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Kyle Harrison sat down with Ali Amin-Javaheri, founder and CEO of Knowde, for an episode released in September 2023. The conversation covered how Amin-Javaheri grew up around the chemical industry, why technology companies had largely stayed out of a $5 trillion market, how Knowde organized product data trapped in supplier documents, how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way chemical companies thought about sales, why the marketplace had to win suppliers directly, how it used search to reach buyers, what the company planned to do with its data beyond the marketplace, and why he wanted more founders building in industrial markets.
Five Key Takeaways
- Product data was the root problem: Amin-Javaheri, who left ChemPoint in 2017, said he spent 15 years trying to work out why the chemical industry had not been transformed and that every answer led back to product data. He said each product had five types of documents of two to 10 pages, sitting behind a firewall or in PDFs. Knowde extracted the attributes from that text and harmonized them against a taxonomy, so that the 15 or so synonyms for cosmetics would resolve to one filter.
- Opacity kept technology companies out: Amin-Javaheri argued that outsiders could not learn the market online or get a meeting, and that the industry was built for insiders. He said most chemical companies still ran without a CRM even though their manufacturing technology was top tier, because their commercial leaders had grown up in engineering roles and few vendors other than SAP and, to a smaller extent, Microsoft called on them.
- COVID-19 exposed the field sales model: Amin-Javaheri said companies whose sales rose asked why that happened with their reps at home, while companies whose sales fell saw how dependent they were on field salespeople. He cautioned that the change was gradual, but said that without it he would still be wondering whether Knowde's timing was off. He also said buyers had become noticeably younger over the previous five years, with little patience for information that was hard to access.
- Suppliers had to be won directly, while search brought buyers: Amin-Javaheri said chemical suppliers held more power than sellers on Amazon or Etsy, so signing up buyers alone would not bring them. He estimated 15K-20K suppliers worldwide, with the largest holding under 1% of the market, and put Knowde at about 7.8K. To reach buyers, he said Knowde was making information trapped in PDFs indexable, with the aim that its links would become like Wikipedia links for the industry.
- Knowde described the marketplace as one use of its data: Amin-Javaheri said the company had never set out to build only a marketplace and that organizing product data would remain its core competency. He described embedding Knowde's software on suppliers' own websites and enabling their sales teams with product recommendations. He called advertising an obvious opportunity but said the company had more fundamental problems to solve first and could not pursue seven ideas at once.
Full Transcript
Growing Up in an Industry Built for Insiders
One of the things I love that is fairly unique for you is that the problem you're solving today, you could trace its roots back to your childhood. Your dad was a chemical engineer, I think worked at DuPont, right? I can't think of a better founder-market fit experience.
In tech, there's not that many chemical engineers, let alone folks that know anything about this market. And so it is fairly unique. And my life history, I think, has set the company up for where we are today.
I'm curious to hear the experience. What was it like growing up? Were you always interested in it? And how did it bring you to the aha moment of this is where I want to solve problems?
I definitely grew up in it. He worked in the industry as I was growing up. He was at a joint venture between the Iran state-owned oil company and DuPont in Iran. And he loved it. It was a lot of fun. As a chemical engineer, building a plant, especially that was that innovative back in the day, was just an amazing experience. And he just talked to me about it all the time. And his experience has certainly rubbed off. And I just grew to build a passion for this space so early. Most people haven't spent literally a minute of their lives thinking about this industry. It's too nebulous. It's too hard to wrap your head around what it even is. But for that reason alone, it just seemed like such a cool space. Nothing is possible around us without it.
And then when we traveled around the world and eventually settled into the Northwest, not a lot of chemical industry over there. And so I just figured that I'd go work for some tech company and that would be that. And then to be able to start my career at a company that was at the intersection of chemical and tech was amazing. The odds of that alone is so low. And then at that point I got sucked right back in, and fast forward 20-some years later, I'm still in it.
If I remember correctly, I think it was ChemPoint, right? And you stumbled on it when you were in college. They had a crappy website. What was the thing that made you want to spend more time there?
The first thing was just the coincidence. There is some biotech up in Seattle, but not much more than that. And so the fact that it was a super early stage company that was wanting to pull the industry online, that had folks in the company that were just really passionate about the space, attracted me a ton to it. And frankly, they had me at hello. They could have said anything and I would have still joined, and it's not like they paid me a lot of money. So I certainly had to be passionate about it. And I absolutely loved the experience. I think that that company was probably a little too early for its time, but even today, this industry is still starting to dip their toes into all things digital. And so imagine what it was like 20 years ago when that company started. It was probably a little too early, but amazing experience. And I was there for a lot of years.
There is this Silicon Valley-ism, the Peter Thiel idea that big markets attract lots of competitors, so you want to find these niche spaces, and competition is for suckers. This is a $5 trillion global industry that touches every aspect of life. You would think that people would be tripping over themselves to sell technology here. But as far as I understand it, not only is there crappy technology here, there's basically no technology. How can such a big industry have avoided being totally overrun with people trying to sell them technology?
I think there's a lot of reasons for it. One is that the idea of going into the chemical industry from a tech perspective just feels daunting. Just the term of it alone, it feels like it's just too heavy. Most tech companies just would never enter into this space unless you're called SAP and you're in Germany and you're around all these chemical companies. This isn't one of those spaces where somebody from outside the industry can hop online and learn about it and know everything that they need to know in order to go build a tech company in this space. This industry is incredibly opaque. You can't find what you need to learn in order to go build a company here. In most markets, it's so transparent. You can find out who the big players are, where they play in the value chain, how much margin they take off the table. You can learn all these sorts of things in almost every market, but you can't in this one. And so it keeps a lot of tech companies out of it.
For those that even try to build something in the space, once they get going, they realize, oh my gosh, there is a lot of complexity here. And just being able to get in the door of one of these companies is incredibly challenging. You can't just knock on the door and think that they're going to give you a meeting. This industry is for the insiders. And so it just has a lot of natural friction and natural moats that keep competitors out.
I think I mentioned this to you a while back. Most chemical companies in our industry still to this day do not have a CRM. They're running multi-billion dollar companies without customer-facing tech. I hear founders saying all the time things like, this is a paper and pen industry, and they're probably exaggerating a little bit. And it's like, no, in this one, it's Post-it notes and pencils. It's wild.
But I will say, I don't want to ridicule the industry in that way. When it comes to back office technology, supply chain, manufacturing, it's second to none. What they do in their plants is unbelievable. Top tier. These are chemical engineers. They're process engineers. They know how to use tech in manufacturing. It's just that they don't have the same capabilities in the front of the house.
When it comes to the sales process, do you think it is more a function of they are the only game in town to some extent, and the buyers have to come to them? Or is there enough fragmentation that there would be plenty of efficiency, and it's just that they are stubborn? What is that behavioral blocker?
So most folks in these companies are engineers of some sort. They didn't cut their teeth in leading edge marketing and sales organizations and then come here, right? They grew up within the industry in a process engineering role and a back office role of some sort. And then they realized, well, this person seems fairly charismatic and knows how to carry a conversation. Let them go talk to customers. And that's how they end up building out their sales teams. And they've just done it that way for a really, really long time.
And it's not that there's anything wrong with field sales and relationships and all those sort of things. So many businesses to this day are still built on that. However, it's still solely built on that. They haven't thought through what's inside sales look like? What does digital sales look like? What does it mean to run digital marketing campaigns? They're still in the early stages of that. And I think partly because of what I said, which is they're grown up in that company. They've only seen it done a certain way. They don't have outside exposure. And so they just don't bring that different perspective into the organization.
And then at the same time, there's not a lot of companies knocking on their door saying, hey, you should do it differently, and let me give you some new ideas. So they're learning about all this in real time. They're just now getting exposed to it, because if you're not called SAP and maybe to a smaller extent, Microsoft, you're not knocking on these guys' doors. If you're the CMO of Dropbox, I can't even imagine how much inbound you're getting from somebody trying to sell you something. Whereas the VP of marketing at so-and-so Chemco, zippo. There's nobody there. So you're just not exposed to it. You don't know.
Organizing the Industry's Product Data
You've been entrenched in this your whole life. You're seeing these inefficiencies that exist. What drew you to solve problems with Knowde the way you're doing it? What exactly do you think of Knowde as breaking into the space to do?
The front of house is by far the most interesting for me, because that's where the interaction happens between the buyers and the sellers, right? If you're a buyer of chemistry, which is basically every physical good company in the world, you rely on chemistry in order to go make your product. It's literally the foundation of every physical good. Think about the amount of innovation that happens with all this chemistry. If you're somebody that works at Tesla or Unilever, Procter & Gamble or whatever, you're working with chemistry all day long in order to go build your thing.
And the thought that always crossed my mind is how can you totally innovate on that product if you don't have massive transparency in the market in terms of what these products do and why I should use it and what its value proposition is and all that? Why am I hunting for a sales rep to get a little bit of information? Why am I waiting seven days to get a document that describes what this product is? That just makes no sense. And so to an extent, our industry has limited the innovation that so many of these companies can do. If you want the car to be lighter and drive faster, that's the chemical industry that's going to solve that problem. And if we don't give folks access to this knowledge, they're never going to be able to do it.
So the aha, or the really important solve that we wanted to make, was that most of this industry's knowledge, product knowledge, chemical knowledge, sits in documents. Each product has five different types of documents. Each one of these documents are two to 10 pages. And they describe what the product is, why you should use it. Hey, Tesla, here's why you should care. But those documents aren't exposed to the world. They sit behind the firewall or they're just sitting in PDFs. And so what we wanted to do is get access to all of those documents and organize and structure all that data and make it accessible to everyone. We knew that we wouldn't be able to create amazing customer experiences unless we could solve this product dilemma. Because at the end of the day, when that engineer from Tesla is learning about chemistry, they want to understand the product. And if they can't get access to that product data, then there's a terrible customer experience there.
And so that's the core of Knowde. That's how we came up with the name Knowde. Most people don't know that. It's this merge of knowledge and a graph database and the nodes of a database. How do we organize, structure and harmonize all this unstructured data that exists in our industry? And if we could unlock that, then you're going to unlock amazing customer experiences.
There's a couple of businesses like this where you build a core infrastructure layer. You do one thing well, and it gives you the extensibility to do a lot of other things because you did that hard thing upfront. You've mentioned this market is very opaque, and I would imagine it's even apples to oranges across different companies. Maybe they don't call the same compound the same thing. How did you tackle that intense complexity across all these different companies to lay that foundation for the product?
You're totally right. There's a lot of markets that still aren't digitized. And in order to transform them, you have to figure out what the root of the problem is. Why is it not getting transformed? I spent 15 years trying to figure out the why, and all roads ended up leading back to this product data issue. Nobody could figure out how to unpack those documents and organize that data. It is a very complex problem, because you're dealing with technical information that's in paragraph form, not always in table forms. Table forms, sure, you can write the right scripts and all that to get the data out of there. But we're talking deep in these documents, very, very challenging problem solved.
But then as you pull out all these attributes for every product, then you've got to harmonize it, right? So I'll give you a very real example. If you're selling chemistry into a cosmetic application, think about all the different ways you can even refer to cosmetics: beauty care, personal care, cosmetic. There's like 15 synonyms for the exact same thing. And so you not only have to extract the right terms, you've got to harmonize it against every single possible thing that anybody can call it. Otherwise, if you create a filter to try to find what you're looking for, you don't want 15 different versions of the same term showing up. And so we essentially are organizing the entire world of physical goods, because chemistry is sold into everything. You've got to unpack all that data, create a taxonomy or classification system for every type of physical good, and then map all those terms back to it. So it was certainly a difficult problem to solve.
COVID-19 and the Buyers Driving Change
You created this universal language for an industry that refused to speak the same language. Then I would imagine you go out and start having these conversations, and there's probably a behavioral blocker where people say, this is just how I do things. And I would imagine that something like COVID completely disrupts this industry, where people have built their entire relationship on, I go talk to that person. What was that like, as you were building the solution and engaging with these people that now had an interruption in the way that they had always been doing things?
That is a very insightful question. So this industry just has relied on the same go-to-market model forever. And there are certainly days that I woke up and was like, you know what, it may be another 20 years. Who knows, right? Because there's no outside forces that are forcing these companies to think differently. And from the inside, they don't think differently. And so there's certainly the timing question that goes through your mind all the time.
It caused a lot of companies to think differently, because if their sales went up, they were thinking to themselves, wait a minute, all our sales reps are sitting at home doing nothing. Why are sales going up? And then if their sales went down, they're like, oh, whoa, we are way over-dependent on our field salespeople. We need other ways of being able to engage customers. So it's this awakening moment. And because it went on for a couple of years, it caused them to really have to sit in their pain for a little while. Now, it's not like COVID came and went and they all of a sudden said, throw a billion dollars into digital transformation and let it rip. There's still a lot of behavioral things that have to change. But if that event didn't happen, I would certainly still be waking up thinking, is the timing off?
It feels like every market that shifts, there's a core driver, whether that's a specific person or role, or customer demand. What do you feel like today is the main tailwind that you guys are riding? What's that driver for you?
It always starts with an individual that's within their digital team that holds a P&L, or in their transformation team, that just gets it. Because if we're having to go in there and educate from scratch and try to create an initiative, we're dead in the water. There has to be a mindset in the organization that we have to change. Once that's in place, it usually then ends up as a commercial conversation where they think to themselves, wait a minute, think about how many beauty care brands are out there. There's probably 10 that pop up every day. And if you sell a lot of raw materials into that space, how do I get in front of them?
I was talking to a chemical company yesterday, very, very large one, that has 3M as a client, and they've got one sales rep that manages 3M. And they were literally for 10 minutes trying to convince me that that one sales rep knows everything happening at 3M. This person, let's just call him Bob for now, because there's a lot of those guys in our industry. He's owned 3M for 10 years and he knows everything. It's like, wait a minute, do you realize how many people work at 3M? And do you know how many active projects are happening there every day that you could be selling chemistry into? Bob does not manage 3M.
God bless Bob. There's just not enough capacity in the human brain.
There's not enough capacity in the human brain. And those same engineers don't know that Bob exists. And so they're just going online.
The other one that I should mention, which is a really, really big one, is that the buy side of the market has gotten a lot younger over the past five years. The folks that work at the Unilevers and Teslas and all that are noticeably younger now than they were five years ago. And their patience for blue blazers and briefcases are fairly low. And so, hey, if you're not making the information accessible, you're not going to have a seat at the table.
Winning Suppliers and Reaching Buyers
When you're part of a transaction, you have buyers and you have sellers, and both need to get value. Do you feel like there is an equal balance where you need to be creating as much value for both? Or is it, if we can just convince the buyers that this is where they need to be, the sellers will come?
That's another very good question. So like I was just mentioning, the buy side is a lot younger and more accustomed to using all the tools that you would expect. The supply side is not. However, the supply side in our market has a lot more power than the suppliers in Amazon or Etsy or whatever. Think about all the different suppliers for any particular SKU on Amazon. There's tons of them. And if one of them doesn't want to play ball, you just go work with somebody else. Whereas in our market, the suppliers have a lot more power. And so you need to get more of them on board.
And therein lies the challenge, because the suppliers are the ones that are a little stodgier and a little bit more risk averse and all those sort of things. And so I wish we could have just gotten a bunch of buyers and said, hey, suppliers, come, because it just didn't work that way. We had to go after the suppliers directly and get them to come, which was certainly a challenge for a few years.
What is the core value prop of what you're offering for the suppliers, and for the buyers? What do they most resonate with?
On the supply side, it's more customer reach, just getting my catalog in front of more customers and making it easier for my customers to be able to discover my products, learn about my products and all of that. Make it a lot easier for them to proactively engage their sales team, rather than their sales team constantly going out and trying to hunt new business. It's a massive value proposition. This market is incredibly fragmented and there's just no way you can reach all these customers. So if you can find a way to get them to come to you, it saves a ton of money and time.
On the buy side, it's all about convenience. How do I find who all the sources are for particular raw materials? And how do I learn about it and engage with them as quickly as possible? Because it's hard for me to paint a picture of how opaque and difficult this industry has always been. If you're working at, and I'll keep using the same example, Tesla, and you're trying to lightweight the materials of your car so that it's more efficient, you solve that problem through the Chemcos and the polymer companies. And you need access to information to be able to know, hey, how do I go innovate on this product? Finding the information is terribly hard. Finding the right Bob in each of these organizations is terribly hard. And so it just slows you down. Something that should take four hours takes four days or four weeks or four months. It's just incredibly challenging. So from the buy side, it's all about organization of information, transparency of that information, and access to knowledge.
When I think about the supply side, is it like 70% of the market is five suppliers, and then there's the long tail? How fragmented are we talking on the supplier side?
The supplier side is also a lot more fragmented than people think. It's not as fragmented as the buyer side, for obvious reasons. But the supply side is also very fragmented. I'll give you some numbers so you can wrap your head around it. There's about 15,000 to 20,000 suppliers in the world. And the largest one has less than 1% of market share.
Who's the largest? Are those the names we might know?
BASF, Sinopec, Dow Chemical.
Even those big names, maybe 1% of market share?
It's for the number that you threw out at the top, $5 trillion. $5 trillion is a lot. The biggest companies are $50 billion. And $50 billion is a massive company. $50 billion in revenue is a thing.
It's a good day's work.
Good day's work. And so if you're the largest at $50 billion, by nature, you can't have more than 1%.
One of the things that's been really interesting when you look at a lot of consumer marketplaces, I always think about this analogy of buyer aggregation, Shopify versus Etsy. Shopify has a single digit percent take rate because they're basically saying, we're going to give you the tools, but then Godspeed. If you don't have a brand, if you don't have distribution, good luck getting in front of people. Whereas Etsy, I list my stuff, and they have this consumer interface that's going to put your stuff in front of people. But that also means that they have a double digit take rate, low 20s, I think. When you think about this mechanism of buyer aggregation, it is so fragmented. How do you make sure they land on Knowde?
So a big play for us is all things SEO. Because all the product information is trapped in PDFs and a lot of times behind the firewall, that gives us an amazing opportunity, which is that we can race out ahead. And if we can unpack all this information and make it indexable, then all of a sudden the Knowde links three years from now are like the Wikipedia links. That is our customer acquisition strategy, or the buy-side acquisition strategy, which is these folks are online all the time, browsing, looking, trying to figure out who's got what and why I should use certain products. Our objective is to drive them to Knowde and then make it really clear that, okay, you found information about a product when you clicked on this link. Now back out and go explore everything that you could possibly explore.
We did a little bit of research on Canva for another research report that we did, and they have a very similar thought process, where they're trying to address this long tail of design use cases. I think they have 70 different landing pages and each of those landing pages has 50 to 100 different possible variations. For you, it's literally the world of products and combinations of things. How do you manage such a massive SEO problem?
It's complex. And I'm not going to suggest that we've got it figured out, because if you go to Knowde and start browsing around the mega menu, you'll realize that, oh, wow, these guys literally are sitting on top of the entire world. And they're trying to organize everything from ag to pharma to automotive to whatever. And so you naturally have tons of content across tons of different markets and applications and everything else.
The opportunity that we have that I think is unlike a lot of other companies is that the world hasn't seen a lot of this content, and it makes us unique. So I was thinking back to the story an investor told me in 2020. He's like, I've done so much research about all of these marketplaces that try to build through SEO. As he was doing his research, he said most of these companies will struggle because their keywords are so saturated. We go do a bunch of research in terms of pay-per-click and who's at the top and all these things. And when they did the research on the chemical industry, they're like, this may be the last remaining greenfield opportunity on Google, because there's just no content out there.
It's pretty esoteric, right? There's just not that many people talking about these very specific things. If you guys even whisper it on Google, you're going to jump to the top because you're the only thing that's really answering the question.
That's right. That's right.
Building Beyond the Marketplace
Bring me back to today. When you think about this $5 trillion universe, what percentage of it is on Knowde, maybe not even transacting, but where you have available surface area of information? How do you think about the dent that you've made thus far?
We've measured the dent through the density of suppliers. And in total, there's probably upwards of 20,000, maybe a little bit more as you go into Asia Pacific, just because over there, it's super, super opaque. But taking China out of the mix, roughly 15,000, 16,000. Today, if you go on Knowde, you can find suppliers up, I think we've got up to maybe 7,800 of them. And so we've got a considerable amount of surface area. From that perspective, a buyer can come in and browse the largest catalog that's ever been made in this industry. And it's all harmonized, which is the most important thing, right? So I'm looking for cosmetic ingredient, it's harmonized across 7,800 suppliers. That's the beauty, is that I can click a couple of filters and all of a sudden I can find everything under the sun for half the market. That's why they keep coming back.
Are there some of these multi-billion dollar, yet still 1% or less market share, whales that you're hunting? Who are the holdouts that you'd love to break in?
We've gotten a good number of them at this point. When they do come in, it's not always the entire organization. It's a classic land and expand. I'll take a great example like BASF. We're very proud to have them as a customer, but it takes time to get the entire organization to adopt. You wedge in with one or two divisions of the 15 that they have, and you keep educating the other divisions as to why they should join. It's a grind for sure. But in these big orgs, you've got to find the right champion in the right division and then just keep expanding, expanding, expanding.
You've laid this foundation. You have the schema of knowledge, the universal language that lets you get into these thousands of suppliers. What's the next mountain to climb for Knowde?
When we started the company, we never said that we were going to just build a marketplace. That was actually not our intent at all. Our intent was to organize product data. And we knew that if we unlock that, we can unlock a lot of other things down the road. And so our core competency today and tomorrow is going to remain the organization taxonomy of product data. Now, what we end up doing with that could be really cool stuff.
I'll give you a great example. All the software that we've built within the marketplace, we've now made accessible within the supplier's own website. And so nobody's locked into a marketplace. We've said since day one that we just want to help this industry transform. And so if you can take now the organization of your own product data and take our software and embed it into your own website and give customers that are coming to your website an amazing experience, by all means, do that.
I'll give you another great use case. Now that we've organized the product data, they think to themselves, wow, you can now help enable my sales team when they're doing those field sales calls. So imagine you go to Unilever and you're having a conversation around the cosmetic ingredients. There's no way as a sales rep you can remember all the different products that you could possibly sell into the application. You need help. And so now I've got an amazing sales enablement tool that will tell me what I should recommend next. And so the root of the problem is what we had to solve, which is the product data. And I think it can unlock all sorts of things in the future.
When you think about how the product evolves, step one was to get people interacting online and making transactions. The two things that struck me as really interesting are, number one, being able to offer ads on the platform. It reminds me of Jeff Bezos famously not wanting to get into the advertising business for years and years, and now last year, Amazon's advertising business was $30-40 billion of revenue. And then, more recently, the website optimization and customer experience platform. How do you think about the product, and what's been the biggest change to it?
Because we're dealing with such a big market that's so greenfield and new to tech and all that, your mind can almost explode with all the directions you can take it. And one of the things that we talk a lot internally about is just trying to remain focused, because it's not like we've raised an infinite amount of capital where we can go pursue seven different ideas simultaneously. And so we've got to be really, really conscious of where we spend our time.
Ads, obvious, right? It's such a huge opportunity. And in our space, transactions are not small. I don't know what a typical transaction on Amazon is, maybe 20 bucks or something. In our space, it's thousands upon thousands. An ad play could be really interesting for us. But there's more fundamental problems that we have to solve for these guys: how they can enable their teams internally and their customers around their newly organized product data. That is one that we're going to still sit on for a little while, because there's still a lot of change that needs to happen.
More Founders for the Industrial World
You're tackling a component of the physical world that a lot of people don't think about, but it makes the world go round. You've seen a few success stories of other companies tackling similar aspects of the built world: people building in manufacturing, defense, space exploration, industries where a lot of people don't know the inner workings. Are there companies you look up to that have built in these types of spaces or models?
That's a fantastic question. Look, my head is down all day, every day. All I do is think about this space. I was actually talking to a friend of mine this last weekend that said, hey, I've learned so much about your company and the way it works. You could essentially pick up this whole business model or platform and drop it into X market, and it would work so well. And I'm like, it might, but I literally know nothing about that market. So even if we wanted to, I couldn't.
There's so many cool things that are happening around us, and we take little tidbits from each of them and try to bring it into our organization. I've got amazing investors that flood me with all sorts of articles and stuff, because they've learned our company and they see all these random parallels, not a parallel across everything that we're doing, but random parallels here and there of what X company is doing around the root of the problem in that industry that is prohibiting transformation. It's not always product data. It could be a lot of different random things. I love reading stories like that, because you find this little wedge in these organizations where there's a fairly acute amount of pain. And then you create these little dominoes that should fall in the future if you solve that initial pain. And stories like those are the ones that I gravitate the most to.
I wish there were more founders in the industrial world that had the gumption or conviction to jump out of their very easy jobs to go build companies, because we need more of these stories. There's not enough VCs sitting in Cleveland and Houston and all these other places that have a ton of need for tech. Those are the ones that need to have their stories written, because there's so many amazing stories that just haven't been written. I mean, dude, how many times are we reading a tech story? I've read the same story 15 times. There's 15 other companies doing this exact same thing, maybe slightly different. Those are not the ones that I gravitate toward.
We've talked about this before, the trailblazing that you're doing, where hopefully the goal is that you want to unlock, jokingly, these mad scientists that are wasting away, frustrated in the world that they live in, feeling like there's not a mechanism by which to go and transform this industry that they know so well. Hopefully folks can look at you and say, hey, that's a model for me to go do something similar in different aspects of the built world.
There's so many markets that are just hidden from the rest of the world, that nobody really spends a minute of their life thinking about. But it's those markets that are the most critical to the world. Any sort of incremental innovation that happens there can have such a massive trickle-down effect. It needs to happen. Those mad scientists need to get unlocked. I've talked to many of them, and the biggest hesitation they have is that they feel like the venture market is too far removed from their day to day. It's so unfamiliar to them. It's still how to even get in front of them, how to pitch them, what does it mean to pitch them, all those sort of things. How do you bring those two worlds a little bit closer together, give them the confidence to jump out of whatever job they're in to go build something?
