5x founder asked Ford for a contract so large—they acquired his company instead. | Amar Varma, Founder of Mantle

Amar is a 5x founder who helped birth Tinder (it was the 10th project—after the first 9 failed), then sold his next company to Ford for putting a platform in every single vehicle they make.

But the wildest part? He got Ford to commit in under a year by doing something most founders would never do: he asked for SO MUCH money that only the CEO could approve it. That one move made him "part of the transformational change" instead of a vendor they could ignore.

In this episode, Amar breaks down the exact pricing strategy he used to land an 8-figure deal, why founders who sell discounted pricing are sabotaging themselves, and what it actually takes to compete against billion-dollar incumbents like Carta (his current company, Mantle, is doing exactly that).

If you're trying to sell to enterprise, wondering if you should bootstrap or raise, or questioning whether your market even exists—this episode will reset how you think about all of it. Amar's built companies in mobile, vehicles, security, and fintech. He knows what works.

Why You Should Listen:

• Learn the pricing trick that got a CEO to sign off to an 8-figure deal.
• Discover why asking for MORE money (not less) is how you win enterprise deals
• Why getting told "you're nuts" might mean you're dead right
• Master the one metric that matters more than ARR in the early days
  
  Keywords:
  startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, enterprise sales, 5x founder, product market fit, pricing strategy, Tinder origin story, competing with incumbents, bootstrapping vs raising, SaaS pricing
  
  Chapters:
  (00:00:00) Intro
  (00:03:56) The Start & Finding PMF for Tinder
  (00:09:04) Xtreme Labs
  (00:12:18) Autonomic
  (00:17:03) The Contract Turned Acquisition
  (00:22:04) The origin of Mantle
  (00:28:56) Going into a Dominated Category
  (00:32:39) Raising & Pitching for Mantle
  (00:40:01) One Piece of Advice
  
  

Chapters

• 3:56 The Start & Finding PMF for Tinder
• 9:04 Xtreme Labs
• 12:18 Autonomic
• 17:03 The Contract Turned Acquisition
• 22:04 The origin of Mantle
• 28:56 Going into a Dominated Category
• 32:39 Raising & Pitching for Mantle
• 40:01 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Amar Varma (00:00:00) :
We did some analysis. I was like, what's a number that our executive sponsor can sign off on? And I was like, OK, what if we ask for a bit more? We knew that if she had to get approval, it'd have to be at the CEO level and so the CEO's bought it. And we go, when the CEO's bought in and it's on the monthly review or weekly review charts, you're part of the transformational change. You talk about product market fit, these vehicle OEMs. They know scale, they know product market fit. There's an F-150 built about every minute at Ford, so they know what's going on. They know colors, they know trends, they know geography, they know a lot. We went at it ourselves. Once we realized we were solving a problem beyond just ourselves, we put in some of our own capital and started doing that. Do not underestimate the amount of magnetic pull that putting your own money into something can be for other investors to come to the table. When you're putting your own capital to work, it's just another level of like, okay, these folks are really in it. They're not messing around.

Previous Guests (00:00:57) :
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:10) :
Do you think the product market fit show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Amar, welcome to the show, man. Excited to have you here.

Amar Varma (00:01:27) :
Excited to be here. Seen a lot and I love all the stuff you're doing.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:29) :
That's good to hear, man. Well, dude, the first thing I have to start with is, I was just looking through your profile just to get a refresh. Five times founder, you're on your fifth startup now. At Mantle, what keeps you going? Why do you keep starting startups? Why do you go back in?

Amar Varma (00:01:42) :
Oh, it's a loaded question. I love it, is the short answer. You know, every time I think I'm done, they pull you right back in, right? Quote from a movie at some point. I find problems and opportunities. I just get into them and I feel like I can't get out of them until I'm done the mission kind of a thing. So it's just been how I'm programmed, how I operate and what I like to do.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:03) :
Is it the money? Is it the hype? Is it the building? Is it the solving the problem? What piece of it all is, the one that most you find that pulls you in?

Amar Varma (00:02:12) :
It's a great question. The answer is really the thrill of the journey, right? The journeys are hard, they're full of ups and downs. Situations where you're like, ugh, right? And I think that whole journey is excitement for me and kind of where I've really excelled in my professional life, so to speak. As an entrepreneur and executive at big companies over time. And I don't know what else I'd do. That's part of the other problem.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:34) :
I will fully agree like the, I've become a VC now and have been for the last like seven years or so. The highs and the lows of the startup world are just uncomparable. There's highs and lows in here as well but it's much more subdued, like the peaks and the troughs are just closer together. The best day at startup world is so freaking good and the worst day is so bad, and so that roller coaster is just it's uncomparable.

Amar Varma (00:02:57) :
It's all relative, right? A sneeze to somebody could be a heart attack for another person, right? So it's just kind of one of these types of, you got to keep it all relative. Where's everything coming in and out of? It's really become kind of my ethos, sport, whatever that analogy is for people. It really has become a thing that I do. I think I've mentioned this before in other places. There's no limits on what you can do. Those limits are usually artificially placed on you by somebody else looking from the outside and keeping their score on you. As an example, it's like, why do it again? It's such a hard thing and once you get to that top, why do it again? Well, because where else are you going? Down? I watch people at age, still be at the top of their game over decades and I go, that's truly aspirational. I really think fondly of those people who are able to do it.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:47) :
You played a significant role. As I understand it, into the birth of Tinder. Just give us that context, like that story. Where are you that, that happens?

Amar Varma (00:03:56) :
Never underestimate serendipity, never overestimate opportunity, right? I think that's just kind of the method there. So, let me rewind the clock back just to give context to it. This would have been around 2009, App Store had come out summer of 08. There was a company called IAC Interactive Corp run by a gentleman, Barry Diller. Barry Diller was best known as a Hollywood executive and then in the final chapters in his career, he started this interactive corporate company to really use screens as an interactive medium versus a one-way medium. That was his thesis. He became super successful, had fifty plus properties under his banner. Spun things in and out over time like Expedia and Match Group, and things like that. And they were a customer of ours at one of my previous, previous, previous companies called Xtreme Labs. Where we did mobile apps, that was a company started by Sonny Madhura and myself. Farhan Thawar was there, the VP of engineering at Shopify and some other folks. We did mobile apps before the App Store came out and became kind of a go-to expert group. So we worked with a bunch of the IAC properties. At the time it would have been things like Citysearch, UrbanSpoon, Angie's List, Match.com. Just older properties and they started noticing all this work we were doing with them and they're like, huh, we should do some more deeper investigation with you all. And this was around the time when Instagram had come out, Uber had come out, and they're like, hey, there's something else going on in mobile that's beyond, taking our existing digital properties and making them enhanced. There's a whole mobile-first experience, and that's really where the entity Hatch Labs that I founded, along with some folks. Dinesh at IAC at the time, and just running Hatch Labs. It was just very much an entity to do that investigation, have a bit of opportunity to understand limits of certain pieces and aspects of the technology.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:55) :
On behalf of Maps.com, this piece?

Amar Varma (00:05:57) :
Just as a joint venture for Hatch. Hatch Labs was the name of the entity.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:02) :
Got it.

Amar Varma (00:06:02) :
So we did exactly ten projects, the first nine of which you probably haven't heard of and the tenth project was a re-skinning of the ninth project. The ninth project was a mobile coupons company. It was basically going into a location-based zone that you knew. Getting delivered a coupon for something that you may like, an example would be a restaurant happy hour, they'd flip you a coupon for something and it really wasn't much at the time. But they had one thing which they really liked. Which was kind of, there was an interactivity of it, of UX, you know, user interface. It wasn't much there. They said, what if we repurpose this for other use cases? Dating ended up being one of them.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:43) :
What was the interactivity that they liked? Was the swiping thing part of it or the?

Amar Varma (00:06:47) :
It was the ability to accept or reject that wasn't a checkbox. If you think back to Hot or Not, I think it was a web property. Where there was a red or green button. One of the things on a mobile was there was a touch interface, so you were able to do some of these other things and credit really goes to that team. Sean and some of the others there that really just figured it all out. But they repurposed it for dating. Back to school season happened, you now, there was kind of better than the restaurant stuff and then 2014 comes around. And the Sochi Olympics hit, and it becomes the headline at the Sochi Olympics. The Winter Olympics, about all the athletes hooking up with each other in the athlete's village using Tinder versus who's winning gold medals and it became kind of a zeitgeist moment.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:27) :
How long after the original launch were the Olympics? When did it launch?

Amar Varma (00:07:30) :
The Winter Olympics in '14 were probably a year after the launch or within eighteen months kind of a thing.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:37) :
Okay, was it doing well already before that or was it kind of okay?

Amar Varma (00:07:40) :
Well it was kind of just a thing and then, you know, kind of back to product market fit. What is product market fit? A, being aware that this tenth project had any legs, right? So it got reported on. B, you start monitoring interactions. So like is it swipes per day, connections per week, connections per day, connections per hour, connections per minute, connections a second. You start getting into these metrics and you're like, there's something here. And real credit goes to the team that was running the business at the time, and just hats off to them for figuring this out.

Pablo Srugo  (00:08:15) :
What happened at the Olympics?

Amar Varma (00:08:16) :
So the Olympics, it became part of the moment. Part of the, you know, if you're an athlete in the village. Once you were done your four years of training since the last Olympics, you know, there's a lot of fit people with a lot of spare time and a lot of extra energy. So there was a lot of connections happening.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:32) :
Was that like the PMF moment sort of thing? That's really a huge inflection point for Tinder and the growth trajectory?

Amar Varma (00:08:37) :
I think that would be the one, that I would say. Others would say there were other ones, possibly before or after. But that to me was really like, okay, this is a thing and when you have a thing. It's usually validated by some kind of data that's describable, repeatable, understandable by other people.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:54) :
And so then after this Tinder experience, because the next startup I want to talk about is called Autonomic. That's the one that was sold to Ford?

Amar Varma (00:09:04) :
Correct.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:04) :
Maybe, just fill in those gap years. Then we can talk about that start up.

Amar Varma (00:09:04) :
Yeah, maybe if I start from the beginning. Is that an easier way just to give you kind of the full thing?

Pablo Srugo (00:09:09) :
Yeah, let's do that.

Amar Varma (00:09:10) :
I did a degree in engineering at Waterloo. I moved to Silicon Valley, and I was a chip designer. People are like, what's a chip designer? I worked on semiconductor products. The first one was this innocuous thing that we called a GPU. Today in the world of AI, the GPU is highly prominent. When I worked on it, it was a graphics card. You know, it was something that put polygons on a screen and that whole computing paradigm over time would have its moment as it's having now. Other products I worked on, I worked on something called Computer Interface One and then a smart marketing person walked in, and called it Universal Serial Bus, or USB as we call it today. So that was version one, we're now on letter C. So I had the privilege of being involved in long-standing things that have had mass adoption, just to see how those markets pull out. Through there, I've just had a journey in S-curves of technology across software, cloud, vehicles, security, AI, mobile. Just the whole bit and kind of retaining a lot of roots in hardware, there's been a lot of chip things that we've just kept in touch with over time. I was also, for a period of time in there, a general partner at a VC firm. Then I ran my own VC firm for a bit, right place, right time. It was kind of the era where mobile and social were fusing together, and hits came early, and often to Electronic Arts, Salesforce, Facebook, Apple, Google. The list kind of goes on and on, and that's why there was never a fund 2 there. Because we just, decide to do it for myself over time and just been doing companies since then. And that's kind of the history of it. So Xtreme Labs did the mobile apps, Hatch Labs we discussed, Autonomic was in vehicle streaming we can get into.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:44) :
Yeah, tell me about that? Like, how? Where does autonomic come from? What is kind of the origin story?

Amar Varma (00:10:47) :
Yeah so, Xtreme Labs was the mobile apps company. If you've ever used an early version of an iPhone or Android phone, we're pretty much guaranteed to have an app on your phone. Whether it was Facebook or we did apps for the NBA, the NFL, the newspapers, the banks, sports. Just any vertical or industry that was kind of getting on to mobile, we were part of that movement.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:09) :
How do you work? Take Facebook for example, you build the original B1 app? Where do you fit into the Facebook app?

Amar Varma (00:11:15) :
Yeah, so we started working with Facebook early on in their mobile journey. We built versions of the app for the phones, the iPads, a messenger, a version of Instagram, post acquisition. So there's just a whole journey of things that we did. Which was super exciting just to be part of that whole thing. Because when you see adoption at mobile's global scale. That was it, right? Everything else was a nice data point. Once you had that stuff, that was key. So we sold that company to a software company called Pivotal. I got to work for Paul Maritz, who was the number three person at Microsoft during the 80s and 90s under Bill. And when Steve Ballmer got the job, he left and ended up joining VMware. And ran that through its height, and then started Pivotal. Purchased our company, got to work there with him and then that company subsequently went public, and got subsumed by VMware, and Broadcom. Eventually but in there, I was the exec sponsor for a series of customers that were burgeoning into not just digital transformation in cloud, but mobile transformation as well. Auto industry was one of those industries. So I was the exec sponsor for our auto vertical, which included the Ford Motor Company and one of the conversations we were having with Ford Motor Company was. This was during an era of, you know, there was on demand, there was electrification and autonomy hitting the auto industry with Uber, Tesla.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:38) :
What year is this?

Amar Varma (00:12:39) :
This would have been '15, 2015 or so, and 2014, '15. And then there was this whole construct around, with those three pillars in place, what's possible? And what became apparent to us in the conversations and the work we were doing was. There kind of needed to be this fundamental layer of substrate of data to power all those three things for various OEMs, and Ford being one of them. And that's when we started talking about, hey, you need this platform to do this. That's when the whole conversation came around, you know, we're not going to build it but if somebody had it, we'd use it.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:15) :
What exactly did they need? What data? What platform?

Amar Varma (00:13:17) :
Yeah, so if you think about the jump from a flip phone to a smartphone. A flip phone had your contacts and phone numbers, and you could dial, maybe text. When you went to a smartphone, it became the world of apps and data, right? That connectivity jump didn't exist for vehicles outside of Tesla. They had to go get modems. You had to get wired into the systems of the vehicle to get information that's outside the firewall and then inside the firewall. And what I mean by that is, you know, outside the firewall would be, door lock, door unlock. And then inside the firewall would be something like, fuel levels. Things that would be something you could view from the inside and they actually physically happen to be behind the firewall in a vehicle for context. And so that platform of connectivity didn't exist. And that's the platform we sought out to make.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:02) :
What does that get for the ability to be able to have this data at scale?

Amar Varma (00:14:05) :
This is where, if you have a vehicle and you're able to do things remotely with it. If you're old enough to remember there used to be these key fobs that could start cars remotely. Maybe lock the door from a distance and unlock the door from a distance or blare the horn. That went into the construct of something called phone as a key and these apps were born that would allow you to remotely lock, unlock, start, turn on, HVAC. Those types of elements inside of a vehicle. So that was the 4A that started it. In order to do that, you needed a baseline hardware piece in the car, the equivalent of a modem. That would allow you to connect remotely and that modem would need to be hardwired into the communication system inside the vehicle. And those communication systems can be in front of the firewall or behind the firewall, figuratively and literally. Once you have that hardware layer, to collect all the signals and all the data from there, and to put them at scale. It becomes a huge competitive advantage on a number of levels. You know, simple things like, what kind of applications can I do knowing people's data, speed, location, number of occupants in a vehicle, right? There's just a bunch of things you can do around ride share. What else can I do knowing fuel levels, maintenance levels, and for a vehicle OEM like Ford. A very good healthy chunk of the profits come from maintenance, right? And that's one of the things that gets unlocked using these things.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:27) :
So it's like a notification to you that, hey, your car needs maintenance. Something as simple as that.

Amar Varma (00:15:31) :
The most basic thing, right? And then.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:33) :
Right.

Amar Varma (00:15:34) :
The other one being, hey, we noticed your fuel level is low. Here  are some partners we have in your geography that would like to service you. So, here's an offer. There's this whole eco system, that lives with it and from our perspective having this in place was key. Decided to start the company, Sunny, Gavin, some others and we, out of the gate had Ford as a customer. Didn't really know what that meant, but they sure let us know pretty quick what that meant in a good way and we started building. We had a prototype in a hundred days. They implemented it, they had a test fleet. Six months in, they're like, we think we're going to take this prototype to the next level. Eleven months in, or ten months in actually, they announce to the world they're going to connect all of their vehicles and have all of their vehicles be connected. And I remember thinking about that announcement going, that's pretty fantastic. We could only dream of such a situation and they've done it. And then the reality was, we realized they were doing it with our platform. So our platform was going to be embedded in every vehicle. That was an amazing achievement just from a product market fit. You know, Ford Motor Company at the time made somewhere between six or seven, six, seven million vehicles, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:16:39) :
But they announced this before running it by you? That you'd be able to support it and whatever?

Amar Varma (00:16:43) :
Well, they'd asked us to prepare a slide for their investor meetings. We're like, okay, yeah, here's what we're doing and then embedded behind it was the, oh, by the way, here's a gift. That was super interesting because having them as a customer out of the gate meant we had a pretty significant contract.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:59) :
What did that contract look like? I mean, how do you even negotiate such a.

Amar Varma (00:17:01) :
Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:02) :
Lopsided situation?

Amar Varma (00:17:03) :
Well, here's the thing. As well as we thought we were doing, they were like, yeah, it was such a small rounding error for them. To be honest and this is one of the startup things that's always been an unlock. If you're going to ask for something, ask for something at a size or scale that's meaningful for your potential customer. Because if they cannot do it at a scale that's of meaning where their boss has to sign off on it, they might not be that serious. So I see a lot of entrepreneurs going around saying, hey, we'll offer this thing for free, we'll offer this thing at a discount and I'm like, what if you added a zero to it? Add two zeros, see what their response is, see what they're doing. Because now people want to be involved with impact scale, especially in a big company. You get promoted for change and offense, right? If your startup product or company, or service is involved in a transformational change, that's offense. You want to be a big part of that. You want to be a material part of that. You're seeing it today with AI infrastructure. People are asking for billions of dollars and hundreds of billions of dollars in some case, and they're getting it.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:58) :
That's the theory. Tactically, how did you do it with Ford?

Amar Varma (00:18:01) :
Yeah, so we did some analysis. I was like, what's a number that our executive sponsor can sign off on? And we had gotten a very good relationship just given the previous life of being the exec sponsor. So I kind of understood the landscape and I was like, okay, what if we ask for a bit more? Then we know that this exec sponsor and she was amazing, Marcy Claiborne. She was the CIO, and we knew that if she had to get approval. It'd have to be at the CEO level and so the CEO's bought it. And we go, when the CEO's bought in and it's on the monthly review or weekly review charts. You're part of the transformational change and that was a key piece for us. One of the observations we made is in some order of magnitude of dollars, it's important at Ford Motor Company. You got to imagine the company today, I think does $180 billion revenue a year. So how that is, is it's like bumpers for every F-150 is a multi-billion dollar line item, right? It's a big line item, right? So you just got to remember that the order of magnitude of these things.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:55) :
So what are you doing? You're doing say like a dollar a month per car, $10 or whatever. Is that something, some kind of formula?

Amar Varma (00:19:00) :
Yes, that's exactly it. So we came up with an eight-figure number to start as a blanket. Because we figured that was enough to be important and the onus was on us to perform, right? Without the performance, none of this happens. Then we came up through procurement with the dollar per month, per vehicle, and even at five million vehicles a year. That's $60 million in year one, sixty plus $60 million a year in year two. So you quickly start getting the scaled number and after the announcement of the a hundred percent connectivity. We ended up in this interesting conversation at procurement, because the procurement people were like, this number, I've got to go get some pretty senior sign-off on this type of scale. That's where it went from procurement discussion to a, what will it take us to not sign this contract discussion. That was a pretty high-class problem and, to start and exit a business within less than a year at a scale like that is right place, right time.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:56) :
Ultimately, Ford acquired it because that was cheaper than signing this kind of contract. We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You wanna be a part of the group. You wanna be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button.

Amar Varma (00:20:11) :
Yeah, and the contracts are like five to ten years long, right? So you end up in this pretty healthy situation. We went in, loved it, I learned a lot about global scale. Like you talk about product market fit. These vehicle OEMs, they know scale, they know product market fit. There's an F-150 built about every minute at Ford. So they know what's going on. They know what's up there. They know colors, they know trends, they know geography, they know a lot. In fact, there's such a treasure trove of data there, that they don't know. Which is why these platforms are so valuable. So now every vehicle that rolls past that yellow line in manufacturing has Autonomics stitched into it, it heartbeats.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:47) :
That's huge.

Amar Varma (00:20:47) :
Now you can answer the question, how many vehicles did we make today? And the system will tell you exactly how many vehicles were made today.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:53) :
That's awesome, man.

Amar Varma (00:20:54) :
And I think over time, you know, this is age. This is a few years old now, I think every day there was ten billion signals running through there. You can think about acceleration, brake, speed, lock, unlock, start, seatbelt. Just the whole list of these things, window up, window down, everything's in there. Fuel filter, capacity, fuel levels, just the whole thing is in there and what's super interesting. Quick analogy here, is that especially in this era of AI tagging on data. We kind of had early versions of this. Vehicles made in different eras had different signals. So what was signal one on one vehicle platform might be speed, and on a different vehicle it might be window up. So there was no consistency between all of these. There's a really interesting decoder technology they have that normalizes all this and then what was super interesting was, even in speed. Let's say we found speed in all the platforms. So like the F-150 platform and the Mustang platform, you find speed. One might be in miles per hour, one might be in kilometers per hour, one might be in radians per second. So you start getting all of this alias type of information that you have to then bring together, tag, and make sure that it's very clear what you're doing.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:04) :
And so then maybe let's fast forward. Tickets to Mantle, which I guess starts in like 2022. Mantle is at the surface level at least, maybe you'll hate me for saying this but like a Carta competitor. Is that a fair way to at least think a bit conceptually?

Amar Varma (00:22:15) :
Fair, let me give you the reason. So after leaving Ford, they brought in Doug Field from Tesla who ran the Model 3 program and he's an ace, right? It's like, okay, you found the right person. My thing is after an acquisition, we were there for a number of years. I'm like, as long as it's fun and you're finding value in me. I'm all in and if you're moving on, and got better things. That's okay too, you know, life happens and we move on. So then I decided consciously to just take time off. Now I've got four young kids.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:45) :
Nice, dude, four. That's big.

Amar Varma (00:22:47) :
Yeah, so I was like, hey, you know what? I've been grinding for a couple of decades and I'm like, you know, maybe it's time to just take a moment for myself. And in a kind of a midlife sabbatical kind of situation, and I thought, let's just do that. I was kind of wanting to do that for a number of reasons, just personal and professional as well. And I went through a really nice curve of getting consciously bored. I use the juggling balls analogy. We juggle a lot of balls in life as adults. How many of them are rubber balls that if you drop them, they'll bounce and you can pick back up? And how many of them are glass balls that you cannot drop, because they're so fragile, right? And this was kind of the analogy that I was using. I'd like to think I didn't let any of the glass balls drop.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:33) :
What's a glass ball? I mean, typically relationships, marriage, kids, things like that would be glass balls?

Amar Varma (00:23:37) :
Cliche stuff you know. You know most of them, right? Like relationships with people that matter, relationships with yourself, because I think we as entrepreneurs don't always have our best interests at heart. We do in our mind, but sometimes our actions put other people ahead of us. Which is fine, but if we don't take care of ourselves, you get lost and the whole wave kind of just picks you up and takes you around. So those were things that I just wanted to really make sure that I was getting the right reps in as well, and then am I getting consciously bored? There's only so many things I could fix at home, only so many books, only so many things. Meetups I could have with friends, only so many school drop-offs, pickups, activities. You get to this finite number and it's great. I loved every minute of it. The lucky thing I had is none of my good friends, some of whom are air quote, retired now. Were off when I was off because that would have been a whole different thread of activity. But I started looking at a couple of different areas. Digital health was one of them, and then one day I was trying to piece together my cost basis, and fair market value of my private alternative asset investments. I thought by launch I'd have it. By launch it was clear I had no shot at getting this. At dinner I'm like, I got to get some people together to solve this problem and, you know, what started out as probably solving a problem for myself. Has really resonated and has taken over the startup community, fund to funds and LPs at scale. Whether they're family offices, university endowments, state investment boards pensions or SEC registered fund to funds. We have the whole range of these folks as Prominent customers in our platform. Yeah, so it's really exciting.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:14) :
So you started from the investor perspective, I mean Carta is capital management at first and obviously, there's all this other value and to capture that. As I understand Mantle also offers capital management, but you didn't start with the founders problem of capital management. You actually started on the investor side of just understanding your assets.

Amar Varma (00:25:29) :
The question started from the investor side, but in order to get the answer as an investor, you needed to create a product that founders and companies could use, right? And the problem over time was it was email and spreadsheets. Hats off to Carta, they're an N-of-one company in this area. They did a good job, the software's good but there wasn't a great experience and when I started to peel it back. The experience wasn't great, probably more so because of the methodology to input the data. Because the data on the system is only as good as the input quality. So I found there were a lot of mistakes in a lot of the cap tables, and I really got burned badly on one. And it took getting burned badly on one where I'm like, the blast radius of that error was big.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:07) :
This is including the stuff that's on Carta? Or you're talking about the stuff that's on spreadsheets?

Amar Varma (00:26:12) :
It happened to be in a piece of software. It very well could have also been a spreadsheet, so I don't blame the software for it. I kind of blame myself that I missed reviewing it two rounds ago, and as this company was about to go public. I had the wrong number of shares. It was, guess which direction it was wrong in. It was just like, this is not a great look and I kind of broke it down, and I have a good relationship with the founder. I was like, hey, what happened? Remember that round we did where we did the conversion of this? And I was like, yeah. The associate sat there between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., and figured it out. What associate? Where? How would they know how to do this between the hours of 10 and 2? It wasn't a complicated thing, but it wasn't something you could just sit down and do in a couple hours. You had to really know the space and understand what to do. And that was eye-opening for me because I was like, ah, any number in a system. You should be able to x-ray vision it, click on it, it should take you to a document where the data is, and the data should have encompassed in it a document that has a signature or something that you look at it and go, okay. That is the record of truth and that's what we've really forced in all of our products. Really, this ability to x-ray vision through it. To make sure that you understand that what you have in the system is indeed accurate, indeed legit, indeed real and that's something somebody fudged in there to get the job done.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:34) :
And this was the thing that Carta didn't do. I assume, and I don't mean to keep going back to Carta. But there are these worlds of when you start and there's a clear incumbent. But a new school incumbent, which would be Carta. Obviously, in this case.

Amar Varma (00:27:46) :
Yeah, they are the incumbent leader in cap tables. A lot of people watching this or hearing this will claim familiarity with them. They have a good piece of software. They're an N-of-one company in this area. I just think the focus on how to get the information in is the big win over time for the accuracy of the data, and that's been resonating with our customers.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:04) :
So for them you can't, you don't have this attribution. You can't tied it back to a legal op, the way their software works.

Amar Varma (00:28:10) :
I don't want to speak for their software, but I would say that we do it in a foolproof way where there's no guessing. You say there's a share cert, the share cert's there. You say there's a document, that access number it's visible, you click on it. Other platforms, including ShareWorks from Morgan Stanley, Global Shares from JP Morgan, Carter's got theirs, they're all good. There's just not a great experience and I think that great experience is what's resonated with our customers.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:35) :
When you go into a category like this where there is a leader. Product market fit is granted because there's clearly product adoption of this, let's say capital management software, right? And so then the question becomes typically like, how is your product so much better than the existing product? Is it much cheaper? Is it just much better? So I'm curious, what's that Delta, right? When you go to a founder, like you should use me instead of them.

Amar Varma (00:28:56) :
When you see product market fit, you see it, right? And it's not there until you see it. We have two things. One, I just think the whole workflow to get on there is a methodology that resonates with those who are trying to do the work precisely. It's accurate, and then there's precise, right? I think there's a slight difference and then the other advantage we have. Which I think is more material, is we started with an AI native capability. So to onboard your product into our product is a fully automated process. Like you literally, you can drop in a folder of documents and boom, you have a draft cap table. That's kind of the big step change. Doesn't mean it's forever remote, but that's how you get started and if that's your experience to start. Where your time to delight is seconds or minutes, that's a big deal. Especially in an enterprise type product like this, where delight is few and far between.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:47) :
I'm curious to hear maybe the specifics on just getting started. Did you have a conversation with fifty, a hundred different founders? Or were you already like opinionated on this is the problem and you just got to go solve it? How did you approach it?

Amar Varma (00:29:59) :
Yeah, I was quite opinionated on it but being around long enough, I know that being opinionated on it isn't the solution to everything. Yeah, that's a little humble pie there. But spending time with those in the ecosystem that have one-to-many relationships. So CFOs, founders, venture investors, the lawyers, which I think is a really strong channel. Really understanding their things that they like and things that they wish were better. And really listening on like, okay, if it was better, would you still use the incumbent or is that enough to get you to try something new?

Pablo Srugo (00:30:34) :
What did you hear there? Those are key moments, what were some of the subtleties that you heard?

Amar Varma (00:30:38) :
Yeah, those are super key, right? Because it's like, huh, what is it going to take for me to jump this hurdle to get on, right? It's usually not price, but this ability to use it as a tool like you're riding a bicycle versus it being a tool where you have to like, it's work. It's a tractor that you're maneuvering and it's got gears, and it's got heights, and you got to keep manually adjusting, and overriding it versus it's something like a bike where you're just pedaling, and it works. I think there's a distinct difference between those two experiences.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:10) :
Was that what people felt with the incumbent? It was just too hard? You might as well stick with spreadsheets, because it's no easier to do it with the software?

Amar Varma (00:31:17) :
I think they spoke. I think there's a lot of adoption of the software, but using the software felt like work versus it felt like delight and I think there's a very subtle difference in there. Where it's like, oh, I'm just going to recommend everybody use this product. Because it gave me the delight in something and it could be nuanced. It could be nuanced of like it saved us hours and diligence or drafting things. It could be something mundane about even drafting stock options or something simple like that. So it's like there's just an overall feel and fit that really resonates with our customer set.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:49) :
Because you started off with this idea that you just upload documents and you get a cap table. That was day one stuff?

Amar Varma (00:31:54) :
Yeah, that was the idea. Because it's like, this shouldn't be hours and hours or, days and days, to get this stuff up and running.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:00) :
Did you raise right off the bat? How did you kind of set that up?

Amar Varma (00:32:02) :
We started working through it, the group that founded the company. So Dwayne's my co-founder here along with a few others. We kind of just bootstrapped it. We went at it ourselves. Once we realized we were solving a problem beyond just ourselves, we put in some of our own capital and started doing that. Do not underestimate the amount of magnetic pull. Solar energy that putting your own money into something can be for other investors to come to the table. I think that's a really, really important lesson there. It's like when you're putting your own capital to work and investors see you put your own money in. It's just another level of, okay, these folks are really in it. They're not messing around. They put up their own money.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:39) :
It's the dual, right? Obviously in your case, you're also, a multi-time founder, a successful exited founder and so I think when you see that. That already gets you to lean in and it's actually kind of funny. Like in those shoes, if you're not putting your own capital in, there is a huge question mark. Cause it's like, you're in a position that you can do it and if you do, do it. Then you just get that double whammy of all the experience, plus clearly you're bought in. Usually that's very easy seed round, at least.

Amar Varma (00:33:02) :
Yeah, and I think for product categories like this. You kind of need a longevity element to it, because it's information and data that's got to last for a whole series of a company, right? A whole life cycle of companies and funds. So you got to have that trajectory.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:15) :
And did you pitch that you were going to out Carta, Carta? Was this the big vision? And I ask this because, a lot of founders think you've got to start something completely new, right? There's nobody there, you find a nice place, whatever. There is this world of just beating out an incumbent. Whether it's an old incumbent or a relatively new incumbent and then the question is, what's that pitch? Is it like, well, you know, they're upmarket. I'm going to go downmarket. I'm going to do it with less money. I'm going to be more lean, or is it the big one of like, no, no, I'm going to be 10x better than them, 10x cheaper and I'm actually going to beat them at their own game long term. I'm curious how you framed it.

Amar Varma (00:33:47) :
This is great, so let me take a longer answer to this. Because I love this question, it's very good. There are two types of companies that I've seen over time be successful. There is one where there is really a pull demand where you're taking an existing industry and you're pulling from it. And it might be taking a $5 billion industry and making it $3 billion. And then reducing it to $3 billion, you've captured some part of the $3 billion and you have a really successful business. There's another type of business that I call the zero billion. Where it's zero dollars today and you're doing something net new in terms of, ideas and activity. But if the following two things stay the same and this one third thing happens. You are set to own the entire market, right? And that becomes a multi-billion dollar company. Those are the two types of things that I've seen, and when we started. It felt like, as well as others incumbents have done. The whole industry was still working on email and spreadsheets. So it was really just the ability to bring emails and spreadsheets to a nice piece of software. Data integrity, workflow, communications and then as this has expanded now into the world of limited partners and LPs. The whole playbook is like, stop having people you pay lots of money to be investors logging into websites. It doesn't make sense. So this has kind of been our reason to enter in kind of where, why, and how we've been successful.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:12) :
Sorry, what do you mean by that second part? Stopping them from logging into websites?

Amar Varma (00:35:12) :
Well in our LP product, you know, I'll describe it a bit here. It's called Mantle Portal. It basically allows LPs at scale to amalgamate all of their positions across all of their funds. So people with 1,500 plus funds, it's hard to manage that off an email and spreadsheets. You got to first automagically log into all the portals, pull in all the information, extract all the data, dashboard the data, and then automate all the workflows around movements of cash, reports, taxes, the whole bit. You know, we've now amassed close to $2 trillion of funds in the system and we're really at scale now. Pulling all that information together for people and it was something where. 

Pablo Srugo (00:35:52) :
And this is regardless of whether the underlying funds and or companies are on your platform?

Amar Varma (00:35:57) :
Correct, because they'll be. For example, your fund probably has a fund admin and the fund admin has a portal, and that portal may be the same as some other funds. It might be different and when you have many funds. This becomes a bit of a challenge and we have hundreds of these instances.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:10) :
Who's your main customer? Is it founders? Is it VCs? Or is it actually LPs?

Amar Varma (00:36:14) :
Now it's all of the above, but really we've found a lot of room in the LP world. Approaching $2 trillion of funds in the system, right? So I think that's a testament to the movement there. It's all coming back to the thesis of there's no system that tracks a piece of equity from a company to a fund, to an allocator in one substrate and I think we really will allow, and open up that capability for people.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:37) :
It's funny, one of the things that you kind of mentioned there. As much as there are other incumbents, a lot of it is email and spreadsheets. I can attest to the fact that, you know, me as a VC. Cap tables are probably ten to one in terms of. For every ten that are on a spreadsheet, one's on Carta, right? And so a lot of times this is true in many markets where there's an incumbent, it's probably a multi-billion dollar type company, and you assume from the outside looking in that they own this market. Actually they own like five percent of this market and ninety-five percent of the market is still to be had. And then the question is, is there a structural reason why that ninety-five is just going to stay the way it is and just never going to go anywhere, your product or theirs? Or is there something you can do to get five percent of that ninety-five on your product? And now you have an equally sized business as seemingly untouchable incumbent.

Amar Varma (00:37:20) :
The change management is unbelievable. I think founders have gotten accustomed to doing in software. When you go to a midtown Manhattan family office, third or fourth generation, change management is a different story. You go to a state investment board, change management is a different story. You can't lead with, hey, we'll make you more efficient. It has to lead with, here's the value you're going to get and your downstream alpha of investments, right? And that's the key piece.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:44) :
And so give me a sense of just the trajectory. You have these conversations, you launch this product. I assume, given that you've been in this ecosystem for so long. It was probably relatively easy to get the first like ten or twenty customers on board. How did you go from there to, you know, hundreds of customers? What's the go to market that really worked for you?

Amar Varma (00:38:00) :
Yeah, everybody asks, is it easier every company you start? I go, getting customers is always hard. Maybe I had an unfair advantage to get started but as you scale and go through the whole spectrum of getting these customers. It's warfare, right? You have to win the battles, you have to win the individual accounts, you have to win the distribution partners. Our best to date customer wins has been through referrals. Our customers love our product and love the experience they have when using it. So that's been our number one testament. That itself has just an undertone of excitement, but you have to build on top of that now, right? So we're really actually in the midst of looking for a couple of distribution partners that already have our customer base set in their sites. So that we're working through them with them in partnership to really scale that out.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:46) :
And I know Mantle is still technically an early stage company. Do you feel you have true product market fit yet, having seen product market fit in so many other companies before?

Amar Varma (00:38:53) :
Hindsight will tell us in 2020 vision, I very much feel like we're in the chasm and as we're going through the chasm, I feel like we've got it. You always want to back it with some data but, you know, number of dollars in the system is one of them. Usage of platform, number of like, hey, we'd love it if your platform did the following, right? You start getting customers recommending that.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:14) :
And revenue is where? Kind of single million ARR sort of thing?

Amar Varma (00:39:17) :
Yeah, it's in the single-digit million ARRs. If we had gotten this year to double-digit million ARR. I'd feel a bit more but sometimes the ARR number's not the right number either, right? Sometimes it has to be an underlying metric, and I feel like if you look at private assets. The market today is high teens trillions, call it $18 trillion. You know, the executive order just came out in August to allow alternative assets into 401ks. Which will make this a 25 to $30 trillion market probably in the next four or five years and I think that's a big deal.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:48) :
And then maybe just to end on this question, having built as many companies as you have. Invested in as many companies as you have. What are some of the biggest pieces of advice you would give an early stage founder, that's kind of in the trenches getting to product market fit?

Amar Varma (00:40:02) :
That's a really good, deep question. I'll start here, you know, as long as your passion around solving a problem is there. Your only finite limit is your effort and the money you have to operate. That's really the only boundaries that I see for people. People ignore that and they forget that. And I go, you can't ignore it or forget that, that's just the truth of it. If you're in it, and you can convince others to be in it. You're there, you have a chance. The second you're not there, it's over, right? So that's kind of the one thing, and I go, don't underestimate the half-life of your intention that you set the company with. That's a big, big deal. As you're going through it, you will get told no more often than you get told yes. You will be told sometimes in a nice way, sometimes not in a nice way, like, this is nuts and you really should pay attention to those folks saying this is nuts. Because one of two things, they are spot on and they're saving you time or they're just deadly wrong and the number of times that I get told I'm nuts, and that folks are deadly wrong. Is more than I would have expected and that's been one of the ones where I always acutely. I'm like, okay, why else am I crazy? Keep telling me, right? It's like, okay, what assumptions need to be true? What changes need to happen? Like, Are we trying to climb a tree to space? These are just the types of questions you really got to gut check yourself and then the other one is don't underestimate the referral nature of a good platform or service. The reason people want to talk to other people is they get referred. There's a social credibility to it. There's a, hey, this person solved a problem for me, maybe they can solve it for you and they're just good people. And sometimes there's a fit, sometimes there's not but that halo and buzz, don't underestimate that either.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:46) :
Perfect. Amar, thanks so much for sharing your story with us, man. It's been awesome.

Amar Varma (00:41:50) :
Well, thank you for having me on and I love the stuff you're doing. 

Pablo Srugo (00:41:54) :
Thank you. Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.