#278 - Brett Martin, President at Kumospace - on the power of focus

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable all of us to collaborate, build culture, and thrive together - remotely. My guest is Brett Martin, Co-founder and President at Kumospace.

Brett is a serial entrepreneur. He began his career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, Since then, he has spent his entire career building or investing in technology startups, including stints as an EIR at PrimaryVC, Co-Founder of Switchapp and Sonar (pioneering location-based social network), Director of Investments at Appfund and Vice.

Today he's the President & Co-Founder of Kumospace, the virtual office platform where teams show up.

When the pandemic hit, he quickly realized the technology for hosting immersive virtual events was pretty terrible. He knew there had to be a better way. And thus, Kumospace was born.

Their mission: to make online connections more meaningful by building the most human spaces on the internet.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ay we enable remote work these days. Brett shares his vision on creating solutions that are game-changers in this space. Then he talks about how the biggest hurdle in going to market is not so much selling the product but selling the organizational transformation that's required - and how they go about solving this. Last but not least, he talks about the biggest lessons he learned around go-to-market and scaling his organization- and how to avoid making the same mistakes next time.

Here's one of his quotes

Truly disruptive tools usually compete on a completely different axis than what they've replaced. So they're not just cheaper or faster, but they're actually qualitatively different in a way. That changes the game.

Virtual offices, like Kumospace, have that characteristic. Sure, there's no substitute for truly being in person with other people. What I can say is that by working remotely, there are all these crazy benefits that you could never get if you tried to co-locate everywhere in one city.

You don't have to pay hundreds of 1000s of dollars for office space. You can hire the best people from anywhere in the world. You can give your people the flexibility to choose where in the world they work. You can give them time flexibility. That changes the game. And but I am a believer in anything that can be done over the Internet will eventually be done over the Internet.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The principles Brett used to narrow down the focus of his SaaS business
2. How to go about gaining traction if the sales is not about your product, but about getting people to gain a leap of faith
3. The secret behind Kumospace' 'crazy high' retention rates
4. Brett's secret (today) to hit the numbers predictably.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Brett Martin
• Website: Kumospace

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