312 Jonas Rinde - A Revolution in Mutli-Person One Room Recording

[0:00:06] Harry Duran: So Jonathrene, co founder and CEO of Namana, thank you so much for joining me on Podcast Chunky.

[0:00:13] Jonas Rinde: Thank you. Happy to be here today.

[0:00:15] Harry Duran: So, for the purposes of the listener who doesn't have the visual, where are you calling in from?

[0:00:23] Jonas Rinde: I'm calling from a home office in Norway. In Oslo.

[0:00:26] Harry Duran: Okay.

[0:00:27] Jonas Rinde: Peter. Far from you.

[0:00:29] Harry Duran: And I'm in my girlfriend's parents cabin, which would explain all the wood paneling behind me.

[0:00:37] Jonas Rinde: Looks like a sauna from her, but.

[0:00:38] Harry Duran: Yeah, it looks like a Minnesota. That makes a lot of sense. Did you grow up in Oswald?

[0:00:47] Jonas Rinde: No. So I'm originally from Sweden, so I'm grown up north of Stockholm on the east coast of Sweden.

[0:00:53] Harry Duran: Okay. What brought you to Norway?

[0:00:58] Jonas Rinde: What brought you to Norway is the fantastic mountains here and the fjords. So I'm a big fan of spending my spare time in the mountains, mountain biking or skiing.

[0:01:07] Harry Duran: And for someone that's never been, what would you say is one of the highlights of the city?

[0:01:15] Jonas Rinde: The highlights is the closeness of the nature. So you have easy access to the Oslo fjord where you can go sailing or Plymouth, and then you have north of Oslo, you have the forest. You even have a ski resort in the center of Oslo. It's pretty cool. You can take the you can take the tram or the subway, I'd say all the way to the top. It's pretty convenient for nature lovers.

[0:01:40] Harry Duran: I was going to ask, do you consider yourself an outdoor person?

[0:01:44] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, but the funny thing is I spend most of my time indoors, but that's because it's work related. But yeah, I'd rather spend my time outdoors.

[0:01:53] Harry Duran: Yeah, it was interesting to see a bit of your history and how you got started. And I'm a child of the obviously a big fan of technology. So I'm curious for you, growing up in the time that you did, what your earliest memory is of your first experience with the Internet?

[0:02:18] Jonas Rinde: Oh, yeah, that's way back before the Internet. So that was the BBS, the bulletin board system. So I had my first day job creating NC graphics. That was for a landing page back in the day. So pretty cool. To following it from using modems to have one on one connections to where we are today.

[0:02:40] Harry Duran: Did you always have a passion for technology growing up?

[0:02:45] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, if you look back into My Child, kind of what you call it, playbooks. So I've been drawing cars and boats and snow mobiles and what have you, moving on into very interesting music. So getting into building your own speakers, amplifiers and then computers came along, interested into that and what you could kind of create out of that technology. So we really, really kind of focus on the creative process and how technology can help you there in foster and create ideas and further on now even, you know, creating awesome experience and products for for humans.

[0:03:26] Harry Duran: Do you remember your first computer?

[0:03:29] Jonas Rinde: Yes, it was a Commodore 64.

[0:03:33] Harry Duran: Perfect.

[0:03:35] Jonas Rinde: Not sure if the listeners of the jungle nation knows what that is and how it works, but it was an interesting time. So to say you needed to sit and wait by the TV while your games were loading and there was an insane techno music sound coming out of the speakers while loading the games and it could take 15 minutes or something like that. Interesting times.

[0:03:58] Harry Duran: Yeah, I remember. So your first hard drive was a cassettech?

[0:04:02] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, it was. But if I remember back, the game had such a gameplay maybe versus today when it maybe gets too advanced to complex. So I think still in terms of joy playing, it was great fun back in days where.

[0:04:21] Harry Duran: So those are the early days of computing. What was your early experience when you first discovered the magic of the Internet itself?

[0:04:32] Jonas Rinde: The internet itself was more like when school an access to computer wasn't that available at the time, so mostly in the library. But my experience with that was searching for things, searching for information, learning and of course in parallel card games, simulation card games was pretty great fun as well using the computer. And also I was early into doing three D, three D renderings. Okay, so when you needed to code the object, something called PovRay where you did ray tracing of objects and then kind of follow line getting into three to Studio Max and all the kind of three to sign programs. But in the beginning, same thing. We did a lot of waiting back in the day. We had to wait for the three months we ran ready. And with the 386 or 486 computer back in the day could take days before you see the result of what you have kind of created using code only.

[0:05:34] Harry Duran: It seems like that's been a consistent thread to always have this passion for technology. I'm wondering as it relates to what you're creating with no mono, what your experience was with podcasting when you first heard about it or if that's something that became on your radar.

[0:05:57] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, podcasting for me personally has been on the radar since I'm a pretty kind of big Apple fanboy. So the first experience was Apple podcast and using the back in days, the ipod for that. And it was also similar to back in the days in school with libraries and learning things, hearing stories. And I was found as being interesting and still are when you fast forward a few years. I worked a lot in the video conferencing industry and the fun part with that was pretty challenging. Use scenarios and use experience, especially solving a good experience with technology and meeting rooms and you've often been doing that for some years, started to look into other areas where it's been kind of a status quo and kind of found that in the workflow of recording high quality audio. From my perspective, it hasn't happened so much because in the video conferencing we work both with audio and video and we work with the cloud and we've started to utilize AI as well. But I want to kind of look into the parallel universe of the audio workflow and the way podcast is being created. At least me and my co founder, we saw a big opportunity there in how we could make it a more appealing experience and of course make it much more easier. But the key thing is still keeping high quality so that's what's kind of a starting point and at the same time we also saw this wave coming with Immersive audio and the way we consume audio today, we consume most of our audio through headphones. That means that inside your head becomes the opera house or the scene for the audio to play out and at least pod costing. Also in terms of how, for example, through crime podcast has been kind of exploding as a part of the podcast wave and that's where it starts to be really interesting, especially with Immersive audio, the way you can replicate, for example, a true crime story, getting all the audio experience the way it was when, for example, something happened in the story. So starting from that perspective and we were out today with the Mona, we still have this kind of this mission of putting the listener inside the story. That's kind of our main purpose, but also on the content creative side, make it as easy as possible. I think we've come a long way now and the first customer had the product in their hands testing it out and we got a good revs from that.

[0:08:51] Jonas Rinde: They're pretty kind of jawdropping experience of that, just taking the nemons on caps and pushing one button. I mean, you got like 15 seconds and seconds to set up anywhere. You don't need a studio or even comp tens and audio. So just like 1015 seconds, set it up, push a button, start recording and you know, get the dialogue going wherever you are. Then just one push of the button, you're done and then automatically bust, bring everything to the cloud and you can listen to it and hear the audio in the same fashion as it was recorded being in you, I'm assuming jungles or just at a coffee shop in your neighborhood. So I think it's really powerful from that perspective, what gave in the hands of the storytellers.

[0:09:35] Harry Duran: I'm curious in what your take has been or how you've seen the technology mature sometimes in exponential fashion, especially with your time at Cisco and Webex. And obviously I was in corporate for 20 years, so I'm very familiar with Webex meetings and the quality that we experienced during those times and how that's probably changed. I don't know if it's the same equivalent or the parallel as we see with Moore's Law, but do you see an exponential change in what was available and how this is something that you're able to do now and maybe ten years ago or something that the technology just wasn't there for this type of quality.

[0:10:18] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, absolutely. It's getting more access. One thing is being building the AI and the algorithms, but also if you look on the hardware side so one example for the mono is the importance of the Bluetooth and the Bluetooth standard, how that also be progressing and there's so many factors around it. Lower power consumptions, you don't need too much battery power, you have shorter charging times. But also the audio quality of Bluetooth, the accuracy of it. But there are some factors there that wasn't like five years back in time in place and it's continued to develop as well to get more accurate positioning of your Bluetooth devices as well with the new standards. So that's kind of one of the trends that at least helped Mimono. But then also you have the tools in the cloud where we built the AI the way we can leverage that in a different way now versus a few years back in time. And kind of the sum of it creates, at least from our perspective, a really good experience that we weren't able to maybe create in the same fashion like three to four to five years back in time and that's one less. But you know, I think working on the B to B segment like in video conferencing has always been a big inspiration and still is to follow the consumer side of the world because that also has a big effect on the business of the BTV world, the way how we experience things. So not but too much credit to Apple here, but because there's pros and cons with that. The pros is the way it's been pushing technology and getting the users experience and also putting a good user experience and design and also the interoperability between things in a good fashion. The con of course is that it's pretty hard to keep developing your own technology close to Apple. I mean it's David, a gulp kind of battle, but still think that it's a pro, at least from the perspective where I come from, that through the Apple products we are fostering the whole world. So it's a way to adopt a new technologies in an easy way, but also leverage new technology that creates hopefully a better life experience.

[0:12:39] Jonas Rinde: And what they are driving is also pushing on the component side and technology side things that we can harvest and then combine and building our own very call it laser focused products and solutions that are of course way too cornercase or too small market for even the big players to go into. And that kind of opens an opportunity at least for us who are very big fan of doing startups and combining bleeding technology into new solutions and experiences.

[0:13:13] Harry Duran: So talk to me if you could rewind the clock back about four years when you are coming up with the idea for Nimono and thinking about who might be the best person to co found this with and how to start building that team. So as an entrepreneur myself, I'm always curious about how teams are built and how decisions are made for who is the best people to put in place for the vision that you have. So I'm curious what your thought process was back then.

[0:13:42] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, I think the key thing is over the years, the people you work with to ensure you have a good track record. And it's so important to build people up and help and support them because you never know in the future who you're going to work with or who you would like to work with, who has the confidence. So I think that's super important. And for me that has kind of succeeded at least twice. I mean, former company that I was CEO for Huddley Four k a driven web cameras or video conference cameras, that was a former colleague of mine who started that company that I hired into university and he worked for me in five years time. And then he jumped up and did a company to go on for three years and then he asked me if I could kind of come in and help him with the company. And I was a great adventurer to do that for less than three years. And pneumonia is kind of similar as well. Alden, my co founder, he was also a guy I hired from university back in the day and he is a PhD. So he was very skilled in doing research in my department back in the days on all Everything microphone arrays. So fast forward now to 2019 and a little bit earlier he kind of asked me if I knew somebody that could help him because he had this awesome technology that could capture audio automatically for for spatial audio or for for this one. And I thought for a while, not too long because knowing Alden has experience and skills, I mean, from my perspective, probably top ten in the world I met in generally in Singapore audio. So having him asking for help was kind of a big opportunity. And I looked into it, I went up to the it is pretty funny, it's kind of talk about the garages and stuff like that. And this was like down in the basement in a dark room in a recent up in Trondon, which is in the middle part of Norway.

[0:15:49] Jonas Rinde: And he showed me this Frankenstein solution is built with his coffee mug and everything. It was then he's super proud, like it was his own baby. And I went like, what the hell is this? But then we did a recording and got a listening experience. And that's what I like about this because that's how to trigger my brain about, okay, the opportunities here. So in the beginning it's almost like a pretty big challenge there because you could see so many opportunities with the solution, but then you need to balance them. Where are the world today? Because in the first place we look at it, we said it could be awesome, this technology, both for the XR, like the VR and the AR 360 video and what have you. But then as I mentioned earlier, if you look on the consumer side, we're not there yet and we're still four years away from that. We still haven't received our Apple glasses. We haven't started consuming media on a higher scale at the moment. There are summer adopters using Oculus Rift and stuff like that. But on the mainstream level, like podcast, that is being really consumed. It's kind of a standard media form at the moment, just like reading web pages or stuff like that and look on YouTube. So at the time we saw that, it was going to be so far away.

[0:17:07] Jonas Rinde: That when you need to kind of start looking closer. Okay, with this technology, what can we really leverage it? And that's back to also mentioned about looking into the audio capturing workflow, how we record audio and we just noticed that it's even complex just doing a simple mono recording or even a steer recording and to digging into that, then we kind of decent changes to the technology to adapt to that kind of first focus. But there's no limitations in the technology we built into the mono to also take that leap into the XR world. When we see that there's a big push to adoption, potentially that will happen maybe a year from now. When have your Apple glasses start to consume at least media through those?

[0:18:05] Harry Duran: What's interesting is I'm curious about the thought and the discussions around form, around the function of how it's contained in a really nice unit and what that's process was like. To think about how you don't want to overengineer the thing, right? You want to make it very accessible, you want to make it nice, you want to make it portable. Because obviously those are all the things that come to mind when I see the mono. And I'm curious how many different iterations you went through before you decided and you arrived at the final form function.

[0:18:37] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, it's so important with advanced technology that it is experienced as very easy to use. And what is super important is to be inviting and also being understandable. And that's also a little bit back to the Apple metaphor or maybe the Apple dent on this in terms of it. So I think that's the pro here in terms of making it easy because under the hood there, it's like twelve microcontrollers. It's the most advanced product I've been involved developing. And they're bluetooth and batteries and the way we combine it, I haven't experienced a product that has done this kind of combination of at least those tall twelve microcontrollers. The embedded software running there but also the chip we're using it's not, it's also kind of bleeding at chip and that's a risk of worse because there are new chips in the market so they haven't been kind of maybe all the bugs have been filmed and sold but so make it inviting and easy to understand. And coming to this form factor. I think we had another concept in the early days, but this form factor, this is kind of called the second one. And then over the different building minds, though. And with the user testing and some ideas around solving things in a better way, it most likely become optimized, more optimized in the way. How you have this charging case with this TopLift. You lift off very similar. If you're lucky enough to experience room service and hotel, it's kind of similar. Then the base of this charging case is becoming kind of what we call a serving plate, I'd say.

[0:20:38] Jonas Rinde: So when you open up, you kind of get the technology served in front of you and it's very easy to see where to kind of grab the small stellar mics, the Lavier mic. They're easy to agronomically grab out of the case. You feel the stability magnetic that keeps them in place. They're kind of being charged here automatically, there's a clip on it and we're kind of used to see clips and use clips so that means that anybody can take their own mic and use them themselves. That makes also back to the setup time there is nobody that needs to make you up with cables or getting under your shirt with a cable. It's so easy just to clip it, that's an aspect of it. And also of course the brain in the solution is the space record itself. I mean it has a display just to show the status so you can be cool and see it's working and you can just press one big red button as for record and that's it and display then it goes over to showing the recording time. You can see also, of course, the range and the battery of a stellar mic. So that gives you kind of at least a control. You need to be relaxed. Because we've designed a product, you can monitor the audio, so there's an output on the space record. But we see that people most likely just use headphones because we want to build trust to the technology and trust to our product. That means you don't need to use headphones because you don't have any gain levels to adjust. We do that all for you and it's lost less oil quality.

[0:22:11] Jonas Rinde: Which means usually when you monitor you want to make sure you don't kind of get too high peaks or out of the level. So we do it automatically and that also improves the quality of the dialogue gap. But when you're sitting around our solution the technology hides away when it's not using it and that I think is super important point because then you forget about the tech and then an interview or dialogue and then becomes more warm and more natural and you can also just sit in a sofa. You don't have to be in a studio. So I mean these are kind of the sum of a lot of details and the sum of it is it probably looks kind of easy in its shape and form and the way it's used is kind of easy but that's a classic one when it feels kind of easy to use. There's a lot of work behind the scenes there to make it very intuitive to use as well. And you don't have to think about storage time or SD cards or hard drive because everything is being stored automatically in the space recorder and everything is also being stored as a backup in the silomites. So for any reasons you lose connection or stuff like that is still being stored here. So that's also giving some more trust to the user in terms of resilience. And as soon as this one gets on the WiFi network it starts to buffering up to the cloud. That gives you also what you call a backup as well. You don't have to think about where to connect it, how to use that, et cetera. So that's also part of kind of make it more ease of use and usable.

[0:23:48] Harry Duran: It's really interesting all the things you've given some thought to because I've been podcasting since 2014 and for the most part I've done a lot of remote recording interviews. In the beginning I wanted the video, so I use Skype with call recorder which is not the prettiest solution. Thankfully there's services like Squadcast which are using today which is actually referring to the cloud as we're having the conversation and across this audio. So even if we have a bad internet connection, we won't hear that in the final. And I think with podcasters, specifically podcasters, I think there's always a concern about the tech getting in the way and there's a huge question when people are one of the first questions people ask when they're in a room with multiple guests is how do I avoid the bleed and how do I avoid the crosstalk? And it's something that it seems like you gave a lot of consideration to when building Pneumono.

[0:24:44] Jonas Rinde: Yeah. So as soon as you have more than one microphone you get into all this complexity and these are the things we have kind of control over. So we have ultimate they're going to take away the cross talk. So we call it crosstalk reduction but also the bleeding part of it and also the things like room acoustics because you never have control over that. And also distance between the person talking and the microphone. And that's kind of what we call at least the basic step to secure good quality on that and we kind of automate it. But then you also have when you talk as well, you do pauses, maybe make some humming words or not humming humming noise when you think maybe backgrounds. And these are things we also automatically take away and reduce. I think today we have around twelve different AIS working, one of course being for the crosstalk and bleeding but also for denoising levels et cetera. And this is just a starting place, so we have pretty cool things coming on the road map further along that will also continue to kind of improve audio quality as number one focus. But keep those in mind to reduce time for the podcaster or reduce the complexity as well because we see that a lot of people are with the editing tooling and doing some cut and paste on the audio files where the courses we already kind of included a way to kind of mark up while you do the recording. You can just tap on our companion app on the phone. That makes it easier afterwards when you did this recording, let's say you had like a two hour stock but it's like only 15 minutes or 30 minutes went out of that while you did recording gives tap on the iPhone and you get a marking on the audio file. So when you go into our web app in the cloud, you have this time markers there, and you can that's true. Because it makes it so much easier to navigate at the same time.

[0:26:47] Jonas Rinde: If you're interested, if you're more than one people working on a project, on a political project, you maybe have an external customers who want to review it, or even the person at the interview might want to kind of have a listen to it before you do too much work with it. So in our web app you can just invite people with a web link email link and they can just come right in like a collaborator into your order file and make comments where they can mark a certain time frame of the file and make comments. And then you as the host can then choose to kind of delete that part or make a comment back for different reasons. So we also kind of include this phase as well because we look today especially when you're larger podcast project that part is also very complex of the workflow how you communicate around your project. So we built everything around the audio file being the backbone so that's where you add the metadata, you add the comments and everything then that creates kind of a log file as well. It doesn't have to be many people working on a particular product before it starts to be complex. You know, did I send the message to Slack, was it an email or where is those comments? And also you need to describe so much, you know, 312 in there could you could do without solution is just click and make a comment and that's also something kind of we copy from other tools. Like if you used to use the G suite with the Google Docs and these kind of behavior. Exactly. Collaboration. And there's not that many other tools that has that built in. There are a few but not that many. So that's also kind of a part where we want to help out for the users.

[0:28:26] Harry Duran: When you were designing the form function, obviously there's a couple of considerations and you decided to go with four microphones. Was there any consideration given to a smaller set up or smaller configuration or is that something that's happening in the roadmap as well?

[0:28:41] Jonas Rinde: So this is the funny part. When I work with a product and technology somewhere you need to kind of get into a product that cover most of the scenarios. So you want to make sure you don't cover everyone because if you do that you kind of fail because then you take out so much cost complexity. So you need to get into what you think will be the 90% of the use cases in the first place. The cool thing with working in that process is that you also get a lot of new product concept or new opportunities. And those are the ones we put on a roadmap so that we put out in time. And then when we release this product in the market, we will measure and get a lot of feedback and measure the use of it. And then the other ideas we have on the roadmap, we can start to kind of optimize, take away, or even kind of bring forward if it's a big gas. And I mean, our first product is really $3,000. From the professional perspective that's not expensive because as of today they usually have equipment themselves with both recorders, storage, microphones and what have you for more money than $3,000. But on the other side, you have a lot of independent costs, starting maybe with the $100 microphone using their PC or Mac or even an iPhone. For them, of course that's too much. So there's a gap there and of course we see that. So that's also an opportunity for us to start looking to call it that opportunity in the market. But for us, once again, super important is the ease of use and high quality audio files.

[0:30:14] Jonas Rinde: So we're not going to sacrifice that. But yes, we can do other things that put us in a lower price point. Jose and one big inspiration for me has always been there's a different market though. But the way they have done it is DJI drones. So think of the first DJI drones, pretty expensive at the time, but they were also targeted in the professionals where you could have a DSLR camera hanging under a drone and being very professional. We're not really there with the sun capsule because it's all self contained and designed, but then they can see how DCI has been kind. Of developing new drones and lower price points for bigger market. But they kept the AI the smartness of the drones, they kept the quality of the drones. So we had a similar thinking for known Pneumono as well. But then again, as a new brand coming out into market, especially the older market where there's a lot of religion around different brands of microphones, it's super important to start at the highest level you can. So while we've been developing our microphones, we've been measuring our performance against the highest high end Love microphones from Sennheiser and EPA for example, and even Shore to make sure that the performance are expected as these more expensive microphones than ours. But these are the ones in the toolkit for the professionals today so we can't be any less than those as well. So we have some comparatives to what we call consumer wireless microphones. They are DJI have one for example, also the girl has one but it's not a really fair comparison for them with our microphones because I would perform on a different level and that means a more professional level in terms of quality. But yeah, there are a lot of opportunities out there, especially in auto space.

[0:32:18] Harry Duran: How did you think about which areas to focus on when Nemono was being prototyped and being built? Did you have podcasters in mind or are there other industries coming from your Cisco webex days, were you thinking that there was going to be a business use case for this as well?

[0:32:40] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, pretty early on, when you do your market research, pretty early on you kind of start to look into the opportunity with the technology and the solution you have. From our perspective, it was almost like a no brainer for the podcast community and it comes from that. That's where you have a lot of storytellers and most of the storytellers and the creators, they have almost no audio competence and if they have audio competence, usually they have spent a lot of time to train and learn or be around in communities and asking, testing and failing to get where they are today. It was kind of tough to see from our side how challenging it is. So that was also a big motivation to get going in targeting the Pod cost market first with our product. But there's no limitation for technology to be used into other areas. So one is for video recording. We already see we have some part of the customer, they were supposed to use it for podcast, we don't limit them to that, but that's what they said, yeah, we will use Pod but then they send us some video shots where they use it in a film production. They have them put the stellar mics on the search but hit it behind instead of using Love. And the spacer cordy has this insert screw on the bottom and it just screwed that on top of the camera and stopped using it for that. And then they just had our audio file being processed in our AI high quality. And then they just had the video file and took it together, time coded. Boom. Then they got the really good audio quality for that. Once again, I mean, we're not setting limitations there, but at the moment the focus where we see we can give the most value and help most of the users and for now it's the podcast, but there's no limitation to what you're used to.

[0:35:00] Jonas Rinde: And that's so interesting. Now getting the product into the market start to see how and where the customers are using it and the feedback from them in terms what they would like us to see us to improve or just kind of give us some ideas about next step.

[0:35:16] Harry Duran: How different or similar is this technology to what's being used in the Spatial Audio which you referenced earlier. And some of the work that Dolby is doing, for example with Atmos.

[0:35:27] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, I think for Dolby with the Atmos, which is keep in mind that when we started the company four years ago, you didn't have special audio on your Apple iPhone or AirPods. But that was something my cofounder alden and the team had kind of foreseen when I started researching on how to capture Spatial Audio. And it's so great to see and at least during the day when you invested a lot of money and time in it, you're getting these proof points. So one of the proof points was that Dolby Optimus was being released. The second proof point was it was also being then adopted and standardized to be used on the Apple devices. So that's back to a mention earlier, but probably on the consumer side was happening and kind of get proof points there. So that's really good. The challenge though with the Dolby Atmos format is to create content on it. So that's the challenge. So you see today it's usually pretty big streaming services or media houses that are doing music labels, doing Baltimores, the Apple Music is being one of those who are pushing and kind of remastering but also doing recordings and to do that on the high portfolio. But today you need property to invest around $300,000 in a Dolby Optimal Studio and certified by Dolby to ensure that the good thing with that is they're putting really high value on getting high quality. But then this is such a big part of the creative community that doesn't have access to that kind of money or that kind of studio or that kind of competence. And that's where we come in and kind of take away because there is a bottleneck today. I mean, if you ask somebody how would you record Spatial Audio, how will you produce all documents? And I don't think anybody really has an answer to it because there is no solution today that is standardized, easy to use to capture the old dot one and that's where Mimono comes in.

[0:37:33] Jonas Rinde: And still I think we are the only ones who has a product that is self contained out of the box, one button to push can capture tall buttons and that's enabling once again all the storytellers to be able to do that. So it's not only for the rich and few in the big media houses label. So I think that's really powerful and just to mention also why, you know, podcast and that goes also back to I mentioned earlier but you consume it usually with headphones. Yes, and we think that Dole Baltimore has a bigger value for podcast than for other media because that's where you I mean, when you listen to a true crime of podcast, you're kind of blindfolded, you just have the audio. But getting those buckmos in the special in Immersiveness, that's a really awesome experience to use to get the listening inside the story because you don't have any visual content that can now fool you or at least engage you. You also have the audio in your ear. So at least my experience listen to it myself. It's powerful and awesome experience.

[0:38:49] Harry Duran: Yeah. One of the companies that's making pretty big strides from a podcast production perspective is a company called Q Code. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they've released several True Crime and similar type podcasts. And it's fascinating when the first time you hear it, because you hear a sound that's coming out from the right side of your head and all you have on is your headphones and you're actually turning to see you're feeling it's almost like a visual. It's like a theater in your head, which is an interesting experience if you've never experienced it for the first time.

[0:39:20] Jonas Rinde: Yeah, there's also a lot of different software AIS that kind of fake facial so you can take a stereo file and kind of pour it in and then also you have on reproduction sites like the headphones and the solution used for that. They can also kind of fake the spatial effect on it and I think that's fine for people to experience, but unfortunately you can't compare that to true spatial audio when it's been recorded in spatial from the get go all the way to the Listers. Because there are still some artifacts with what we call them I wouldn't call it fake special, but there are some artifacts that can't be. Yeah, I have a pretty funny story driving the car, listening to I have all but in the car. So I was listening to this True Crime podcast and there was a sound effect of a car, a taxi car crashing in that podcast. Yeah, the brain was like Melissa Canal was looking over my right shoulder and I just pulled myself there. But I think that's a good thing in showing how kind of immersive it is.

[0:40:32] Harry Duran: It should probably be a warning that you probably shouldn't be listening to this while driving a car. I'm curious, Jonas, this is obviously not your first time leading a company. How have you matured, how have you grown as a leader with this new team?

[0:40:55] Jonas Rinde: It's been interesting times, I think, from an experience perspective, very unique to be able to build a bleeding tech startup through a pandemic with all things happening there. And also now unfortunately, a war in Europe over the last year as well. You got to keep in mind a lot of developers based in Ukraine and there's a lot of tech startups in Europe who are working very close with the skilled engineers in Ukraine. So it's really sad to see what's happening. But building a company, building a team through these times has been challenging, but also uniquely in terms of a learning experience. So in the mono, we have been able to do this well because we started as a hybrid company from day number one. So, for example, myself and we are like six people based in Oslo, so let's call it the southern part of Norway and then in the mid Norway, in front end, we have most of the engineering team. So another 35 people are based in Tronde. So we kind of had that set up before the pandemic hit us. And also not most, but a few of us comes from the video conferencing. So we're very used to having video calls and using video. So for us, we've been kind of following along pretty well what's been challenging and being able to go to different parts of the world to meet customers during the pandemic, that's been challenging. Vendors, chip manufacturers and others. You have been able to kind of follow that closely. So, yeah, been relying a lot on video and then you notice in the world how different the penetration of interconferencing has been, but also bandwidth and also the way of working is very different in other parts of the world, which has been challenging during the pandemic.

[0:42:59] Jonas Rinde: And there's some part of the world usually fly and meet them in person due to cultural differences and language barriers and what have you. But, yeah, we've been coping well. We're around one year delay, though, I would say, thanks to the pandemic, but to the complexity around it. But we have good, strong investors, so they have been fully understanding the challenge we had and kind of helping us financially and supporting us. And I think that's super important to have strong investors when you're building a start up that believe in your visions and where you're going, but also when tragic things hit you, like a pandemic, for example, that they're still backing you through those processes. But there are some team, it's always learning with new people. So although you've done it before.

[0:43:54] Harry Duran: It'S.

[0:43:54] Jonas Rinde: Always a new start with new company, new people. But I think the thing you learn over the years is I think I have interviewed over 500 people plus to start to get this kind of sense of who could be the right person for the right role at the right time. And I think that's most of the important thing when you build a startup is getting the right people with the right mindset at the right time.

[0:44:21] Harry Duran: Have there been some mentors from your past that have been helpful for you and are inspiring you as you've grown as a leader?

[0:44:33] Jonas Rinde: Absolutely. So I have very good leaders and mentors while I was working in tandemburg, I came to Norway in 2007, my first year in Tanburg. I think a lot of the traits I have as a leader now and the way I build companies, I learned from those mentors and leaders I had back in the Tanbor days. And what's pretty cool to see is I'm sure I'm not the only one being able to say that because if you look around us who was a part of the Tamburg journey? Some also reframe the area into Vida Valley. So not Silicon Valley, but Vida Valley because after Cisco acquired Tamburg there, I think it's around now 14 or 15 different companies coming out of those teams. I think that has the biggest at least impact on me and the way I work. But then it's also this thing you have to always learning. That's the kind of endless journey to be on. You always learn and you learn and with new people is new scenarios, but at least you get some tools and you get some thinking. And for me, one of the key things is speed is everything. So I think the most important thing when I manage the company, build the company, is keeping focus on speed and making sure you have high speed at all time. That means reduce the number of meetings, reduce process, build autonomous team where people have their own responsibility to take their own decisions because that makes you faster instead of having committees or have a lot of decision making. So the closer to the problem yard, most likely the better you are to find a solution on it. But these are the kind of things to foster the team with and make sure they have and feel that responsibility but also motivated by it.

[0:46:33] Jonas Rinde: So I think keeping focused on speed is super important.

[0:46:39] Harry Duran: A couple of questions as we get close to wrapping up here. What's something you've changed your mind about recently?

[0:46:46] Jonas Rinde: Wow. Yeah. What's changed my mind is when should I retire?

[0:46:59] Harry Duran: What's your new answer?

[0:47:02] Jonas Rinde: It's never because it's too fun to be building things with people. That's the truth. Back in days you will be nice to retire and settle down somewhere. But I think you're older, you get to start to realize, no, that's not like an end goal. More to perspective, just continue pushing on. I saw some of the older people that are maybe one or two generations older than me. A few of them chose to kind of settle down, go play golf or sit on the beach, but I don't see them so happy anymore. At least I started getting these different diseases while the other ones are just continue to pushing on. I think you get so much energy and also your brain got some training to keep up with younger generations. I think that's one of the learnings of the last time, how the younger generation, how they adopt technology and how this becomes a natural thing for them versus like what we started talking about how we have been kind of fostering into the Internet, into AI and crypto, and now we're talking about DPT generate. I think right now we're once again at this. What is that going to mean in a few years? Open AI, set DPT and board. What are the opportunities you can pull out of it and build something better for humans? And I think if you would retire, though, sit on the sideline, just watch this happening, I think that would be pretty boring, but rather just jump into it.

[0:48:27] Jonas Rinde: And at the point maybe you're getting too old and too slow so you can't keep up with it, well, then you might find something else. But yeah, I think that's the key thing with life discontinued learning and there's so many things happening all the way. And at the moment, I'm super interesting about the opportunities that's been built out of the combination of blockchain crypto and now the chef GPT and OPI on top of it. When you combine these things, there are some really interesting comments, I think. I'm not scared, I'm on opposite.

[0:48:59] Harry Duran: No, a lot of people are comparing what's happening with Chat GPT and Chat GPT Four and AI with the equivalents of what happened during the industrial age and the Industrial revolution. I think, in terms of the amount of change that's going to happen in such a short period of time yeah. What is the most misunderstood thing about you?

[0:49:33] Jonas Rinde: Yes. That people think I'm too kind.

[0:49:40] Harry Duran: What's the truth?

[0:49:42] Jonas Rinde: I am very kind until somebody has done mistrust or been stretching the rubber band aid too much on that trust thing. But I'm fortunate enough back to when I'm hiring good people, work with good people and people that inspire me and hopefully I can inspire them as well. So from that perspective, it looks everything is nice and kind, but, yeah, there's a very clear line where you need to be a bit more what you call a bit harder on things.

[0:50:15] Harry Duran: Well, that's probably how you get done what needs to get done. And it seems like you've done a lot in a short period of time with the team that you have. So it's really exciting to see. I think it's a really big innovation in the world of podcasting, just having been in podcasting since 2014 and seen some of the challenges that the industry faces. So I think they're definitely in the right market, and it's really exciting to see. And I'm looking forward to testing at some point. The equipment out, and I'm sure there's going to be more of a marketing push, obviously. With some of these conversations are happening at conferences and on podcast itself. So it's really exciting to see, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

[0:50:59] Jonas Rinde: Thank you. And keep your eyes open on the Mona for the next month there. It's going to be some pretty cool announcement coming, so be aware.

[0:51:07] Harry Duran: Okay? I appreciate your time, Jonathan. Thank you so much for the background and the history and the trip down the memory lane as well. That was really fun. And for people to learn more about Nimono, we'll send them to Namo, Dot, Co, anywhere else you want to have people connect with you or the company.

[0:51:26] Jonas Rinde: They can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. It's easy to find me there. Happy to answer any questions there. And once again, Harry, thanks for having me. Good questions.

[0:51:36] Harry Duran: Yeah, likewise. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks, Jones.