How OneMeta's Stalled Six-Figure Contract Grew Into Eight-Figure Revenue

TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY:

00:00 The CEO’s Ultimate Accountability
04:54 Entering AI Before the Boom
07:49 The Meaning Behind OneMeta
10:48 Creating a More Understanding World
15:54 Choosing the B2B Market
18:55 Real-Time Translation Use Cases
29:29 When Traction Falls Short
32:56 How Corporations Kill Startups
36:52 Leading Through Radical Transparency
42:53 The Formula for Failing Fast
45:13 Reaching Fifteen Billion Minutes
49:59 Finding Joy in Missing Out

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Saúl Leal (00:00)

You'll be surprised how these large organizations actually kill more entrepreneurs than support them. I'm 100% accountable as the CEO and now roadmaps have changed into the company. You have to find the joy of missing out.

Jeff Holman (00:13)

Welcome back, everybody, to the Breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman, with Intellectual Strategies. I I get the pleasure of talking with a lot of cool people about their companies. I work with CEOs. I see what's going on behind the scenes. And it's stuff that CEOs don't always share with everybody else because, you know, it's CEO stuff. some of it, some of it's really good, some of it's really tough. but this this podcast, the Breakout CEO, is all about getting behind the scenes with some smart

CEOs who are scaling their businesses and sharing a few breakout moments from their businesses, how they think about it, how they approached it, how they solved it. And today we get the pleasure of having both a a great guest and a good friend of mine, Saul Leal, here with us. Saul, welcome to the show.

Saúl Leal (01:00)

Thank you. Jeff, it's a great honor. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Holman (01:03)

it's a pleasure. we we just had some really great discussion. Some of it was recorded, some of it wasn't. for the for the those people in the audience who haven't heard the icebreaker segment with Saul, I think you should go back to it. I I really enjoyed it. and and I also got the benefit of a little bit of after commentary or in between commentary that isn't recorded, but you know, that's always special for me. Because there's there's something about there's something Saul about

Being able to sit down with a CEO and talk to a CEO as a person, in addition to talking about the business, right? I think a lot of the community sees CEOs as, you know, they're either on this pedestal, either either, you know, to revere perhaps, or maybe to, you know, maybe some people are are not as happy about CEOs and and the what what appears to be the disparities or or whatever. CEOs just have a a lot to deal with.

And and so I know that talking with CEOs and seeing stuff behind the scenes, there there's so much more dimension and depth than even what most people see. D do you feel like that's am I capturing the role a little bit that you've that you filled as a CEO for the last how how long has it been since you've been doing one meta?

Saúl Leal (02:22)

it's been about four almost four years, three years and a half. Four years. yeah, so absolutely. I I think there there are different paths to Rome and there are different journeys. And within Rome, just to follow the analogy, there are different destinations in Rome. So there you can go through a corporate career and be the CEO of a company after being the

the director, the president, the vice president, the senior vice president, the CFO, the chief the CTO or the the chief revenue officer, and then come to a CEO. So there are just different paths. also there is doing a startup. And within a startup you are you grow because you're doing a lot of things. You're the visionary, you're taking the company from zero to one

And it becomes your baby, and then that baby as a company grows because of a teenager. And sometimes you have to be detached of the company. So there are different maturity levels while carrying the CEO responsibility. But throughout all of those, there there are lessons that connect all CEOs, and it's the the responsibility of having individuals report to you.

the responsibility to have shareholders depend on you, stakeholders, and then carrying a vision to execution on a yearly basis, on a quarterly basis.

Jeff Holman (04:02)

It's a very demanding role. And very few people I think understand the full demands or or empathize with people who are who are having to manage those demands. so I wanna go I wanna jump into your business some. And one of the things that strikes me about you and your business, there are a few people that I can distinctly remember talking with about AI.

before the whole AI launched, right? You think back to when ChatGPT or, you know, Claude all those were making these big announcements like this is this is here, right? You were you were in this scene before, at least as far as I recall, maybe correct me if I'm wrong. I think you were on the scene well before these companies made their big announcements.

Saúl Leal (04:54)

Yeah, I was involved a little bit. it was probably a year before what we call the great breakthrough of you know, open AI and revealing Chat T and the speed and the the large link language models. that's so I started the company about a year before. maybe and I had a connection with Microsoft. So I got to see

a few aspects of open AI a couple months before the public and at that time it was very revealing to me that the especially the large language models were going to become a commodity and and it was a incredible high barrier of entry

To go into that, you needed you know, the cost to build a model was about fourteen to fifty million dollars to by the way, now is it about eighty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars. So it went from forty million to six million to seven million, then to three and just in the last few years. So it's it's become rapidly a commodity. What I could afford, so as a initially as a solo solopreneur.

at the time with a a specific vision as I wanted to get passionate about the concepts, finding a a specific problem to solve that I feel connected with. And I for me it's always about adding value in a meaningful way. But you always get constrained because of resources. I focus on on data sets. And that ultimately has become a great

a strategy. you know, recently a few months ago, NVIDIA announced that our technology will be on the chips and we're on their website.

Jeff Holman (06:57)

Amazing.

Saúl Leal (06:58)

and you know, it's it was a very specific decision early on where where we focus on on data sets and how to train models. So that has become a good a good compass, if nothing else, to to the business. Well

Jeff Holman (07:15)

We'll get we'll get into what the business does a little bit more. but but carrying on with this theme of you getting in a little bit ahead of the trend the trend, like the other thing that I remember, and we may have had some conversations about this at some point, was the name of your company, one meta. I believe you had that name not too long before the whole Facebook transition to Meta. and right, you you were you were ahead of that curve too. how are you

How are you on the front edge of these waves so much?

Saúl Leal (07:49)

There's the conceptual aspect of being ahead and there's the practical execution aspect of being ahead. So I think that conceptually I've I've I I I've been ahead mostly because I I'm overall I'm an early adopter. I I like I like the the early adoption process and it's something that personally feeds me. So I'm always looking at those. The Neil De company was fascinating because he was basically came comes from the word

one goal and that was my object of one universe and one of purpose so meta means universe or goal meta like the goal in Spanish and then one always been fascinated with you know being the first or opening or pioneering I always like the concept of you know being a pioneer probably mostly for you know living in youth and having not a direct

relationship but more of a legacy relationship with the pioneers and as I grew up into the community I I always admired the pioneers that came from the from the east and call you know came to Utah. So I always like the concept of of pioneering and being the person one. So that's kind of where the name came from. It's a one meta, one universe, one purpose. So

Interesting enough, that that I was almost looking for a problem to solve with that name, if if that makes sense.

Jeff Holman (09:27)

So you had so you had a concept. You're like, I want to work on something big, new, pioneering. And so the name did the name actually precede the company? yeah.

Saúl Leal (09:38)

Yeah, yeah. In in in a way we I the original name for the company was Meta Language. before we got acquired by into a public company. And so it was I already have the the name what me, I was looking into it and but it so it came very naturally. But the original name was Meta Language, which is a universe of languages.

Jeff Holman (10:06)

With that, tell us let's give the audience a flavor for what the for what the business is. What like where did it start and and where is it today? What kind of types of things are you doing? Just a quick note about our guests. I host the Breakout CEO podcast to share behind the scenes insights from scaling businesses. As an attorney, I see the real challenges leaders face long before success becomes public. But client stories have to stay confidential.

So we invite guest CEOs to share their own moments of struggle and success. I'm so grateful to our guests and my team at Intellectual Strategies for making this show possible. Now, let's get back to the show.

Saúl Leal (10:48)

So I'll start with the mission because it's it's very attached to it. So the mission is to create a more understanding world. So over products, over initiative is about understanding. How do we create a more understanding world? And as we try to break down understanding, we we start with data sets and how especially transcription. So the original challenge was

Any large language model needs another model that precedes it because the large language model needs text. So you need another model to convert a speech to text. So about four years ago, a speech to text accuracy in English, it was and it it still is about 98 to 99 percent. It's it's really accurate. You still have some challenges in the normalization on

personal identifiable information, but overall it's there's a lot of data in English. Spanish is second and Spanish is about used to be about seventy three, seventy five percent. Right now it's about eighty three to eighty five percent over the last four years. but any other language besides those, accuracy is not very good. Accuracy it's a challenge. So if you go into Japanese, Swahili, German, Portuguese, accuracy becomes a challenge.

on on the speech to text, especially when you go into dialects within a language. So think of your Spanish Argentinian versus your Spanish Cuban, versus your Spanish Mexico or English Ghana versus English South Africa or English Australia. so you when you start going to dialects becomes a lot more difficult and accurate. So that's one or Arabic, I don't because there's a lot of challenges on dialects for Arabic. So

We start to build data sets and all those dialects and train models. And the interesting thing is when you have a a model A and you train it, it's a complete different model after you train it. So we could acquire open source or pre-established models. And then with our data sets, we will create a new version of it that the IP will belong to us. And then we can just work with that new model under the right licensing. So as we start to do that.

we encounter another challenge and it was the interpretation, the translation of those with context. And then as we go through those, we find found another challenge and was outside of the AI, it was the infrastructure, the you know, the 30-year-old in internet infrastructure, the content delivery networks, and how did you accelerate speed on those?

So we build technology that it's outside of TCP IP protocols, so different transmission protocols that makes the speed really fast. Latency is very low, outside of of the AI, so into the content delivery networks. So when you start putting all that together, we have a really strong technology

That will do live interpretation. So that's what we focus on, is which is a really big problem to solve is as the words are spoken, just do an interpretation on the flag. So just to give you an example, and then we put the technology on on phone system. So no app, no internet. Jeff, I'll call you right now and talk to you in Spanish and you hear me in English. And you talk to me in English and you hear in Spanish as the words are being pronounced.

Jeff Holman (14:42)

So so okay, so I just want to give everybody a a an idea of the scope of this. So you so you start with transcription, you move to translation, you're building out data sets for different languages and dialects, and and you're to the point where not just not just written translation, but spoken translation is happening in a in real-time settings. So so to compare that, you know, a couple years ago I was in Greece with my wife, we were tracking down her family.

And we ended up in some churches talking to priests who only spoke Greek. And the the the conversation, if you can call it that, was was us typing in or speaking into Google Translate and then waiting for it to translate and then showing it to them and him doing it back to us. And it was it was surprising that we that we even had much coherence between us when we were doing that.

The y where does your technology get deployed? Who who's using it? You know, aside from a a one off person who could have benefited from it doing some family history research in a in a you know, a a Greek church in

Saúl Leal (15:54)

No, Jeff, this is fantastic. So first we focus on B2B. So we have not deployed. we have some some Borough Advisors that tell us to deploy B2C apps, but I see that market crowded and not sophisticated or secure. Like we cannot add too much value. And it's it's rapidly becoming a red ocean.

So the B2B is a more difficult world. It's more of a blue ocean. and there's great need for that. especially honestly, one of the greatest challenges is the eco. A lot of people don't understand, but when you go to the last mile to actually implement AI technology, most of these enterprises across the world, they have a AI council that is mostly served by lawyers, IP lawyers.

So and they approve after the CTO, after the CEO, after the CIO, after the chief experience officer or customer officer, after all of that, you just have this AI council dominated by these by lawyers. And sometimes they don't know what they don't know, but one thing it's to protect intellectual property. So you actually and and what happens is that last year.

90% of the AI DOCs, proof of concepts, got canceled by the AI councils across the world. So now you have CTOs, you have providers, you have CEOs frustrated. And a lot of organizations are not getting the intellectual property aspect right, which is something that we have worked quite a bit. So

With with that said, we have passed those AI councils and now we work with some of the largest institutions. So first is business to business. we're highly regarded on security and introductory intellectual property. And some of our clients are the Vatican. The Vatican was actually one of our first clients, which is a really difficult client in terms of GDPR and compliance. Right. is actually one of the first entities that was

Kind of again AI at the time, yet they were open enough to look at technology and the were we were scrutinized by them and their security. One the toughest security audits that we had was through the Vatican. So Vatican is a client. we have United Nations as being a client. We have Department of Defense, so I presented personally several times at the Pentagon, and we have US Navy use our technology.

Jeff Holman (18:45)

And these guys are using these th they're deploying this in like group meetings, councils, or or where do they where would somebody deploy this?

Saúl Leal (18:55)

There are mainly three use cases. eighty percent of those are on one of the use cases. So the first use case will be an event. So you walk into an event, actually there was an event this year, Syndicon Slopes you know tech week. and we did at a at the event, you walk into a room, you QR code, a link.

And on your phone, you can hear the speaker in any language. We did it with Mark Cuban. So Mark Cuban was talking in English, and there were people hearing him in Spanish, in Portuguese, and in Ukrainian early this year. And you do it's on the fly. So you hear as the guy is pronouncing the words. which I can talk more about the technology and why that is so difficult and why NVIDIA had a relationship with us or us with them. the second use case is

talking on a video conference call. So we have an app we you put it on your computer and then it intercepts the audio from your headset through the Microsoft Teams or or Zoom and intercepts and we'll do the translation on the flying and put it back in. So that's okay that's another use case. And the one that we work the most is call centers throughout the world. So we put the technology on on a call center software.

It's called call center as a service. So these are companies it's called CCAS, CCAS provider.

Jeff Holman (20:31)

Okay.

Saúl Leal (20:31)

So this is companies like In Context or NICX1, Ring Central, Five Nine, Genesis, DialPad. and what these companies do is that they provide a call center software with this voiceover IP. So we put our technology inside that call center.

And then if a doctor or wants to talk to their patient in their language, they pick up the phone, they make a selection on the software, and they start talking in English, and the person can hear them in Arabic, and vice versa. And so we have insurance companies, Accenture, we have a global agreement with Accenture, and we have received revenue and we have deployed our technology with some of our center's clients and throughout the world.

Jeff Holman (21:19)

I know that you meant you mentioned before that you have a mission to I'm gonna get this wrong, but to make the you know, to improve understanding a around the world, right, throughout the world, by what you're doing. W why why were you the right person to do this? What what was it about what you did? Is it your engineering background or your pioneering spirit? What what what pushed you or drove you to to build something like this?

Saúl Leal (21:45)

I'm not sure if this is the answer you were expecting, but I'm not sure if I'm the right person.

Jeff Holman (21:51)

Well you've been the right person so far by by default, if nothing else. You've d you've been doing it, right?

Saúl Leal (21:57)

And and I think that that's the answer is we make ourselves the right person for the mission that we want to accomplish, right? I don't think it was I was not prepared to be a father, definitely not prepared to be a CEO of a public company or to be a member, honorable member, a good member of the community. I'm I'm not prepared s to do so many things, a good husband. I think we we just

We just go and jump into the into the water and start swimming. and that hopefully will make it better as we start doing the job. So so that's that's one aspect. Now looking back, there are certainly some certain aspects that I can connect the dots and say, yeah, actually that experience really helps. NVIDIA is actually an interesting one. so

First being an engineer really helps, especially my background is in cybersecurity and solutions architect. So I'm I yesterday I spent two hours and a half with our solutions architect just jamming and talking and you know geeking out about you know a specific type of implementations in in 10 downing in England. So we we have we're working with a company that it's working on

very intelligence agencies across the world. So these are knowing the background, knowing architecture at that level has really helped me. So I can say, okay, that I'm I'm probably unique towards that having that knowledge. Then interesting enough, I had experience on entertainment. So you can probably see on the background, I have a couple of Amy Awards. And part of my career was

BYU Television International. And I go really in depth with master control, producing companies or executive producing, working with producers across the world, working with live life sports and we'll talk probably more about that specifically so as I was you know having those experiences

have really helped me to understand audio and I I did probably over fifteen hundred hours of content in multiple languages. then later in my career we were doing forty six articles in you know a dozen languages a day. so translating and creating processes for interpretation and translation that you don't get used to. then you know traveling I I

I build entities like legal entities in thirty-two countries. I sat down with lawyers, built a business, go through the taxes, go through the people that are calling you, and you're not doing something right with the compliance for that country in Brazil, and it's all the pay to build a business in Guatemala. So all of that legal aspect, the technology aspect, my being inquisitive.

I will say that you overlap all of that, it makes my experiences very unique. And yeah, Jeff, sometimes I get surprised myself. So one of the things that NVIDIA was looking is they were looking they are looking to do life sports in multiple languages.

Jeff Holman (25:37)

But that makes so much sense when you said that, yeah.

Saúl Leal (25:39)

Then and imagine the first understanding the why. And a lot of people say, the why it's cool, but it's great. But I know that advertising, well one of the most expensive advertising opportunities is actually life sports. Yeah. And the network owns that. So and the network when they provide the licensing into Portuguese for Brazil, and they're not providing that content in that language, they're giving licensing rights.

And they are giving advertising revenue. And but if they were to keep the language because they produce in that language, there's more revenue for that for that network. So I understand that because I deal with royalties during my tenure at Bigonia University working for their television station. So understanding that and then I know the flow of audio and master control and

Intimately, they understand what the the causes and how you do translation, having someone an audio engineer and having a director for the intonation of the voice when you do translation. So all that knowledge came in and and that's when NVIDIA came in and said, Hey, we're looking at you, your expertise and your technology to solve this problem. Can you help us do that? And that's why we are part of their media.

live media team. There's about fifteen companies in the world. and three are software specific. And we're one of those. So these are this is where I believe I may be unique, but at the same time, in many aspects we're just pioneering.

Jeff Holman (27:26)

Well and it's funny because y you you started out by saying, I'm not sure I am the right person, but but then when you describe your background, there can't be many other people with with a background like that that would even be capable of building the w building what you're building today. So so technically speaking, it sounds like you're absolutely the right person. So

Saúl Leal (27:49)

Well,

i it it depends on the day, yeah.

Jeff Holman (27:53)

Well, there's struggles i in every business, right? And and that's a good segue into into kind of w maybe a a moment to talk about what we talk about here on the on the show is the breakout arc, right? Every CEO there you you go through kind of different stages in your business where you're building momentum and then something comes and disrupts or breaks that momentum, and then you gotta figure out how to how to navigate that problem and and we call that the breakout where you're reflecting and

gaining insights and dealing with constraints to be able to overcome the the the the disruption or the break, that hopefully leads to some type of breakthrough for the business. So on that note, what what are some of the struggles as you've been building this business over the last three and a half or four years? Are are there moments that come to mind where you're like, Yeah, we had we were doing so well, it was like going great and and all of a sudden the brakes just turned on. You know, we

We either externally or internally, something happened that that caused disruption to what would otherwise have been a great run if you could have kept the momentum going. Have you have you run into some of those?

Saúl Leal (29:02)

Yeah, and obviously and but I think it was a little bit different for me. You describe it as there was acceleration and we got disaccelerated. For for me was more of how do we get traction? basically when all the numbers add up, why the result it still doesn't match the equation.

Jeff Holman (29:28)

W what do you mean by that?

Saúl Leal (29:29)

Well what I mean is

Everything seems to be right. You got the right client with the right employees and with the right person on the other side, the right contract, the right technology. And as you go through all of that, we there was a point where we're not seeing as much traction as we expected. Or we are seeing we're we're talking to all the right companies, they're praising the technology.

They want to do the agreements, but we're not seeing the revenue come to sustain the the company. So we're seeing what's wrong. Like where where are we failing? And and I'm not sure if they were even failing adapts, but while we're not getting the results, because we were not necessarily doing something wrong, failing. We was just not getting the right traction. And

you know, it's a it's a different mo it's a different way to to hit that that breakthrough. so it's it's starting to go, I call it tweezer moments. And some of my employees will probably laugh when they hear to this, but we tweezer

Jeff Holman (30:48)

Did you say tweezer moments?

Saúl Leal (30:50)

moments. So that okay. We go and and I don't know, I gave it that name and they know exactly what it means. It's basically we go.

We we it's almost going to a war room, sit down and we start going into very detail and be very careful careful about every relationship that we have and try to understand the the the why what's stopping the relation to go. So let me give you a a very specific example. we got we got a contract and the contract had prepaid revenue and it was in the

hundreds of thousands will was one of our first contracts. So we were really happy to deploy. And we're moving forward to deploy and and we're looking through the implementation of the technology. As we're building implementation of technology, we're seeing all of this excuses from the client to implement it. And it's been one month, two months, three months, four months. Now we're six months

into the agreement where I have all this forecast of revenue in the millions of dollars.

Jeff Holman (32:03)

Yeah, revenue should have should have been should should have been released by then, right? You're yeah.

Saúl Leal (32:09)

And then it's not happening. So we call it okay tweezer moment. We start having meetings internally, and we end up finding out that the company, the client actually was expecting to have let's call it middleware, to connect with us. And they thought they had it, and they signed the agreement and they pay and they do all these things. And we found out that it was not only they don't have it.

But they cancel it on the roadmap for the following year.

Jeff Holman (32:43)

so so you're building for something that they that they've effectively taken off their roadmap or somebody has taken off parts of it, critical parts of it from the roadmap, so you now have a bridge to nowhere with

Saúl Leal (32:56)

them. So and and this is that when you deal with the type of organizations that we're we work with, which is in the thousands of employees, those things happen. But you know one of my one of my board board members, Roy, he he's the former chief strategic officer for Verizon. And he tells well where that another complex is just not gonna put necessarily a name but it said

So you'll be surprised how these large organizations actually kill more entrepreneurs and support them. Because the bureaucracy of of itself of these large organizations to make a decision kills the or will burn the the money and the resources of the entrepreneurs. And they just can't get to the end. So

Jeff Holman (33:46)

Sometimes unintentionally, but sometimes sometimes that can be intentional too, or at least it feels that way, right?

Saúl Leal (33:52)

It may feel I I think it's hundred percent unintentional, but it happens. The the fact of the matter is that it happens. So those type of situations, Jeff, I think was a a a real challenge for the company and for me. Because I'm building an expectation for my shareholders, I'm building an expectation for the employees, I'm building an expectation for my own self, and then the numbers were not adding up. So

To understand, you know, one month, two months becomes three months, and three months becomes six months, six months becomes a year. Those are how you sustain the company, how you keep building, how you maintain the momentum without that traction. And that that has been solved. not as much as I wish, honestly. but you know it was very pleasant to see one of the the

VPs directors saying we have never had a partner like one meta. They're so patient, so they will work for us in our behalf with our best intentions. And this is the type of individual that will never give a compliment. And and to say that in front of other people and to have in cheer for our company after you know a year of our relationship and say those things and build and

Have him as a full supporter, where now roadmaps have changed into the company to accommodate our technology. And now they can see the revenue aspect of it, which is in the tens of millions of dollars. it's it's been fascinating. So once we get to and as I was you know talking, once you hike and you you break through that, you know, then you find that there's another mountain to hike.

And there's another breakthrough to have, and I can talk about more eloquently about those and those implementations, specifically for a company.

Jeff Holman (35:50)

Yeah, be before we move on to something else, I mean, I it seems to me like there are a lot of companies that th this is a I mean, in a way it's pretty typical. We celebrate the early win, right? We're like, yes, we close the customer, yes, they promised to send us a check, yes, but but there's you know, oftentimes implementation getting to the getting to the end of that of that financial relationship, if you will, getting to the the revenue recognition part of

of the of the transaction is often harder than it seems when the deal is closing. How how did you like in that situation, and and maybe it's still ongoing, maybe the the revenue is still waiting to be recognized 100%. But in a situation like that where you're you where you do have shareholders, you've got employees, and you've got just the the the real the real costs for your business

How do you navigate that conversation among your team?

Saúl Leal (36:52)

There's no shortcuts for excellence. So and the the best way to provide excellence is with transparency on those and just deal with the situation exactly as it comes and and as it is.

So I just bring everybody to to the same page and I present the problem. I'm hundred percent accountable as the CEO and majority owner of the company. but I just express the you know the situation as it is. And you know, there have been situations where I have to go to my my employees very embarrassing or I'm not sure the words embarrassing, but very difficult situations.

Because as a CEO owner, you feel that you have to provide no matter what. other people can fail, but you cannot fail. And you know, sometimes this whole concept of I have the book, leaders eat last gets really ingrained, and that's a good that's important, but sometimes you cannot give what you don't have.

So some I have come to the situation where I have to go to some of the employees and say, Hey guys, we need to for a period of time, we need to cut salaries. I have to we have to hold the salary for like cash flow properly for a month or two. And employees have come back and say, We're all in. And to my surprise,

I've been expecting for people to scream at me to resign immediately. So I come very tense already. And they have come to me and said, We know the numbers. We know what we're building. So this is only a couple of months. Let's go.

And they don't even mention it. And to have that support SEO, it it makes your day, honestly. And then we we go through it, we push it and and we get to the next to the next mountain. so those are those are difficult moments and that's how I navigate it, Jeff. Not sure if I answer specifically, but that that's how

Jeff Holman (39:32)

You did. and I I I wanna ask a follow-up on that because you know, it seems to me like you you've done a lot of startups. I've done worked with lots of startups. and and all startups go through these tough moments. But and we know that. Like like again, maybe going back to what we talked about in the icebreaker, left brain, right brain, right distinctions, we we know that these things happen. We we understand that they're relatively common in the chaos of

of starting a new company and growing a company and you know and and navigating the just the the natural issues that come with it. But still you you know I think you're I think you're conveying your experience very authentically where you're saying you go into that meeting, you you go into that conversation already tense because but because even though you know that these are common issues, it hits us every time we have to deal with

an issue directly in our own company, with our own team, with our own investors. why do you think that why do you think that is for CEOs that have been down this path before. They they know the struggles they're going to deal with and yet it's still in a sense maybe harder than it seems like it should be.

Saúl Leal (40:52)

I don't know. I'll I'll give you my explanation. I think that we have high expectations, and you cannot have as a high expectation generally in others that you don't have to yourself. So if personally I ha I hold everyone at a high expectation and

If I do so, then that means that I have to hold myself at a at a high level. And I I think that that's probably at at the core of of disappointing or have the perception of disappointing others. Now with that said, we talk a lot a lot about failure, but do we really accept failure? I know I don't.

Jeff Holman (41:48)

On paper we do though. Everyone says, just fail fast, you know, fail forward, all these phrases that make it sound like it's

Saúl Leal (41:55)

And and I have my own theory about failing or failing fast and I I had that opportunity working for a company called Desert Management Corporation, DMC and Desert Digital Media, and I learned what it meant to fail fast. And I can I love the concept because it had helped me with all my businesses. And we at the time we that that company was we were doing

Content creation and the just to give an idea, the cost of of article in the New York Times about seven thousand dollars. For USA Today it's about four thousand when you depreciate all everything. And then for you know, Oklahoma Herald, it was about four hundred dollars at the time. So our cost per article was seven dollars.

Jeff Holman (42:49)

Seven. Seven dollars. One thousandth of the New York Times.

Saúl Leal (42:53)

Yeah. and we were having a lot more impressions. Now we built a network of people to write articles. We had different layers. also we had we were in different languages, but also we had build a network of two hundred and thirty two hundred and fifty two million followers. We were probably the top five network on Facebook at the time. With the definitely in the top ten. with you know Coca-Cola had eighty five.

Disney actually had a little bit more. They had about 320 million followers. We have 252 million followers. And so as we and I was a general manager, I built everything from scratch. So if we only had a million dollars and to the cost to fail, it's a million bucks, you can only fail once. Your

Jeff Holman (43:42)

Right.

Saúl Leal (43:43)

cost to fail is a hundred thousand dollars, you can only fail ten times. Right. But if your cost to fail was seven bucks,

Then you can fail how many times creating articles. So usually by your 30 plus time, between 30 to 150, you will figure it out. I mean, you just cannot fail that much until we figure it out. Like our no natural tendencies to solve problems. So when you say fail fast, you know, I have learned that there's actually a formula. It's it's identifying where's your cause for failure, where is your wrong way.

And think how many times can you fail? If I can fail like fifty to a hundred a hundred and fifty times, well, I'll know I'll know that I'll make it. Yeah. So that's that's what it means to me, you know, fail pass.

Jeff Holman (44:33)

I I haven't heard that before, but I I can see from an engineer's standpoint that that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. You're like, let me work this backwards and yeah, it's okay, carry the one. Yep. We c we can we fail enough can we fail enough to get to success? Yeah. That's really what that formula is. Yeah. So I I like that. I like that a lot. Well, I know we're kind of coming up on time here, but and you've probably got many, many more stories about

building one meta, where would you like to see, to the extent that you can share, where would you like to see this company grow to i i in the next few years?

Saúl Leal (45:13)

So I wanna have a billion interactions, at least a billion interactions a year. ideally with a billion people.

Jeff Holman (45:23)

That

sounds like a ton. So where like w put that in perspective for me. It like what does what does that compare to with other companies or other how how would I relate to what a billion transaction it transactions are?

Saúl Leal (45:36)

So so a billion interactions, I I can give you the the number that I backed up in my mind. So I think a conversation it's anywhere from seven minutes to fifteen minutes. Okay. So I would like to to have a billion interactions a move that means that I would like to have about fifteen billion minutes in a year.

Jeff Holman (45:57)

Of of interaction.

Saúl Leal (45:58)

Of conversations using our technology.

Jeff Holman (46:01)

Going through yeah. Okay.

Saúl Leal (46:03)

So that's that's kind of where my my head is at. And and I'm constantly thinking, where are those interactions? Are those interactions between a doctor and a patient? Are those interactions in a coffee shop in an airport? Are those interactions in IT support between Nestle and someone fixing their computer? Or are they with Conagra talking to the HR employees across the world? Or you know, th that's kind of where where my head is at. It's I want

fifteen billion minutes a year at the very least.

Jeff Holman (46:39)

How many minutes does one person have in a year? I haven't I haven't done that math.

Saúl Leal (46:43)

So there there are about if I recall correctly seven billion seven million mm minutes in a year, let me see.

Jeff Holman (46:53)

Something like that.

Saúl Leal (46:54)

Minutes

Jeff Holman (46:56)

Sixty times twenty four times three sixty five. Is that what we're

Saúl Leal (46:59)

Yeah, there's no, there's much much less. it's about fifty half a million minutes in a year.

Jeff Holman (47:10)

Yeah.

Saúl Leal (47:11)

Yeah, half a million. Okay. It's five hundred and twenty five thousand six hundred minutes in a year. So

Jeff Holman (47:19)

That that makes it I like put in reference, you know, one full year of my life is half a million minutes, and you wanna get to fifteen billion minutes, that's that's that's quite the reach. You you you have

Saúl Leal (47:33)

Yeah. And and I think that there the consumption is there as we look at call centers. some of our call centers, some of our clients, they do about five to ten billion minutes a year. Just one client.

Jeff Holman (47:47)

Okay. Just one. Just one. Okay. Well that's a that's impr impressive. What w what's it gonna take for you to get get there? What are the you know, as you look at from where you are to fifteen billion you know, minutes, what are the one or two milestones that you see along the way?

Saúl Leal (48:04)

deployment. So we already have the contracts to reach 15 billion minutes. Those contracts are already signed and in place. which is I think is probably the most difficult aspect of it. So we've been very good because of the technology. we've been very good at attracting the the type of clients at scale and they they trusted some of the largest companies in the world they have done incredible diligence. So

the possibility to get to fifteen billion minutes is there. We have the contract sign, so the pipeline is there. So now it comes down to deployment. So these clients will have twenty six thousand clients. We have a client that have about half a million clients. So now it's deploying to them and then you know training the models for those specific companies. We didn't go too much on the security, but we build a technology where

Every model lived in its own tenant for every client and the data set is for every single client. So it's completely isolated from yeah,

Jeff Holman (49:10)

All localized, all

Saúl Leal (49:12)

and we've built we have built some on prem solutions, which there's a huge trend, Jeff, right now. from companies to go from hyperscaler back because of AI, security and intellectual property. Now companies want to have their whole data center, you know, back into their offices and people are

You know, like Dell hasn't been selling much of hyperscaler opportunities in the last, you know, couple of years. They're all selling on prem solutions.

Jeff Holman (49:41)

What would you for th for other listeners who are hearing your story and, you know, your ambitions and some of the things you've dealt with, w what would you say, what would you tell some of them as, you know, tips or hints or encouragement to take away from your experience?

Saúl Leal (49:59)

There there's a lot of lessons. for some reason this one came to my mind as you're asking the question. I had I have become an incredible mentor and and and dear friend, someone that I truly admire. Paul, and he told me something. He said, Saul, you have to find the joy of missing out. And it's not about the fear of missing out.

It's about the joy of missing out. The joy of saying no and focus on the one thing. And that's not an easy place to get, because as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, you're always looking to not missing out because you always think like where is that opportunity under that problem? Let me turn around to see if I can find that golden nugget.

Where nobody has seen and you're always looking. But on the contrary, having joy in not turning that rock in understanding that the path and the focus is so clear that you're not diverting any energy of what doesn't value, what doesn't matter. That's hard. And getting there, getting to a point of the joy of missing out, and

Finding that joy. It's it's key. There's always a balance. but that's that's key. That's that's some of the lessons I've I've learned.

Jeff Holman (51:31)

I love that twist too. Because a lot of people when you talk strategy, they're like, you've got to learn to say no. But you're actually you're actually adding a another layer on top of that, which goes back to what we talked about in our in our icebreaker segment about, you know, a decision to be happiness is a decision, not just a journey. And you're and you've you've just meshed very well, I think, meshed the decision to be happy with the

with the s strategic notion of saying no so you can focus on what's most important, all in all in one statement of, you know, find the find the joy in missing out. I that's clever. I haven't heard that before.

Saúl Leal (52:11)

Well, it's it's now mine, the loss to Paul. So

Jeff Holman (52:15)

Well, thank you, Paul.

Saúl Leal (52:16)

Yes. He's in he's in Africa right now. So yeah.

Jeff Holman (52:21)

fantastic.

Saúl Leal (52:23)

Jeff, thank you. Thanks for for the lesson. and the time and the lessons thought as you're directing this podcast. This is fantastic. Can't wait to to do it again over time.

Jeff Holman (52:35)

Well, I I really appreciate your you coming on. You you really make the show. I just try to keep up with the conversation as it as it's going. But thank you for coming on, sharing about your journey building one meta, and and where you're headed with that and some of the insights and struggles and and lessons that you've learned from that. It's been a pleasure. So

Saúl Leal (52:54)

Excellent.

Jeff Holman (52:56)

And thanks to our audience that joined us again on this episode of the Breakout CEO. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you enjoy the show, a rating or a review goes a long way. Our mission is to promote the stories of breakout CEOs in scaling SaaS, e-commerce, and tech companies to equip peer CEOs with valuable perspectives and confidence.

Thanks again for joining us on this episode of the Breakout CEO. I'm Jeff Holman, and I'll see you next time.

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