Deep Dive with Martina Lauchengco

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. Today we're going to go in deep with Martina Lauchengco. Martina is a partner at Costanoa Venture Capital, she's also a partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group, and she has had a phenomenal career working in and around product marketing for some of the most iconic brands of our lifetime in technology. Martina, thank you for joining me today.

Martina Lauchengco: Matt, it's always so much fun to talk with you.

Matt Blumberg: Martina, I would love to start with a little bit of your career story because your career story has had some just fascinating things in it. I don't know what you did before Microsoft, so if you want to do a quick hit of a couple of things before Microsoft, but then you were on the Microsoft Office team running inaudible.

Martina Lauchengco: Well, I will claim there's a big caveat here is, I don't think I could have designed my career path, and the job that I had before Microsoft that let me get the Microsoft job, is actually an internship for a consumer chocolate and coffee company in Europe. The Milka chocolate bars, the purple cow, or Toblerone, inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: One of those.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. It was the best job, by the way, because we got to sample all the chocolate products, but I worked for-

Matt Blumberg: Obviously, the transition from that to Microsoft Word makes a lot-

Martina Lauchengco: Here was what was so interesting is I developed a new product for East... The Wall had just come down and they were trying to get more product into Eastern Germany and we developed-

Matt Blumberg: Well, by the way, just for those of our founders who are a little younger, and Martina says, " The wall had just come down." She's talking about the Berlin Wall.

Martina Lauchengco: The Berlin Wall. Okay.

Matt Blumberg: So now we're in 1990.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you. Aging myself. Yeah. So this is, 1991 and we were trying to get product into this new market, which is the former Eastern Germany. And so we built a specific display product for the former Eastern German market and that made my resume totally stand out.

Matt Blumberg: Totally unique. Yeah.

Martina Lauchengco: Totally unique in the pile of people that were applying to Microsoft. And so that internship for sure, is what got me the very first in screening interview at Microsoft. And that's all everyone ever wanted to talk to me about. So I know it had a huge impact on me being interesting to Microsoft. So thank you to Kraft Germany.

Matt Blumberg: There you go. Yes, the development of your brand.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: So Microsoft, what were your roles? How long were you there?

Martina Lauchengco: I was there for just shy of three years and I started as a product manager on the Microsoft Word team and eventually moved over to the Microsoft Office team. As did most of us because office just became the epicenter of all things that desktop productivity apps were doing.

Matt Blumberg: Right, yeah. And it's funny, the metaphor of Microsoft and what it did with Office, I hear so many times from founders who say things like, " Well, I've already got everybody buying X and now I'm just going to make them buy Y and Z and I don't even care if they use them. Eventually they'll use them." Is that strategy one that's kind of a tried and true?

Martina Lauchengco: There was a lot of really, really smart stuff done in the early days and I would say the smartest initial thinking wasn't just, " Hey, we're going to ride on the coattails of a product that has high penetration and just load it up." Which is I think, what a lot of people mistake it for. What they really did first and foremost was they worked on the product to make sure that the easiest to use product in the portfolio, which was Word, was that same interface, was then rolled out to the harder to use products that reviewed as specialist products. So Excel, which was an analyst tool and PowerPoint, which was presentation graphics, was truly no one knew how to do that. " Wait, where do I start? What do I do?"

Matt Blumberg: That was stuff you used to... I started my career in management consulting. You sent that to another department to go-

Martina Lauchengco: That's right. Exactly. Sent it to a bunch of designer specialists that knew what they were doing. And so the real insight there wasn't just, " How do we get more share of wallet with bundling our products?" Which by the way, Microsoft Office existed as a product bundle, where it was literally just those products bundled together. It didn't sell very well or it sold fine, but it was literally just, if I'd already decided I wanted both, I could get a better price. But this was doing the product integration work and then creating a market position, which was, it was a recession, everyone's trying to do more with less with their office workers. How might you do that? Will you just give them a bigger tool set for just an incremental amount of cost and look at all the things that we can't even imagine what they might do, but if they know how to use one, they know how to use them all. And that was the real thing that made Office really take off because suddenly people could envision doing work a different way that they hadn't thought possible before. And it was a bundle and they created great licensing and they did all this other fantastic stuff on top of it. But it started first with thinking through, what do we need to do in the product? So that what we envision is adoptable and possible and that we can own a market position.

Matt Blumberg: So when you think about the dominance that Microsoft had in productivity apps and then throw Outlook onto the mix and Exchange onto the mix, and you look at the world today. And I assume you and Costanoa use Gmail and G Suite and you're able to open Excel files and Word files like everybody, but you've kind of shifted, Microsoft still has healthy market share. What did Google get right in order to wedge themselves into that world of Microsoft domination? And is there anything Microsoft could have done differently to either prevent that or slow that?

Martina Lauchengco: I think the two things that Google did exceptionally right was one, they focused on taking advantage of the cloud and collaboration, which was something that was distinctly different. If I'm working on anything with anyone I like, " Let's just move this to a Google doc." Because it is perceived as better for collaboration. And that's really where they got their big start. That was probably a more obvious thing. The thing that I thought was utterly brilliant that they did it very, very early stages, was if someone sent you any kind of Office doc, you could still open it, even though they didn't do full conversions, you could see the document, you could see what it looked like, Excel spreadsheet, they didn't have sheets yet. They would still open it and show it to you. They didn't fully convert the Word doc into a Google Doc or they gave you the option eventually to do that. But that, when I saw that, I literally said, " Oh, this is so good." This is the first time I saw the possibility of the chink in the Office armor. And because they did that one specific thing is for transitioning anyone that has legacy document assets, that's the single most important thing. And Google did that exceptionally right.

Matt Blumberg: And does that translate into other areas? Have you seen that play get run outside of productivity apps?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes, I see that play all the time. What are the common products that are used to do this today and can we just make it easy to suck it in? So right now, one of our companies, Sync Computing, they're working with Databricks and they're like, " Hey, you just do a couple of clicks and we suck in your entire workflow. You don't need to do anything else. We're just going to make it super easy for the work you've already done, to be moved into our world." So I do see that integration play as hyper necessary in most categories.

Matt Blumberg: That's so interesting. And did you ever get to meet Gates or work with him at all?

Martina Lauchengco: I did. I did. When we launched, again, I'm dating myself, Office 95, we had him come to our tent and do something. So I actually had to direct him and make sure that he had, his whole team, all the things-

Matt Blumberg: Right. Because you're the marketing person, right?

Martina Lauchengco: I was the product marketing person. I was in charge of this launch. And just making sure that he showed up, that he knew exactly what to do. So it was so nerve wracking for any of us whenever we had to do anything with Bill because he was famously opinionated and not terribly patient with anything that he perceived as being like, " Hey, is this not going exactly as I wanted it to go?" And so you just wanted to make sure everything was going right for when Bill was around, that he had all the information and that he thought what you were doing was smart because he had very low tolerance for anything that wasn't.

Matt Blumberg: So speaking of smart people, you went straight from Microsoft to Netscape?

Martina Lauchengco: I did.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. So Netscape and then presumably, straight from there to LoudCloud?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. So talk a little bit about those years, Netscape, the dawn of the internet, and for people who have been listening to Daily Bolster, we did have Greg Sands on in season one, talk a little bit about Netscape, but what was it like there and LoudCloud where you worked and Greg did not work?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, I would say for me, going from Microsoft to Netscape, which was the epicenter of the change, the internet change that was happening to the whole world.

Matt Blumberg: It must have been night and day. I mean, you went from one of the largest technology companies in the world to, how many people were at Netscape when you were there?

Martina Lauchengco: There were about, I want to say 600 when I started there, or my employee number was 600 something. I don't know if they were that many people there. But it went from a totally disciplined approach to going to market, to barely managed chaos. And within my first week I thought, " Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life? This place is total chaos." At least my perception, compared to Microsoft. But our CEO at the time, Jim Barksdale, came in and he talked to everyone because everyone was just working like crazy because there was so much to make the internet happen. And he came in and the very first thing he did was thank all of us for our work. And I'd never heard that before. The entire time I'd worked at Microsoft. Bill Gates and Steve Palmer did not leave with thank you. And I was like, " Oh my God, they're treating us as humans and they're being grateful and acknowledging the work." And that made me think, " Oh, I really definitely made the right decision because now I'm seeing a different way of being." Which is to acknowledge the change that your employees are enabling and saying thank you. And he started with the employees, he said a little something about what was happening to the company and he finished with the employees and I was like, " Oh my God, that is leadership."

Matt Blumberg: He was not a startup guy, he worked at FedEx or something?

Martina Lauchengco: No, he came from FedEx. Exactly. He came from FedEx. And that's why actually why they brought him. They're like, " We want someone that knows how to get the trains out on time." Because again, barely managed chaos. They needed somebody who everyone would believe and listen to. And Jim Barksdale was phenomenal. I learned so much watching him work.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I mean he is the font of many, many, many great sayings.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: So actually when Greg was on, I asked him about his favorite. So let me ask you, what is your favorite Jim Barksdale?

Martina Lauchengco: My favorite Jim Barksdale, and I don't remember if Greg said this or not, was, " All problems look like snakes. If you see a snake, kill it. If a snake is dead, leave it alone." But again, " All problems look like snakes." So it was kind of this, you got to take care of problems, but you don't always necessarily recognize them. And that was always a good one. We'd be in meetings and someone would bring up something that we'd already made a decision on and people would literally go, " Dead snake. Dead snake."

Matt Blumberg: Actually, I think the one Greg used, which I'm not going to get quite right, is, ]]" Who wins when the alligator wrestles the bear?" Or something like that, right?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: It depends on whose home territory it's on.

Martina Lauchengco: Right. Yes. That's another good one.

Matt Blumberg: So when you were there, 600 people and Jim Barksdale was already there. What was Mark Andreessen's role at that point? And Ben must have been there, in?

Martina Lauchengco: Ben was there, Ben was the product manager. So he was on the product management floor with the rest of us. And Mark, I can't remember exactly what his role was at that point. He was either the CTO or he was a very senior executive. And I think they were trying to figure out, " How do we carve out an operational space for this genius, Mark Andreessen?" And I think Mark was also, I mean Mark and I, I think we were the same age at that time,. And he was trying to figure out, he'd never been a company before. He'd only been in academia. And he was trying to figure out how do I guide this thing that got created and still bring some of that magic? And so in the beginning, I actually had, I still remember, I'm like, " Well, do I dare send this email to Mark Andreessen?" Because I was observing something that I thought was important to call attention to. And I was like, " Why not? I'll just do it." And I sent him an email and he wrote back immediately saying, " Let's meet." And so in the beginning, I had a lot of conversations with Mark, just sharing things that I had learned at Microsoft. He thought that there was a lot that he could learn from that. But he was also, I'd say, my observation of Mark as a human was one of the most voracious learners I have ever seen. His ability to consume books and the rate at which he could consume, was unlike any I'd ever seen before.

Matt Blumberg: So in the end, what's your analysis of what happened to Netscape? So you talk a lot in your book, LOVED, and we'll come back and talk about that more in a little bit, but you talk a lot about how it's so important to attach your product to a trend that's bigger than yourself. I cannot think of a better example of that than Netscape, right? Netscape was the internet when the internet wave, first wave, was cresting and there's no Netscape anymore.

Martina Lauchengco: So Netscape was the browser, it wasn't the internet. And that was the fatal flaw, was the brand was so associated with the browser, that when Microsoft became ascendant with Internet Explorer, the perception of the company was driven entirely by the perception of how Netscape was doing in its browser market share. So it didn't matter that most of our revenue came from the server division-

Matt Blumberg: The servers, right? Yeah.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Most of it. And Netcenter, which was the portal at the time, the Yahoo competitor, it was generating in a tremendous amount of revenue. That stuff almost was irrelevant. The whole perception of the company and its stock price was determined very much by the perception of, where was it in the browser world and how was that going to determine the shape of Netscape? And I don't think it could get out from under that narrative. And that was it. So that was a brand problem, but there was a lot in the product portfolio that contributed to that. But it ultimately became this brand problem/ opportunity, which is actually why AOL then wound up acquiring Netscape. Was it literally, it looked at the brand ecosystem where they didn't own affinity already and that overlapped 100% with the people who had affinity towards the Netscape brand. And so they're like, " We want to acquire that brand and that audience." So that's what happened.

Matt Blumberg: And what happened to the server business? AOL took it-

Martina Lauchengco: It moved over to Sun.

Matt Blumberg: Moved over to Sun, right. And did that ever turn into anything material for Sun?

Martina Lauchengco: That's good question that I don't know the answer to. Or maybe I did once and I forgot. But I know people stayed there for many, many years.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so Netscape and then LoudCloud.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. So Ben Horowitz was very much the ying to Mark Andreessen's yang. Mark has this spectacular brain, but Ben has the ability to understand it and also then to translate that into being an executive and operationalizing it. And so this was the ultimate in that, where it was like they were going to co- found this and Ben was going to be the CEO. And I loved Ben. I thought he was one of the most extraordinary leaders I'd ever worked with because he's simultaneously technically utterly brilliant. But he also has the EQ, which most people don't know about him. He has unbelievable EQ. His capacity as a human being is truly extraordinary. But he presents very much as a technical guy. And so you just don't know how much richness is underneath that. So I would follow Ben anywhere. And so it was like, " Okay, great. Let's go be part of this LoudCloud adventure." And at the time when they started it wasn't just about being what AWS and all the cloud services are today. That was the original vision of LoudCloud. It was a little too far ahead of its time. But the thing that got me to go there was Ben saying, " We want to create the next great company of Silicon Valley." Culture, the people part. He wanted everyone to be committed to perpetual learning. And that's what got me to go there because I was like, " Well, I want to help with that."

Matt Blumberg: I want in on that.

Martina Lauchengco: I want in on that. Because for me, I was less wedded to any particular technology and I really cared a lot about the kind of company people were trying to put on the planet. So that's what got me.

Matt Blumberg: So obviously Ben's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, is at the head of the list of books that every founder should read more than once.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: When you read that, or when you read that when it first came out, did you feel like, " Yeah, I lived that book."? Were there things in it that were things you didn't know, or were there were things in it that Ben had sort of distilled warnings from afterwards, that you were like, " Oh, that's a really interesting take on it."? Or did you just read it and feel like, " Yep, I just saw three years of my life pass before my eyes."?

Martina Lauchengco: I did feel very much that was me being able to read all of the things that I saw and observed in Ben's mind, with him sharing his CEO narrative of it. And I'd say the things that I learned, I don't think, I observed Ben feeling embattled, but I didn't know how much internally, how painful that was for him. Because you could tell that it was hard. But what I love about that book, very specifically and why it is the must read is it is rare for a CEO to have the capacity to remember their feelings, their thoughts, and be very vulnerable with that. And I think that's so unique about Ben's narrative. And those were some of the things that I've seen all of this, but then I'm like, " Oh, and so this is what he was thinking." And he has a very unique ability to articulate the human lessons that are essential and then communicated about it in an extremely effective way. But there's actually a chapter in there that is specifically about me.

Matt Blumberg: Now I have to go back and read it.

Martina Lauchengco: When it was a blog post. And so it became a book. And so he brushed up a lot of that also. But way back, when he did the original blog posts, I had written him this letter just saying, " Thank you so much for letting me have inaudible experience." And I reflected on mistakes that I had made and just thanked him for giving me that opportunity. And right after that, the very next blog post he posted, " What happens when you need to demote a friend?" And I was like, " That's my story right there." And it was the only time he, and the reason why I was like, " I'm pretty sure this is about me." Is he very assiduously always used she pronouns in his work. So he wanted to promote women. And it was the only time that he used he pronouns in a blog post. And I'm like, because he doesn't want me to think it's about me. But I'm pretty sure that I was definitely an inspiration for that. We'll just leave it at that. But he was, he's like, " You want to bring your closest friends and the people you trust the most when you first start a company. But then the company happens and that person that you first brought on that you love and you trust, is not necessarily the right person for that role. And what do you do?" And then he does a tremendous job of identifying what are all the human things that you need to recognize are going on for that person. Again, EQ off the charts and he did all of those things with me.

Matt Blumberg: Well, for anyone listening who has not read that book yet, and I hope there is no one, you should go read that book.

Martina Lauchengco: Certainly no CEO or Founder. That in his must read for all of this.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so after LoudCloud, did you work full- time at Silicon Valley Product Group for a while before Costanoa, or am I missing?

Martina Lauchengco: I did, yeah. Well, I'll put full- time loosely, in the sense that it was the primary thing that I was doing. But I was also simultaneously figuring out what my teaching at UC Berkeley would look like. And the very first, I think it was two years, I taught for an entire semester. And so it was figuring that balance out. How much is SVPG, how much is teaching? Do I want to lean more into teaching at Berkeley, for the engineering graduate school? And so was figuring all that out.

Matt Blumberg: And are you still doing some work for Marty and at Berkeley as well as Costanoa?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes. So-

Matt Blumberg: A full plate?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes. I have a very full plate. So basically, I take teaching leave every year in the month of January to teach at Berkeley in the Graduate School of Engineering and our Fung engineering leadership department. And this is a way of getting engineering leaders, they're sort of MBA equivalent, without them having to have an MBA. And so my marketing and product management class is now a one unit digestible thing that they take before they start the semester. And so it's super intense. And so I get it done and they get it done in this really short period of time. And then I go back to my full- time job at Costanoa. And then for Silicon Valley Product Group that is, I teach workshops twice a year. Obviously I wrote the book, which was a big endeavor, but that's kind of the side hustle.

Matt Blumberg: Right. Yeah. So Silicon Valley Product Group, at Return Path, we hired Marty at some point, I can't remember, I'm going to say it was around 2010, 2012. And he did a bunch of work with us and really kind of transformed the way we thought about product management, which I assume that that organization has done for countless companies.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: And I'm not even sure I was aware at the time that he also did that for product marketing, but presumably he had multiple practice areas?

Martina Lauchengco: Well, Marty's practice area is exclusively product. I'm the only person in Silicon Valley Product Group that focuses on product marketing.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, interesting.

Martina Lauchengco: And what that looked like for a period of time it was Marty did product and then he brought in other people that did engineering, operations design, and I did product marketing, but that wasn't a sustainable model. So it became just product with me as always being, because I was part of that original group. I was always like, " And we also do product marketing." Because it is super adjacent and oftentimes the first question people say like, " Well, how are we actually going to bring this product to market?" So it was really logical to keep it attached in some way.

Matt Blumberg: For sure. And so that's a good segue to your book. So your book, which is called LOVED and I don't have the subtitle at the tech-

Martina Lauchengco: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products.

Matt Blumberg: Rethinking Marketing for Tech Products, LOVED is a great book. If anyone is listening and has not read it, it doesn't matter what job you have at a company, you could be the CEO or you could be anybody. It is worth reading.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: The way I sort of explained the book to people who ask me is that it's essentially an instruction manual for running product marketing and more, but that's sort of the kernel of it. And so let me ask you a couple of questions from the book, but from your life's work, that I think will be helpful for founders and CEOs who are listening to this. Because I think product marketing is a little bit of a misunderstood function or at least, a function that has lots of different incarnations. So in your mind, how do you define product marketing and where does it sit in an organization? Does it sit in product? Does it sit in marketing? Does it depend? Is it its own thing?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes, product marketing is often misunderstood, but it is practiced differently in every single company. So you can't blame anybody. And that is also why the answer to where should it report? Is somewhat, it depends. It depends on who the leaders are, whether they're able to take advantage of the function for what it can do. It depends on what problems you're trying to over correct within the market. Are you trying to shape and prepare the market more or are you trying to, marketing has just become amplification and enabling the sales and it's not really well attached to what's happening in product, in which case you might need to move it deeper and closer to product. So it kind of depends on the market problem that you're trying to solve. And I did write the book precisely for the reason you described, which is a lot of product marketing, there's the function and the rule within a company, but then there's the discipline in how it must be practiced, which actually involves product and the entire go- to- market machinery. So product marketing can't occur without a really deep partnership with all of those other functions. And some of the best ideas might actually come from those other functions in that collaboration. And so I really wanted way more people to understand its power and that it is, for most tech companies, it is really the foundation upon which you build everything else.

Matt Blumberg: So is there a model for a product marketing leader that makes sense? Like must a technology company have a very senior product marketing leader? Is it okay to have a more junior one if you have a strong head of marketing or a strong head of product? And how do you recommend that CEOs engage with product marketing?

Martina Lauchengco: So this is one where the answer does depend somewhat on stage. So if you're an early stage company, I don't think you can get strong product marketing with less than a director level of experience. This person just needs to have seen enough to be able to recognize patterns quickly and know how to problem solve. So it's kind of like director level and above, is really what you need at those early stages. Because they're your generalist and they're going to be doing a lot of fast laps as the companies figuring out product market fit and where do we need to turn the dials? So that's true at the early stages. At the later stages, it is actually a little more sophisticated because you are, let's say you have product market fit, you've been very successful. And now you brought up the classic example is, we have one product that's very successful, now we've acquired in or we've built in these others, and now it's more of a full- featured product line and we're going to create suites. How do we bring that to market? And is it just a pricing of packaging exercise, or do we actually shape how the world thinks about why they need to think about it from a platform perspective? And that is product marketing. It's much more sophisticated and it's much more market shaping than it is talking about the product. You have to talk about the product in the shape that you're creating inside the market. That's why positioning work is so essential and it's a much longer term game. So you do have to have someone that is senior enough, strategic enough and strong enough to be able to recognize and see the work that must be done across all parts of the company. Some of it is working with sales, some of it's working with marketing, some of it's working with product. So you need a senior enough person. I'd say it's hard at that juncture to do it with less than a VP's worth of experience, but that can be a VP of marketing that's very strong in product marketing, that has a really capable director underneath them. There's not just one size fits all, but you do definitely need bench strength in understanding the discipline.

Matt Blumberg: I'd love to ask you how you think product marketing and even sort of product life cycles have changed over the last 10 or 20 years. So you talk in your book about Jeffrey Moore, who I've read all of his books and we did some consulting work with him years ago as well, around his famous technology adoption lifecycle, visionaries to early adopters, the chasm, main street, whatever comes after main street, laggards. It feels to me like the pace at which products move through the TALC has increased tremendously. And the example that's sitting in front of all of us at the moment is ChatGPT and maybe the other large language models as well, but somehow something just had a hundred million users. And it didn't exist three months ago.

Martina Lauchengco: So here's what crazy. ChatGPT had a hundred million users in February and in June it has 1 billion. I'll actually say that in my lifetime, there has never been a technology that's been adopted that quickly. And I'd actually say the next most successful version of that is the iPhone, which was rapidly adopted. But if you actually look at that full lifecycle that you described it, depending on where you draw the lines, it still fell in the seven to 10 years of adoption, for one of the most successful products of all time. So I would argue with this notable exception of ChatGPT, there's not that companies or products travel through that technology adoption lifecycle faster. It's that the sheer volume of companies attempting to go through that has gone up exponentially. And so that's why, when I look at that from a product marketing lens, I'm like, it's never been more important because you can't shorten that. There's just like humans operate a particular way, technology gets adopted in society and cultures in a particular way, and we can see some of the edges of it, but really it just takes time. And B2C usually goes to the first part of that curve really fast, and then those next parts of the curve is actually takes a really long time. And it's the inverse of that for B2B. You can spend years and years and years trying to really figure out those first markets and then you go public and all of a sudden you're accelerating through all the other ends of it. So very, very different for those two. But I think it's much more the sheer volume of companies that are trying to get our attention and not so much that we actually get through those different phases faster.

Matt Blumberg: So that just means there's more noise?

Martina Lauchengco: There's more noise, exactly.

Matt Blumberg: And more and more noise every day, right?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: The world of startups, it's never been easier to start a company, it's never been cheaper to start a company. And the net of that is there are a bazillion startups running around out there.

Martina Lauchengco: Exactly. Well, that goes back to your first question, which is like, what's more important? Is it the vision or it's the market? And that's why I argue, it's not your vision because PS, there are a other interesting companies that are talking about their very interesting vision and how disruptive they're going to be. And so you really have to align yourself with what is happening in market, what are people trying to do right now? So generative AI is not interesting in and of itself. Everyone's looking at, what should I be doing in my job differently? How should I be taking advantage of it? And so that's the larger thing that you want to attach to.

Matt Blumberg: Right. It's a class of technology that is a solution looking for problem. s

Martina Lauchengco: And everyone's asking themselves the question. I have this mom's group I'm a part of and one of them does grant writing for lawyers, and she's like, " Oh yeah, I started using it to help me with my grant language and for the emails that I'm sending out to people that I don't normally talk to." And she's like, " It's been really helpful." And she was one of the first people I knew that was using it and I was like, " Wow, she's taking advantage of it?" Then who knows who else should be taking advantage of it. But it's a powerful tool.

Matt Blumberg: So when you look forward five years, what do you think AI looks like or what do you think even just large language models, what impact is that going to have on us?

Martina Lauchengco: Well, I think it's going to impact every single one of us in ways that we can't even anticipate now. I'd say the biggest thing I see is the shift in interfaces, a conversational based interface as opposed to buttons and menus, where I just ask the product to do things on my behalf in natural language. I know that's coming, I'm already starting to see that. And you see this actually with a lot of companies that are trying to use their product on behalf of the user. The thing that gets really tricky there is, from the technology perspective, it's not that it's not possible, it's that it's computationally very expensive. And how do you actually do all of this in the background so that it's hyper performance? So that becomes a tech problem to solve. But I see that happening and it's really exciting, I think. I'm looking forward to that where I don't have to learn how to use all these different pieces of software. I can just say, " Oh, Bolster, can you just find me five candidates for this role in two weeks and make sure they meet these minimum thresholds and will accept this level of pay based on their past salaries." And it just goes and does the work for me.

Matt Blumberg: And by the way, we'll be happy to do that for you.

Martina Lauchengco: I look forward to it, Matt, and I hope I can just, and I won't even need to type it in. I'll be able to use an audio based interface to do that. So that's the future that I see in the next five years.

Matt Blumberg: All right. My last question, or I may have a quick one to wrap up. But my last question is, so you're now a partner at Costanoa. Tremendous early stage venture firm. And you're on-

Martina Lauchengco: Costanoa thanks you,.

Matt Blumberg: You're more on the operating side, right? What you all call builder ops team. So you spend time helping the portfolio, et cetera. Are you also effectively the head of product marketing for the firm?

Martina Lauchengco: I am a major influencer. This is one where it is a collaboration. So if the product is primarily the investing team and where they choose to invest in the sectors that we think are important and how we choose to invest and partner with our founders, if that's the primary product. Obviously that team has a really strong point of view and say in the shape that takes. I spend a lot of time facilitating how do we articulate that in a way that is not us talking VCEs to the venture ecosystem. But actually talking about ourselves in language that is more meaningful to founders and the founder ecosystem, which is what matters most.

Matt Blumberg: And does the firm feel like that has worked in terms of differentiating it, in terms of getting it in deals it might not otherwise have gotten in?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah, I would say a huge adjustment we made last year, which was something we collaborated on, was to choose to focus and not list off everything that we invested in because it's a hard thing to do as an investor, " Oh, there are all these areas that I think are interesting." And we made the explicit decision to just say, " Developer, data, FinTech." Period. Just those three. Not a little like PS and these other things too. Not cybersecurity, not Web 3.0, not all these other things, not in Sure Techsure. Yes, we invest in those areas too. Not verticalized SaaS, not verticalized implementations of AI. We'll presume that's built into data. But to just simplify it to those three, was a huge, I'd say multi- year in the making, decision. But it has been super clarifying for us in the market, it's increased our deal flow in all the areas that we care about. So it has absolutely worked as intended. Focus and simplification has clarified our market position that lets us stand out better.

Matt Blumberg: It's amazing to see a small investment firm taking the advice of, given to technology companies every day. It works.

Martina Lauchengco: It matters like in any market, it matters. Simplifying and connecting yourself to what's relevant in the market, makes all the difference.

Matt Blumberg: Okay, last question for you. Can you give one piece of advice? What's your best piece of advice for CEO who's listening to this, who's working on scaling up her business?

Martina Lauchengco: My best piece of advice is make sure you set aside time every week to reflect on what might you be doing differently or better the next week, based on what you've learned. Because we're always doing stuff, we're always super busy, but are we picking our heads up and saying, " Did I learn what was necessary to learn this week?" And making sure that it's being applied. So these are all things that people will do naturally, but just doing that with great intention and regularity and putting the time box on it so it's not like, every quarter we review, see how we went. It's kind of like, every week, there's something we should have learned from this week that should change how we prioritize what we do next week? I think having that practice leaves you really open to learning, but make sure that you're reflecting on that, are you learning the right lessons?

Matt Blumberg: I love that. Just put it on your calendar. Put it Friday afternoon, Saturday or Sunday, Monday morning

Martina Lauchengco: Whenever you're planning out your week. Did I learn when I needed to make sure I'm applying it?

Matt Blumberg: Martina, thank you so much for joining me and chatting today. This is a great conversation. I know founders everywhere are going to benefit from this.

Martina Lauchengco: Oh, thanks, Matt. I really enjoyed it. It was really fun to reminisce with you.

Matt Blumberg: Take care.

Martina Lauchengco: Bye.