came from the wireless engineering world.
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I like to use the term signal to noise, right.
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So like what is that signal that you actually need to see in order to do your job better and filter out all that other noise?
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Because, because there's a lot of communication these days and I think a lot of that came from the pandemic as well right, we didn't just get better tools, we got more of them.
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Everyone's working hybrid and remote, and now there's some back in person, but there's still teams that are distributed.
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There's international and remote teams.
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How do you tie all that together?
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And there's some incredible tools out there, but I think it gets really messy, right, it's a hard thing to do.
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So my hope is that if you can start to integrate these things so that you kind of have a single source of truth for your work life and the form of your communication work life, at least to start then we can start to figure out all right, how do I make that workflow more effective for you?
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What are those things that really matter to you?
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So you know what is the first principle here.
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The problem I have is over communication.
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That's the first problem, and so, all right, we'll try and collate all this information together and then distill it down to things that are important to you using some machine learning, big data, all those really fun buzzwords.
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The second problem I'm kind of focusing on is stuff that gets missed meaning oh, I forgot to follow up with this person, or there's an action item, but you know, we kind of let it slip.
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Those little issues tend to maybe not matter in the short term, but in the long term lots of them kind of death by 1000 cuts.
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They can hurt the bottom line.
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I mean, like you know, you're just letting small things slip in a big company, so I don't think anyone necessarily would call you out on it, but I do remember there were a few of those that were big oopsies at Apple and I don't want to get into the details there, but essentially that can cost the company quite a bit.
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So how do you prevent that from happening?
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Maybe getting little pings in the background?
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You go oh, wouldn't it be nice, assume you have this entity, this person working for you in the background?
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Maybe if they give you little nudges throughout the day about stuff you care about, oh, there's something trending.
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We noticed on chat that this thing is happening.
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Do you want to know more about that?
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Oh, interesting, oh, wow, there's a critical bug that just popped up.
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Maybe that's something you know.
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If you're in a software group, maybe it's something you should take a look at sooner than later so you don't miss time on it and you can actually try and fix it and ship it in a timely manner, as opposed to just waiting and hearing about it from your team or from a chat or from an email whenever you get around to it, when it gets escalated high enough.
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So that's the first principles.
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Thinking is really like all right, what actually matters, and it's getting those decisions, it's having those discussions, talking with your team about the important matters.
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It's not just oh look, another status update with my team.
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I love talking to the team.
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I think that's incredible.
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But you want that to be valuable, right?
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You don't want to waste time.
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Nobody wants to go to work and say like, all right, how can I kill eight to 10 hours here a day?
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No, you want to spend it doing things that matter.
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So that's what I'm trying to do is figure out.
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Like all right, let's give you more time to do what actually does matter.
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Yeah, Tim, I'll tell you what.
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I'm all aboard.
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However, I'm going to bring this up because I know that you for sure have thought about this and given a lot of intentional thought behind it, and that's the elephant in the room with regards to anything AI based, which is, of course, data privacy content.
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What the heck are we giving these things?
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And you're talking about communication channels which are so intimate to all of us having access to go through our emails, our chats I mean, I'm a big fan of Slack.
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I live in Slack with my teams, as well as meetings.
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We're talking about all of this sensitive stuff, and I know that it's a world where I'm thinking about my parents' generation.
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They're so skeptical of all the things that we give to technology and to tech companies.
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What's your take on that?
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Talk to us about the state of where it is that we are with regards to this and, of course, doing what you're doing with Atrove.
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I'd love to hear that executive mind as to how the heck you take care of this important stuff.
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It's critical.
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I mean you hit the nail on the head right there with one of the top concerns I hear about, and I think it's obviously very salient across any technology company.
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What are you doing with the data?
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Is it going to be sold for advertising?
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Is it going to be purely used to make the product better?
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Is it completely yours that you can do whatever you want with it?
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And even if it is yours, where is it residing?
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What's the likelihood of having a leak or a hack or something along those lines?
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So some of this does get exposed and obviously anytime you were going to connect data sources together and move information around, it's not zero risk.
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There's always some potential for concern there.
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In general, I'm trying to adopt best practices.
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My thought is like look, I don't want to make money off of your data, I just want to make your life better in whatever way I can.
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In that case, we're trying to adhere to all the compliance standards.
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Hopefully in the next few months, if we can get around to funding here, then we'll probably try to do the whole SOC compliances, the ISO 27001, all that stuff, just to give people peace of mind.
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For now it's kind of a handshake and a trust issue.
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I think what you're talking about with data and privacy gets down at its core to trust.
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Do you trust this company?
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And some people don't mind giving their information to companies and like, yeah, it might get sold, but that's all right.
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The net giving their information to companies and like, yeah, it might get sold, but that's all right.
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You know, the net benefit outweighs the potential risk.
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Others, and especially in a corporate setting, are a lot more locked down and I can tell you that Apple it was a crazy process to try and use any external software because they had a very extensive review process and they very much are about privacy and secrecy and need to know and any information that could go to the outside could be damaging to the company's reputation.
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There's a risk there.
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That's probably something they don't want to take.
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So thinking about my own company then right now again, it's kind of just knowing people reaching out to my network.
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There's a trust piece here saying, oh look, we're trying to do everything we can, we're going to encrypt everything, make sure it's using the latest standards.
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That said, some people do bring up concerns about language models.
00:17:02.518 --> 00:17:08.153
All right if this goes out to OpenAI, because that's who we're using to run these queries.
00:17:08.153 --> 00:17:09.730
What are they doing with your data?
00:17:09.730 --> 00:17:17.010
So it's not just me storing it anymore, it's me sending it off to somewhere else, having them do something with it in the form of a language model call and then getting a response back.
00:17:17.010 --> 00:17:19.008
Ok, that's a potential risk as well.
00:17:19.008 --> 00:17:20.028
How do you mitigate that?
00:17:21.050 --> 00:17:25.218
I think one obvious way could be run stuff yourself if you need to.
00:17:25.218 --> 00:17:30.715
Right now, we're in the phase where we're just trying to find early inklings of product market fit.
00:17:30.715 --> 00:17:38.911
I don't want to over-engineer this thing, but the value of something, what I'm trying to do, along with communication and everything, isn't necessarily in the language model itself.
00:17:38.911 --> 00:17:50.411
I think we're just using that to parse, you know, parse some rough couple of paragraphs here or there of an email, give you some metadata about oh, here's the sentiment, here are the action items, here are things that are interesting, maybe some tags and everything.
00:17:50.411 --> 00:17:55.433
Does that need to have kind of these frontier models in order to work?
00:17:55.433 --> 00:17:57.839
I don't think it does so.
00:17:57.839 --> 00:18:06.942
From that perspective, at some point you could start to do more in-house, but for now, we're going to go ahead and prototype with what's out there, because it's quick, you can get some free credits, all that stuff and go from there.
00:18:07.262 --> 00:18:09.688
Long-term, this could even be run on-prem.
00:18:09.688 --> 00:18:12.688
Everyone talks about their data not leaving the site.
00:18:12.688 --> 00:18:25.797
If somebody wants on-prem meaning they want to have their data in a server on their property somewhere the company goes oh, we've got an entire server room.
00:18:25.797 --> 00:18:27.301
Can we just run everything over there In the case of a trove?
00:18:27.301 --> 00:18:28.567
Sure, I think at some point that might make sense.
00:18:28.567 --> 00:18:30.532
So that is a way to mitigate data privacy concerns to some degree.
00:18:30.532 --> 00:18:38.881
So I don't think there's ever any way to get fully foolproof and have no risk, but trying to make sure that you're adhering to the best principles and all that stuff.
00:18:38.881 --> 00:18:40.144
That's what we're trying to go for.
00:18:43.575 --> 00:18:43.796
Yeah, gosh.
00:18:43.796 --> 00:18:49.058
I so appreciate the way that you answer that question, tim, because I do feel like it's easy for all of us in our own businesses to say, yeah, this is the simple solution.
00:18:49.058 --> 00:18:57.765
Maybe it's a case of oversimplification, but that real life, transparent insight, I actually think, even when I ask you the question, it is easy to think just about a trove.
00:18:57.765 --> 00:19:03.260
On that level, it's your company, but I love how you point out yeah, our data feeds to so many different places.
00:19:03.260 --> 00:19:07.563
I even think about when we all use Zapier, which is a popular API integration tool.
00:19:07.563 --> 00:19:12.298
Gosh, yeah, that's also part of our data and content mix that probably we don't think about.
00:19:12.298 --> 00:19:15.836
We just think about those end use cases that we're involved with.
00:19:15.836 --> 00:19:17.696
So really important considerations there.
00:19:18.038 --> 00:19:20.820
Tim, you're an engineer and you use the word over-engineer.
00:19:20.820 --> 00:19:22.281
You don't want to over-engineer thing.
00:19:22.281 --> 00:19:26.866
Of course, as entrepreneurs, we've all heard of MVPs minimum viable products.
00:19:26.866 --> 00:19:31.971
Talk to us about that approach to it, especially as you're in this phase of finding that product market fit.
00:19:31.971 --> 00:19:38.761
Where's your engineer mind go with regards to not over-engineering and maintaining that MVP that people can actually use?
00:19:40.154 --> 00:19:40.737
Oh, it's torture.
00:19:40.737 --> 00:19:42.540
Brian, that's a really hard one to answer.
00:19:42.540 --> 00:19:46.057
You know, engineers, I think, tend to be perfectionists.
00:19:46.057 --> 00:19:56.205
I think scientists, engineers kind of go that route where you know what is the truth, what's the best optimal approach to do something, how do you do it with the least amount of resources to get the biggest bang, that kind of stuff.
00:19:56.205 --> 00:20:01.636
So it's hard, especially coming from a company that, I think, notoriously overengineers products.
00:20:01.636 --> 00:20:07.397
Apple does a phenomenal job, but do they need to have the amount of people working on every single feature?
00:20:07.397 --> 00:20:08.220
I don't know.
00:20:08.220 --> 00:20:08.942
Up for question.
00:20:09.262 --> 00:20:14.603
However, on the other side of the coin, now is all right, you're trying to get an idea into the world.
00:20:14.603 --> 00:20:18.157
You're going, as has been said, from zero to one.
00:20:18.157 --> 00:20:20.806
So how do you do that in a way that makes sense?
00:20:20.806 --> 00:20:24.803
And to me it goes back to like all right, trying to mitigate risk.
