The Story Behind My Investment In Myra Labs

This is going to be a fun story to write about Myra Labs.

About a year ago, my good friend Nakul told me I should meet this guy spinning out of Bloomreach — Viksit. I happen to know one of the founders of Bloomreach, who quickly pinged back to endorse Viksit as one of his top engineers. We met up last summer, and at the time, he was developing a bot for chatting inside Whatsapp. We met for coffee in Palo Alto. A few weeks passed, and we met again, and during that time, Viksit had single-handedly built integrations into other chat apps, made friends with folks who were working for Telegram, and had somehow smiled his way into developing some relationships with more closed mobile messaging platforms.

We met a few times and while I initially didn’t think it would work at scale, Viksit always had a non-obvious and insightful rebuttal to any areas of doubt. He is relentless in this way — and I will come back to this trait. As the summer ended, I hadn’t gained enough confidence in the specific application (going directly to consumers with these bots), but I had gained confidence in Viksit. This was right around the time I started my Fund III and was writing what would be larger checks (for me, relatively). I committed to Viksit that I would invest and also open my entire syndication network to him. I gave him a strong recommendation and made a ton of intros. I was searching my email for the exact date and text: August 31, 2015. In the email, I wrote:

MYRA

Round: $300-350k open on $5m cap, 20% discount; Small round, just me, a Waze co-founder, and early Whatsapp eng, and the two founders of Bloomreach, where he was previously (this may be best-suited to individuals).

On Product Hunt: http://www.producthunt.com/tech/myra

Founder: Viksit Gaur https://www.linkedin.com/in/viksit

Background: Myra is an intelligent assistant tied to a phone number and virtual machine for each user. Viksit himself has already built integrations with Whatsapp, FB Messenger, regular SMS, and Slack.

Risk and Fine Print: I know what you’re thinking – “uh, another bot. Won’t the clients just own this like Moneypenny and FB?” So, I dragged my feet on this for the same reason for weeks, but Viksit handled every strategic question I pummeled him with for weeks. He is a very deep systems thinker and strategist, in addition to being an incredibly productive engineer. I know his former boss (Bloomreach CTO) very well and he also is investing and remarked on his drive and intellect. He’s been obsessed with all the messaging platforms, and that’s essentially why I am investing — the sheer size of all the world’s messaging clients and their restrictive power and influence over how those billions of people will use the web is super interesting to me.

Then the round started to break down. Viksit and I had a number of hard chats. I don’t mean to imply that I could save everything as I have a very small fund and rely on the broader network to syndicate and co-invest. As I replay those conversations, I know Viksit was nervous and there wasn’t much I could do except give harder advice on how to keep going, raise less, lower the cap, etc. To his credit, Viksit stayed with it. He eventually caught the eye of one of the best seed VCs out there (as well as this little, new enterprise tech company called “Slack”), and after a month of deliberation, got a larger seed round with a fantastic investor. It took much longer to happen, but it happened.

That’s the relentlessness I referenced earlier in the post. During those difficult investor meetings, Viksit slowly digested the feedback from the community — mainly that the opportunity to go direct to consumers inside siloed native messaging clients would require too much permission and, therefore, too much friction. Viksit shifted course and moved Myra away from direct-to-consumer and, instead, focused on empowering developers, big or small, to build conversational interfaces in a platform-agnostic way. In this manner, when messaging clients break out, or when new interfaces (like voice) emerge, Myra is flexible and extensible enough to handle the terrain. Additionally, their architecture can recognize similar users across applications, so that you (as a user) don’t have to worry about resubmitting your preferences within each silo each time. The machines actually learn who you are within the context of your interaction. (You can read more about Myra and link to their site here.)

In the time that we’ve gotten to work, I would say that Viksit and I have the most “tough conversations” I have with any startup. It’s partly because we are comfortable with each other and I have now known him for a year, partly because we are both prone to debate and argue in a mild yet relentless manner, and at times, it has led to one of us getting frustrated. I am sure he’s frustrated with me right now in reading this! But, ultimately, we are friends and have built up trust, as well, and he can really create a rich product and evangelize his vision to a degree that’s rare to find. I’m lucky to be a small part of it all.

Since that initial email above, the attention toward bots has exploded, this past April 2016 to be exact. I wrote about the craze here. As I surveyed the market, I was lucky in retrospect to pick Myra early because it is in the #2 category I outlined (“picks and shovels”) and, so long as they can woo developers to build with them and help them scale, the company can grow as the more activity goes inside messaging clients and interfaces, and/or becomes more conversational in nature. Ultimately, no matter what does happen, I know the Myra team will always bob and weave their way to the best opportunity — and I want to publicly congratulate Viksit on not only putting up with me, but also staying the course during a challenging market for fundraising. It all paid off for you.