Lessons from building an AI-enabled service that customers love | Hooman Radfar

**Hooman Radfar** (0:00)
I think the AI is the least important part of building an enabled service.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:07)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, the show is brought to you by frontlines.io Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, our guest is Hooman Radfar, CEO and founder of Collective. You sold your first company, 34, 200 million. Have you found it harder to stay motivated the second time around? I feel like for a lot of founders I know, you're very motivated by fear and wanting money and stability and all of this stuff, and then all of a sudden you hit the milestone financially. Then the next time around, you have to learn to be motivated by something different. Have you experienced that?

**Hooman Radfar** (1:03)
You know, it's difficult to remember. I think we're always contextualizing the past through the lens of the present, right? We remember things a little bit differently. But what I remember viscerally when I was younger was, you know, a lot of it, there's an egoic part of it. Like you want to create, I'm created by nature. Like I like to play music, I like to do all these things. So there was that core, like I want to build and I want it to be big, like my St. Castles to be big. But there was also, you know, fear. And in particular, like 2008, when it hit, you realized like all that money, which you didn't realize psychologically, you started to count on this fake monopoly money called startup stock to go away. Like it starts making, you know, changes. So I think that relief was great. It didn't really shift my motivation. If anything, I'm fiercer now. I often think why? Because it's not solely motivated by money. I would love the outcome. But I was just at the conference we were discussing before, the mission matters to me a lot. Like I care about the customer fundamentally.
Whatever product we're dealing with, I care about the customer because they're my family. I'm a customer, my brother is a customer.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:04)
My wife is a customer. I told you this.

**Hooman Radfar** (2:05)
Yeah, it's coming out of the woodwork. My wife's friend's hairstylist is a customer and I know. So it's real people and this is their life. I really understand that and I'm a founder, so I get it. But also I care about my team. So the downs are there. So I think those are my two motivations and I'm hoping that those inputs yield obviously the great output which is there, but I think that's what drives me.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:28)
Given the success you've had and then you obviously were doing venture, had a bunch of very successful investments, I'm sure you could have founded any company. Why did you decide to found Collective? What was it about that opportunity?

**Hooman Radfar** (2:38)
I think there was a confluence of factors as there are again in anything. One, I mean, the general platform I think for any founders, do you still have itch, right? Like you have to, you have to be something unresolved at a psychological-based level, and that's where you start at that point. I think what in particular drove me to this direction was, I love working with founders.
I have been doing it my whole life. I've been a founder, I've been funding them with whatever money I have at the time, and then with Expo, obviously, that's what we did. But I really enjoyed the scale of AddThis, right? It was 15 million customers, reached 2 million unique users.
Billions of people would touch and use things that we created, and that level of impact for an ICP that I care about was what I was looking for. This particular problem set, finance and administration, how do you help people focus on their core business, what they care about, and become that finance department, like that autonomous part of the stack that they just say, hey, you know what? They run that. That got me into that scale, but also that ICP, and it's a very difficult problem, and I was intrigued. I was like, I think I'm going to keep learning this whole time, so I'll stay interested. So yeah, over the years, interestingly enough, I've become more excited about, more interested, which is painful. At the beginning, when everything's academic, you're just like, look, Tama's this big, if you get this percent and whatever, it's all academic, but now it's real. It's real. It would really hurt if I couldn't work on this.