Revolutionizing Photo Storage with AI Innovator Iz Shalom, OIlie AI

Curious about the rapid evolution of online storage and photography? Join us as Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society chats with Iz Shalom, the founder behind Ollie AI, an innovative AI photo assistant. As a former key player at Google and Dropbox, Shalom offers firsthand insights into the launch of Google One and witnessing its growth. Learn how the explosion of mobile photography and the normalization of online payments have shifted consumer behavior towards paid storage solutions, and discover the pioneering efforts of tech giants like Google and Apple in meeting these new demands.

Shalom's journey from the corporate tech world to startup life was fueled by the challenge of creating a photo book for his daughter. He identified the inefficiencies in existing storage solutions and set out to revolutionize photo management. By engaging directly with parents and everyday users, Shalom developed a camera roll-centric app that addresses the cluttered landscapes of smartphone photo galleries. 

Shalom also delves into the rebranding of OIlie AI from "Good Ones" and its mascot-driven user experience. He explains the importance of AI in transforming the way users sort and manage their photos, bolstered by the growing acceptance of AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney. Learn about the strategic decisions behind adopting a subscription model to maintain an ad-free environment and the invaluable role of venture capital funding. This episode is packed with lessons on product development, the necessity of mentorship, and the exciting future of AI in photo organization. 

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Chapters

• 0:02 Online Storage and Photography Evolution
• 7:07 Photo Organization Startup Journey
• 9:25 [Ad] The Dark Horse Entrepreneur | Helping Parents Make Money Online
• 9:51 (Cont.) Photo Organization Startup Journey
• 17:05 AI Photo Organization App Development
• 26:56 Venture Funding and Product Development

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Pegeau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, gary Pegeau, and today we're joined by Iz Shalom, the co-founder and CEO of Ollie, the AI photo assistant. What it didn't always used to, Olli e, used to be something else. But first let's talk to Iz. Hi Iz, how are you today?

Iz Shalom: 0:36

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Gary Pageau: 0:38

So, Iz, you've got kind of an interesting background before we get into OIlie and the app and what it does and what the opportunities there are. You've kind of always been just from reading your background kind of been in the storage world, like the online storage space. Can you talk a little bit about kind of where you started and how you got into that?

Iz Shalom: 0:58

Yeah, I mean not always, but certainly the last seven years or so. Before that, I was an engineer at google, but I found my way to the Google Photos monetization arm, if you'd call it what's called google one. If you end up depleting your 15 gigabytes of storage today, you will be prompted to purchase google one, uh, and we were the team who I was lucky to be part of the team that launched it. Uh, and right now it has. It was just announced that it has 100 million users, so we've been in that space.

Iz Shalom: 1:31

I know it's a thank you for your business and, yeah, we saw it kind of firsthand and photos and storage related stuff and later on I actually went to Dropbox to lead their consumer business, which was also really interesting. I saw very much the same problems and when you think about storage footprint for actual consumers so like not in business scale, it winds up being photos and videos. So that's kind of been my background.

Gary Pageau: 2:01

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about kind of that business case for that. Because back in the day, you know when the internet was new and all that in the nineties, early 2000s people are saying no one's going to pay for storage, right, no one's going to. Different people tried it. No one could ever make it work. You know they're all kind of different, you know locker type environments or whatever, but it seems like whether it's a cultural change or just because people just have so many pictures online, they feel they have to pay to protect them. What do you think has been driving that? Because I don't know what percentage of Google users have Google One, but it's probably a reasonable percentage to continue that service.

Iz Shalom: 2:39

Yeah, it's a pretty reasonable portion and if you think about it, actually, with Apple and the percentage of people who are paying for iCloud, it's even higher, which is very impressive if you think about it. I think two things, two secular trends that I can point out to. One of them is simple, it's just the photos and video taking has increased. Them is simple, it's just the photos and video taking has increased, yeah, ever since the mobile revolution, like you can probably see it in your camera roll, like you used to take uh, you know, I don't know a couple hundred photos. If you're not a photo enthusiast specifically, then you're taking a few hundred photos per year. Now it's in the thousands, right, uh, per year. So so that has just increased. Um, the second thing is generally the idea of paying for something over the internet has become we've accepted that much, much, much, much more yeah I remember, like you know, it's now 2024.

Iz Shalom: 3:37

In 2004 you would be like really hard pressed to pay for anything in the internet right, I remember buying my first, uh, my first ipod touch, dating myself a little bit, uh, but uh, I remember I was appalled by the fact that I have to plug in my credit card to set up an apple id. I don't give my so like the, the infrastructure for payments or for micropayments etc. Became much more, much simpler. So I think everybody's will be much more willing to pay for a subscription period and I think you know storage, like with anything else, is enjoying from that trend because I think in a lot of ways, uh, people can't really cope with their content, right.

Gary Pageau: 4:20

They create so much of it and they don't really you know, they don't really want to delete a lot of pictures and everything. And that's kind of is going to roll into our Ollie discussion, obviously, but it does kind of address a need that I think people have where you know it used to be, storage used to be an inhibitor, right. It used to be expensive, right. Buying a hard drive was a big deal and you know, you know people were buying all kinds of removal media to store their pictures on, and there used to be album-like devices people would store. It was weird too. It was a weird era back in the 2000s where you'd have a photo album kind of thing, but it was just filled with SD cards or whatever. People would store their pictures. It was really weird. And then it migrated online, right, and you had some of the photo services doing that, right. You had clearly S shutterfly.

Gary Pageau: 5:05

That was their game for a long time, was hey just upload everything and you know, eventually you'll want to print it and I think that kind of deteriorated as the volume got to be very expensive and people weren't printing as much. And then you have kind of the storage people, um, getting into that with the um, you know amazon, obviously, google doing that, dropbox doing that. Actually, dropbox used to have you know carousel and some great products for that. But it was interesting to me that that never really it was more the storage people becoming the keepers of memories, not the photo people. Why do you?

Iz Shalom: 5:39

think that is um, storage is really expensive and if you don't do it, it's actually becomes a problem, a technological problem of how to maintain those data centers in a way that is cost efficient, right, uh, I can't get into the numbers, but we were, when we were at Google one, we were acutely aware of how much it's cost us to store a gigabyte like in a really replicated way that it's not going to go, not going to be lost, and we were like really really good at assessing that and making sure that we have a profitable business. And that comes only with scale. And you know, google and Apple and Dropbox are companies that are fortunate to have the scale to merit like a really deep architecture and thinking about it like really, really deeply. So I think that's kind of what's changing.

Gary Pageau: 6:37

And the other part that's interesting is, you know, all of those people have kind of made photography piece almost the centerpiece of it. Right, it used to be. You'd only get certain uh editing features in your app Google Photos your app, if you subscribe to photo one or Google O one. I I think they've changed that policy, but that was sort of one of the incentives was hey, you get the, the magic ai, the blurring, the portrait mode and all the other fun stuff. And you know, the other people have responded to moving away from the past and going into the present and, hopefully, the future. Tell us a little bit about Ali, which used to be called Good Ones. So how did you make the jump from you know, being in two huge companies, right, Dropbox and Google to doing your own business?

Iz Shalom: 7:23

Yeah, well, that story starts actually like way back when I was just launching Google One and my daughter was turning one and I was faced with the garrigating task of making a photo book for her first year, right, and I think just about a billion photos.

Iz Shalom: 7:45

I think just about a billion photos. Like you can I back then, uh, like we used to have this like little graph of how many photos you took per year and so like you're going to see kind of like this like almost invisible graph at the bottom three my daughter's days, like it's like a handful of photos, a thousand, a couple of thousand, growing slowly and all of a sudden, like my, my, my daughter is born, take a bunch of photos. And then I looked at the past it. It took me like I I don't, I don't even finish it. It took me like hours and hours. I gave up potentially and I realized like, for all of this abundance of storage, I was really doing less. I was revisiting my camera roll much less often because it was such a cluttered space yeah, and there's all the other stuff in there.

Gary Pageau: 8:31

There's receipts, there's exactly all the other stuff. Yeah, so you know it's interesting. You mentioned kind of the photo book dilemma because that's like the trick that the industry has been struggling to to solve for 20 years. Right, that was almost the. This is going gonna be the golden product that's gonna save the industry, because who doesn't want a photo book, right? And then, back when I was at the Photo Marketing Association back in the day, we did all this consumer research and it really came down to I think the number was as high as 75% of photo books that are started are never finished. And the number one reason we asked consumers what was the reason why? It was always as I don't have the photos I want right, or I can't, I don't. You know, they're all in different places, there are different services and all that other stuff. How did you decide that the camera roll make a camera roll centric app as opposed to one that pulled from 17 different services?

Iz Shalom: 9:43

honestly, just talking to a bunch of people. I just talked to people to, you know, I just started talking to primarily parents, to be honest, and I said, okay, like, do you have you own a dslr? Uh, do you? Because we own a dslr, you know where it is, you can find it any weekend in my drawer and the dslr doesn't really go out.

Iz Shalom: 10:03

And I think, like people, especially with um, as the technology has progressed and you can have things like a nice, like portrait, bokeh effect and things of that nature, I think the quality of a photo that a lay person can take, uh, on a, on an iphone or you know, or an android, or a high-end android like a Google Pixel, has shot up dramatically.

Iz Shalom: 10:25

Oh sure, and then sort of the percentage of photos that are in the camera roll, it became close to 100%, save for sort of really semi-professional, like the shutterbugs who are going to do DSLR and then they're going to go to Adobe Lightroom anyway, right, so for the lay person, uh, who's not like, who doesn't have time to, to manage it like in a really high end production way, which, by the way, initially, when I was conceiving of this idea, I was thinking about a desktop product and when I talked to people pretty quickly they're like oh, I would not open a desktop product for this. It has to be simple. It has to be simple, has to be. Uh, I should be able to do it on the elevator was the.

Gary Pageau: 11:08

It was the remark that. So it's all local, right, you're using all the local information, right, exactly. So I, I, I like your uh approach to marketing research. Right, just asking people, right, asking for that because it does seem that work. So, so, how did the company actually start? I mean, you were, you know, in a big company. You decide to take the plunge. What was that? Yeah, I says about like, because I mean, I mean, theoretically, you could have like, probably pushed, you know, suggested it to a company that you worked for and said, hey, this is a product we might do.

Iz Shalom: 11:38

Yeah, it's a so so, yeah, I would say that we did see the need for something that helps managing the storage footprint quite a while, both at Google and at Dropbox, and that was sort of the second component of what made me think that, oh, we need a product like this. At that time, it did not occur to me that I would start a startup around this. As you remember, I had my one-year-old and I was quite busy. Yeah, I was going to say it's a little risky me that I would start a startup around this, but I, as you remember, I had my one year old and I was quite busy at that point right quite busy, my one year old.

Iz Shalom: 12:11

So it took me, like you know, six years or so past that moment, five, five or six years past that moment, to actually go ahead and do it. Uh, but uh, yeah, so like I think it was a germ of an idea at that point, it's like there is a, there is a gap, but you can think about sort of just naturally, what the set of incentives are.

Iz Shalom: 12:31

You know we are making money when people are storing more. So to go and build a product that is going to help people store less is not the most natural thing that a company that's, that's true.

Gary Pageau: 12:46

Because you don't, because you want to. You know people upgrade once they fill out that storage. You want them to upgrade it. Right, I mean to the next tier, because there are at least what three or four tiers on the google one platform and dropbox has their tiers and all that.

Iz Shalom: 12:59

That's interesting and that's not to say that we were not going to offer tools like that. And we wanted to and we did.

Iz Shalom: 13:06

And the Google Photos team still does Like you can archive photos, you can delete photos you can delete, you can do all these things. It's just sort of what ends up being your bread and butter and how aggressively you pursue it. And I think just sort of the organizations that were part of like they put some amount of emphasis, but perhaps not all the way, to what a consumer, what might want so you've got a, you've got a co-founder, so tell me about how you met her and kind of how that created the business yeah.

Iz Shalom: 13:39

So I met a partner back in 2021. She was just through a, through an. Actually I had somebody who was wanting to invest at that point and I already was talking about the idea and I was like, well, you know, I don't, I kind of want to do it with somebody, I don't want to do it alone. And I I just like, oh, I should meet a partner. She just sold her business that was also marketing to uh, to to young families. Yeah and uh, and you know, we kind of met very quickly, like within a month. We're like, okay, we want to start a business together. Uh, and we were like, okay, well, you know, let's give it a try up here, let's not be sort of hasty about this. We did that and and and yeah, and then, kind of early 2022, we sort of officially, uh, started it so how does the experience that she brings in?

Gary Pageau: 14:34

you know, having a background with you know family orientated startups and media. How did that help help get the company on foot?

Iz Shalom: 14:43

Yeah, I think she had a lot of insights into the psyche of that demographic Right. She also had a lot of experience thinking about like she thought her initial product was going to do one thing and it or serve one demographic and it wound up serving a very different demographic and it's so. She was kind of a bit more adept of these like vicissitudes and like the roller coaster that is the startup life, that things are not as you expect, you know, compared to working in the big tech where we have a pretty good about idea about what our customers want and it's all about like really solid execution. So she was. She really was both in terms of kind of how what are the concrete steps you do, as well as how you manage your psychology around it honestly or like, oh, things are not as as you thought, because you may need to pivot, as you did actually do when you started with good ones and changed to ollie.

Iz Shalom: 15:45

So first tell me about good ones how you kind of thought that was the brand you were going for yeah, so like there wasn't a whole lot of thought going into naming it, I just I was like I had an idea at some point. I needed a name for the idea, just like. So I oh that little project about like something related to photos organization. I need to just like a short word as a shorthand, and people were always like telling me whenever we were in a situation they're like oh, don't send me all the photos, send me the good ones, just send me the good ones.

Iz Shalom: 16:17

Send me the good ones.

Iz Shalom: 16:18

I'm like that's a good name, like good ones ones, yeah, uh, and the idea and and it's still today, it's, I think it's in our dna is not so much about decluttering and sort of emptying out your camera roll and saving on storage though that is like a helpful byproduct, but it's actually sort of to upgrade those, those good ones, so you can you have a sort of a source of truth of what are your best photos, what are your top like 100, 200, 300, 500 photos that graced your camera roll that you can later look in a slideshow, in a footprinted photo book or in any type of artifact. Um, so, so that's kind of uh, that was the idea behind good ones, and we wanted you to empower you to find a good ones in your camera roll and to and to, you know, to elevate them in a certain way.

Gary Pageau: 17:10

But now you changed the name to Ollie, which was sort of the, the technology platform. What was that? Was that a business decision? Was that a marketing decision? Was that, you know, people weren't responding to good ones, or you got to find something more cutesy, or what was the? What was the thought process there?

Iz Shalom: 17:27

So, first of all, Ollie is the name of the octopus, which like kind of like you know duo and duolingo, you might have seen their commercials and the super bowl and we wanted the mascot. And we were like, and at that time, the movie my teacher octopus was all the rage If you, if you remember on Netflix, if you haven't watched it, really recommend it. It's a fix in my life, uh, but uh, but like as their octopuses were having a moment, uh, and we wanted to sort of represent the intelligence and sort of the multitask capabilities of the app, because it's juggling a lot of photos, because it has eight tentacles, and that was Ollie. And then the one reliable thing that everybody loved about our app. So we went to the app store early 2023 and after six months, when we looked, the one thing that reliably everybody loved is the octopus. It's like, oh, the octopus is so cute Ollie's so cute.

Iz Shalom: 18:25

And then the other thing that we heard from our users was hey, uh, I don't want, like, I want ollie to do the work for me, as opposed to me doing the work for ollie, like me spending time sorting. So they wanted ai a lot more to the forefront and that kind of brings me to um the how the landscape changed between, I would say, early, like early 2022 or like late 2021, which is kind of when we did our initial market research, right to sort of summer of 2023, which is when we did the rebrand. Uh, at the beginning people were very, very hesitant about ai doing anything on their photo. They were way too precious about it, and I think what happened is both the technology has advanced quite a bit, but also, more importantly, the zeitgeist has, like with chat, gpt and everything. The zeitgeist has become much more not just accepting of AI to assist their day-to-day problems, but expecting AI to assist that with day-to-day problems, but expecting AI to deal with their day-to-day problems Right.

Gary Pageau: 19:29

Because, for a lot of reasons, you know and I've had different AI experts on the podcast who have talked about different things and you know, from a technology standpoint, people have been interacting with AI for years. They just may not have realized it right. You know, when you're doing with some of the chatbots or if you're calling a phone line and you know you keep talking to an AI and there's other all kinds of AI assist that happens behind the scenes and most people don't even, weren't even aware, was AI. And now. But like you said, it's become to the forefront and people now can actually go and play with it and kind of see the usefulness of it. I mean, you may not, you know, really be thrilled with the results that a chat, gpt or a mid journey gives you, but at least you've played with it, you kind of see what it can do and whatever. So the the barrier, the inhibitors to accepting what an ai can do for you, I think, is lowered.

Iz Shalom: 20:16

So I think you're exactly right yeah, uh, I mean like definitely it's in the like, I think, sort of the technological breakthroughs that have allowed us chat, gpt and mid journey, like you know, the uh sort of LLMs and uh, specifically GPT and the and the diffusion models where, like late 2010s, early 2020s like kind of like were available and the people who were in the now were like, oh my god, this is a huge breakthroughs are coming. And then I think like uh, october 2022 was uh, or november 2022, when chat gpt came, that was the, that was a killer product, that sort of opened everybody's mind to it and then kind of the rest is history, but but it had built up to that point.

Gary Pageau: 21:04

That's the thing. I think. What's interesting is that you know now I mean back then, if you had ai, you trumpeted hey, we've got ai. Now it's sort of a given right, people are expecting everything to have ai. I mean, now you know meta is now yelling at me that I got to have meta ai on my phone and yada, yada, yada, and it's just kind of a given thing. So, given, given that you've got AI building, can you kind of talk about that a little bit?

Iz Shalom: 21:30

I don't want to like divulge any secrets about how your thing works, but you know what are some of the parameters in terms of what it will do for the user, that, that, that, that that's now at the forefront, right now that Ali is, you know, got his tentacles and yeah, I can tell you, like, actually, the interaction model that we're thinking about Very initially, the way we conceive this, is the user, like you would go through all your photos, essentially like you would go through like batch by batch, like bit by bit, just go through like, hey, this is good, this is bad, this is going to be the trash, etc. That's what we started from and we said like, oh well, we'll throw some initial filters in there to make it a little easier for you so you can think about, sort of the tandem of the user and the ai like, and how do they work together as a team, which I think is just generally the most like, generally the paradigm to think about so the user is more or less training the ai if you will.

Iz Shalom: 22:27

So so that's what we shifted towards. So the initially like the user was fully in the driver's seat doing most of the work and the ai was kind of like a little bit of assistance. It was given a little bit of assistance. Um, we've shifted over time to add to like initially like the, literally one by one, the user had to process everything. Now what we're doing is the ai is actually giving you like recommendations for to what to do with every single photo, right, and you can press accept or you can change. Right, and that will train the ai model for you specifically. So that's what we're trying to do.

Iz Shalom: 23:08

We're trying to create a good way to replicate like what's your desires, and a really good mental model that I found is that imagine if you had a person who was like helping you out with, uh, with photos and videos and you kind of tell them.

Iz Shalom: 23:24

Like you might tell them hey, try to pick one where I look good, that's what most people want. To pick the photo like. If you you pick eight of the photos, I look good. Or you know what, whenever I take like 10 photos, I only want, I want a favorite one and keep like three or four that are good and then the rest of them you can delete.

Iz Shalom: 23:43

So you sort of give those parameters and train, and that's what you're gonna, what you're doing with Ollie, and we're like, and we've moved more and more from this more manual mode to this more automatic mode and there are still a couple of breakthroughs that we need to do to make it fully, fully working for the user. But the dream is that you would open the camera roll and you would find it exactly organized to your tastes and any change you would do would in turn create like, ripple down, like oh, I get it, gary likes to keep like five of the same sort of uh, so it will learn over time, kind of your preferences when, when the user and I encourage everyone to go to you know ollie and download the app.

Gary Pageau: 24:25

But. But it's a separate app from the camera roll but interacts directly with the camera roll data, correct? So it's almost like a view of the camera roll through Ollie's ai, correct?

Iz Shalom: 24:35

correct. Yes, does not create a new source of truth which very early on our market research realized that's not what people want. They'll want another place to drop their photos. So we work fully with icloud, with google photos, directly.

Gary Pageau: 24:48

So it's, it's an organization later on top of whatever you're already using and you actually have a monetization, which is a refreshing thing, because a lot of these things you know I'm not sure what the model is Like. Throw your ads at you or something you don't do, ads, so talk a little bit about. Was that from you know in the intent from the beginning that you're going to have a subscription model, or what was your thought process there?

Iz Shalom: 25:11

Yeah, subscription model, or what was your thought process there? Yeah, I mean, there is essentially two ways to like. Well, I guess three ways to monitor a concealer, product ads, subscriptions, and number three like Marketplace transaction fees, if there is some, some selling that is going on. Uh, you could see all three, number four sell prints so that would be, that would be, that would be, that would be three right, like, if, like, if I'm like contracting.

Gary Pageau: 25:34

I'm just throwing some out to my printing friends out there. You can always yes.

Iz Shalom: 25:37

And that's the three part which we also thought about, or we also thought about like actually ink, like one thing we're still thinking about is creating a subscription which includes prints, right. So right now we're charging like I don't know like $4 a month or something like that when you pay annually, like 350 a month when you pay annually, uh. But what we've discovered is people willingness to pay shoots way up if you include a printed uh product as part of your as you mean almost like a monthly book or something a monthly subscription like reminds you of, like I mean, we, we're not.

Iz Shalom: 26:12

This is not our focus right now.

Gary Pageau: 26:12

It's something for book or something a monthly subscription like reminds you of, like chat books, the chat book books, and if you other I mean we?

Iz Shalom: 26:16

we're not. This is not our focus right now. It's something for way in the future. We're thinking, and it could be like we have not you know.

Gary Pageau: 26:23

No, I'm just saying I mean that's interesting, that's so that because, because you've got some, some smarts on the back end to help determine that it could even be like you could envision it being a partnership with somebody like yeah, no, or or anyone else because, you know, like actually their uh sort of capabilities, which is a very heavy operational burden.

Iz Shalom: 26:44

We're a software company ourselves, right, we're fully, fully on the software side. Um, and we, we knew that ads had no place in the product.

Gary Pageau: 26:52

Yeah, that we knew, uh, that like it's you can never make enough money off ads to avoid pissing off your consumers exactly.

Iz Shalom: 26:59

Also the joy I don't know like we were, just like the joy that photos bring like should not be painted with the ads um are you sure you once worked at Google? I'm just joking. So I worked at Google O one which was a subscription product of Google.

Gary Pageau: 27:14

And there was no ads there.

Iz Shalom: 27:16

actually, they don't put ads in Google Photos, which is pretty neat Exactly, and we really did believe in it that we can create a great, great, great consumer product that is worth paying for and it gets better over time. And that's what we still believe in, exactly like you mentioned. It's refreshing because you put you know at the end of the day, once you put monetization in there, it really tells you do people actually want this, are they willing to pay for it or are we like? So we wanted from very quickly, we wanted to get to a point where we have some monetization model and I'm glad we did, because it sort of reaffirmed a lot of our beliefs that this is a big problem, that consumers are willing to pay for it, and, yeah, we're really glad that we did it so, uh, so what are the tiers people can participate in?

Iz Shalom: 28:01

yeah, so right now, uh, the free product, you know people, uh, people can use and can get like. The only difference between the free product and the paid product at this juncture is it essentially does not. The free product bumps you like, gives you a prompt to buy the paid product. So you get the, you remove the prompt. So that was just very initially just kind of like reaffirm that there is something to pay for, and that already saw like I can't again discuss the numbers really, really good results. So people were finding enough value to say, hey, I'm willing to pay for this, it's a good product, worth it for me, and they were doing it um, and over time you can imagine it will differentiate those the free tier and the paid tier sure and you've actually had some success with some investment in the last few months.

Gary Pageau: 28:54

Can you talk a little bit about bringing on investors and what has that done for the company?

Iz Shalom: 29:00

Yeah, I mean we were venture funded Really fantastic.

Iz Shalom: 29:03

We're really lucky to be working with phenomenal investors like backing some successful unicorns and some consumer companies and some ai companies, and that's been tremendously valuable because it also it allows us to shoot really really far, to take really big swings, because we're not, you know like though we want to do, want to monetize, uh, it allows us to uh do it in a way that is thoughtful and not sort of uh kind of with our backs against the walls. So it allows us to, to give, to take big swings that would with, like, great growth potential, even even if it means that they're going to pay off later and you can imagine, like a lot of this ai research is not yielding fruit immediately, uh, so so it actually a lot gives us the, it's the space and the breath to do all of that.

Gary Pageau: 29:56

I've had a friend of mine who's got an AI photo app say it's a relentless appetite. Is AI it is relentless?

Iz Shalom: 30:08

it does have a lot of demands, both on the personnel side and also on the compute side. So we're lucky to have that backing, and of course not just monetarily, but also their advice.

Gary Pageau: 30:20

Yeah, well, that's what I was gonna get to. That's why I kind of brought up is that I mean you've got some experienced people from the list I saw of investors and you know they have had some success successes with, with and that's you know. Know that is a role that uh, taking on a good venture capital partner can be is they can coach you, they want to mentor you. They don't just want to, you know, give you money and hope you, you know yeah, they want, they want you to also return the money with a great multiple.

Iz Shalom: 30:49

So I mean it's it's been great to have their support. They have like there is a lot of things. So just kind of my general advice to founders is investors can give you very great generic company running advice, like they, and it's great to count them and dot content and one dot. But uh, for your specific problem face, problem space, you want to like, like what great advice is going to come to, like how to fundraise, how to run to do hiring, how to do operational things.

Iz Shalom: 31:25

If you want to look at, like how to create, build a great photo product, what are some photo needs for people, like things that have to do with your own problem space, you're kind of you should stay on your own and not take like I don't know future advice from your investors but they, they're also there to like, oh, like this is a thing that is happening in the company and it seems like the end of the world to you. But guess what? I've seen three others in the last 12 months that the exact same thing happened. It's very normal. Yeah, I'm kind of quoting the glitches through that.

Gary Pageau: 31:51

So that's, that's been really, really, uh awesome to have because that is one of the things that I don't know if people understand about you know being a founder or, you know, startup person. You know, yes, you have your team, but in a lot of ways it can be very isolating, right, because you're focusing on your product and to get some advice, who's maybe? Hey, maybe they've got other people they're advising and they guess, hey, you know, you know this person's running into this issue, maybe you should talk to them. And that network interaction is super important.

Iz Shalom: 32:18

Yeah, and I mean, it's not necessarily about the product itself, it's just the type of challenges that you're going through Like I don't know. A year and so ago, svb went under and it's like a value bank. I don't know if you remember that. But like we had a good amount of our money parked there. So, like everybody's traveling, it's really good to have people to talk to, like what are other people doing?

Gary Pageau: 32:42

so, uh, it's, it's tremendously helpful so where can people go for information about ollie and, to you know, get the app and play with it and hopefully subscribe, and also, you know, maybe reach out to you and if they want to connect with you yeah, absolutely so, uh, first of all, uh, the app is get ollie. ai and the ollie spelled as o-l-l-i-e like short for oliver, I guess?

Iz Shalom: 33:10

uh, we never called him oliver, but he's, I guess, uh, ol Oliver. So get Ollie AI and you will see kind of our product there and you have a link to download it. It's only on iPhone, it's not on Android yet, so that's the first thing. I'd love everybody to connect with me on LinkedIn. So Israel, or Iz Shalom, and I'm also planning to be at Visual Ist like last year. So it was a great, great program. So I'm looking forward to meeting everybody there. So just connect with me there. And if you just need to shoot me an email, it's iz@getollie. ai.

Gary Pageau: 33:46

Great, well, great. It is great to see you again. Looking forward to seeing you in October at Visual 1st.

Iz Shalom: 33:54

Thank you. Thank you for the time, Gary.

Erin Manning: 33:56

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