Triangle Tweener Talks

00:00:03 - Eric Boduch
And some people are like, oh, AI represents the death of a product manager. And I think that's crazy talk. If anything, it's going to lead to the golden era of product management, you know, because product managers and people that understand the domain and what they want to build and have empathy with their users and really understand the problem space and what customers problems are, that should be gold in the age of AI. Welcome to Triangle Tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by Builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to the exit and all the lessons in between with an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Now here's your host, serial, Founder and General Partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo.

00:00:52 - Scot Wingo
Welcome to this episode of Triangle Tweener Talks, Part one of a two part series where we interview Pindo Co founder and the Triangle's only venture studio operator, Eric Bodo. This episode is brought to you by our amazing sponsor, Eisner Amper, Formerly hpg, one of the world's largest business consulting firms with a dedicated technology practice offering outsourcing, accounting, tax and advisory services.

00:01:17 - Scot Wingo
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00:02:16 - Scot Wingo
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00:02:53 - Scot Wingo
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00:03:30 - Scot Wingo
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00:04:07 - Scot Wingo
Visit Whitley Recruiting Partners today to learn more. And an extra special awesome thanks to our friends at Irfluence Walk west who have partnered with us to produce this podcast. On today's podcast I am really excited for you to learn more about Eric Bodick. When you think Pindo, everyone thinks Todd Olson, and rightly so. He's the CEO thou spoken frontman, also the spokesperson, co founder. But remember, there are three other founders at Pindo and one of them is here and that's Eric. And what's interesting about Eric is he is now quietly building a startup factory and not a lot of folks in the Triangle are tracking this. I think it's kind of a hidden secret if you will. In this conversation we go over Eric's background, how the heck from someone from Pennsylvania, went to Carnegie Mellon, ended up in the Triangle founding Pindo with Todd and then ultimately in 2021 he made the decision to leave Pindo and we go into some of the details on that.

00:04:59 - Scot Wingo
This episode and conversation were so long and dense with great information that we decided to stop at that part in the story and then in part two we're going to pick up the Venture Studio piece. So you'll hear about all that next week. Eric, welcome to Triangle Talks Podcast.

00:05:17 - Eric Boduch
Thanks Scott. Great to be here.

00:05:18 - Scot Wingo
I'm excited, awesome excited to have you so here on the podcast we have founders on and we like to crack open their head and see what makes them tick. So good to have you on. The.

00:05:29 - Eric Boduch
I've heard by my neurologist told me I have a nice brain, so whatever.

00:05:32 - Scot Wingo
That means, crack open away nice and pink and squishy. Let's start at the beginning. Where are you from?

00:05:38 - Eric Boduch
Born in Massachusetts. Close to the center of the state, but what they call Western Mass. So little town called Wilbraham, home of friendly ice cream.

00:05:46 - Scot Wingo
Oh, nice.

00:05:47 - Eric Boduch
So if you've ever been to a friendly or had their ice cream, that's from my hometown.

00:05:51 - Scot Wingo
Nice. That's gonna. I imagine that's not a city like Boston. It's a very rural part of Massachusetts.

00:05:56 - Eric Boduch
It is. It is kind of up in the edge of the Berkshires.

00:06:00 - Scot Wingo
And is it known for cows, thus the ice cream?

00:06:02 - Eric Boduch
Is that correct? No, no. To my knowledge there's no cows in town, nor were there when I grew up. Calfrey. There's a turkey farm there somewhere, you know, and a bunch of peaches. Peach farm. Yeah, yeah.

00:06:15 - Scot Wingo
Down here. Peaches are from Georgia. We don't. Don't eat those. Massachusetts peaches.

00:06:19 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I think it's a little later season, I think. Yeah, yeah. Peaches aren't ready yet in Massachusetts, but definitely, definitely ready in Georgia now, I think. Right.

00:06:29 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's coming in the season.

00:06:30 - Eric Boduch
Yeah.

00:06:31 - Scot Wingo
The. So what was your childhood like? Were you a nerdy kid going out and doing sports? A little bit of both.

00:06:38 - Eric Boduch
A mix of both. Kind of an interesting mix of both. I think I was, you know, I love sports. Played sports, you know, four sports. Sports every season. Right. Growing up. But then at the same time was, you know, writing basic code when I was like seven. So, you know, a mix of the two. Definitely a big video game fan. Still play video games when I can carve out some time. But yeah, sports were definitely a big part of my life. Still a big sports fan on video games.

00:07:06 - Scot Wingo
Is this like, are we talking Atari 2600 Pong era or later?

00:07:11 - Eric Boduch
Definitely Atari 2600 era.

00:07:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:07:13 - Eric Boduch
Okay. Yeah. And then an Apple IIe, you know, where I was writing BASIC on.

00:07:17 - Scot Wingo
Nice.

00:07:18 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, that was.

00:07:19 - Scot Wingo
I had a 2C, which was the portable version, which is hilarious because it looked like a giant laptop, but then it didn't have a screen. So then you had to like bring the 80 pound screen. So that was portable back in the day.

00:07:29 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. Their definition of portable is like, are you a weightlifter? Then it's portable.

00:07:33 - Scot Wingo
Do you have a, you know, a cart that you can put this thing in? At that point in time, it's kind of unusual to have a computer in your house. Was that something that your dad did or like, well, how did that happen?

00:07:43 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, it was probably unusual to have a computer in the house. I think we were kind of at that stage where it was right in between. Right. Like the 2e really opened up home computer ownership. It was definitely something my parents got involved in early as far as know pushing us to that. And it was something I always had a natural attraction to technology as a whole. So it was a good fit.

00:08:07 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Were your parents technologist or what?

00:08:09 - Eric Boduch
What did they do? No, my mom was a. A teacher. She had her own nursery school. My dad worked for the state of Massachusetts as an arbiter. Kind of like a pseudo. Not a judge, but worked in deciding cases specifically around unemployment law.

00:08:28 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So then you're growing up in Massachusetts and I know you went to Carnegie Mellon. How did that come about?

00:08:36 - Eric Boduch
Always a big computer science guy. So wanted to go to a good school for computer science. One of the great things about growing up in Wilbraham went to a high school called Minnechog. Go Falcons. They are the Falcons, just to be clear. But yeah, relatively small high school. I mean our graduating class was 200, but I got four years of computer science in there which was amazing. Right. That's something that more than the Apple Iie was. It was definitely unusual. Had a great computer science teacher there. Still remember her name. Ms. Lagarsky. Carol La Garski. She's since retired, probably long retired. But yeah, she was, she was amazing. And just spending my time around a mix of computers and sports that was kind of my time. A little bit of that geeky, sporty guy.

00:09:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Interesting. Cool. Did you only apply to Carnegie Mellon or did you apply to other folks?

00:09:30 - Eric Boduch
I almost didn't go to Carnegie Mellon. I actually saw it really late, last minute. I didn't think it was going to be somewhere I wanted to go. My first choice was Cornell who didn't let me in, which is weird. I must have wrote a really bad essay because they're like you're a slam dunk to come in. And then they got my application. So evidently my essay was that bad. Didn't get into Cornell. Thought I would end up at RPI Rensselaer and visited Carnegie Mellon and just loved it. Loved Pittsburgh, loved the campus, loved the place. Did a little bit more research on the quality of the school and then it became instantly my number one choice. But it was kind of a last minute decision. Definitely glad I did It. I mean, great school for computer engineering. Computer science, yeah.

00:10:16 - Scot Wingo
Did you go the science route or the computer engineering route?

00:10:18 - Eric Boduch
Computer engineering route. At the time, my choice was computer engineering. I got to do circuit design or if I want computer science, I had a lot more math, and I was way more interested in doing things like chip design than I was in taking whatever it happened to be. 10 semesters of math. Still had a good chunk of math, but not as much as I would have pure computer science. So went the computer engineering route, which is mostly all computer science classes for me.

00:10:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Did you have to take some of the core engineering stuff?

00:10:48 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, yeah.

00:10:49 - Scot Wingo
Oh, and all that jazz.

00:10:49 - Eric Boduch
No thermo. All just electrical and computer engineering. And then one outside. I took an intro to civil engineering class. It's my one outside of computers.

00:11:02 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. When did you realize that you want to do more software than hardware?

00:11:05 - Eric Boduch
There's kind of like, oh, it was always the path.

00:11:07 - Scot Wingo
Okay, you're always on the software.

00:11:09 - Eric Boduch
And for me, the computer science. Computer engineering was, you know, that decision. Do I want a smattering of hardware or do I want a smattering of math on top of the computer science? Because it was more or less the same. And I just jammed full of computer science classes. Cool.

00:11:25 - Scot Wingo
And then at this point in time, were you thinking you want to be entrepreneurial or you hadn't really thought about it. You just loved computers and computer science.

00:11:32 - Eric Boduch
I mean, there was always a little bit of an entrepreneurial bug in me. We ran. There was a group. There was an undergraduate entrepreneurial association, I think it was uea, I think it was called, which probably makes sense. I was involved in that. I sold until Marriott Food Services shut us down. We were selling subway subs on campus and making some money and doing stuff like that. So I always had that bug in me. Did some consulting when I was a junior senior for a local manufacturing company. So there was always a little bit of running my own business. Maybe got that from my mom. We ran our own nursery school, but, you know, kind of different. Definitely had different kinds of businesses than she ran.

00:12:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So then you graduated, and then where did. Where did you go after? Carnegie Mellon?

00:12:22 - Eric Boduch
Did a startup with Todd Olson. You know, who's the. The current CEO of Pendo, or CEO of Pendo. Founder CEO. You know, at the time, he was the CTO of a company called Vision Systems that became Cerebellum. That was our. Our startup right out of school. I had. I turned it into a company out of the consulting I was doing. And then we expanded it and Turned it into a product company under Todd's technical leadership. How did you meet Todd first met him at Carnegie Mellon. He was a year behind me in school. We met through school and then started working together and became good friends. Gotcha.

00:12:56 - Scot Wingo
Then where was that company? Is that what brought you down here? Or this was up.

00:12:59 - Eric Boduch
No, that was Pittsburgh. Yeah, we both lived in Pittsburgh right after school for a while. So we had that company there. Grew it up to like 60 something people.

00:13:07 - Scot Wingo
Nice.

00:13:08 - Eric Boduch
Almost sold it for a big chunk of change. Had an offer on the table from a public company and then the market crashed. Well, we were negotiate. Well, we hired an investment bank or the board hired an investment bank and negotiating, shopping the company around to get the best price. And, you know, that's when we had the dot com crash. I went from, well, very wealthy on paper, say 15 million to 4 again.

00:13:35 - Scot Wingo
Yep. So you have two lessons there, the bird in the hand. You know, sometimes if you have an offer, you can just take that thing and run and don't get greedy. And then the other lesson we always learn as founders is you can't count those chickens till they hatch.

00:13:48 - Eric Boduch
Oh, absolutely. You definitely can't count them until they hatch. I mean, I also had a board member who described as, well, we should just eat when served. Which is probably a good way to put it too. You know, I also, I'm like, well, why don't we just take a great deal on the table instead of hiring an investment bank and running a process? And we could have been out and we would have still had a bunch of downside from, you know, as a public company, we were going to get a chunk of it in stock. Right there. There would have been some downside, but we also had access to their secondary that they were running. And so we would have done. We would have done pretty well all in all.

00:14:19 - Scot Wingo
But, yeah, somewhere in the middle, probably.

00:14:21 - Eric Boduch
Yeah.

00:14:21 - Scot Wingo
So at this point in the story, you're. You're probably in your mid-20s, right?

00:14:26 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, yeah. Like 20, I think maybe. Todd was 24, I was 25, give or take a year. Yeah. So we were pretty young. That was some of the reasons we had a pretty solid board. Larger companies, college professors, investors. And they're like, hey, we love what you guys have built, but we should probably have a real bank running the process. Just, you know, a rational decision to make.

00:14:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Just kind of screwed you over in this example.

00:14:56 - Eric Boduch
Hey, you never know. You know, the bankers thought, you know, we had an offer around 60 and they thought they could get 150. So you know, that's a big number. It was an inflated number, but still, you know. Yeah, it was an inflated time in the market too.

00:15:11 - Scot Wingo
So bankers are always intended to put a big number out to get the business. They.

00:15:16 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, yeah.

00:15:16 - Scot Wingo
They never get fired for saying 150 and doing.

00:15:19 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, 70 and they, I mean, yeah, exactly. And they had 60 is kind of their floor at least as far as an offer. So. Yeah, but we probably should have as. As one board member later put it back to that eat when served comment. You know, it was good deals, it was good, good fit with the company, good opportunity. Some well regarded tech leaders were in. The company was making the offer would have been a good thing to do. We should have just signed it in the room. Todd and I actually had that discussion right as it was happening. It's like we should just do this deal and get it done now. And yeah, we didn't.

00:15:53 - Scot Wingo
Corporate governance for the win.

00:15:55 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:56 - Scot Wingo
Did you have a board because you'd raised VC or you just felt like you guys wanted to have some.

00:16:02 - Eric Boduch
We had raised a good chunk of money at that point. It was mostly corporate money. We had some corporate investors in what we were doing and some high net worth individuals. We had a little bit of VC in at that point and we raised some VC after that. But there wasn't a ton of VC there. But there was board members because of those investments and we had a board right from the beginning. One of my mentors from Carnegie Mellon, Jack Roseman, was a great businessman and business professor at the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon. Was on the board from the. Right around the get go. Yeah.

00:16:38 - Scot Wingo
You're 24, 25. You've had this experience. Did that mess with your head?

00:16:42 - Eric Boduch
No, not really. I mean, I think.

00:16:44 - Scot Wingo
So you thought you were rich and then you were poor.

00:16:46 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, yeah, I think, I think not. Not. Not having the exit probably less messed with my head than having the exit. You know, you worry if all of a sudden, you know, you have a significant amount of money, you become that arrogant prick. Right when I was, you know, that 25 year old kid. Right. That didn't know a lot.

00:17:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. So then what did you guys, what did you do after that?

00:17:12 - Eric Boduch
Well, I looked at starting another company, you know, because once that bugs in and you're doing it now, post.com crash wasn't the easiest time to raise money. We raised a little bit, did some consulting actually around product management, more around roadmap and feature requests and that whole side of the business never really were able to raised Enough to turn it into a real company. And then Todd went and came down here with togethersoft.

00:17:36 - Scot Wingo
And what'd you do?

00:17:37 - Eric Boduch
I was doing the consulting stuff for the product management side. So I ran that for a few years. Never really turned it into like a real company. We had a little bit of software, a little bit of consulting, raised a tiny bit of money from some angels and then we ended up merging it, or looking to merge it with a company in San Francisco that had raised a little bit more and was working in the same space. But then their financing fell through and that company went away.

00:18:06 - Scot Wingo
Was that ProductSoft? Cerebellum?

00:18:09 - Eric Boduch
ProductSoft was the consulting company I had started. Yeah. Cerebellum was the one Todd and I had done. And then this company I think was called TrueRec. At the time though they were gonna take the ProductSoft name for True requirements, not for Crash though I guess it ended up like productsoft kind of just crashing, not turning into anything. And then from there a friend hired me to convince me to interview at a public company called Embarcadero. Worked there for a little while. It was very corporate in structure. It wasn't exciting for me. And then left there to run marketing at a company called Vitria, which I really enjoyed from a standpoint of it was running an executive function at a time public company. They've since then taken private. Having exposure to a lot of international that I never had at the early, you know, the dot com startups tended to be US centric, a little bit different than today. But you know, we had an office in Tokyo, so that was my first trip to Asia and Japan and running that and I had a team member there. You know, we had a big group in Europe so doing sales training for the European sales team and all that was a new experience for me. So that international marketing was interesting. And then helping write the narrative around the analyst calls. Being a public company was very interesting. Helping our CEO position the company and try to set up the next call. Like what are we going to say we're going to do that? We know we're going to deliver for the next call and start building more momentum around the company. Those kind of experiences were all new to me and really interesting. And running big, well user conferences at that time, as a startup today you would do them when you're relatively small. But back then it was larger companies that were doing them. So running a conference in Vegas and then doing one and we did a European conference in Nice. Those are great experiences.

00:20:07 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So through this journey, so when you and Todd had the company, were you writing code still? You were both coding?

00:20:13 - Eric Boduch
I wrote a little bit when we first started as I kind of transitioned from being a consultant to being a CEO of a startup. So then a lot less code and more on the sales and marketing side of the house.

00:20:26 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And it seems like, you know, in this part of the journey, as you get into Embarcadero and then Vitria, you're squarely in the marketing side of things.

00:20:34 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. Mix of marketing and product. You know, at Vitria, we drove some of the product direction there too. From the, from the marketing team.

00:20:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:20:41 - Eric Boduch
You know, it was back in the day of where does product belong? You know, they belong in an engineering organization, the marketing organization. It wasn't as often that product was its own org, which is where I think it should be, Right? Yep. Yeah.

00:20:54 - Scot Wingo
And every company has a different definition for product marketing and product management. And then there's especially back project management. So you've got three things called pm, which is confusing.

00:21:03 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, it definitely is confusing. And there's a little bit. There's a blur, you know, between product marketing and product management, where that line is in particular. I think, you know, less people get trained formally from places like Pragmatic, I think, these days, and the product management space, but I think they do a good job of, of defining that. They used to have a box diagram, one of those one sheet kind of things you put on your desk of here's all the areas of responsibilities for product management, product marketing, and you could kind of move that line around a little bit. Pragmatic always did a good job. At the time it was Pragmatic.

00:21:42 - Scot Wingo
I've seen their stuff.

00:21:43 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. Specifically around product management. But then they expanded the company, I think to some extent lost the focus. But they were always the go to on insights and process for product management back in those days. We're talking a while ago, but still, I think a solid organization on that side had some great instructors that came out of there and went into different spaces in the industry.

00:22:08 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So you're at Vitria, you're doing your marketing, you're learning public company and doing some international. And then you started Smash Technologies in 2007. Tell us, how did that come to be and what is the future?

00:22:17 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, a friend of mine from school, Chanu Damarla Chanaka, Carnegie Mellon guy had started a company around text messaging and he needed some help. I was leaving Vitria, they were in the process of going private and made sense for me to help him. Jumped over there, he was in Pittsburgh. I was still in San Francisco. So we're kind of running the business back and forth that way. I was flying. I was the only one in San Francisco. I think at the time we had an advisor there. But yeah, I was flying back and spending more time in Pittsburgh. All my family was east coast and inevitably I ended up moving back to Pittsburgh.

00:22:56 - Scot Wingo
So Smash Technologies tell us, was it like a Twilio kind of thing or.

00:23:00 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, well, we started more. I mean, it was probably closer to like what eventually became a company like Klaviyo. So we did a platform for brands to be able to use text messaging with things like short codes. We're kind of like in between. It was like too early for the Klaviyos of the world. And maybe on the later side there was what were called aggregators at the time that would connect you to all the different cellular networks. So too late to participate in that kind of area. It probably wasn't the greatest of timing for sms. You couple that with the fact that right after we launched the company or right after I joined the company, Chanu had been working on it for a while. You know, the iPhone was announced, so it became, hey, we're not doing text messaging, we're doing apps. And it wasn't quite to the point where SMS was thought about in the same way for outreach for brands to use. And that came later with companies like Klaviyo.

00:24:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, did that. Was this venture backed and what was the outcome of what?

00:24:04 - Eric Boduch
Raised a little bit of money. We're trying to merge it with another company and then just kind of shut it. Ended up shooting it, shutting it down, but never raised venture money, but did raise money from some angels. Yeah. So it was an interesting ride. You know, probably hung in that business too long trying to make it work for, you know, some of the early investors we had. Chanu ended up leaving, you know, so I was kind of like that. The co founder, CEO that got brought in to run it, you know, left there, you know.

00:24:36 - Scot Wingo
Thanks, bud.

00:24:37 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. Yeah. You know, Yeah. I spent a lot of my probably too many years trying to make Smash work. Yeah. There's something we said for grit and grind, but it's also something we said for like, it just doesn't have all the pieces to make it work. And if you can't get the pieces put in place, you know, you're spending a lot of, you know, your prime years doing something that maybe isn't the right thing to do.

00:24:59 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. It looks like you were acqui. Hired by Mind Matrix up there in Pittsburgh as well.

00:25:03 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I mean that. I mean I'm not sure that that deal ever really got consummated. At that point I kind of stepped back out of things. But we were going over there with the intent of getting a deal done and eventually just closed down shop.

00:25:19 - Scot Wingo
At some point here you're going to join Pindo. I think we're about. At that part of the story.

00:25:24 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. So I mean I started working with Todd to figure out what we were going to do next and ended up joining Pindo first part time just because we were trying to conserve cash and.

00:25:34 - Scot Wingo
He was post together soft and then post together soft.

00:25:38 - Eric Boduch
Post Raleigh Rally. Yeah. Borland in between. With that. With that. Yeah, yeah.

00:25:43 - Scot Wingo
Okay. So he calls were you guys. And I think there's a.

00:25:47 - Eric Boduch
We'd always talked about doing another startup together. So Todd and I started throwing around some ideas. Our original idea was a little closer to doing something like Anaplan or Adaptive planning, you know, which wasn't really a space either of us were particularly excited about. But we actually did a first pitch to that, to Core Capital, which became our early investor. We got Raoul involved in that point. Rahul Jain was the third co founder. He had been doing work over at Core and been doing some consulting.

00:26:18 - Scot Wingo
So it was kind of an EIR that kind of glommed onto.

00:26:20 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I forget his actual. What his relationship was at Core at that point. It's hard to remember, but he had worked with Core at some point. Todd had raised money for a startup he had done in between that whole process called Sixth Sense. I think it was called Sixth Sense, but not the existing Sixth Sense that's out there. Yeah. That ended up not going anywhere, but got bought out by Raleigh Software, which is what brought them there. And then we ended up pulling in Eric Trone a couple months into things before we incorporated and set up the company. But as we were working through the idea of. So that was the four of us kicking off Bendo now in. What was it, 2013. Todd and I started working on ideas of in early in that or July of that year. And then I didn't join them full time just because it was early to have a marketing person. But I was like that board member advisor until he raised the capital. They could afford to pay me.

00:27:22 - Scot Wingo
Cool. And is that when you. So you were in Pittsburgh? Todd was here.

00:27:25 - Eric Boduch
I was in Pittsburgh when you moved.

00:27:27 - Scot Wingo
Down to the Raleigh Durham area when.

00:27:29 - Eric Boduch
My daughter hit college. So I was a remote co founder for a while. I mean there was always a Desire on the VC side to move. Both Raul and I. You know, my time period was as soon as my daughter went to college, I would come down to Raleigh. At some point they stopped caring. I mean, Raul never moved to Raleigh. You know, once the business was up and rolling, there was a little. There was less concern, you know, and you start adding offices. Pendo had, you know, added an office in New York and then we had an office in San Francisco. And you know, then two offices now in the UK and one in Israel and Sydney and Tokyo. And you know, it's a lot less important where people are.

00:28:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:28:13 - Eric Boduch
So obviously we don't have all of those early, but you know, it becomes less and less important as the companies are distributed across multiple offices. So. But yeah, Raul's still living in dc.

00:28:24 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So then. And is he still at Pinda?

00:28:26 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

00:28:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And is the other Eric still at Pinda?

00:28:29 - Eric Boduch
Everybody's there but me.

00:28:30 - Scot Wingo
Oh, you're the, you're the odd man now.

00:28:32 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I am.

00:28:34 - Scot Wingo
We'll talk about that.

00:28:35 - Eric Boduch
Bad decision making? No, I don't know. I mean, Pindo is amazing. I would have been happy staying there, but, you know, ended up choosing to start the venture studio.

00:28:46 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So you start Pindo after about a year. So you're just kind of hanging out on the side. Then they. Then about a year you come in, run marketing. Yeah. Did you at that point was the product solidifying and you had a, had a vision?

00:28:59 - Eric Boduch
Oh, yeah, yeah, we, we had, we built product quick. Had product in customers hands. Pretty quick. Yeah, it was, it was pretty solid.

00:29:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then you guys, you know, as a startup, you want to define a category. And I don't know if this was your marketing genius or. I'm sure you'll take credit for it.

00:29:18 - Eric Boduch
But I probably won't take credit for it. I would say we didn't define a category. I would say we struggled around, around defining a category and what we would name that category and how we'd position it. We went through a lot of different permutations of how we describe ourselves. And I don't know that there was an early category. We talked about things like product success, we talked about product experience, we talked about product management software as kind of a space in and of itself. But the category itself, I don't know, was particularly well defined in the early days and even now.

00:30:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, as an outsider, it seemed like you guys kind of built this quadrant around product experience and having. There was DevTech, which was developers, and there was sales and Martech, but there was Nothing for that product. Mainstream.

00:30:12 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. I would say our Persona was always really well defined. Right. We wanted this. We wanted to be a product manager's best friend. We wanted to be the product that product managers loved. We wanted to be their go to resource. We wanted to solve all of their problems. Our Persona was always strongly in product management with some secondary users because of the product data. We had things like customer success. So ICP was always really well defined. The category, the naming like Gainsight had customer success pretty early on. We didn't have that kind of. Of well defined category. Nomenclature. Nomenclature naming.

00:30:53 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. A lot of tech founders struggle this flipping from I'm going to build a, build a technical product and then figuring out the marketing message. How. How did you pick up all these skills? Like how did you learn about Personas and how to define your icp and because you've.

00:31:08 - Eric Boduch
Yeah.

00:31:09 - Scot Wingo
You have a computer engineering background.

00:31:10 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I had spent a good. I mean even going back to Cerebellum. I mean that the marketing fell to me the, the that side of the house. So, you know, it was learned by doing a lot easier to do today with all the resources that are out there from. Yeah, you know, it's not fair.

00:31:25 - Scot Wingo
Like we had to struggle to learn all this stuff and now there's like books for everything Infinite.

00:31:28 - Eric Boduch
That definitely when I was 24, 25 and someone was like this is what marketing is. I was like, well that's not what we're doing, but that's what we probably should be doing, you know, back in the cerebellum days, you know, but definitely learned from, you know, kept learning from there. Learning it Embarcadero learning, you know, from Cerebellum. Just hands on experience, you know, continuing to learn about what it meant to manage a marketing team at. I think that we had a team of 11 or 12 at one point at Vitria, you know, so learned from that and took those experiences and then, you know, we were, we were just, we were figuring things out as we want as, you know, as that, you know, SaaS marketing took place. I think we were doing some things that were, you know, on the front end of things. You know, everything from. I feel like we're the first person that drove at scale socks as giveaways, which are always a big hit. It's little random weird things. You know, people still show me pindo socks that they have, which is kind of funny.

00:32:31 - Scot Wingo
Part of marketing is being different, right?

00:32:32 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, it is being different.

00:32:33 - Scot Wingo
You can't just do another pin with your logo on it.

00:32:35 - Eric Boduch
Well, A lot of marketing is finding things that currently work, and then they change. Right. You want to build something that works and keep doing it until it stops working, but you want to keep building out channels that work. Right. You know, we did a lot with small events, things like product camps. I heard Pendo's back to doing some of those, which is great, you know, some of the grassroots product camps. But early on, I was spending a lot of Saturdays in random cities. Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, you know, all those places that were running local product camps, those kind of unconferences where we had, you know, more or less donate, you know, pay a couple hundred bucks to have a table, you know, with a little tablecloth, and be pitching our, you know, what we do for product managers.

00:33:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Where'd the little pink dinosaur come from?

00:33:18 - Eric Boduch
Oh, well, pink came early. The color first.

00:33:25 - Scot Wingo
Let's go back even further. What's your memory of where Pindo came from?

00:33:28 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, Pendo, the name came from Todd, I think, meant to measure value in Latin. It turns out it also means love in Swahili, so that we definitely played up with build products. Your customers love all that kind of stuff. We played up the love we had already coming out of some inspiration from Marketo, who owned the color purple. We thought a lot about colors, and there was a local company that went heavy on the green side of things at the time. What was it? Windsor Circle, I think.

00:33:59 - Scot Wingo
Green pants.

00:34:00 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, exactly. We had bought Todd pink pants, I think, some golf pants to wear at an early conference. But, you know, we started with this idea of, like, we're thinking about color, you know, and I probably would have gone a little more traditional if it was my choice back then. But Todd's like, hey, let's go pink. I think he thought of pink as an accent color. You know, let's work pink in. As an accent color. I'm like, hey, I started thinking about, like, I think pink's a great idea. You know, like, going back to Marketo, had purple and really used that. We. We. We dove into pink, and it was kind of a unique color for tech at the time, especially for software tech. So we went pink as primary and pink, heavy pink everywhere. Pink T shirts, pink booth. Eventually, pink dinosaur. So it was really heavy. Pink set us apart from a brand perspective. We got a lot more bang for our brand buck where we would even conferences I wasn't sponsoring, I'd run into someone. I was like, oh, I saw you at XYZ conference. And they just saw someone wearing pink and assumed it was Pendo. You know, so we had that. I got a lot of kudos from the brand we established early. Heavy around like, you know, being that best friend of product manager and trying to build tools to make their life better. Really thinking it through their eyes and their lens and us, all of us having some kind of product background. You know, Todd heavy on the product, Raul spending time on product, me owning some of product along with marketing, Eric Trone doing product along with engineering. In past lives, we had a lot of empathy for product managers. And it was at the time too, where like I think people understood how important product was, but didn't necessarily. It was beginning to be a point where product was super important but wasn't entirely well recognized by everyone in the software space. The importance of having a strong product organization. So we were able to push on that pretty heavily too.

00:35:53 - Scot Wingo
Excellent. So you established the brand. The pink. The dinosaur came along.

00:35:59 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, the dinosaur kind of came as a one off. We quickly needed a T shirt and we did a lot of T shirts and I don't even know who came up with the tagline of a dinosaur with a, you know, don't let your product go extinct. Right. And people love the Dino T shirt. So, you know, you got to give people more of what they love. So that turned into eventually, you know, nine, ten foot tall pink dinosaur that we had outside Saster, much to the organizer's dismay at the beginning, but then Lemkin loved it afterwards, so it was all good.

00:36:32 - Scot Wingo
But it's guerrilla marketing at its best.

00:36:34 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, we did a bunch of that. I mean. Yeah, yeah, we were pretty aggressive in how we looked at marketing. I had a lot of fun doing that, you know.

00:36:43 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, cool. And then on LinkedIn it said, at least it says at 2017 you relinquished the marketing position. Was that you kind of felt like you were getting over your ski tips or you wanted to do something different or was it just kind of a mutual type of thing?

00:36:55 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I mean, that's a harder question to answer. I think Todd was looking for someone that had a different approach to how we were thinking about marketing. And frankly, it was hard doing marketing with Todd at that point. So, I mean, I think it worked out well. I mean, one of my good friends, Jake, wasn't a good friend at the time. I didn't know him, but he came on board and we became good friends afterwards to run marketing. And then I took over and I was already spending a lot of time on the road doing community customer stuff, doing workshops and so I just doubled down on that side of the business. We launched our podcast, which I still run into people today that talk about product. Love. It's a great podcast. Love doing that. So we're spending a lot of time with customer community evangelism. So it was a nice little transition into that, and it added to our management team. Bringing Jake in as CMO was. Was a huge benefit to the team. It was great.

00:37:54 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. When you're growing as fast as Pindo has, there's plenty of food on the plate for.

00:38:01 - Eric Boduch
Oh, there's lots of things. There's lots of things for everybody to do. There's no issues there. Yeah.

00:38:06 - Scot Wingo
So the org imagine in those Go Go days is just like, what was it like? What do you remember? Was this what you expected or has it dramatically exceeded your expectations?

00:38:15 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I mean, I think it probably dramatically exceeded all of our expectations. When we were first starting Pendo, we thought it would be a nice product that we could build and eventually sell. You know, and I think we did a really good job executing, especially in those early years, going from 0 to 1, from 1 to 4, 3. You know, from 4, 3 to 13. Like, that growth rate was. Was pretty awesome to a lot for us all to be happy about. And then Jake and on the marketing side took over at that point and Joe and extended that even farther. Bill Bench joined us as CRO. You know, Chaz, who's our original head of sales, you know, stayed on for a long time doing, you know, different spots in the sales. He ran Europe for us from some point, so we just kept getting great people involved in the company. Yeah, yeah.

00:39:01 - Scot Wingo
How about company culture? Everyone raves about the Pindo company culture. Did you. Did you have a hand in that, like, or was that all?

00:39:08 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, I mean, I think founders have to drive culture. And one of the early employees was a huge driver of culture, too. Shannon Bauman, who's the first guy who ran product at Pen Dao. It's kind of interesting. You have four founders that have some background in product. Todd extensively. The rest of us a little bit less than that. But still. One of our first hires was ahead of product. Ex Google guy, big culture guy. He helped us drive the culture. Core values and culture were always really important, and I don't think you realize how important culture is until you try to grow really quickly. Like, at one point, after we had raised money from battery, we went from 14 people to. Or maybe 12 people. 12, 14 people. It's a little blurry these days to, like, say 30 people within 40 days. Right. So you think about the extent of that hiring and you think, just think about the interview schedules. You know, we would have multiple people coming in from every position. You know, we were, you know, Todd was still interviewing everyone at that point. I was interviewing a lot of it. Not everybody, but Close and Eric and Raul and frankly all the employees. You're having four different employees say on average interview someone, maybe five. That's a lot of interviews. And getting that right as you hire those people and then try to incorporate them into the business. A lot of it has to be because you have that strong culture, core values to point to and kind of a Pendo way of doing things. I mean, my, my marketing team went from. I was a one man band until we raised our series A right. We were already doing. By the time we hired someone into marketing, I think we're at 700 or someone beyond me into marketing. I think we're already at 750k of ARR. So it was like me as the marketing guy. Yeah. And you know, that's without all these AI tools and everything else and frankly just a lot of. Lot less SaaS infrastructure. Yeah. So one man band at that point. And then I added three. Was it three right off the bat? Yeah, three right off the bat. So it was like my team went from one to four, you know, within 45 days.

00:41:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:41:14 - Eric Boduch
So it's crazy.

00:41:14 - Scot Wingo
Integration first 90 days is a train wreck because your productivity goes to zero because you're just busy trying to.

00:41:19 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, well, we couldn't afford that.

00:41:20 - Scot Wingo
Yes.

00:41:21 - Eric Boduch
Right. So it was just work more, work harder.

00:41:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:41:24 - Eric Boduch
You know. Yeah.

00:41:25 - Scot Wingo
Sink or swim, figure it out.

00:41:26 - Eric Boduch
You know, there isn't. I mean, there definitely isn't work life balance at certain points. Right. Over the time, you know, appenda. Was there some of that? Sure. But was there a work life balance then? No, no.

00:41:39 - Scot Wingo
There's like you're in the heavy sprint move.

00:41:41 - Eric Boduch
Try to get work sleep balance at least. So.

00:41:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Then looks like. When was it? 2021 is kind of like when you phased out say or you were a GM of something called Adopt for a while. What was that?

00:41:54 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. So took over Adopt, which is our second. Now it's called Pendo for employees. I started Adopt, which was a business opportun Pendo that we started as an OEM piece of our business, specifically going after how we can bring Pendo guides and analytics to package software.

00:42:15 - Scot Wingo
Got it. Okay.

00:42:18 - Eric Boduch
So it was a big successful.

00:42:19 - Scot Wingo
What's an example of package software like Salesforce.

00:42:22 - Eric Boduch
Right. Like if Salesforce or SAP is not a customer of us, but you still want to build Your own custom guides for how your business uses SAP.

00:42:31 - Scot Wingo
So it's internal facing into the business. That's how we use. We're a GM and we use.

00:42:36 - Eric Boduch
I think of it as like this. Like the first step of Penda was, was helping people build better software. Right. So if you are a software builder, like Marketo or Home Depot even, right. People building software, we help you do it better, we help you get the analytics, we help you guide your users. And all of that is part of your, you know, commercial or internal software package. And then the second part of that is people. Or the second side of that coin. Right. Is people use software. And it might not be software that's built with Bendo, it might even be software that's built with Pendo. But you, as, say, bank of America, are big users of software, huge amount of software. So how do you help your employees use that software better? Well, Pendo can help there too. So that's the second piece of the business. How do you utilize and help your employees get more value from their software they're using every day? And that is a natural step from how do we help companies build better software?

00:43:29 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. In this world of SaaS glut, where people look and suddenly you've got 80 SaaS, applications you're using, many of them don't get any usage. It's super helpful to have something like that.

00:43:38 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a huge market for doing that better. I think more companies should be looking at that. And I think Pendo has a huge amount of upside in that space and going after it. And they've continued to build out a really robust product. I mean, when I was there, we added things like roadmap and feature requests and that whole side of the business, you get feedback on products, things like surveys. I would say probably the average customer doesn't even know the full capabilities of the Pendo platform. Session management, session replay, all that kind of stuff. Now, companies should be thinking about, hey, how can I work with Pendo to build my AI offering if Pendo is capturing all my usage analytics and we capture everything which is kind of unique in the industry, that's a good data set that Pendo customers should be going back to Pendo for and being like, hey, can you help me build my AI product on top of this?

00:44:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. Data is going to be the. It's the gold dust.

00:44:36 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. There's an interesting opportunity, I think, for Pendo and the data that they already capture for people.

00:44:41 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So in 21, you phased out a pindo on the day to day and you're.

00:44:46 - Eric Boduch
Yeah.

00:44:47 - Scot Wingo
So say a little bit about that, whatever you're comfortable saying. And then you're still on the board.

00:44:50 - Eric Boduch
No, no, I haven't been on the board for a while as we raise vc. Internal board. Yeah. So like early board member, you know. And then we went down to. I think there's two internal Pendo seats, Todd and Eric Trone. But yeah, I lost my seat a long time ago. Still went to all the board meetings, but up until me leaving, but wasn't an official board member. Yeah. So, I mean, I think at the time, you know, Penda was growing, I was figuring out what I wanted to do, you know, whether I wanted to continue there and take a larger role with. Adopt a larger role around the channel business. There was a bunch of opportunities which naturally made me think of what do I want to do next with my life. Always wanted to run a venture studio. So sat down with Todd and said, hey, I'm thinking about leaving. Gave him a ton of notice. I think between that conversation and me not getting paid, it was like six or contin. You know, like leaving the company. It was like six months and I still did some work for them for a couple months after that. So it was a long transition period out, you know. You know, Todd and I are still great friends.

00:46:06 - Scot Wingo
Still a large shareholder, I imagine.

00:46:07 - Eric Boduch
Yeah, still a large shareholder.

00:46:10 - Scot Wingo
Now you're waiting on. Now you're on the investor side, waiting for that exit.

00:46:13 - Eric Boduch
I mean, I don't know as much as I'm waiting. I would like a. I'd like a little more liquidity, but I do think Pendo could be a huge company. There's an opportunity, $10 billion companies. Yeah. I mean our last round was done, whatever was announced, it was like two point something billion. Right. I'm forgetting now if it's 2.426, whatever the number was or the valuation was announced the last time. But we're talking about back in 2021. Right. This is a long time ago. I think there's an opportunity at Pindo could be a 10, a $20 billion company. I think product is arguably more important than sales. Right. And you look at how big Salesforce has grown, could we build a really huge company for software? I mean building software is the manufacturing of this next generation. Yeah.

00:47:00 - Scot Wingo
And you can paint a scenario with the cost to build software going to zero thanks to AI taste. And product management becomes more important because it's got to work. You've got to really get better at measuring the customer Experience and all that stuff.

00:47:13 - Eric Boduch
Absolutely. I mean, I think we look at this and some people are like, oh, AI represents the death of a product manager. And I think that's crazy talk as, as one of my old professors or friends used to say, it's crazy talk thinking it's the death of product managers. If anything, it's going to lead to the golden era of product management, you know, because product managers and people that understand the domain and what they want to build and have empathy with their users and really understand the problem space and what custom consumer's problems are, that should be gold in the age of AI. If anything, it becomes more important than it was in the past 10 years. So I think we are going to, I have the contrarian view maybe on that. I think we're entering the golden age of product managers and maybe the term manager, you can start nitpicking the word. But the role, if you look at the definition of the role, even going back to that old pragmatic, you know, one sheet, that stuff is super important. Right. Doing that effectively is super important. And some of the stuff has changed a little bit. Do we write like back in the early days I was writing MRDs and PRDs and all that kind of stuff in large detail. Do we do that in the same way? No. But are all of those things still important, like the concepts behind them? Absolutely. And I think we're going to move more and more to understanding that product managers are even more important in building software.

00:48:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's going to be a taste and kind of a human touch is going to be what separates in a sea of computer generated products.

00:48:49 - Eric Boduch
Yeah. So I mean, I think Pendo could be a hundred billion dollar company and I think Todd could be a CEO to drive it there.

00:48:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, he's definitely very focused on getting to his end point there. Keep growing the. So why were you interested in venture studios and what is a venture studio?

00:49:06 - Eric Boduch
You know, I became friends with a couple of VCs back from the Sarah Boem days, you know, one in particular that we ended up not doing a deal with because. Because we had gotten that acquisition offer we had. The acquisition offer came at the same time we had a VC deal that we were negotiating our way through, you know, which didn't make the VC necessarily happy. This guy by the name of Bill Holley, who's not a VC these days, has since left and retired, I think retired, but definitely left the VC business. Haven't talked to Bill in a while, but shout out to Bill, he's always a great Guy, great guy to talk to, great friend back in the day. Haven't talked to him in ages. But I was always interested in that space. But still an entrepreneur at heart. So how can you get a little bit of the blender, do entrepreneurship in parallel? And that seemed like what venture studios or startup studios or whatever you want to call them would do. So thought about that when we were starting Pendo just didn't think we had the experience and the credibility to be able to do that at that point. And I think we'll get to this in a minute and maybe we just put a pin in it. I think to run a venture studio and be a principal or gp, you have to have a certain background. And I didn't think I had that right when we were starting Pendo. I hadn't done that. The Pendo like experience. I hadn't brought a company from 0 to 40 million or 0 to 100 million or 0 to 250 million, you know, plus like, like Pendo is today. Like I hadn't had that Pendo experience, right? So I'd been, I had had the negative experiences that I think are also, you know, important and the AI experiences that are important, like having multiple experiences and starting companies, I think is important for a founder or, you know, the CEO or partner at a venture studio. But I didn't have that Pendo experience and there's something to be said about having that experience of high growth startups. So I didn't know that the time was right to start one there. And Pendo was a great idea. I loved it. You know, we loved it from the get go. So now, you know, fast forward to, you know, leaving Pendo. I had had that experience and I thought I had the credibility to start a venture studio.

00:51:30 - Scot Wingo
Okay, thanks for listening to part one of this two part series with Eric Boda. We're going to pause there for this week. As a reminder, Eric's left Pindo and now will be starting a venture studio. What's a venture studio? What are some of the companies that have come out of that? How do they operate it? We're going to learn more about that next week.

00:51:47 - Eric Boduch
For more tweener content, check out the Triangle Tweener time substack@tweener.substack.com for more tweener content, check out tweenertimes.com thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon on Triangle tweenertalks. It.