In Otter Words: Tim Draper

Otter Marketing16min

Ross Rubin

00:00

Hello, welcome to an auto words, an audio series that looks at how people are using real time translation in different roles. I'm Ross Rubin, Principal Analyst at radical research. And our guest today is Tim Draper. Tim is one of the best known venture capitalists in the industry. He's the founder of Draper associates, DFJ, and the Draper venture network, among other initiatives, and his firm's investments have funded some of the most important and best known companies to come along since the earliest days of the web, including Coinbase, Twitch, Skype, Tesla, Baidu, Hotmail, and Solar City to name a few. Today, we're going to be talking to Tim about how he uses otter in his work. Tim, great to have you with us. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you use otter,

Tim Draper

00:55

I am possibly their most enthusiastic supporter. We are using it. And and we're using it for almost every venture meeting. Anytime a new entrepreneur comes in the door, I ask if they mind if I record, and then we record all those meetings? And what's happening is I'm able to go back and look and say, Oh, wait, how much money? Were they raising? Or? Or what was the? What were their revenues? Or? Or wait, what was the main part of that business? And, you know, what customer did they talk about in the meeting, and it's been incredibly valuable to me. And then I love the calendar feature, because I don't even have to type anything in. It says, you're meeting with Joe Schmo from ABC Company, from New CO or whatever, and and then, up comes Joe Schmo, new Co. and, and then I'm, I'm recording immediately. And then the other thing that's really great as a watch the, the tell, when I'm rereading it, I'll reread the text. And then I'll go back and I'll say, Wait, that text doesn't make any sense. Because sometimes it records sometimes that transcription doesn't work that well. And so I go, Well, it's in this area, and then I hit the audio button. And I hear just what was happening at that moment, in time. So I think that there are going to be all sorts of amazing applications here. And I think some of the real value, I think, is going to be win, win, everybody's kind of comfortable with it. And they say, you know, they assume everybody's going to it's going to record for everybody, but then everybody's going to get their own transcript of it. So everybody can remember the meeting, not just me. So the more otter users, the more valuable otter becomes, in the bigger picture, I could see otter running in the background in every office in the US or in the world. And, actually, I guess any English speaking in part of the world, and, and anybody who is in any of those meetings will have instant access to all that data. And I think that's incredibly valuable. A lot of people are a little bit nervous about being recorded, at least at first. But after a while they realize this is, you know, people aren't thinking about this as some legal document because of the translations not probably good enough to say it to do anything. You know, just like every other industry that where there's this sort of people say, Oh, isn't this hurting our privacy? I actually think we all kind of get over the privacy because the features are so strong. And I think that's true. In the case of

Ross Rubin

04:10

great perspective, Tim, thanks so much for that. One thing I'm trying to get a sense of is the kinds of problems that having access to otter has helped for you. I imagine before you had access to this, people would take notes at meetings, but what kinds of issues or challenges has the tool been able to help you with?

Tim Draper

04:32

Well, I mean, I think I interviewed something like eight entrepreneurs that day. And and then once a week, go through with my, my partners, associates and analysts and say, which ones we want to fund or we decide which ones we want to fund? Well, a lot can be forgotten during that period of time, but Have you get into the habit of recording everything? And yeah, I mean, what's great is I also take a picture of the founders when they come in. So that in Otter, I have the picture of the founders, and I have everything that everybody said. And so then I can glance through and go, Oh, yeah, I remember those guys. Remember that woman or whatever. And they've made, you know, that was a really interesting business. And, and a lot of the reminders pop in. Because, I mean, if I'm, if I do eight a day, even, even if I only do five days a week, that's 40 entrepreneurs, I've got to remember when I go into the meeting, and I think it's a lot better, they just have it right there and easy for

Ross Rubin

05:50

you. Oh, absolutely. And thinking about your portfolio companies or the entrepreneurs with whom you work. Have there been any examples of Otter usage that have enabled companies to be more nimble?

Tim Draper

06:06

You know, what's interesting is about with each, each of our meetings, I say, hey, take a look at this. It's great as the real time transcription is kind of amazing. Demo. And they, many of them say, what's the name of that, and then they type it in. I'm sure what they're all doing with it I haven't ever asked. I think that there, I think generally people this thing spreading, it's going to be a big deal. It's very exciting. And in keeping track of all the things that you do in a day, is a very difficult task. And you know, you can have a notebook or you can type it into a notes, notes on your iPhone or whatever. But this is so much better and so much easier. Pretty easy to refer to. So if I need to search for something, it's pretty easy.

Ross Rubin

07:05

Right? And it when you see it for the first time, it really does seem kind of magical. One of these holy grails we've been thinking about in technology for for many years. And it is kind of amazing, not only to see it working, but to see it update in real time and correct itself as it as it figures out what what people are really trying to say.

Tim Draper

07:28

Yeah, I by the engineers behind otter have got to, they really understand

Ross Rubin

07:36

language. I wanted to switch gears a bit and talk about initiatives beyond your core investing activities. Looking at your website, I was intrigued by both Draper University and Draper TV. There are two different kinds of education initiatives, one in person, and one using the webcast model. Otter has already been used for many podcasts. What do you see as its potential for these kinds of environments?

Tim Draper

08:04

Yeah, we, we get a lot of really amazing speakers at Draper University. We've had founders of Airbnb, Tesla, we've had Elon we've had founders have over some of the biggest and best companies in the world. And they, and then we and we record them. And we put them up on Rei pro TV. So our goal really is for our students in the university have a great experience, but also for those people that aren't able to go to the university to be able to learn from these extraordinary people. How they're, how they might build their business. So so we think that that Draper University ism, first of all, it's an amazing, amazing place. It's, it looks at schools in a totally new way. And Draper TV is a great offshoot of that. Which by the way, also has a as a TV show called Meet the Draper's, which, which allows the viewer to invest $100 or $1,000 in the companies that they see. Present it to me and my dad, my, my daughter, my sister. All of those things can easily use otter because while they're being video recorded, there isn't a text transcription. And we could easily just incorporate that in real time on during the show we can incorporate it in real time for The students. It's interesting, when I saw otter presented, when I saw people presenting on stage, and otter, trans scribing, on the side of the stage, I noticed that I, I wouldn't listen to the person and I'd say, Can I didn't quite catch that. And I look up and there's otter, and they, they give me the words that the person just said, so I can under better understand what they're talking about. It's going to be a valuable tool for education, too. So we're, I'm excited about that, too. In fact, we're hoping to incorporate otter into our next Euro training class.

Ross Rubin

10:46

That sounds really great. You know, another area you've been passionate about is the role of innovation in reforming state government and California's government in particular, I could think of a few applications there such as, say, aggregating voter feedback or sharing transcripts of town halls. In fact, I kind of see it as complementary to some of the education examples. In one case, you're recording and sending it out to the public. And this is a kind of return path, going from the public back to decision makers and other elected officials.

Tim Draper

11:22

Wow, that would be very powerful. If Town Hall used odd or because then people could, you know, it's a big effort to go out to town hall and sit in uncomfortable chairs for three hours, well, they deliberate it's a lot easier to listen to the, through the presentation, in an audio form, or better yet, to look at a transcription and then jump around and look at the things some of the people said, from an audio through the audio, it, it does have huge implications for democracy. It opens people's doors to to reach them, even if they they can't make it down to town. And then they can, they can probably participate better in the democracy than they can right now.

Ross Rubin

12:29

Sure, tremendous potential there. I wanted to close by asking you about some complementary technologies, you may be looking at, perhaps things that are based on machine learning. Certainly, the audio chat we're working with right now is highly complementary to otter. We've also seen machine learning make strides in real time translation, what do you see emerging to help build out this ecosystem?

Tim Draper

12:56

Well, it's interesting, I think that there's a really interesting connection with all of the, the administrative assistant software that's out there, whether it's Sonia or Linda or hefty, or whenever they're there, they're about 15 of these administrative, like secretaries online, and, and I could easily see that that Secretary online would incorporate otter into the calendar, it would tie the discussion with otter into the into whatever the to do list is to come up with a, you know, an outcome. I guess these are features that otter could add. A lot of those things are starting to happen. An application we haven't talked about is is the press. Because it keeps the press honest. If you record to add and, and so it's not a bad idea to when you're doing an interview, to use otter because then two things happen. The journalist gets an opportunity to recheck their work and you get an opportunity to protect yourself from a journalistic kind of goes awry. So I think there are going to be some really interesting new applications and then tying otter into everything from you know, you can put it in your car and make it a transcription. You can help it it can help you write a book can help you With a podcast, if you're in a podcast, you have the ability to record everything and, and then print it out as a as text. There are going to be so many applications that none of us have ever thought of. But I think just having your world around you recorded for whatever reason, turns out to be very helpful.

Ross Rubin

15:27

Fantastic. Tim, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. For our listeners. If you want to keep up with Tim's initiatives, you can visit his website at Timothy draper.com. Or follow him on Twitter at Tim Draper. As for me, you can visit my website at radical research.com or follow me on Twitter at Ross Rubin. If you'd like to check out my podcast, it's at Tech spensive.com. And of course, please do check out otter. Its website is otter.ai and you can follow the team at otter underscore AI for an otter words. Thanks for listening

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