Just Getting Started with Max Keenan, Co-Founder and CEO of Needl

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max keenan

Sara Lindquist:

I'm Sara Lindquist from Fuse. We're an early stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio
companies in the Fuse family to date.

Today, I sit down with Max Keenan, Co-founder and CEO of Needl. Join us as we discuss the recent advances allowing for better internal search, the best Pizza restaurant in Seattle, and how Needl is super charging the way we can find information and digital files across all of our internal systems and cloud tools.

Let's get started!

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Sara:

Welcome Max. As always, it's so great to be with you!

Max:

It's great to see you too! I appreciate you having us on.

Sara:

Well, we're going to have some fun! And I appreciate you taking the time and I'm excited to jump in and talk all things Needl - so let's get after it! So to kick things off, could you share a quick overview of what the company is and how it serves customers?

Max:

Really, we're building a single search bar for your entire life. I like to say-

Sara:

Amen.

Max:

... it's Spotlight on steroids.

Sara:

Yeah, drop the mic!

Max:

Yeah. We let you instantly find any file, document or message you need across Slack, Drive, Gmail, whatever it may be, all of your web apps, all at once.

Sara:

Love it. I am certainly a big user of Needl already, so really, really grateful that you guys are building this product just to make all the pain points of - before a meeting, and you can't find the deck or the relevant email thread or just can't remember where you saved things - this is definitely a key pain point that we all have. So Max, I want to walk back in time a little bit. When did you and the team know that you needed to build Needl? Can you explain that key "aha moment"? And then also, in the midst of that, it would probably be helpful if you could share how you got connected to the team as well.

Max:

Yeah. So taking a step back and answering the latter part. We all met at the University of Chicago. So we actually met at a hackathon. So James and Angela were hosting it. And in very stereotypical finance, undergrad fashion, I was there stealing free food. And we became really close from that. And James and I ended up living together. And when we were in college, we worked on a few projects together. We wrote our essays in GPT-2 and we even built almost like a TikTok for blog posts. And we ended up tabling that and we went to our full-time jobs. James and Angela worked at Microsoft as software engineers - really the reason why we're in Seattle. And I worked at investment banking at Moelis.

Really there was this moment. And right when we started working at our first jobs, it was amazing how much time people were wasting looking for information. It was a constant like, "Did you send that over Teams or email? Is that presentation in Slides or Miro?" Or just another like, "Can you just send me that link again?" And we looked at the root causes. All this information was siloed across these different platforms, and there was really no unifying force to help people find the information that they needed. There was no single source of truth, which was really what we set out to build with Needl.

Sara:

That's great. Can you explain a little bit, Max, about the history of what search has looked like and why what Needl's doing is so different than what's been tried before?

Max:

One of the things that's a little bit contrary to popular belief is that internal search is just a much harder problem than web search. Now, if you're searching for the best food in Seattle, there are dozens of correct results. There's only one right answer and it's Blotto, by the way. And there's also just millions-

Sara:

I still have to try that by the way. High on my list!

Max:

You have to. Yeah, it's great.

Sara:

Calling all Seattle pizza fans. Go to Blotto!

Max:

Yeah. There's millions of searches to train Google's ranking system in that case. But if you're searching for something like specific to you, and maybe it's like your tax returns, there's only one right answer, and there's no training data. That search has never been done before. You've never clicked on this file before. And often in cases, there's thousands of emails and documents that reference tax returns. So when you think about "how do you give someone the right answer and make sure that it's in the top five results?", you have to take an entirely different approach than what was typically used for web search.

And so a little bit more in the history, really until language models came out in the last two years or so, this was never even possible. It was something like, for years, people had tried internal search and it was always awful. And now it's exciting because we can really hone in and actually give people what they need rather than just a list of worthless links.

Sara:

Well, and it's interesting. And we've had this conversation before, but it sounds like in the world, enterprise search or knowledge management, all these other tools, a lot of them try to find work arounds to do this type of problem. So it seems like before these GPT-3 and language learning models really became commonplace and sophisticated, people were using endpoint - like they were leveraging other endpoint search. I mean, you've explained it to me before, but I just think it's interesting.

Max:

Yeah. One of the things that we're doing, and it's probably a little bit understated, is not only are we unifying all of these platforms together, but we're also just making search individually better. I have a little bit of a party trick that I always do, but I search for: "Alaska flight." And for context, I was looking for my confirmation number right before I was about to board my plane. And on Needl, it's the first result. It's the confirmation number, it's right there. I don't even have to open the email, it just has the confirmation number.

When I do the same search in Gmail, it's amazing because it's bogged down by - Alaska Airlines sends me 15 spam emails a week - so I think it's the 50th result rather than the first. And that's just a little bit of some of the things that we do differently than the other platforms.

Sara:

Yeah. That's helpful, Max. Thank you. Okay, so my next question for you is back to the team. How would you articulate, why do you think your team is the team to do this?

Max:

One of the things we talked about is just how difficult of a problem this is. So solving it really takes great engineering talent and a novel approach. And beyond that, I mean it also takes a dedication to being able to apply tech and in a way that is actually useful to people's lives. When we think about our general motto and how we describe Needl, one of the things that we've used as a guiding light is this idea of, we like to call agnostic experimentation.

We take a very scientific approach where it's, we come up with a theory of something that might be valuable for our customers, and as quickly as possible, we go from insight to customer feedback to see if that's actually providing the value we think it should. And if it doesn't, we move on to something else. And if it does, we double down our efforts on that.

Sara:

Yeah, that's great. In my next question for you I was going to ask you, if you had one word that you think sums up your culture, do you think it's that? Or do you have other color you want to add there as well?

Max:

Yeah, I definitely think it's that - agnostic experimentation for sure.

Sara:

Yeah, I love that. That's great, Max. We're so excited here at FUSE to be a part of the Needl journey with you all and excited to see you just completely transform internal search for all knowledge workers and consumers alike, or really anyone who leverages any digital asset across a laptop anywhere. So Max, my next question for you is about the founder journey. Being a leader of a company and a founder is hard work and comes with all sorts of challenges. So what has compelled you to embark on this journey and what keeps you going?

Max:

I think probably one of the biggest things is that we're building the product for ourselves. And being your biggest customer also makes it so you have the most complaints, and really, you feel everything from A to Z. And a lot of it is, I'm just naturally a junk drawer person. I hate spending any time organizing. And if you looked at my downloads folder, you would really see that. And the way I usually think about it is, this is going to be a problem for future Max if I ever need to find this again. And so I never-

Sara:

And future Sara, by the way. I'm with you. My desktop is an explosion!

Max:

Yeah. And truth, present Max is a little bit of an asshole and does not help Future Max on that front.

Sara:

With the organization. Yeah.

Max:

Yeah. So really for building out Needl, it was just something that was so natural for us because it was something that we felt. And beyond that, probably some of the biggest motivation just comes from our early users. I have this story I always like, but when we first hacked together really an MVP and we gave it to a few of our friends, one of the most rewarding experiences was one of my friends called me a few days later and he was like, "Needl saved my life on this quiz." And I'm sitting there like, "How?"

But basically what would happen is, he would get a concept and it would be, I don't know, maybe it'd be something on international trade or whatever it may be. And then he would search the term in Needl. From there, he would have all of his notes, the lecture slides, the study guide, all from that one search.

Sara:

That's awesome. And I'm sure you've had other instances. I mean, even in my personal use, I have these interview files stored across Google Drive, across my desktop, and the transcripts everywhere. And so, I've just been so impressed with how satisfying it is to click that CTRL + space bar and open up Needl and find my interview content in the right file, right at the right time. So it's been a huge time saver for me.

Max:

Great to hear.

Sara:

And I use it every day, multiple times a day, which we've talked about. Well, thank you for sharing that. So in closing here, I have one final question for you. What right now do you need more of Max? How can any listeners help or get involved?

Max:

Yeah, so one of the biggest things is we're starting to onboard a lot more users. So we're going GA on October 26th, so about a month from now, where you can download and set up the Needl on your own. And for context, setting it up takes less than two minutes. But until then, if you're interested in signing up now, feel free to send me an email max@needl.tech. Or honestly, you can just call me directly or send me a text. And my phone number is (813) 417-4219.

And on another note, we're hiring two engineers. So if you or you know a phenomenal backend and full stack engineer, please send them our way.

Sara:

Love it. That's awesome. Even down to giving out the phone number. I love that, Max. It's great. Well, appreciate you sharing the story. Max, it's so fun to sit down with you and work with you - and really excited to see you, Angela and James just continue to build something truly special at Needl. You're going to change the way that all of us work for the better. So looking forward to see it getting in the hands of many people. But thanks, Max, appreciate you taking the time.

Max:

Yeah, thanks for having me. And a huge shout out to the rest of the FUSE team. You guys have been phenomenal throughout the entire process.

Sara:

Well thank you. We're grateful to be a part of it.

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Sara:

If you want to start drastically improving the way you work by using Needl, head to their website and sign up today. Trust me, it's worth it. Also, if you're an engineer looking to work with an awesome team solving this massive problem, be sure to reach out to Max directly.

Happy searching, and thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time!