It’s easy to typecast what a successful entrepreneur should be like: someone growing up awash in technology, attending a prestigious university to study in that area, and then building a unicorn. But that’s not how it always works. In fact, it may not be how it often works. There’s a different sort of entrepreneurial narrative. In this story, it’s about a person who has had a winding path to business success. But along that journey, this character saw a problem, came up with a solution, and then had the ideal balance of perseverance and business sense to create a successful company over a period of time. Tom Livne, the CEO and Founder of Verbit, started his career in the Special Forces, which he credits for teaching him resiliency. He then became an attorney and came to the conclusion that the transcription industry needed disruption. At the time, the technologies necessary to disrupt the industry, A.I. and the cloud, were not quite ready. He continued on his journey earning an MBA and even founding a security company. Then when the business-stars aligned, alongside the right technology, he created Verbit to focus on the transcription issue he was passionate about. His spirit of resilience helped him to develop Verbit from a bootstrap company to one with major investment and lots of room to grow. On this episode of Future of Tech, Tom shares his unique entrepreneurial story and the values that have led to his success. Enjoy this episode!

 

Main Takeaways:

• The Importance of Resiliency and Passion: According to Livne, resilience is an essential quality for an entrepreneur. Though he first learned this value in the military, it has served him well throughout his entrepreneurial career. Additionally, he points to passion as another key ingredient for an entrepreneur and believes having it helps to see a person through when difficulties arise.

• A.I. and the Human Touch: In part due to regulations that require 100% accuracy, Livne believes that the human touch will always be required to supplement A.I. Verbit utilizes A.I. along with freelancers to transcribe efficiently and accurately. Livne shares how hiring freelancers, and learning how their experience working with Verbit has empowered their lives, is very satisfying. 
• Customization is Key: Though there are large tech companies with speech recognition tools, Livne contends that Verbit has a particular corner of the market. He makes the point that these companies use A.I. but do not have the human component to help them achieve the high level of accuracy required by regulations. Furthermore, he explains how Verbit is able to customize transcriptions as required by each of its customers given the unique needs in their different industries.
• Customer Consolidation: Verbit has undertaken a strategy to take over other more traditional transcription companies to bring in their customers. He describes the communication between Verbit and these companies in an effort to bring them on board. He also shares that this strategy has enabled investors to have a clear sense of Verbit’s path for growth.

 

Key Quotes:

 

[00:31]

“So, I've been in the Special Forces of the paratrooper. [and am] still doing the reserve. And I think as an entrepreneur, one of the most important thing is resilience. So I really think that the army service help with that.” 

 

[14:54]

“Instead of doing everything manually, we said, ‘Okay, let's do most of it by technology.’ And then the last mile editing the technology, we know that it's not able to get it, we will put the human [in] and kind of give them the tools to make their job more efficient.” 

 

[25:02]

“So as long as our customer base is growing, it means we'll need to have more freelancer. It means we're creating more jobs from people to work from home. And we have a lot of our freelancers from third world countries, and we are getting emails, ‘because of Verbit we have the ability to feed our family [and] take care [of] our kids.’ Once you see that you say, ‘Wow, because of my hard work, I'm creating a lot of jobs for more people around the globe.’ So, it's another great mission to be part of.” 

 

[35:03]

Today, in the venture world, there's what they call magic numbers. So, how much you invest in sales and marketing, [and] how much new revenue it's bringing. They want to see [a] ratio of one-to-one. And then we really saw that those manual transcription companies they're flat. They're not growing. And they have much lower gross margin because they do it all manually. So we come [up] with this thesis that we can acquire their book of business and then migrate their customers to our platform and to make the whole process much more efficient and literally to grow this way.” 

 

[37:50]

“So first of all, and foremost, you need to do something you're passionate about, right? So, for me, the founder-market fit was as a frustrated customer. This is how I actually thought about this problem…When I'm trying to be more generic, I would say, look for problem that have high friction and low efficiency where you think that the technology come and shift it around.”