How To Accelerate Your Business Idea With Yarden Shaked

Yarden Shaked is the Co-founder and CEO of Varos, a data-sharing platform helping companies compare KPIs with their competitors. Varos, a Y Combinator startup, provides performance marketing benchmarks to over 4,000 brands, agencies, and SaaS companies. Yarden is an active angel investor and was a Private Equity Investor at Apax.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Yarden Shaked shares the inspiration for founding Varos and its ability to provide accurate benchmarks
What are the best use cases for Varos’ services?
The correlation between CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPA (cost per acquisition), and performance
How are benchmarking services progressing during AI advancements?
Yarden reflects on his experience presenting Varos’ original product at a Y Combinator interview
The source of Yarden’s competitive spirit and how it’s benefited his career
Yarden’s book recommendation for introverts

In this episode…

An entrepreneur’s role is to create innovative ideas that mature into functioning businesses. However, not all ideas come to fruition. Turning your vision into a business model takes sheer determination, hard work, and resources to solidify your mission and goal. What resources can you leverage to transform your idea into a thriving entity and prepare for execution?

Sometimes entrepreneurs have difficulty navigating the process necessary to reach their end goals. Without proper guidance, they can feel discouraged and unmotivated. Yarden Shaked, an entrepreneur and founder, discovered accelerator programs are a strategic way to kickstart your business idea. Program mentors challenge you to focus on every facet of your business and alter it as needed. Obstacles are inevitable during the pre-launch phase, but accelerator programs can help you work through blindspots and launch quickly.

On this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Yarden Shaked, Co-founder and CEO of Varos, to discuss how his experience with an accelerator program contributed to his business success. Yarden also shares the correlation between CPMs and CPAs on performance and how benchmarking services are progressing with AI integrations.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

William Harris on LinkedIn
Elumynt
Yarden Shaked on LinkedIn | Twitter
Email Yarden Shaked: Yarden@Varos.com
Varos
Lior Chen on LinkedIn
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Eluymnt is a performance driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the Show.

William Harris 0:13

Hey everybody, William Harris here. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt. And I'm the host of this podcast where I feature experts in the e-commerce Industry sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. I'm excited about the guests that I have here today, I have Yarden Shaked here. He is the founder of Varos, which is a VC back Sass startup that gives performance marketing benchmarks to over 4000 brands, agencies and Sass companies. Before starting Varos. He was a private equity investor. And he is also an active angel investor. Yarden. Thanks for coming out here. Thanks so much for having me.

Yarden Shaked 0:47

I'm pumped about this.

William Harris 0:48

Yeah. And before we dig into the questions here, I do want to at least make sure that I announce our sponsor, this episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with the largest one selling for nearly 800 million. And we were ranked as the 12th, fastest growing agency in the world by Adweek. That said, let's move on to the fun stuff here Yarden but when I think about benchmarking, in Varos, that's a very interesting niche. And there's got to be something that makes you say, you know that why you're passionate about benchmarking? What was it that made you say, I want to start Varos? This is something that needs to exist in the world.

Yarden Shaked 1:32

Yeah, people, a lot of times, people a lot of times asked me, like, why are you devoting your life to benchmarking? It's a pretty random, very specific sort of problem. I'll quickly take you through like how we sort of got there as I used to work in private equity and private equity. A lot of times to make an acquisition, or to do due diligence on an acquisition, you'd want to understand how much room for improvement Does the company have, so you can expand their margins? And so we would look at companies and let's say a company had a 10% profit margin, you were trying to figure out, can they get to, let's say, 13% 15%? Now, the way that you actually do it, is you say, Well, okay, there's, you know, three equivalent companies that are at 13% margin, or 15% margin, we can get there. And it's not really like, you know, what you would think of, you go into a factory, and you're like, oh, that's inefficient, or something that actually doesn't really happen in real life, at least in my experience. And so, a lot of times, we would make decisions based off that. But the issue was, is that a lot of times there aren't public companies, so you couldn't have that type of data. So we'd spend boatloads of money on like McKinsey studies and BCG studies, to get this type of information. And then, you know, if you think about it a little bit deeper, like, it's actually kind of silly how the whole industry works, that everyone has their data, but there's this like, massive gap that's missing of the market data, like how you're comparing to others, just because it's not as valuable, it is inherently private. And so like, if we can think about as sort of performance marketing benchmarks, which is, like, pretty specific. But if you think about, like the broader view of democratizing, you know, private data and like making people understand how they compare to others. I think that that's a really big piece of the data puzzle, but Well, yeah, slowly, slowly.

William Harris 3:38

Well, absolutely. And I think you and I have talked before I, up until Varos, I'll be completely honest, with everybody listening here. I hated most benchmarks, or even some of the benchmarks that would get into a little bit more granularity where they say, Well, here's the average CPA for someone in the fashion industry, it's still so broad that it didn't really mean anything. And then you'd have, you know, clients or companies that would come to you and say, Well, you know, this report says that the average CPC for someone in fashion should be this, it's like, well, you know, you've got an ARV of $2,500. And so you're not in the same boat as everybody else. And so there's a difference there. And so I think that's the thing about like, accurate benchmarks, and that's what Varos helps to solve. Right? Right.

Yarden Shaked 4:23

Yeah, that's exactly why I think that there needs to be like a standalone company that does it. You know, you'll see if you Google benchmarks and Facebook ad benchmarks, you'll get a million PDF, sort of reports or some like throwaway feature from some company but you really like what we spend our days doing is solving for nuances. Like exactly we're saying like yeah, like adding you know, that ao V filter or adding like countries filters or you know, you say like well needs to be on the same objectives like brand awareness campaigns are completely different than conversion campaigns. Headley prospecting, going after you know new clients is completely different metrics and going after existing clients and like big companies versus small companies. And actually, you know, women's skincare is completely different than men's skincare like they buy differently. And you can't put skincare together, that's completely insane. And so there's like, you know, lots of these things that you're actually our job is less like, it's less sexy, it's really just getting all the all the red flags out of there. So it's like as comparable as you can get it to be.

William Harris 5:37

Yeah, and, you know, the way that I always describe a lot of this is, you know, the lurking variables, there's a really good article that I put out, maybe I think it's a year old, but it might be two years old. Now, the about Simpsons paradox within advertising. And you know, for those who aren't familiar with Simpsons paradox, it's the idea where you could have something that rolls up to saying, let's say, Something is better. If you look at let's say, add a or add B. And if you look at all of the aggregated data for add a maybe add a ends up looking better. But if you look at the lurking variables and say, But wait a minute, what if we, what if we look at this for new customers versus returning customers, what's interesting is within this, you know, when you segment that data set, that way, you can find that ad B outperforms in both of those categories, even though the aggregate level ends up being better for ad a and b is better in both of those levels. It's just the amount that was weighted towards one or the other. And I think that's where better debt benchmarking comes into play. In what you guys do is you basically help to eliminate a lot of those lurking variables by I can come in to various and I say, you know, I want to see children's brands, with an average order value between 50 and $100, spending at least $100,000 a month on prospecting. And now I'm gonna get a benchmark that's way more relevant than anything else that I'm going to find out. They're

Yarden Shaked 7:00

completely that that totally and so and that's one side of it. And then the other side of it is just that the timeliness of it like the the benchmarks that are out there are very stale. Sure. I mean, this market is so dynamic, like to a point that it just surprises me all the time. About just one month is different than that. I mean, we see this year that things are just a lot cheaper than they were last year.

William Harris 7:28

This happened with the metal bug, just the other one, you know, that's like a month old now, but didn't realize it was

Yarden Shaked 7:36

like two weeks. So it's still pretty new. And, you know, for people that don't know, right, there's this massive bug that I think it was a Sunday that it just spiked, it basically spent everyone's budget in the middle of the night, cause this I, we gave, we gave data for CNBC, to this to what happened. And the analogy I gave the guy was that, I don't know if it's a good analogy or not, but he put it in the article, which I was not expecting, which is that it's like in the middle of the night. You know, usually people are advertising their new shiny things. But in the middle of the night, everyone is just bidding on some meaningless product, like an old toast or something. And there was a bidding war over it like, sure, like it was a bidding war over nothing because of some bug. And so, you know, CPA is obviously completely skyrocketed. And the thing is, is that with Barrows, because it's in real time, you can know if these spikes are something that's a problem in your ad account or in the market. Because if it's your ad account, then that means that like you immediately need to change something something. But if it's, if it's in the market, you shouldn't be changing things in your ad account. Maybe you shouldn't be reducing spend because the markets more expensive. But it's like the analogy is, is if your power went out? Is it? Is it you like it? Is the power out in your apartment that you need to call the electricity company? Or is the power out in your whole building? And then it's kind of like it's a different it's a different ballgame.

William Harris 9:13

You need to rewire the house or something. Well, yeah, I mean, I see this happen very often, where people will make changes unnecessarily within their ads accounts based on things that had nothing to do with their ad account. The ad account was completely fine. It was set up the way that it needed to be. But there was some other bigger macro thing going on over here into your point where it's like you're actually undoing good work that you have set up. That'd be like rewiring the house when the house wasn't the issue. It was the power company. You just rewired it but now you just you just you know MacGyver wired it kind of put together something you know, not that great better not as good as what was actually already done in the house. And now you've got this you know, hodgepodge of wires and extension cords running everywhere and you've got something that's a lot worse than than what you actually had to start with. If you would have been patient.

Yarden Shaked 9:58

You no matter needs to go back into Earning fears when you do all that, right?

William Harris 10:02

Yeah. So, you know, when I think about benchmarking, what are the best use cases for Varos because you guys are doing some things. You sent me an email, boy maybe just a couple of days ago about some other interesting things that you guys are digging into even on like, you know, ad creative and stuff like that. But what are some other things outside of benchmarking that your data is able to help people uncover?

Yarden Shaked 10:26

Yeah, so I think like better, like, the way I look at is that our sort of unique angle is always around comparisons. But like, benchmarking is just one thing that you do. So like when I say benchmarking is how do I compare to my competitors? Right? Like, sure, you know, am I good or bad. And if that were, so you can see, like, you know, your cost per purchase and your row class, and then you could see if it's Whoa, like, if it's not good relative to others, and then you can see where so you can say, Oh, my God, my click through rate is absolutely horrible. On prospecting campaigns in this country relative to others, I need to go fix that, or my conversion rate is too low. In this situation, I need to go up my landing page, or a lot of times people will be like, actually, we're really good at, you know, meta ads, but we suck on YouTube, or, like, we're really good on performance marketing in general. So we should really spend our time on LTV, like a lot of that type of stuff. That's just one thing. You know, another really main use case is like what we were just talking about with the with the Facebook ad bug wasn't me, or was it the market, that stuff happens all the time, the weather changes, and you know, things spike or things plummet, and it's not you, and sometimes it is you, and you need to know that, or there's a bug, like this bug was massive, but they're these bugs every month. Like they really happen a lot. And so just, you know, understanding, like having that clarity in that context is, is critical. agencies use it often to put in their reporting. So it's like constantly in their weekly reporting, sometimes a client would miss budget, and they're coming in and saying, like, look, the whole market, this happened, we actually beat the market in terms of that.

William Harris 12:16

That's important, right? beating the market.

Yarden Shaked 12:21

It's really important. And if you if you look at like, you know, the W promotes of the world know, stuff, I mean, they've built these tools internally, to have those arguments, but the smaller agencies, how are they going to do it? Like, one day, they don't have the data. But to even if they did, it's a ton of work, to, you know, cool this stuff together and make it right. And, you know, the last main main use case that I'd say is around, like budget allocation. So how are you splitting your spend across channels versus others? Like, you know, sure, performance Max is your 20%, but everyone else at 35% of budget, and you're spending 15%, on YouTube, but really, your competitors are only spending 3% on YouTube. So it's not necessarily bad or good, your Strategy, but you should know how that compares to others. And you know, what, some million dollar a month spender is doing because they probably have some stuff figured out.

William Harris 13:23

Yeah, it just gives you insight into, you know, where you might be, you know, let's just say SWOT analysis, like where are you strong, where you're weak at, like, gives you the opportunity to say, maybe there's some way that we can dig in more on this channel, or maybe we're over leveraging this particular channel. And to your point, it's not necessarily a better good, it's just, it's just an indicator to say, hey, take a deeper look at this. Right, right. Right, right. Well, and I liked that you call that weather too. Not that you guys track weather, but that's something that I've personally seen as a result of, oh, it's a very real thing. And I can remember there was a coat company. And I don't say their name, because I don't have necessarily permission to talk about that. But there was a coat company that we were working with, and I could remember it. I don't remember what year this was. But it was unseasonably warm. And this could have been 2020 2021 I don't remember but it was unseasonably warm compared to, you know, the previous winter, as far as we're coming into November, December, and sales were slow, just significantly slower than they had been. And then I think we came into, you know, some type of winter apocalypse and I remember this, you know, this big cold front that came in and all of a sudden sales, you know, went through the roof again, and it's one of those things where, you know, you can look at it, you know, in aggregate and understand that you're doing all the right things, but there are these other factors that need to be looked at when you're understanding the macro versus the micro within the accounts.

Yarden Shaked 14:45

i I'll give you an even more specific example of the weather thing that I heard last year from a client said, Oh, my God Varos saved me because like our CPAs were spiking and we're doing any conversions. I didn't was going on. And then I saw it happen everyone. And I realized I realized why it was happening is this British guy, and some British ran. And I'm like, Whoa, that's like, I'm happy that it helped what happened? And he's like, it was the first sunny day in London three months. So everyone was out in the park, and no one was buying. Specific, but it's real. It's real stuff.

William Harris 15:24

Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, we've seen very similar things like that to when, you know, even when we were coming out of COVID, there was a coffee company we were working with. And at the time, I want to say that they were up 300% year over year, I mean, we were just massively growing them. And a big part of what we were looking at, you know, from a macro trend perspective, was just even just the basic demand for coffee. At home. It's the demand we were looking at. But we also like to look at anti demands. And so we were looking at Coffee near me, because if you're looking for coffee near me, you're you're looking to buy it to Starbucks, or caribou or Dunn brothers or wherever you like to go. And, and so whenever, you know, a lot of the restrictions loosened up, and people can start going back outside, again, demand for coffee, coffee at home still was pretty high when you looked for that. But the demand for coffee near near near me spiked significantly. And so you know, they went from being up 300% year over year to let's say, 280% year over year, and you know, they're a little bit worried. And it's like, Well, okay, but you know, the demand changed in a very significant way. And you're only down this 20% difference here from where you were. And so it helps to understand, like you said those bigger macro economic movements, right? Really does. Yeah. So, you know, what, when you're thinking about improving e-commerce businesses, because you see a lot of data, are there certain things that stand out to you, as far as, you know, the shining stars in this as we're getting into aggregate data, as opposed to getting into the benchmarks? But are there certain things maybe from a spend perspective, or, you know, something that you're seeing in the numbers, you're like, these are the things that seem to be resonating the best that the companies that are performing the best right now? Tactics are? And you know,

Yarden Shaked 17:15

that's a really good question. I don't think I have like a super smart answer to that. To be honest, I think that's something that we want to get into. Like, like, you know, we get asked that all the time, like, Alright, our CPMs are super high, relative to others, like what are the what are the ones with low CPMs doing? And I think that that's like, gonna be a very exciting step for us and one that we have in one that we haven't tackled yet. Well, and

William Harris 17:42

here's how you brought up CPM. And I'm glad that you did. And I don't know if you have an answer for this one, or not, as well. But it would be an interesting look that I think you have the data to dig into. Does low CPM actually even matter? And I think it's what what very hot talks all the time about how CPMs don't matter. We've personally talked about this for years as well internally, where oftentimes you'll see there's a a lower CPA and a higher return on adspend with a higher CPM. And that's mind boggling to anybody that's familiar with, let's just say the old school media buying tactics where you base you bought based on CPM, right? And you'd go to the media network, and you say, here's the CPM that we negotiated, and that was fine. Whereas these algorithms, now, they're looking at CPM. And they're saying, Well, I'm going to charge a little bit more premium here towards the CPM, because I'm reaching the people who are actually going to make that difference. Right. Like, have you seen any kind of a correlation were positively correlated with performance.

Yarden Shaked 18:43

It's, it's It's spot on. And I'm a huge I'm a huge berry fan. I'm sure that he's always considered that I, I would actually go farther to say like, none of it matters if your CPA is good, like, that's why like in Barrows in the dashboard, there's like this red, yellow green chart of the overall metrics and so it's like in the leftmost side is row as and CPA, and like how I tell people to use it is like a Verizon CPA or green move on just like, it doesn't matter if one is red and one is green, and one is yellow in the funnel, because at the end, the funnel was working. So okay, you paid a bunch to get eyeballs, but like you got them on the right eyeballs and then clicking or buying, don't, don't mess with it, you know, like, even if you could optimize it a little bit like it's actually it's actually super performing well, but I do think that where it does come in is you have a high CPA, let's say like your CPAs and read relative to everyone else. And then you have to figure out where is the problem? And you know, sometimes a really high CPM is the problem like everything else is normal. But you're spending $20 to get eyeballs versus, versus $10 For everyone else. And if you could break that $10 that down and keep the same metrics, then you're in a good spot. So I think it's only important when you're you're diagnosing, when something is wrong, you're trying to fix something, and you're trying to figure out where in the funnel because everyone in the funnel is improvable. It's just, you shouldn't be improving like random metrics unless something is broken. And then you should be improving the one that's broken. Yeah, like, that's

William Harris 20:33

so hot, I mean, whole thing. I've seen people do that they've actually damaged the bottom of funnel by focusing on the top of funnel, and, you know, they'll say, Oh, our CPM or CPC is too high. So we're gonna focus on changing that and lowering those numbers, and it ends up creating damage on the other side of it, because to your point, none of the other stuff really matters. As long as the bottom of funnel metrics are, where they need to be. Those all are just indicators that say, Hey, you're on the right track. And that's where I like, benchmarking, let's say specific to your store on that particular area where you say, sometimes ignore the benchmark of what other your competitors are doing, especially if you've got the CPA in the row as where you need to be. You now find out your CPM, your ideal CPM is $10. Now, if you start changing on your ideal CPM, if your individual CPM goes to $20, you can likely bet that probably something might happen here in the next day or two or even that day, that is going to change your bottom of funnel metric because you know that the $10 CPM is resulting in the bottom of funnel you need, all of a sudden, that's doubled, you'd say, hey, maybe we need to pay attention, here's a red flag within our own. But that $20 CPM in that context could still be lower than all of your competitors. And it doesn't matter. It's just the idea that has changed for you specifically.

Yarden Shaked 21:47

Right, right. And we were very intentional about like, like, even though it's on the bottom of the funnel, where you like, when we visualize it, we show it at the start, because we maybe as we're talking, I'm thinking like, we should even get more aggressive with it, like, just show those and then like, you have to keep scrolling or something to get to the wall, we're apart. Just because yeah, it's like, you know, the whole game is return on adspend, right? Like that the day. And so if you if that is healthy, nothing matters. If it's not healthy, then things matter. It's similar to go in the doctor's office, right? Like, if you're healthy, he's not going to start doing random, like, you know, checks and like, you're not going to just do like a surgery on you. Right? But like, if you're not healthy, and you can't figure out what's going on, then he's got to start, you know, doing more invasive type work.

William Harris 22:43

Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's the key to anything is don't make changes where they don't need to be if everything's moving the way that it needs to move. We see that happen way too often. Right? Where do you think the future of maybe not necessarily Varos, maybe Varos, benchmarking in general is going and I know, this might be a sensitive topic, because there's always going to be things that you're you're not wanting to share out to the public just yet. But, you know, are there any hints, you know, some of the stuff that's going on with AI right now is making it very interesting for people to use their data a little bit better and find their own individual metrics. But what do you see as the progression of this?

Yarden Shaked 23:24

Yeah, I mean, my, my goal is that, it becomes like, your data, like, you know, today, let's say you start a, you start a company. Like in the SAS world, everyone gets like Mixpanel, and amplitude, goo, goo, everyone gets Google Analytics, also e-comm. But you also, you know, make get some other analytics software, in e-comm. And that's all for how you're doing. My goal is that it's always going to be how you're doing and how you're doing relative to the market, whether those are the same or different. I'm not really sure how, like, I have my theories of how it evolves. But, you know, it could go many ways, but like that, that context of knowing how you're doing, like knowing your revenue of today, that added layer of knowing your revenue today versus how that moved. versus your competitors. Like that is I hope, where things are going like that spreadsheets read or read every day up or down. There's gonna be another column. That's how did the market do?

William Harris 24:41

Yeah, I love that. And I like you know, I'm even envisioning this potentially as you know, candlestick type charts, which I which I liked that you already have. You guys look at things quartile based, as well. Yeah, because I think it's so much better than looking at averages. Averages are helpful, but They're only helpful to an extent once you begin getting a big enough data set, I feel like having the quartile makes a world difference. And I don't know if you remember this, there was a chart that I shared out with children's brand apparel. And I will say it was children's brand, maybe ARV $50 spinning $100,000 a month or so. And you the way that you guys have is there's the there's the bottom 25th percentile, you've got your your median, you've got your top quartile, and then there's you and you can you see your own line, and we obliterated the whole rest of the chart. I don't know if you remember this, but I just appreciate where it's like you can use squished all the rest of them down that you couldn't even see.

Yarden Shaked 25:40

Yeah, it's actually a hard, it's actually a hard UI problem to solve is like, if one line is so far off from the others, how do you? But yeah, I remember that. And you know, that I you guys are crushing him in many ways. And I think that we're able to, like, it's fun that we're able to show quantitatively, to people when they're doing really well. Like, I'm hoping that this stuff gets people promotion is short, right? You know, if you can improve it, you didn't go to your boss and say, Look how much better I am than everyone else. Like, it doesn't get better than that, you know, you can go in and like, like, what is the better solve, then, look, we're going against head to head all our competitors. And I'm all green man. Like, I'm the best of the best.

William Harris 26:32

Right? By we use it. I mean, it's one of my favorite things about your software is is actually just using it to send the clients or even leads and just says like, Hey, do you want to know how we do? This is how we stack up, right? Um, something else that I feel like a lot of people listening could relate to is just founder stories in general, a lot of people end up going through, let's say similar things to what you did. And I remember you telling me a little bit about the the original days, the MVP of your product? And what that looked like, and do you mind telling that story? Is that one you're willing to share?

Yarden Shaked 27:07

Yeah, definitely. There are a bunch of funny and like stories from from that time, but But yeah, so. So the the original MVP, I mean, for context. So I started this with my co founder will your, your is this. I mean, super, like Israeli NSA equivalent. And he spent like five years there. And then he came out and he was first employee one coming in, it's like $600 million, exit another one. He's just, he's the best. And like, I am the luckiest person to have landed him. And so he and I'm not technical. So he was building all these things that we were very scrappy. We were at the start, we had no no funding or anything. We're getting my apartment. And so you know, we're really trying to try to launch and just just get clients because our products meaningless without any data, right. So we got like, 510 clients just from you know, network hustling, whatever. And but the MVP, because we didn't want to waste time with writing code on a product that we didn't know, like, we didn't really know what people wanted yet, or how to build it. So the first, actually, the first version was just spreadsheets. But then at some point, we had a dashboard. And that dashboard, people had to tell us before they were logging in, and we would have to like I don't actually know why this was the case. But we'd have to like, you know, up like a server to have them log in. It wasn't like a live website or anything like that, which sounds it sounds completely ridiculous. And then what we, we had, we were in a we did Y Combinator and we were in an interview, the interview there and the interview is this like, famous interview of it's, it's 10 minutes, okay? And it's just rapid fire. It's, you don't even remember what happened. They're like people practice these interviews. I have friends that practice interviews by standing there. There's like a list of questions on the TV that's rotating, they have to respond in like, I think it's 15 seconds, where someone else is throwing socks at them. And they have to like, because it's so hectic during the interview that you have to prep. And so, and during it, they basically never asked for a demo from like everything I could read because they have so much to learn on your business. The five minutes and they come out of nowhere and ask for a demo. And this product you had to it didn't work like you had to spin something up before. And so I was like somehow storied where we are I was sitting here and I was like hitting his leg. And he, he, he got it, he got it ready to go. And like, I don't know, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, and then we put it out. But even when you like put on the server work like one out of three times or something, and but you know, luckily, luckily at work that everything was fine. And I don't think that they they do what happened. But uh, but yeah, at this at the start it has to be like that and it's the most fun.

William Harris 30:27

I mean, it worked, you guys got into Y Combinator and that was, you know, a really good deal. The sock thing cracks me up because I've got three daughters in the 1310 and seven. And I want to say it was the 10 year old who at the time was maybe eight. And playing basketball. That was one of the things I used to do with her all the time was like when you know, her older sister was practicing it would be at her practices, okay, just get your basketball. And as she's dribbling with that, it's like I throw a glove at her right. And she'd have to catch up with her other hand and then switch hands and then throw the club back. There's something to be said for that. But I've never heard that in the business use case. So I liked that idea of just throwing facts at somebody.

Yarden Shaked 31:04

Yeah, you can handle it, you can handle any any pace, you know,

William Harris 31:08

you can handle getting thrown the idea of launching a server in the middle of a Y Combinator meeting, right?

Yarden Shaked 31:15

Yeah. But yeah, I love the concept of that interview. Like, it's just anyone I know that did it even when they didn't get in just had so much fun.

William Harris 31:28

Yeah, I think you were telling me a little bit about, you know, Y Combinator and just even just like raising funds in this kind of environment and what that's been like, too. Yeah,

Yarden Shaked 31:40

so, so, so YC, for us was was a really, really great experience. I mean, basically, you spend three months in San Francisco, you're with some of the smartest people in the world. And it's not necessarily like credential smart, you know, like, there was sure a couple guys that were there, like 2020 years old, they had dropped, they grew up in Columbia, they had dropped out of Columbia, when they're like at some high school in Columbia, and they're 17 build some company. Now they're like, on their second one, a lot of people and then you also get the like, you know, we're working with these two MIT PhD in applied AI that are building this, like, you know, AI software that

William Harris 32:31

don't even speak the same language as us. Right?

Yarden Shaked 32:33

Right. And so it's like, you have both ends of the spectrum there in terms of like the types on paper, but everyone is just hustlers. And you're, you're in these, you basically get put in a cohort. And every week you meet with that cohort, and the cohort and like partners that work at YC. And the partners are all like post exit founders that are very impressive. And basically, like in these, there's like a agenda for the meeting. But in the meeting, like starts, like what did you do last week, and the people are so impressive that they're just coming out with like, all the like, one guy signed some $150,000 deal. And, you know, another guy just like, redid his whole product in a week, and, you know, someone else, like spun up some amazing marketing campaign. And it's just, every week, you see the momentum, and it, that's why I like the, like the term accelerator, like, you know, technically an accelerator, like I really understood what it is, because we're all competitive. I'm super competitive. And so, you know, I'm going into these meetings, and I'm just like, Screw that, like, I want to, I want to show that I did the most I got the most customers, you know, the most revenue, the most like, impressive, sort of thing. And so, but everyone is in that mindset, so everyone is sort of racing against each other in a friendly way, you're also trying to help each other, like anyone who's trying to sell you something, you want to buy it if you can't. And so, you know, there's lots of that, but it really, really pushes you forward. And it makes you focus on the right things. You know, I think anyone who started a company, I think that they'll they'll relate to it that you know, at the start you're kind of just like sitting with like a whiteboard like talking to a bunch of people probably like irrelevant people that like shouldn't even comment on like what you're trying to do and you're strategizing and you're you're you're kind of like a I don't know some napkin in the wind type thing like you're wasting your time in a way and I feel like everyone goes through this process and you know, you're and I definitely did even though we were scrappy, wasting a bunch of time like talking and strategizing and stuff, which is important, but it's up to it's up to a point and then and why see is just If they're just stopped, they're like stop with that, there's two things you should be doing. One is you should be getting customers, and you should be talking to them about what else they want. And two should be writing code. Nothing else. Now, don't go to conferences, don't go to meetups, don't write a blog, don't do anything. Just yeah, get that and grow. And that's, and when you have those targets, like when you basically have, all you need to do is grow, you know, 5% a week, it doesn't matter how you do it, then it's like very focusing for you and very good for your business.

William Harris 35:40

Yeah. Well, that's, that's literally what the benchmarking is doing for you guys, to where, like you said, it's like, focus on the bottom of the funnel focus on those metrics. Yeah, the other things are fine, but like, keep your focus where it needs to be. Otherwise, it's very easy to get distracted, and you're spinning around in a lot of different directions that aren't productive.

Yarden Shaked 35:56

Right, right. Totally. And it's also go, like, you know, a lot of things we learned are still very baked into, like, how we build the product, like, you know, you'll see that basically all the features that we have are just user requests, like it's just and that's where the filter is called. We're not we don't we don't necessarily like know, okay. Sure, you know, people need to filter by objectives, or by videos versus photos. It's more like, someone will be like, Yeah, I'm not using it. And we'll be like, why? And they'll be like, well, because you know, you're combining prospecting retargeting campaigns, that's completely as meaningless for me, if you combine them, you have to, yep, you have to split them out, I got no problem, you know, in like, two days, we'll go and we go and do that. And so it's like, a lot of those warnings are still there, even though you know, we're a lot bigger than than we were then.

William Harris 36:51

Yeah. So you're driven, obviously, like, competitive, you're competitive. You have a desire, a pension for data and accurate data that is benchmarked out nicely. Why was there something in your childhood? Or something that made you this way? Have you just always been gravitated and drawn towards this, you know, a sports league or something? Like what what made you the person who could be successful at this endeavor? Yeah.

Yarden Shaked 37:25

You know, I've thought about this question a lot. Like, or this type of thing. I think it came from, when I was a, when I was a kid, I was really bad at school. Like, I just, I couldn't be in the box that they set like I couldn't, you know, on the field trips, when you stand in a straight line. And like you walk in, you know, you have to be like, super quiet in class. Like, you know, you're you're seven years old, why I don't, I still don't know why that's the case. And I actually think it's pretty normal, that I wasn't able to do it, but I never, I never was able to connect to like the test of I need to remember what year and month this war happened or what the commander of the some, you know, armies middle name was like, I just, it was always me, it was I wanted to learn about the war. That was interesting to me. But like, as we all know, when you're in, you know, middle school or elementary school, like, actually, knowing what happened isn't important. It's like memorizing the random facts. It was important. That was always hard for me. And I just I struggled, I got bad grades. I was in the principal's office a lot. And the thing that I the thing that I was good, I was I was good at sports at the time. Like, I just played soccer all the time. And I just threw myself in there. And I got really, really, like, I don't know, I just love the competition of competitive sports. And so I think that that was like really ingrained in me because I always really wanted to win, because that was the only place I could win. Like, I was losing everywhere else. And so I really want to win. And then, you know, as we all do, from being kids, and you know, somehow someone messes you up that I just feel like that chip on my shoulder that it's like, you're gonna prove that fourth grade teacher rug or

William Harris 39:13

something. You know, Mrs. Smith, this is for you.

Yarden Shaked 39:18

I actually don't remember I don't I don't remember a lot of their days, but I have their faces in my head for sure.

William Harris 39:24

That's funny. I remember I think every one of my teachers names even my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Ulis. Like all the way through like for some reason their names have stuck with me.

Yarden Shaked 39:33

Yeah, maybe maybe they're haunting you like they're haunting me?

William Harris 39:36

Maybe no. Like I actually I did well, in school. I was I was maybe maybe barely booksmart and a little less streetsmart so I did just fine there. But I appreciate what you're talking about with sports being an outlet for that. Let's just say like that that warrior mentality like there's there's something that's As genetically, you know, let's just say bloodline for generations of warriors, who we have a desire to want to go and conquer and achieve. And there's not necessarily a bad thing for that if it's done in a in a kind in the right way, but sports gives you that outlet to be able to go and do that. And I think that that's a really good thing. And I enjoy sports for that reason. And I have my kids in sports. And I think there's something to be said, for the teamwork, cooperation, but also, it's like, go put it all out there on the field, right, like two days, like, let's give it everything you've got.

Yarden Shaked 40:33

Right, right. And I wonder how that sports and stuff for I don't know what it is how that impacts impacts, like risk tolerance, like I think, starting at least, like a tech company, like it has a lot of, you need a lot of risk tolerance, which I for some reason have, like, I actually don't don't know that that's a good thing. Like I like risks come with failure to like you're failing. And so I have a lot of that, and I think you need to because, like if you think about it, so you raise the raise VC money, the VCs want, you know, billion dollar plus businesses. And it's, it's quite a different approach to build a, let's say, a $10 million business than a billion dollar business, you actually, when you're at that $10 million business, you actually have to, like sacrifice the whole thing to go for the for the billion dollar shot, you have to swing for it. And at the cost of that. And so, you know, these are like very big bets and risks that you're you're taking. And so I think like, you need to enjoy those risks, and it can't haunt you. Because if it does, then then you probably won't be able to go and do that. So I don't know where that part comes from, like I know where the competitiveness comes from. But I don't know where that part comes. I think

William Harris 41:59

it was Ray Kroc, who said something along those lines, I'm gonna butcher his quote, but it was something basically like if you can't tolerate risks, like get the heck out of business, and it was something to that effect in. And I think that to your point, you to start a business, you almost have to be okay with like putting on blinders on like a horse, it's in a race or something, saying that it's like, I'm not even going to look at a lot of these other risks. Because yes, there are and there's enough risks that will immobilize you from being able to do anything, but you can't, you can't accomplish it if you're not willing to take that risk and just go for it and be willing to pivot and and all that's fine. But you got to have that tolerance for that risk.

Yarden Shaked 42:34

Yeah, pivoting is part of it, too. It's like you have to, you have to say, All right, I'm pivoting like, you know, it's it's just it's the game. Yeah, like that's, that's the game that like a SAS founder gets gets into?

William Harris 42:50

Yeah, yeah, when an e-commerce founder as well. Now, speaking of just a little bit about like, who is Yarden Shaked, there's also a book I remember you telling me about that was was pretty good, I think might even be on your shelf. If I remember last time we talked here, I think it was called Quiet. And just like how that book has helped shape you and your understanding of like who you are, but also like management and leadership and people on your team. Tell me more about that book.

Yarden Shaked 43:18

Yeah, so. So it's, I recommend everyone to read it. It's a very special book. It's about introverts, actually, it's it explains what an introvert is really well, and it's also talks about like, the power of introverts. And I, I'm an outgoing person, but I'm always, I always have this internal conflict, because on the one hand, I'm outgoing, but on the other hand, I feel like I need a lot more alone time than the average person, like, I need to go on walks alone, and I read alone and you know, just spend time myself go to the gym, like and, you know, be in my own head and, and focus and things like that. And so it was always conflicting for me because, you know, I am not going I've outgoing friends and they're always wanting to hang out and there was wanting to do things and like, I could never keep up. And the other thing that's it sounds pretty random is like, you know, I love a lot of types of big music fan. I like a lot of types of music, but I really love sad music, like, I don't know why, but it just gets me going. And, and I'm reading this book, someone had recommended it to me. And I'm reading these things, and I see like the attributes of what she's writing about an introvert. And it's like, one by one these like random personality traits that I have that I just have always thought were just random, and Jesus naming them and it was amazing for me, and I think that you know, a lot of people will be surprised that they actually probably are injured. Words. At least for me, I had always sort of thought that like an extrovert is someone outgoing and an introvert is someone shy. But it's actually not the case. An introvert is someone who regains his battery recharge his batteries by being alone and extroverts someone who recharge his batteries by being around people, not necessarily by like, if someone's trying or outgoing has, it doesn't have anything to do with it. And so I always I don't know, for me, it was always like a misconception kind of. And I just learned a lot about myself from that book. And I've learned a lot about other introverts and like, the ability to sort of respect them. Like somehow it talks a lot about how group projects, right, like how in the US group projects is kind of like, it's kind of broken the system that you're forced, like, you go to heart or some Harvard MBA, and everyone is like doing these group projects together. But like, a lot of times people actually, there's a lot of people that just do really good work in their own quiet and better. And then, you know, maybe they can like, deal with things async or stuff like that. A lot of developers usually have those personality traits. And I'm seeing now and Barrows that, like you actually do have to just give them their space, like no meetings, no, get out of their way. And if you want write something, and they'll respond, and so there's like a lot of really important things that you learned about managing to

William Harris 46:30

Yeah, well, and I appreciate the idea of just it's like you said, it's how you get your your charge. I'm an extroverted extroverted people who know me know that I'm definitely outgoing, but I get charged up by being in a group of people, my wife, you know, if we have compete over, you know, she'll say that it's like, it's like, somebody just gave me crack cocaine or something. It's like, I'm off the walls, like, I'm elated when there's like an audience to entertain and dazzle or whatever that might be. And I get charged up from that. Whereas, you know, she's an like you. She's an outgoing introvert, where it's like, she loves having people over, but it's like she needs after after party. I'm, you know, on cloud nine, she's like, I need a break. I need to just kind of let go at some point. She wants him to leave. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so I think that there's something to that, and being able to understand how that impacts your team, as well. And like you said, there may be like, maybe that's true for most of developers, but not all the developers and you might find out okay, well, this particular develop, they're, they're still energized by being around people. So you know, I include them in these types of things, or whatever that might be. And just understanding who your team is and how they're, they're energized, I think is an important piece of of success and moving the company forward.

Yarden Shaked 47:40

Definitely. I would also just as an aside, I'd love to come to one of those dinner parties.

William Harris 47:45

Yeah, absolutely. You make your way to Minnesota, we'll have you over for sure. So, you know, before we end here, because we're getting towards the end of the time here, I like to do some kind of like a silly in the call with something personal game or something like that. And the one that I was thinking for you would be just like, show and tell. And so I don't know if you guys ever did show until when you were in like kindergarten or anything, but it's just like, hey, what's something that's around you, that you want to show us? And tell us about? And you know, kids bring in their, you know, plastic dinosaur or whatever that might be? But is there something in your office that you have that you're like, Oh, this is cool and personal?

Yarden Shaked 48:23

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'm looking at the view behind me. So I have this bookshelf. I have a bunch of books. We talked about a book, I have this. I have this camera here. I'm a film camera lover. So basically, it's like, I mean, I'm sure, I don't know, maybe you have on your kid or something. But it's like, there's there's 36 roles here. There's 36 pictures per film. And it's just like, it's, it's very special. Because, first of all, you know, we're so used to immediate gratification instant gratification, take pictures, you take like five of them just in case then you go well, no. And here, you know, first of all this these kinds of expensive like the rolls and games developed. So you're really only just taking one picture and you just like hope that it goes well. And a lot of times it does it a lot of times it breaks sometimes it comes out fuzzy, but it's super cool. And when the picture comes out, right? It's just like your ears, your friends or something your family and it's like, from the 1920s You know, and everything is amazing. It's old school and it's like just it's very special and it's very fine and someone go take a picture and they hear that click and that buzz like they get very excited. So I love

William Harris 49:40

I'm going to age myself a little bit here, because I'm also from the generation that I can remember getting my first digital camera and I was in high school and I think it was a two megapixel camera. It was definitely not attached to my phone at the time. And so I grew up taking film then as well for a while and nothing fancy when I was a kid But you know, it's like 110 or 35 millimeter and I was trying to think is like, oh, it almost looks like the old 110 camera. I don't know if you know what size film that's taking?

Yarden Shaked 50:07

No, I don't know. It sounds like 35 Like, yeah, I feel like I've never seen 35 I'm not a, I'm not sure.

William Harris 50:16

But I remember like you said, it's like, you take it and then you send it out to get developed and you get it back. And you're like, that's not at all like what I thought I took it to like it right? It was a learning experience of like patience and figuring things out.

Yarden Shaked 50:29

Right? And sometimes it's like, the pictures don't even they come back black or something. And you're like, wait, I hope Vietnam trip just got erased. Oh, sorry. Somebody got messed up the camera, these things break to

William Harris 50:45

know that they think that there's something special about just going back to some of the analog stuff and just in life too. So Yarden if people wanted to follow up with you stay in touch with you, you know, check out more of what you're doing what's the best place or places that they can go and be part of that?

Yarden Shaked 51:01

Yeah. So our website is Varos.com Varos.com. My email is just my firstname@varos.com. So Yarden@Varos.com. Yeah, you can email me follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm very available, always happy to help in any way that I can. And I want to say thank you, you were in for having me. Yeah.

William Harris 51:27

Well, thanks for coming out everybody. Thanks for joining in listening and hope you were able to take away some good learnings here and enjoy some of our reminiscing about dome cameras.

Outro 51:40

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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