Meeting Title: Brainforge Weekly Kickoff Date: 2025-02-17 Meeting participants: Nicolas Sucari, Uttam Kumaran, Hannah Wang, Robert Tseng, Caio


WEBVTT

1 00:05:33.330 00:05:34.380 Uttam Kumaran: Hey, everyone.

2 00:05:38.020 00:05:38.760 Caio: Hello!

3 00:05:40.160 00:05:40.640 Uttam Kumaran: Hey!

4 00:05:43.740 00:05:44.580 Uttam Kumaran: Anyways.

5 00:05:44.830 00:05:45.670 Uttam Kumaran: And

6 00:06:24.910 00:06:25.950 Uttam Kumaran: second.

7 00:06:36.480 00:06:37.963 Uttam Kumaran: Hi, where are you in?

8 00:06:38.380 00:06:39.659 Uttam Kumaran: In Spain right now?

9 00:06:40.760 00:06:45.829 Caio: I’m actually in Portugal visiting my family, but in Spain, in Barcelona. Yes.

10 00:06:46.490 00:06:53.380 Uttam Kumaran: Max I. I was in Bilbao not last year, but the winter previous year.

11 00:06:54.170 00:06:55.010 Uttam Kumaran: Best plan.

12 00:06:55.010 00:06:59.169 Caio: Beautiful city I love that I’ve been to Barcelona. I’ve been to Madrid.

13 00:07:00.470 00:07:03.919 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know. I feel like that’s the best place like that’s so nice.

14 00:07:04.990 00:07:07.379 Caio: It is Spain. It’s a nice place, and

15 00:07:08.032 00:07:13.169 Caio: if you go to the north they usually have the best food. More greenery.

16 00:07:13.530 00:07:14.030 Uttam Kumaran: In the south.

17 00:07:14.030 00:07:16.619 Caio: Has the beaches and everything, and other things, so.

18 00:07:18.480 00:07:20.170 Uttam Kumaran: The food was amazing.

19 00:07:20.680 00:07:21.509 Caio: There it is!

20 00:07:23.490 00:07:24.720 Caio: Can’t deny it.

21 00:07:27.360 00:07:28.635 Uttam Kumaran: Cool. Let me

22 00:07:29.320 00:07:34.742 Uttam Kumaran: Let me get the slides up and then let’s get started.

23 00:08:03.280 00:08:10.750 Uttam Kumaran: okay, great. So second round of our sort of

24 00:08:11.462 00:08:18.909 Uttam Kumaran: slide update process. I think it was really great. Last week. I’m I’m excited to continue and sort of

25 00:08:19.230 00:08:22.650 Uttam Kumaran: basically start to build this motion of

26 00:08:22.790 00:08:31.798 Uttam Kumaran: looking, how we did, saying how we’re gonna do looking, how we did saying we’re gonna do right. I think that’s a great way to keep everyone accountable

27 00:08:32.500 00:08:37.620 Uttam Kumaran: And I just wanna share again this slide.

28 00:08:38.222 00:08:45.309 Uttam Kumaran: I think overall, I think we did a really good job. And we’re continuing to do a really good job of

29 00:08:46.880 00:08:49.090 Uttam Kumaran: These 1st 2 items.

30 00:08:49.200 00:09:11.429 Uttam Kumaran: I think, the second item in particular, we are making a lot of process and moves to start to take us from sort of like juggling random clients and sort of like hoping by the end of the week everything works to guaranteeing that not only things are going to work, but that they come out

31 00:09:11.630 00:09:13.070 Uttam Kumaran: the best

32 00:09:13.763 00:09:19.579 Uttam Kumaran: and right. And really, I think we’re working towards a process that we can get from 7 clients

33 00:09:19.770 00:09:30.740 Uttam Kumaran: to 17 clients, right? And so that’s where we’re thinking a lot, and so we’re, I think, hopefully, a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today is sort of aligned with that

34 00:09:31.750 00:09:40.659 Uttam Kumaran: in terms of executive update. I think. A couple of things I want to share one. We’re making a little bit of a change on the data side today.

35 00:09:41.313 00:09:45.180 Uttam Kumaran: We now have a really amazing crew across

36 00:09:45.666 00:10:07.270 Uttam Kumaran: the analytics engineering team and the data analyst team across all of our 6 or so active clients. And so we’ll be splitting up meetings into 2 sort of pods, one, just 2 groups, basically 3 clients, each at its simplest level, would just give us more time to talk through each client. But also hopefully

37 00:10:07.810 00:10:15.699 Uttam Kumaran: keep those meetings more organized. I think in over time we may move to something that’s more client focused

38 00:10:16.154 00:10:30.690 Uttam Kumaran: at the moment. We have some clients that are smaller in touch points some clients that are larger in terms of number of touch points. But I do think that this is a good evolution. The AI team. We have one active client, and we already meet every day. So sort of considering them

39 00:10:30.970 00:10:32.510 Uttam Kumaran: sort of taken care of there.

40 00:10:32.910 00:10:38.449 Uttam Kumaran: But I think on the data side. We have a lot to discuss every day. So I think this is a good process.

41 00:10:39.092 00:10:43.420 Uttam Kumaran: The second thing I wanted to introduce Kyle, who is joining us today.

42 00:10:44.195 00:10:56.260 Uttam Kumaran: Maybe, Kyle, if you want to give a brief introduction, Kyle will be. I’ll give the work introduction. And you can give the life introduction. Kyle is joining us on the analytics engineering team.

43 00:10:56.917 00:11:06.992 Uttam Kumaran: Has worked sort of in a number of different roles on the data side, but really like a self starter and sort of self taught on in Dbt,

44 00:11:07.560 00:11:24.310 Uttam Kumaran: has worked for, you know, a number of different firms from doing big migrations into Dvt to standing up analytics. So I’m very excited. I I really think that you’ve worked in sort of the environments and sort of chaos that we sort of thrive in work directly with executives.

45 00:11:24.879 00:11:27.479 Uttam Kumaran: And so you kind of get the balance of

46 00:11:27.610 00:11:39.200 Uttam Kumaran: working on short term things as well as working on, you know, longer term infrastructure decisions. I think hopefully working with us. You’ll learn a lot more about the latter. And then hopefully, we can gain a lot of the former.

47 00:11:39.640 00:11:45.060 Uttam Kumaran: You know, which is which is what we need. So yeah. And then maybe I’ll let you give an introduction.

48 00:11:45.482 00:11:53.660 Uttam Kumaran: Sort of where you are in the world. You have an interesting background, so you can feel free to share, and anything else you want to add.

49 00:11:54.680 00:12:06.499 Caio: Perfect. Thank you. I appreciate so Hi, everyone. My name is Kyle. I’m originally from Rio Janito Brazil. So I was born and raised mechanic engineer but then.

50 00:12:06.620 00:12:22.620 Caio: when I finished school, I started working. I worked a bit in Fintech at Tech, and then I decided to move abroad, and I got a chance to do a master at Ucla, in the United States, where I lived for almost 2 years and a half.

51 00:12:22.800 00:12:45.860 Caio: and then I decided to pursue a little bit more of education, and I was doing economics for my master, and then I came to the Netherlands, where was the 1st time for me in Europe for a Phd. In economics. But unfortunately, I didn’t finish long story about Covid pandemic. I think it changes a lot of people’s lives, including mine.

52 00:12:46.676 00:13:05.679 Caio: And yeah. And then, after that, I started switching back to the industry started working with data. I decided to to live in Spain, because it’s a it’s a place I feel. I feel a bit more like home. I also have family in Portugal, so I’m always in Portugal and Spain. It’s very close to each other.

53 00:13:06.443 00:13:16.699 Caio: So yeah, that’s a little bit about my my background. And well, if you need anything related to anything just just being me. I’ll I’ll I’m always available.

54 00:13:16.930 00:13:17.890 Caio: Thank you.

55 00:13:19.130 00:13:30.100 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, so I’m really glad, I think now we have myself away, Luke and Kyle on the Ae. Squad, so we’ll be working, of course, on anything related to Dbt data modeling

56 00:13:30.735 00:13:40.609 Uttam Kumaran: and pipelines. But also, I think, as a crew, we’ll talk we’ll talk about how we improve documentation, how we improve Cicd, how we improve our

57 00:13:40.720 00:13:44.689 Uttam Kumaran: dev saving prod environment. So a lot to talk about this week.

58 00:13:45.271 00:13:51.858 Uttam Kumaran: But super super excited there, I think the only other update on the executive side is,

59 00:13:53.190 00:14:00.730 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, we’ll be starting with a new client today, starting with urban stems. So I can talk a little bit about that during the data team meeting.

60 00:14:03.420 00:14:06.539 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I don’t know. Robert. Is there any? Do we have anything else to update.

61 00:14:08.393 00:14:10.309 Robert Tseng: No, not yet. I think that’s good.

62 00:14:10.590 00:14:11.630 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool.

63 00:14:12.618 00:14:40.099 Uttam Kumaran: So yeah, I guess, like, we want to talk a little bit about how we’re doing across these. Yeah, I think what what you’ll see is that we’re we’re still doing well on the revenue goals. Our revenue goal is to hit sort of 83 K and build revenue or like in, you know, basically like, yeah, what we’re gonna build by the end of the quarter and looks like we’re gonna hit that I think this is one of the few areas that we are

64 00:14:40.340 00:14:50.039 Uttam Kumaran: like we, even though we haven’t been spending a lot of time on, we are actually doing really well on, and, in fact, probably the bottleneck in selling more is our ability to execute

65 00:14:50.613 00:15:05.326 Uttam Kumaran: which is a different problem than we had before. But you know, just another problem to solve. So on the delightful service delivery, we still have a little bit of a ways to go. The process change on the data side should help here. We’re also

66 00:15:05.850 00:15:34.479 Uttam Kumaran: looking to bring on one more pm, which will solve a couple of problems here. Of course, as I mentioned, like throwing people at problems is not always the best solution. However, there’s fundamentally, I think, a lot of hours that need to get filled on these, on Pm tasks related to clients. So we’ll fill that. The AI team is also working really diligently on stuff. Help us on the Pm side. Some stuff that should go live, you know, probably in the next 2 days.

67 00:15:35.366 00:15:39.090 Uttam Kumaran: And then driving attributable revenue. I think Hannah is sort of getting a

68 00:15:39.190 00:15:44.590 Uttam Kumaran: her hand on everything, and I think this week in particular, I’ll be interested to see how

69 00:15:45.790 00:16:02.570 Uttam Kumaran: her and the team sort of begin to weave in the content work into the entire process. I think really that’s probably more of a discussion between Hannah and and Robert, I mean, and and Ryan. But I think the biggest thing that we want to figure out there is. How can the content team

70 00:16:03.163 00:16:22.460 Uttam Kumaran: pull resources from design? But also everybody sort of have the same intention and the same mission. When we talk about our brand, whether it’s 1 pagers, decks content. We want all want to be going from the same page. So if we need to slow down there, we can. But I do think that there’s probably a group conversation that needs to be had there.

71 00:16:22.974 00:16:28.630 Uttam Kumaran: So I’ll probably you know, Ping, Hannah, and you guys in the the design team channel on that.

72 00:16:30.060 00:16:34.650 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, this was our last week achievement on revenue goals.

73 00:16:35.132 00:16:39.930 Uttam Kumaran: So we I just wanna flash this up there. We had some really great progress on moving Eden up.

74 00:16:41.350 00:16:43.320 Uttam Kumaran: Our goal is to move Javi up.

75 00:16:43.480 00:16:51.894 Uttam Kumaran: We are sending out a few proposals. And we have a few leads in the pipeline for legal, but also even broadly.

76 00:16:52.510 00:16:58.561 Uttam Kumaran: So I think, for these are basically the goals for this week, I think.

77 00:16:59.500 00:17:23.859 Uttam Kumaran: again, we want to make sure we nail joby this week, and a lot of what you’ll see from my side on this is, I’ll be kind of bear hugging the entire data team and making sure that across all of our clients. Things are going out. What you should see if you’re on the data team is just more structured tickets, a really clear understanding of, like what our goals are for each client. And ideally.

78 00:17:23.970 00:17:32.977 Uttam Kumaran: instead of working on like 3 or 5 things, you’re working on one or 2 things at any moment. And sort of how does that ladder up to us making these upsells?

79 00:17:34.850 00:17:37.640 Uttam Kumaran: so yeah, any questions here, any comments here.

80 00:17:41.884 00:17:54.135 Robert Tseng: Since I added to the slide this morning. So I think couple of things I’ll mention. So yeah, I think the the 1st key result. Kind of goals have not really changed. It’s pretty still pretty much the same as last week.

81 00:17:54.620 00:18:00.410 Robert Tseng: so I think you have a work that we’re re the way that we’re restructuring, not really restructuring, but

82 00:18:00.901 00:18:30.529 Robert Tseng: just kind of doubling down on our on our service delivery. That’s gonna enable me to be able to make those upsells. So I think we can grow revenue that way. And then for the second key result regarding kind of new leads in the pipeline. So just we’re all. What are all the active conversations we’re having with prospective clients. We’re kind of back up to 10 plus leads per week now. And I I still want to bump that up to 20. So definitely had a lot of work to do to to kind of get more conversations going. So we can always have a potential

83 00:18:30.670 00:18:33.470 Robert Tseng: potential clients that are whether we’re talking to you.

84 00:18:33.908 00:18:39.570 Robert Tseng: And then yeah, on the partnership side, which one. I spent some time talking over the weekend kind of

85 00:18:39.710 00:18:40.950 Robert Tseng: we wanna make

86 00:18:41.509 00:19:07.460 Robert Tseng: our partnership strategy kind of more clear to everyone on the team, so that any of you, and kind of brain forge and brain forge friends like, you know, if you you’ve all come from different companies, you have former colleagues, whatever. We want to make it very clear to you like. What’s the incentive to be able to like? Enable that to kind of bring them in to work with us if it’s a good, a good opportunity, I think what we’ve realized is, you know, we have a lot of

87 00:19:08.040 00:19:35.579 Robert Tseng: We have a pretty strong. We have a pretty strong network, and it continues to grow of just people who give us warm leads. And obviously, those warm connections are always more. You know, they they just seem to convert more than than the just direct cold, cold contact leads. So yeah, I think that’s something that I want to get pretty. I wanna be able to communicate clearly to the team so hopefully, you’ll see that in the Friday demo.

88 00:19:35.820 00:19:50.739 Robert Tseng: And then for the last one on the on the on the legal side. Yeah, we’re sending out proposal this week. Just to get get kind of kick, kick off some work with an AI client in that space. So I’m excited about that.

89 00:19:53.060 00:19:59.790 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So I I think the for me, I think the one of the things I’ll be looking forward to is how we set up that

90 00:20:01.000 00:20:04.599 Uttam Kumaran: agreement again. We we’re lucky to have a lot of friends.

91 00:20:04.740 00:20:05.610 Uttam Kumaran: I think

92 00:20:05.790 00:20:16.650 Uttam Kumaran: we have a lot of friends that are helping us out of like just goodwill. We have a lot of friends that if they were given a little bit they would totally help us, and, in fact, I would love to give them that because people are spending time

93 00:20:16.780 00:20:22.290 Uttam Kumaran: selling on our behalf, and what better way for us to to leverage them?

94 00:20:22.769 00:20:36.830 Uttam Kumaran: You know. So I’m super excited for that. And then also, even for internally, we want to create a process where, if if internally, you are to refer business or refer a new team that there’s, you know, an incentive associated with that

95 00:20:37.350 00:20:41.729 Uttam Kumaran: you know. And that way, you know. Again, everybody wins as as we grow so

96 00:20:42.660 00:20:48.062 Uttam Kumaran: great looking at delightful service delivery. So last week we talked a little bit about

97 00:20:48.660 00:20:59.769 Uttam Kumaran: getting out updates for clients today, sort of planning out ahead for Javi as well as like, basically kicking off this new work stream for pool parts.

98 00:21:00.110 00:21:06.350 Uttam Kumaran: We talked about sort of decks. And Pm’s, yeah, go ahead, Robert, if you wanna talk to that.

99 00:21:06.710 00:21:11.559 Robert Tseng: Oh, yeah, hey? I just wanted to say, I think I think you’re sharing your entire screen, not just the deck. So like.

100 00:21:11.560 00:21:12.429 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, okay. Sorry.

101 00:21:12.430 00:21:14.940 Robert Tseng: Is like pretty small, so you can’t really read it. And then.

102 00:21:14.940 00:21:15.280 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

103 00:21:15.770 00:21:16.420 Robert Tseng: Yeah.

104 00:21:16.420 00:21:19.429 Uttam Kumaran: I’m just trying to hustle on urban stems work as well.

105 00:21:19.700 00:21:20.852 Robert Tseng: Okay. Okay. No. Worries.

106 00:21:22.110 00:21:22.670 Robert Tseng: Yeah.

107 00:21:23.770 00:21:25.219 Uttam Kumaran: Cool. So

108 00:21:25.580 00:21:37.980 Uttam Kumaran: the I think the key things we wanted to do is update stuff for get sort of ahead on Joby, which we will this week, and for me, I think the biggest goal is trying to look at 3 months ahead. There.

109 00:21:38.873 00:21:41.799 Uttam Kumaran: And then, yeah, we talked a little bit about stuff for pm.

110 00:21:41.940 00:21:49.010 Uttam Kumaran: I think, in terms of updates for this week. So in terms of high cloud high quality message every

111 00:21:50.360 00:21:56.249 Uttam Kumaran: every day we’re going to sort of work through the AI team getting this out this week.

112 00:21:56.666 00:22:15.279 Uttam Kumaran: I’d be adding the brain forge bot to our client channels where we do have a slack connect, and we’re gonna start to be able to see how many messages that we are sending to clients and vice versa, so that should go out this week. That data is already in Snowflake. I’ll I’m gonna be putting up a real dashboard for us to take a look at that. But we should be able to get that update in slack as well

113 00:22:15.380 00:22:17.470 Uttam Kumaran: in terms of the second item.

114 00:22:17.650 00:22:26.250 Uttam Kumaran: So yeah, I’m making some adjustments on the data team sort of project management like flow. We’re also looking

115 00:22:27.140 00:22:29.719 Uttam Kumaran: one potential hire for the Pm side.

116 00:22:30.540 00:22:49.779 Uttam Kumaran: I do think that we’ve been better at the onboarding period as well. You know. I think one of the things that I’ll probably work with Mary Ann on is sort of probably later this month we can talk to some of the new folks that join and sort of get some feedback on how their onboarding was, and how we could have improved that but I feel pretty good there

117 00:22:50.540 00:22:54.739 Uttam Kumaran: and then on the junior Pm, agent. Yeah, we talked this morning. I think.

118 00:22:55.480 00:23:15.770 Uttam Kumaran: we’re gonna get the slack thing out. Then the next focus is really on tickets here. So for people for context, we built an an AI agent that helps us create tickets and notion. There’s still a couple of things that need to get resolved there. And so my directive to the AI team was to sort of shift to that as soon as we sort of nail the measurement for this top item.

119 00:23:19.180 00:23:19.940 Uttam Kumaran: Great

120 00:23:22.118 00:23:37.031 Uttam Kumaran: so attributable revenue from brand and content, I think last week we just talked about pricing page one pagers, and we sort of put a little bit of a pause on Newsletter and Legion. We did our we did our sort of

121 00:23:37.560 00:23:52.539 Uttam Kumaran: post on merging the 2 brands last week, which got a lot of promotion. I do think that there’s there is something about trying to take advantage of that over this next week. But I know we want to get these 2 items out as well.

122 00:23:52.977 00:23:59.520 Uttam Kumaran: Maybe, Hannah, I can kick it to you if you’re on about about any of the updates here that I saw.

123 00:24:00.140 00:24:05.142 Hannah Wang: Yeah, sorry I put those updates literally 5 min before the meeting started. But

124 00:24:05.892 00:24:25.148 Hannah Wang: for the pricing page. Yeah, I checked just now, and it’s live. So thank you. Everyone who got that up and running, maybe we can maybe track user engagement, create a heat map of some store or something along those lines. Just to see where people are clicking. If they are even clicking onto that page.

125 00:24:25.480 00:24:38.239 Hannah Wang: And as for the design assets, still working on it, prioritizing the capabilities deck, I feel like we’re going through a lot of iterations of that just to make it really good and solid, so that all the other

126 00:24:38.700 00:24:58.359 Hannah Wang: those components can kind of trickle down into other assets that we have, like the one pagers and then, as for content. As Utah mentioned. I’m gonna try to take initiative on that. And kinda yeah, merge the design and content world together. So that everyone’s aligned there. As for the second initiative, yeah, those have.

127 00:24:58.650 00:25:07.430 Hannah Wang: Those updates are the same. From last week Newsletter has been halted and Legion not been started. So those are the updates.

128 00:25:09.100 00:25:12.180 Uttam Kumaran: Great, I think. I gave us a lot of updates, I think.

129 00:25:12.760 00:25:21.239 Uttam Kumaran: Friday or Thursday evening on the capabilities deck. So I think we have enough to probably wrap that up.

130 00:25:22.870 00:25:28.720 Uttam Kumaran: And I think this week, Hannah, I’m also gonna be leveraging the mid engagement decks for all clients.

131 00:25:29.223 00:25:40.450 Uttam Kumaran: And probably starting to to build those out. So yeah, would love to see capabilities deck go out. And then, yeah, I think the next biggest and thing is sort of planning how we could sustainably.

132 00:25:41.129 00:25:50.709 Uttam Kumaran: You know, build our content side. Of course, there’s a bunch of other design needs on a few other decks that I’ll sort of. We could talk about tomorrow’s meeting.

133 00:25:52.550 00:26:01.900 Uttam Kumaran: But yeah, I think this is updates. Great. I’m really glad we got the pricing page up. I know there’s probably still some room for improvement, but the biggest thing is sort of just getting what we have out as fast as we can.

134 00:26:04.110 00:26:05.475 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, I think.

135 00:26:06.130 00:26:11.023 Uttam Kumaran: the only other update is we’re starting on a new client this week. Urban stems.

136 00:26:11.730 00:26:20.670 Uttam Kumaran: I’m sort of getting my head around all the things that they need and sort of we’ll think through who is assigned with me on that client.

137 00:26:21.650 00:26:26.139 Uttam Kumaran: But apart from that I don’t know if we have any other like big milestones to chat about.

138 00:26:28.480 00:26:30.969 Uttam Kumaran: This week. Anything else we want to discuss.

139 00:26:38.440 00:26:39.310 Uttam Kumaran: Cool.

140 00:26:40.100 00:26:40.980 Uttam Kumaran: Okay?

141 00:26:41.330 00:26:49.060 Uttam Kumaran: If not, then I think we’re good for today. Yeah, I think we’ll probably end up chatting with everybody, one form or another today. But please just send me a slack

142 00:26:49.653 00:26:56.180 Uttam Kumaran: if you need anything. And yeah, super excited for the week. So we have a lot to do this week. So yeah.

143 00:26:58.970 00:26:59.800 Uttam Kumaran: awesome.

144 00:27:00.030 00:27:01.710 Uttam Kumaran: Thanks. Everyone appreciate the time.

145 00:27:02.780 00:27:03.510 Caio: Thank you.

146 00:27:04.190 00:27:04.940 Robert Tseng: Alright, take care!

147 00:27:04.940 00:27:05.600 Hannah Wang: Run.

148 00:27:06.150 00:27:06.910 Nicolas Sucari: Kyle.

149 00:27:07.470 00:27:09.050 Caio: Thank you. Bye, bye.