A five-year-old building a video game with AI should feel like science fiction.
Instead, for Daniel R. Odio (DROdio), it’s just Tuesday.
That quiet shift—from “impossible” to “normal” overnight—is exactly what this conversation is about. Not just AI as a tool, but AI as a force that reshapes what humans are capable of doing in the first place.
And if you’re building a company today, that changes everything.
The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Execution—It’s Understanding
Most companies don’t have a data problem.
They have a meaning problem.
Data lives everywhere—Slack, Zoom calls, CRMs, spreadsheets—but it doesn’t connect. Marketing tells one story. Product sees another. Sales hears something completely different.
So what do companies do?
They hire more people to translate it all.
We call that… marketing, analytics, ops.
Daniel’s thesis with Storytell flips this on its head:
What if your data could actually talk to itself?
Instead of forcing everything into rigid systems (hello, data warehouses), Storytell extracts concepts from across your data—turning messy, incompatible information into something AI can reason over.
Not dashboards. Not reports.
Understanding.
The Pattern Behind Every Platform Shift
Daniel has built through multiple waves—early web, mobile, DevOps, and now AI.
His rule for spotting the real ones is deceptively simple:
“When users can suddenly do something they couldn’t do before—that’s the signal.”
In 2010: non-developers building apps.
In DevOps: teams deploying software continuously.
Today: knowledge workers analyzing data they couldn’t even access before.
This isn’t incremental progress.
It’s like giving someone night vision goggles in a dark forest—they don’t just move faster, they see a different world.
Why Most Founders Get Product-Market Fit Backwards
Here’s a subtle but powerful inversion:
Most founders think:
→ Build product → Find fit → Learn
Daniel argues:
→ Learn → Find patterns → Build the right thing
At Armory and Storytell, he ran 100+ customer discovery calls before writing meaningful code.
The goal wasn’t validation.
It was boredom.
When you hear the same problem over and over again, you’ve struck signal.
And now, with AI, there’s a twist:
You can build while learning—prototype in real time, test instantly, and tighten the loop faster than ever before.
The Hidden Risk of Success
Armory was, by most standards, a rocket ship:
Enterprise customers like JP Morgan and Sony
$83M raised
Massive contracts
And yet, it revealed a trap many founders don’t see coming:
Success can kill scalability.
Big enterprise deals pulled the company into bespoke implementations—custom setups, deep integrations, one-off solutions.
It worked… until it didn’t.
The lesson:
“You can always go deeper later. But once you’re addicted to big contracts, it’s hard to come back.”
In other words: revenue is not always progress.
The Most Underrated Founder Skill: Clean Communication
Most founder conflict doesn’t happen at the level of logic.
It happens beneath it.
Daniel shares a framework from his co-founder Erica called “clean communication”, which breaks conversations into three layers:
Logic – what we say we’re discussing
Emotions – where tension surfaces
Needs – the real root (and where resolution happens)
Most teams bounce between logic and emotion—never reaching the underlying needs.
But here’s the unlock:
Conflict doesn’t exist at the level of needs.
When founders can communicate at that level, alignment becomes possible again.
When they don’t, even great companies fracture.
AI Isn’t About Answers—It’s About Better Questions
Here’s the twist most people miss:
We used to live in a world where answers were scarce.
Now, answers are abundant.
The bottleneck has moved.
“The answers are already out there. You’re just not asking the right question.”
That changes the skill stack entirely.
The best operators aren’t just executing—they’re:
Framing better questions
Orchestrating AI workflows
Letting systems run independently and return with results
In Daniel’s view, the future of work splits into two roles:
Doing the work
Orchestrating the work
And those are rapidly collapsing into one.
The Endgame: Insight Without Asking
The most ambitious part of Storytell isn’t answering questions.
It’s eliminating the need to ask them.
Imagine this:
You didn’t ask about churn.
You didn’t check CSAT.
You didn’t analyze customer calls.
But suddenly:
→ You get a signal
→ It’s relevant
→ It changes your decision
That’s when the system becomes magical.
“You didn’t even know to ask—and now you know.”
It’s like having a world-class executive team whispering insights in your ear… constantly.
So What Should Founders Do Now?
We’re in a strange moment.
It’s never been easier to build.
It’s never been harder to predict what matters.
Daniel’s advice cuts through the noise:
Don’t start a company unless you can’t not start it
Use AI not just to move faster—but to learn faster
Focus on outcomes, not activity
Fall in love with problems, not solutions
And most importantly:
Pay attention to what people can suddenly do that they couldn’t yesterday.
That’s where the future is hiding.
Final Thought
A child building a game with AI.
A founder orchestrating entire workflows solo.
A system that tells you what you didn’t know to ask.
Individually, these feel like neat tricks.
Together, they point to something bigger:
We’re not just upgrading tools.
We’re upgrading human capability itself.
And the founders who understand that early?
They don’t just build companies.
They redefine what those companies are capable of becoming.
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Chapters:
00:01 Introduction & Guest Background
02:30 Early Entrepreneurial Roots & First Lessons
04:00 GE Experience & Operating Discipline (Ownership + Deadlines)
06:00 Recognizing Platform Shifts (From Mobile to AI)
08:00 The Builder Mindset & Vibe Coding
10:30 Consistency Across Startups & Leveraging Technology
13:00 Empowering Non-Technical Builders
15:00 Co-Founder Dynamics & Evolving YC Advice
18:30 Product-Market Fit vs Learning First
21:00 Armory: Building, Scaling, and Enterprise Sales
24:30 Fundraising Strategy & The FRAP Framework
29:00 Open Source to Enterprise Lessons
32:00 Founder Conflict & “Clean Communication” Framework
38:30 Storytell Origin: The Data Problem Inside Companies
43:00 Concept Graphs & Making Data Actionable
47:00 Real-World Use Cases (Paramount, Retail, Ad Tech)
50:30 Competing in the AI Stack (LLMs, Context, Agents)
53:30 Future of Work & AI as a Thought Partner
56:00 Final Thoughts & Where to Find Daniel
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01.422)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have DROdio on the mic. He is the CEO and co-founder of StorytelI.ai, a Team Ignite portfolio company. And he’s the second person from the podcast to come on. His co-founder, Erica, came on about seven months ago on episode 181. So we’re excited to drill down more into Storytel’s vision, who Giorgio is as a founder. He spent the last two decades building and scaling companies across major platform shifts from DevOps to AI. So we’re excited to chat with you today. Thanks for coming on.
DROdio (00:34.615)
It’s pleasure to be here. And also just a thank you to you, Brian, like the way that you support portfolio companies, I think as a founder trying to figure out who to take money from, especially early stage, you know, there’s like, there’s a lot of options, and you just have been a very, supportive investor. So very much appreciated as a founder.
Brian Bell (00:50.594)
thanks. Appreciate that. I’m often told that I’m one of the more helpful on the cap table for our... And I think people are surprised. I think founders have this misperception that small check writers like us, we rewrite $25,000 checks out of funds two and three, they won’t be that much help. But I think I find that it’s almost like the inverse is true.
DROdio (01:12.734)
think you have a lot of like horizontal like ear to the ground across many different industries and just startups. And that’s the kind of perspective you don’t get as a founder because you’re like way deep down the rabbit hole in the thing that you’re doing. So having an investor that has like that wide swath is really valuable.
Brian Bell (01:31.138)
Yeah, appreciate that. I’ll pay you later for all the nice words. But would love to start paying tokens to the mother AI. I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?
DROdio (01:46.484)
You know, I’m a technologist and I’m a founder from the very youngest age. know, my dad was an immigrant with $20 in his pocket. And I think you just see the world a little bit differently when you don’t have what all your friends around you have. You know, everybody had these big allowances. I did not have those things. And so what I did have is a dad that said like, Hey son, you know, I bet those construction workers are thirsty. Let’s go sell them sodas. And so he took me to Costco, which was called Price Club back then. And, you know, loaned me $20 to buy sodas to then go resell and you know it’s just seeing opportunity where others don’t is the way that I would describe my my genesis and then just being a technologist and wanting to use software to apply leverage to solve problems is intoxicating for me.
Brian Bell (02:31.662)
I love that. And so you started at GE’s technical leadership program during back in the Jack Welch era. What did that machine teach you about operating and standards and ambition?
DROdio (02:42.462)
Yeah, well, know, GE kind of fell apart under subsequent leaders, but back in the Jack Welch days, that was a very, very well run, very well respected company. And one of the things that I, it was also like 25 years ago. So the thing that has just stuck with me is how people treated action items at that company. So unless there was an owner that committed to a date, then it was just an idea. And the thing that I learned there was like, the date doesn’t have to be like the date you’ll deliver something. It could just be like the date when you give an update about what you’re doing, right? It’s like by Friday, I’ll have a plan. You know, it’s like signing up as an owner with a date. And I’ve really taken that and I’ve used that in my companies. We actually do something called ARCHI, which is like most people call it RACI, but it’s, know, who’s accountable for the outcome? Who’s responsible for the task? Who should be consulted and who should be informed? And anyway, I read a whole post about ARCHI because I think a lot of times everyone’s like pointing at the other people and they’re like, wait, thought you’re responsible or I was just informing you, you wanted to be consulted. And so we literally have little emojis in Slack, ARCI, and we drop into Slack, whether we’re just informing somebody or we’re consulting or ask them to be responsible or accountable. Like you’re accountable for an outcome or responsible for a task. Those are two different things.
Brian Bell (04:01.186)
Yeah, I love that. do remember the RACI from, you know, grad school. And ARC is a lot better acronym than RACI. So you’ve repeatedly built platforms and products through transitions, you know, from mobile to DevOps and now AI. How do you do you how does it feel in a platform shift before it’s obvious?
DROdio (04:24.924)
Yeah, I think when you see real users that can do things they could never do before, to me, that’s the signal. So for example, I did App Maker back in 2010 and we let people make no-code apps. that was the, I remember the night before we were about to launch App Maker, we taking bets around a whiteboard about how many apps people would make the first day. Would it be? 10 or 50 or 200, and it was like thousands in the first day. And this is back in 2010, like there weren’t that many apps in the app store. And just like people being unleashed to be able to do things, it’s the same thing with Storytel, knowledge workers being able to make sense of otherwise incompatible data that they could never make sense of before all of a sudden they feel like superheroes and they’re telling us that. That’s the moment that it’s meaningful.
Brian Bell (05:14.158)
So when you look back, what was that first moment you realized you were going to be a builder?
DROdio (05:20.165)
you know, I think I’ve, I’ve always been an entrepreneur and back, back in the day, that meant that if you wanted to have any sort of leverage, you needed to be a developer. So I was, I was a web developer. was a cold fusion web developer back in the, you know, like early 2000s. And that’s when I really realized the power of software. It’s actually interesting because, you know, I stopped coding for probably 20 years. And then I’ve just recently really gotten back into being a, you know, like a vibe coding CEO. We can talk a lot about what that means, but that’s a whole nother shift. But yeah, just being able to like apply leverage.
Brian Bell (05:57.4)
Yeah, I basically Vibe coded a lot of Team Ignite at this point, know, lot of Airtable automations and integrations and AI and API calls and, you know, the website and all of the JavaScript and CSS on the website’s all Vibe coded, you know, yeah.
DROdio (06:12.444)
Yeah, think what, you we have enterprise clients like Paramount and we pop up a chart asking how, you know, like avoidance or curious somebody is around AI. And I think maybe if anybody who’s listening, you know, doesn’t know what they want their relationship to with AI to be, just being curious and trying things is like the number one thing that I say because You really don’t know what you can do until you try, and you’ll probably be very surprised about what’s possible if you keep trying.
Brian Bell (06:44.534)
Yeah, love that. So you’ve you’ve had multiple companies and multiple exits. What stayed consistent across the winds and what has changed each time?
DROdio (06:57.303)
That’s an interesting question. I mean, the technology has changed. That’s the easy answer in terms of the technology and the ability to have more and more reach with technology. like the things that are possible today just would have been a dream before. Like when I was working at a startup in the early 2000s, we were literally racking and stacking servers, you know, and now you just, you know, and then when I started Armory, it’s a lot of cloud infrastructure work, it’s like, okay, now you can spin up, you know, compute with just a button, you know, like that changed. I think the thing that stays the same is unlocking the next level of what a human is capable of with that changing technology landscape. And I think, you know, we think linearly as humans, but the technology is changing exponentially. And it’s just hard for us to imagine what that future state is going to be. And I think we often just like underestimate even just today what capabilities we have. You my co-founder Erica was never a developer. And she has been doing a lot of vibe coding of a platform called humanebench.ai. that’s gotten press and tech crunch, and it’s being used by companies, it’s being used by story tell. She was never able to be a builder before, and now she can be. And so, yeah, that’s definitely changed.
Brian Bell (08:16.59)
Yeah, I love that. App Maker, going back to App Maker, that was about empowering non-technical creators and storytellers about empowering knowledge workers. Is that the same impulse in a new form or something different?
DROdio (08:27.108)
Yeah, no, I totally think that it is. think it’s absolutely the ability for somebody who has a desire to achieve an outcome, to be able to use a tool, a new tool, in order to achieve something that they’ve never been able to before. was actually, I realized it was the same thing with Armory, where it was, you know, a startup is all about shots on goal. and it’s about the ability to deploy ideas out into the world. And we were doing continuous delivery of software, which is a lot different than if you release code once a month or once a quarter or 10 times a day.
Brian Bell (09:03.192)
or like a waterfall, like you deploy once a quarter, yeah.
DROdio (09:06.48)
very, very, very different outcomes because you have many more shots on goal. you know, it’s the same kind of thing, like enabling that innovation to happen faster.
Brian Bell (09:16.75)
Yeah, I love that. We’ll get to armor in a sec, but I’d love to talk about co-founders, know, because you’ve had different configurations. What’s on your kind of co-founder selection checklist today? There’s probably lots of founders out there thinking about getting a co-founder. Something I often see, I see a lot of solo business founders without a technical co-founder, but what’s on your kind of co-founder checklist today that maybe wasn’t true 10 or 15 years ago?
DROdio (09:46.106)
So my answer is actually changing now. I went through Y Combinator in 2017 and the belief from YC, which I have also held, is that you should have really two founders, a hacker and a hustler. so my main learning has been to have fewer founders. When I started a company in the late aughts, there were five of us as co-founders. that’s a really hard thing to actually scale a company and split the cap table in a way that it’s gonna be worth it really for you as a founder. And then I had three co-founders or I had two, were three of us total when I did Armory as well as the beginning of Storytel. And what I’ve realized is this hacker and hustler like optimal mix, I think that’s still true. What is changing is that as the hustler, you can also play hacker a lot more than you used to be able to by vibe coding. I even see YC’s attitude towards this changing. They didn’t used to really hardly accept solo founders at all and now they’re much more permissive of it. I think...
Brian Bell (10:49.102)
Yeah, I’d say probably, gosh, if I had to guess, I’d guess there’s four or five a batch now. You know? Yeah, so it’s like two or 3%. But I mean, it needs to be a hard and fast rule. No, no solo founders. Yeah.
DROdio (10:54.926)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. Right. I wouldn’t be surprised if if that loosens up even more. Now, there are a lot of reasons to have a co-founder. I think just like by definition, when you’re starting a company, you’re doing something people think is a bad idea. And so, you know, just having somebody else who’s in it with you, who’s been to the future and is coming back to the president, trying to bring everybody in, you know, to balance each other out, that that alone can be worth it.
Brian Bell (11:16.365)
Right. Right.
Brian Bell (11:21.966)
Yeah, I love that. What’s the biggest myth in early stage founders believe? Getting the product market fit that you now think is backwards.
DROdio (11:32.719)
Yeah, so I think founders often think that they need to achieve product market fit to really start to learn. I actually would flip that around. Like I would say that learning is how you get to product market fit. I like to say like build the right thing fast instead of the wrong thing, right? And, you know, when we started Armory, we did a hundred customer discovery calls and the same thing with Storytel. I think that you, you You basically do discovery calls until you’re not learning anything new, until the pattern is like, I’ve heard that before. I’ve heard that before. And it’s a magical thing. I mean, you start hearing these patterns when you ask about pain. And so, you know, that learning, think, like starts from the very, very beginning.
Brian Bell (12:17.198)
Yeah, it’s almost like instead of PMF product market fit, it’s like pain market fit or something like that. It’s like you’re the pain first and then you’re finding the product, right? That’s all the pain.
DROdio (12:22.67)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DROdio (12:30.846)
Yeah, exactly. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. It’s a great saying. Yeah.
Brian Bell (12:30.846)
A problem market fit, something like that. love that. Let’s talk about Armory for a sec. What was Armory?
DROdio (12:36.879)
Armory was a rocket ship for a while. We went through YC in winter of 2017. We were commercializing Spinnaker. Spinnaker is an open source continuous delivery platform for code that was built by Netflix and Google. we landed, like our first customer was a six figure contract with one of the world’s largest companies. We were doing seven and eight figure deals with companies like JP Morgan Chase and Home Depot and Sony and Snap. you know, it was quite an incredible ride. And sadly, it didn’t end up the way that I thought that it would. And, you know, there were a lot of learnings that came from that, which we can definitely talk about. it was, you know, we went through Series C, raised $83 million and learned a lot.
Brian Bell (13:26.626)
Yeah. And for folks listening, Jordio is one of the best fundraisers I’ve ever met. know, and I’ve made over 300 investments now and probably met, I don’t know, 10 or 15 thousand companies in my career. Jordio is like, what makes you such a great fundraiser, you think?
DROdio (13:41.57)
Well, I’m not so there’s that great saying like, like, when you build a startup, it’s like you’re going on a journey across the US and fundraising is like stopping at a gas station, like you don’t want to be doing a tour of gas stations, you know, so, you know, like, I don’t know that it’s necessarily great to be a great fundraiser, it is useful and valuable telling stories, telling data driven stories, actually, there’s so Crosslink did the series A for Armory and there’s a guy named Eric, Eric and Phil, and they have a really great fundraising process called the FRAP, the Fundraising Attack Plan. And I wrote about this in Founderculture, which is a founder community, but the short of it is, I don’t think there’s any one right way to do fundraising, but a way, and I think a good way, is to try to have a really condensed period where you are actually in fundraising mode. And that is what you’re doing as a founder. You’re focused on it. I think ideally you’ve got two two-week windows. You’ve got a two-week window where you’re talking to like tier two and tier three VCs because you’re going to be changing your pitch a lot. And then the goal is to try to get a term sheet from that first batch. And then you overlap that by a week with the tier ones. And then you walk into this tier ones with the term sheet on hand because your first term sheet sets the floor, right? You negotiate up from your first term sheet. you’re like, you’re as good as your second best term sheet. And so you have a really condensed fundraising period, but you’re preceded by nine to 12 months of really intimate conversations with partners where you are trying to get information from them. I think this is the thing that founders often get wrong is they’re often telling VCs a lot about their business. VCs have phenomenal memories and they don’t tell the VC anything you don’t want them to ask you about later, right? And so really what you should be doing is, totally, mean, yeah, it’s only gotten even more like a steel trap. So instead, ask what great looks like, ask a partner, what would it take for me to go into that partner meeting and just absolutely kill it and nail it? And like the biotech partner who knows nothing about the business, like he or she is like a strong yes. So what would it take to to go there and the VC will say things like, well, you need to have strong revenue retention. It’s like, okay, well, what does strong look like? What is your associate gonna put into that model where it is like a hell yes. What does that number look like? So really try to understand what do you need to do to make that partner look like a hero because they are going to bat for you, right? They are maybe trying to say yes to. to you as a way to make their career within that VC. And part of that is dripping little bits of information. And so one of the things that I love doing is like, hey, this isn’t public yet, but hey, I’m giving you a little bit of like an early insider look at this. And then you do it as a secret link and then the VC can share it around inside their partnership, like, this company, you know, they’re about to, you know, sign this customer or whatever, things like that.
Brian Bell (16:55.118)
Yeah, love that. Really good tips. So you took an open source software and sold it into the enterprise. What did you learn from doing that? I see a lot of startups trying to do this. Either they kind of made their own open source or they’re creating an enterprise version of an open source product. And it seems to be a common path. What did you learn from doing that?
DROdio (17:15.222)
think probably the number one thing that I would do differently, we fell off the SaaS train pretty early when we did Armory. So because we were working with these very large companies, they wanted us to install in their VPCs. And we did. And it was hard. There’s a lot of dealing with all the networking issues and all that type of thing. What I wish that we had done is we can stuck to our guns more and just offered it as a service because that would have allowed us to see more patterns across more companies. We wouldn’t have been able to go as deep with any one given company, but we would have been able to build more actual scalable software versus what ended up turning into very bespoke implementations with a lot of just everything that goes along with that solutions, architecture and engineering. you know, just it’s a lot to go that deep, especially as a young startup. So. you know, like stick to offering it as a service as much as you can and see the pattern so you can build scalable software. You can always go deeper, but it’s hard once you get addicted to that seven and eight figure revenue to go the other direction.
Brian Bell (18:18.124)
Yeah, so I’m not sure I understand. So you guys got away from SAS and much more into it. It sounds like the multi-year enterprise licensing kind of game.
DROdio (18:28.125)
Yeah, it’s exactly right. implementations that were like installing, know, we’ll take a Kubernetes, like install it as a Kubernetes cluster running in their environment versus just offering it as a service. And so that just meant that it was each implementation was very bespoke and specific.
Brian Bell (18:48.184)
Yeah, yeah, can see that. And very similar with that having worked at the cloud at AWS and Microsoft during that era. What are some other things that you’ve taken away from your journey with Armory that you’d like to instill and impart on other founders listening?
DROdio (19:07.209)
Yeah, well, I think the number one thing is about the humans. So, you know, we were building a rocket ship and it was phenomenal. We got through series C and then COVID hit. And as we probably all remember at the beginning of COVID, there was a lot of uncertainty. mean, we were, you know, having board meetings where there was a question of whether like nations were going to fail. I mean, it’s just going back to that moment. It was very unclear what was actually going to happen. And I ended up having founder conflict. And I had founder conflict in a way that I didn’t even realize that I was going to, because I’d been doing startups with one of my founders for 15 years. I mean, we were literally like, like brothers. And I think the thing that I realized was a founder relationship is like a garden and you need to tend to that garden. And when you start to scale a company, you start seeing different data, you know, like I was a CEO, one of my founders was a CTO. We were starting to see different data. And if you don’t keep reinvesting in that founder relationship as you scale the company, then that data starts to not jive with each other. And then those conversations become a lot harder. But if you keep investing in that co-founder relationship instead of trading on like the fact that you think it’s exceptionally strong, you know, that’s, you just can’t overstate how important that is as the company scales.
Brian Bell (20:19.726)
So you go through this, at some point you step away from Armory. We don’t need to belabor the details there, but tell us about the incubation and aha moment for Storytell.
DROdio (20:30.718)
Yeah, I I’m happy to talk about it because I think it doesn’t get discussed enough. Like every founder that I talked to has had some kind of founder conflict. You know, if they’ve done anything at any sort of scale, it’s just like we’re humans and investing in those relationships with the humans around you that you’re building with, that you’re probably seeing more than whoever you’re married to, you know, that really is important. It really matters. And so I’m happy to actually talk about that as much as you’d like, because I think it doesn’t get discussed enough.
Brian Bell (20:58.19)
Let’s roll into that. Like if you had a time machine and you could send yourself back a message, like what would it say to do differently?
DROdio (21:05.043)
So one of the things that’s really helped me, and Erica is phenomenal with this, Erica’s background is in a lot of just like human psychology, is she has this great framework that she calls clean communication. And so to kind of step back, what does that mean? If you think about interactions at three levels, level one is logic. So oftentimes we’re just at the level of logic, it’s where business gets done, you’re figuring things out. Level two is emotions. Emotions often surface as judgment, right? Like you, it’s like if you’re pointing your finger at somebody else, you’re probably at that level of emotions. Well, level three, think level three, we often don’t even realize is there, that’s the level of needs and oftentimes unmet needs and that’s vulnerability. And that’s like, that’s when you’re pointing the finger at yourself, me, like, what do I need? And so like, what happens is, We stay at the level of logic because if we go down into emotions, it’s very explosive down there, right? And the problem is that we get stuck at level two emotions and we never get to level three needs, but every emotion is an attempt to meet an unmet need, right? And so just to give a little analogy, it’s like, if my partner gets home late and I get mad at that person for being home late, then I’m really saying like, I had an unmet need to be loved and the strategy that I’m using is I need you to be home early so that I feel loved. So if I focus on blaming you for not being home early, then I’m at level two. But if I can talk about how like, I really want to feel loved, you I really want to like have that need be met. And when you don’t come home on time, then I’m not feeling like I’m, I’m loved, you know, then you’re having a conversation and there’s no conflict at the level of needs. The conflict is only at the level of emotions where you are pointing the finger out at somebody else. So either we stay up there at logic, afraid to go down because it’s explosive. Or if we go down, we don’t get down actually to the like where things like what’s really calling the shots around needs. And I think if founders can become good at being able to traverse, don’t like logic circle and try to like give data. if I just give another data point, I’m going to convince this person that like, I’m right. you know, like don’t stay at that level of logic, but be able to traverse down past emotions through needs and really talk about like, what are your unmet needs? That’s where you can start to see progress. And anyway, there’s a whole framework that Erica has called clean communication that literally has like a one cheater back in front that we use to like identify feelings and needs. It’s transformative.
Brian Bell (23:36.27)
Wow, that is super cool. Well, let’s fast forward to Storytel. What’s the of the origin story there?
DROdio (23:43.1)
You know, the origin story is my time at GE, a very big company, my time selling to very large companies and just seeing how much data gets dropped on the floor and how siloed organizations are and how inaccessible data typically is to be able to create value. And when I say that is like when I was scaling Armory, I had the doers, right? I had the engineers, I had the product managers, know, sales engineers. And then I spun up an entire other division that was basically just telling a story of what the doers were doing, right? We call that marketing. And they’re basically telling a very low fidelity story about what’s actually happening inside the company to the people outside the company that are gonna be buying whatever you’re selling. And the reason that we have to do it that way is because all of that data, all that, you know, it’s stuck in linear or it’s stuck in JIRA or it’s stuck in Anaplan if I’m the finance team or it’s stuck in an HRS systems, right? All these systems of record have all of this data that’s like fundamentally incompatible with other data. But like, what if, what if it were possible to actually use that data to be able to achieve strategic outcomes for the business? And that’s, know, like AI actually makes that possible when there’s data of incompatible types. Before you had to put it all into a data warehouse. But the reality is like 85 to 90 % of a company’s data doesn’t live in a data warehouse. It never, it never will. And so like, there’s gotta be a better way. And that’s really the genesis for building storytellers. Like what if we can build that better way to make all of that incompatible data actually work as a strategic asset so humans can be more effective.
Brian Bell (25:23.502)
I love this and I loved it in particular because I wish I had this 10 years ago as a product manager, right? Because I get lots of, product managers are kind of the nexus of information inside of software companies, I’d say. And so I’d get 10 different constituencies reaching out via Slack and asking questions. And I’m like, gosh, if I can only just get all this knowledge and put into a place where people could ask the AI for it.
DROdio (25:31.015)
Totally.
Brian Bell (25:52.591)
I literally, and I remember looking at the technology that existed back in, must’ve been 2015 at this point, 2016. I was just like, we just don’t have the tech to do this. So when I saw what you guys are building, I thought, okay, this is exactly what I wish I had 10 years ago.
DROdio (26:02.524)
Yeah.
DROdio (26:07.687)
Yeah, let’s actually go even deeper than like asking the AI, right? Because even that would be magical. But let’s take an example where a salesperson’s on a call with a customer or a prospect and it’s an hour long, let’s say that it’s like a Zoom call, right? So as a product manager today, you probably have zero visibility into what happened on that call. Maybe, maybe the salesperson’s like, hey, Brian, you should go listen to the gong or the Zoom recording. Like go listen to an hour long call. Like the customer said a thing about a feature that they wish.
Brian Bell (26:36.952)
Which I don’t have time to do, by the way.
DROdio (26:37.895)
Existing which you never have time to do right? So probably you don’t even get that well that so what is that zoom call? It’s really like that file that transcript is a container of Concepts that were discussed in that call and one of the concepts was the customer bitching about a feature or wishing that a feature Existed like what if it was possible to take just that 37 seconds of that hour-long zoom call? and push that into the JIRA ticket of the product manager that is building that feature or alert that product manager. So that product manager doesn’t even know to ask for that thing. And this is like where I get really excited about like pushing signal. We live in this pull world. Pull works great for B2C like Google, you like you go ask a question, but in B2B, like you don’t even know what question to ask because you don’t have the context of what’s going on in the sales team. And so it needs to be pushed, not pulled. And that’s the thing that we’re building with Storytell is number one, the ability to transform that Zoom call into a number of concepts, which then can be pushed into the places that they need to go.
