Interview ‘Brett Martin , Co-Founder KumoSpace and Charge Ventures’

The Extra Mile interviews Brett Martin, co-founder of KumoSpace and Charge Ventures, about his journey in creating KumoSpace to foster authentic digital connections during the pandemic.

During our interview, Brett shared insights on several key topics, including the creation of KumoSpace, the importance of transparency and radical candor in building company culture, and tips for balancing personal and professional life. His experiences offer a fascinating look into the world of startups, remote work, and effective leadership, highlighting the innovative ways technology can bring us closer together.

TEM (The Extra Mile) : For those of our listeners and readers who don’t know a little bit about you, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

Brett: Yeah, well, I’m, you know, Brent Martin. I’m from Ocean City, Maryland, a small beach town in Maryland. But I’ve been, you know, building or investing most of my career. So, aside from a two-year stint in investment banking right out of college, I have, you know, started several companies or worked at several venture capital firms. So now I run Charge Ventures, which is a New York-based pre-seed, seed-stage venture capital fund. We’ve got 80 portfolio companies. Just raised our third fund. Investing in basically anything that is, you know, empowering entrepreneurship is how we think about it. So, you know, making it easier, a lot of creator economy stuff, a lot of crypto stuff, a lot of SMB tech. And then I also run the co-founder of KumoSpace, which is a software, productivity software for remote and distributed teams. So we’ve got, you know, millions of people signed up and, you know, tens of thousands of folks spending eight hours a day running their companies and their teams inside of KumoSpace. Got folks like KPMG and Google and Shopify all using KumoSpace to create a, you know, better, more connected work environment for their distributed teams. And my, you know, final job is that when I have a little extra time, I teach data analytics and machine learning at Columbia Business School.

TEM : What kind of inspired you to create Kumospace and how did you identify, you know, the initial opportunity?

Brett: You’re like, hey, something is here, maybe we should make a business. Yeah, well, all the startups that I’ve done, and I’ve done three startups now with my co-founder Yang Mou, all relate to kind of creating new ways for humans to connect digitally, but more authentically, and so when I was during the pandemic, you know, it is a pandemic baby, and during the pandemic, you know, I was just literally on Zoom calls ten hours a day, and I was thinking, you know, wasn’t really loving it, it felt kind of dehumanizing, and just being in a box, and everything, you know, just felt the same, and I couldn’t remember, you know, would literally be talking to people for ten hours, and at the end of the day I would look back and be like, what just happened? And so I thought, hey, there had to be a better way, and so I reached out to Yang, and in two weeks he had prototyped, you know, KumoSpace, which is kind of a, you know, sort of 2D video representation of a world, but you kind of are there with your team, and so I just think it’s crazy that there’s, you know, these remote companies with tens of thousands of people working at them, and they’re all working, and they’re all working really hard, but everyone feels so isolated, and they don’t feel any, you know, connection to all the other people that they’re supposedly working alongside, and KumoSpace kind of solves that, it creates more visibility for your team, more transparency, seeing who’s available, who’s around, you can kind of quickly tap people on the shoulder, get a quick answer, and then, you know, you also, it just creates more surface area for building a more rich culture, so.

TEM: Brett, culture seems very important to you. So what would you say are some, you know, key values that are important to you and that you really hone in on in your companies?

Brett: Yeah, you know, for me, sort of transparency is really important. I like to build like a really hierarchical kind of, you know, need-to-know basis. It’s like I like to, you know, we’ve definitely started to lead with kind of, you know, radical candor. I don’t really, you know, radical candor sometimes gets a hard name. I think you can still be gentle with the truth, you know, but I think I always in personal and professional lives like want to know even if it’s an uncomfortable truth. Like I prefer to know and so, you know, with my team, no bullshit, kind of constant feedback, letting people know where they stand. And, yeah, I find that people often appreciate that. Like even when we have had to go through hard times, you know, sometimes we have to lay people off. You know, you have to, you know, let people go. And I think that because we’ve always been transparent with people about the situation, you know, no surprises. I think they can, you know, they react positively. I think as a leader, I’ve always been surprised by how just graceful and magnanimous people can be, you know, and teammates and employees can be even in a hard situation. And I think if you treat them with some respect, they’ll return the same.

TEM : Brett, tell us, for those entrepreneurs out there that are grinding, I mean, obviously you have a variety of companies that you own, what would you say, how do you find the balance between, you know, the demands of a company, or multiple companies, and your personal life? Any tips or tricks?

Brett: Yeah, I mean, well, I think that you can do a lot of things as long as they all sort of support and reinforce each other, right? I think if you’re doing a bunch of different things that are pulling you in a bunch of different directions, you’ll never get anywhere, you’ll just be frozen. But if everything is kind of like working together, so, you know, I’m here with my fiancée who also works at Venture Capital, and so we are kind of combining, you know, personal and professional in that way. You know, we can split the hotel room, we can… But, you know, really we can, like, talk about deals together, and we’re always kind of talking about things we’re looking at, and she’s giving me great feedback on, you know, things I’m thinking about investing in, or business decisions I’m making, and I also get to spend time with a loved one, so that’s a nice way of, you know, killing two birds with one stone.

TEM: So is that the trick, maybe, having a personal in?

Brett: Well, you know, maybe a more generalizable way of describing that is that I think, like, I’m from, you know, a middle-class background, and, you know, my one piece of advice I think that, you know, middle-class folk always give is, you know, don’t do business with your friends. Yeah. And I think it’s terrible advice, honestly. You know, if you look at all the really successful people, you know, rich people, they’re all doing business with their friends all the time, and so there they’ve really combined professional and personal life, right? Yeah. And, you know, I think it’s maybe why it’s not great advice for, you know, quote the average person is because, you know, you don’t want to invest in average people, you want to invest in exceptional people. Yeah. And so I think really the advice there is that, you know, surround yourself with exceptional people and make them, you know, build real personal strong relationships with them, and then definitely invest in them as well. And I look back to, like, you know, I grew up in New York Tech, which when I entered in 2008, 2007, 2008, you know, I look at the people.

All that I entered into tech with them and they’ve all gone on to start and sell, you know, great, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, billion, billion dollar companies. And I think, man, if I had actually been investing in those, just in my peers, that would have been the amazing angel portfolio of 2008, 2009, 2010 tech. And so, you know, I didn’t learn this for years. But, so yeah, invest in your friends. Maybe another one I would give is, you know, when I first started doing venture capital on my own and starting my own fund with my partner, Chris Hibachi, I thought, oh, you know, I think I’m going to be good at this. I think I’m pretty smart. I think I’m pretty hard-working. I think I have a good network. But, you know, I didn’t really know. And so I, you know, I think I was more cautious than, and I, it took, you know, six years and, you know, we returned the first fund and now, you know, we’re going to make multiples on that first fund. And I said, oh, I looked at the data and it says, oh, you know, you’re better than average at venture capital. And I can say that. I have the data to prove that now. But honestly, I wasted a lot of time and energy those six years, whereas if I had just acted like I was going to be, you know, if I had just known I was going to be great and I had acted accordingly, I would have, I would be so much more successful today. Right. And so I think that most truly successful people, they don’t wait for the data to come back. They believe in themselves and they, you know, act as if they will be great and that becomes a reinforcing thing. And so, you know, don’t wait for the world to tell you that you’re great. You know, believe that you’re great today and get started, you know, getting the gains from being great.

TEM: What are some trends in technologies that you think can, change the space in the industry, potentially, within the next five to ten years?

Brett: Yeah, I mean, you know, I’ve actually been trying to make a conscious effort not to be talking about AI constantly. I try to use AI less. I think Jeff Bezos has the focus on the things that remain the same. Those are the things that will be valuable in the long term. And so, I try to live by that. But I, you know, where we’re spending a lot of time at Charge right now, and, you know, Kumu’s place as well, is I think that SMB tech is just a really exciting tool. You know, AI tools built for small and medium-sized businesses is a really great place because I think, you know, historically, you haven’t been able to – SMBs haven’t been able to afford a lot of, you know, professional services. So, you know, legal services or consulting services or, you know, marketing agencies, right? And now, these, you know, services are being turned into AI products, and now you can, you know, sell them to SMBs as products, not as services. And I think it’s going to totally revolutionize. So, if I look at who’s really going to gain from AI, you know, I think it’s big incumbents that have, you know, lots of costs and lots of data, and they’re going to become more and more efficient and have higher margin. And then, also, SMBs where, you know, historically, they couldn’t even afford these services. And now, as AI products, they’re affordable, and they’re going to make them, you know, way more efficient. And so, that’s a place to head charge. We’re spending a lot of time, and I think just, like, empowering entrepreneurs, you know, small entrepreneurs that do their best work is just a great place to spend time these days.

TEM : So last question, is there anything that you’re excited for here at Collision?

You know, even though we invest in AI and we build software for remote and distributed teams, I think just seeing people, connecting with people, shaking hands, feeling the sound of people’s voice is really what reminds me of why this is great. Just seeing the energy from all the young entrepreneurs just getting started. Making time to spend some time with first-time entrepreneurs or just getting off the ground and get that energy. It’s always so reinvigorating to me. Anyone who’s starting out, we at Charge invest in first-time entrepreneurs all the time. We lead pre-seed rounds and just getting in touch with those people and seeing the next generation, that’s what does it for me.

Learn more about Brett Martin here