In this episode, Jason Niedle interviews Vahid Kolahdouzan, co-founder and COO of JIBB, discussing how technology, particularly AI, can enhance human connections and transform business practices. Vahid shares insights on the importance of whiteboards in fostering innovation, the role of AI in streamlining processes, and the growth strategies JIBB employs through partnerships, particularly with Cisco. The conversation also touches on navigating market challenges and the future of AI in business.
Takeaways
- Technology can empower human connections.
- The whiteboard fosters rigorous and transparent communication.
- AI can significantly reduce the time needed for product development.
- JIBB’s platform digitizes analog surfaces for hybrid meetings.
- Partnerships are crucial for JIBB’s growth strategy.
- Cisco’s partnership provides access to a vast network of customers.
- Awareness within partner organizations is key to sales success.
- Federal agencies are seeking on-prem solutions for security reasons.
- AI agents will revolutionize task completion in the future.
- JIBB aims to automate mundane tasks to enhance creativity.
Sound Bites
“We add unique value to all these cameras.”
“Awareness is the big key to growth.”
“You can find us at www.jibb.ai.”
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with Vahid Kolahdouzan, co-founder and COO of JIBB, about how technology can empower human connections.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We are a growth agency and we partner with tech companies just like JIBB to deliver growth solutions and sales. I’ve recently taken all the things that we’ve learned and put them into a cool hyper growth playbook. If you want to grab that, it’s at tethos.com/podcast. I promise it’s actually useful or you can drop the word growth if there’s comments wherever you’re watching and I will DM it to you.
Today, I’m excited to be exploring tech company growth with Vahid. And Vahid, I appreciate, got up early. He is in Australia, calling into California today. And he’s the co-founder and COO of JIBB, which is a patented AI-powered platform that digitizes any physical writing surface, like a whiteboard, and extracts the handwritten content in real time with your existing camera. And if you guys watch their videos, it is really cool to see how that shows up. So JIBB was a global finalist in an extreme tech challenge.
is now venture backed and is a Cisco preferred solution provider. And it looks like Vahid, you’re a dynamic blend of investment banking and IT and entrepreneurship and education. So I think that’s a fun thing to explore with you. And I like that you’re really seeking to reimagine what work looks like and how AI kind of amplifies our efforts and doesn’t take away. So welcome.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (01:21)
⁓
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me in this show.
Recently I started, I just read a book and I want to start with that and the book is called The NVIDIA Way, Jensen Huang and the Making of the Tech Giant by Tae Kim. So this book is just recently released in December 2024.
Jason Niedle (01:33)
Mm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (01:42)
And it actually struck me heavily. And the reason for that is, know, the Jensen obviously is a figure now and is compared to Steve Jobs and is one of the, you know, all time greatest entrepreneurs. And talking about the culture in Nvidia and how we build it from a startup to what it is now and became even at the time the
biggest company in the world. And it shows how hardworking the culture of NVIDIA is and how innovative it is and how Jensen is basically playing with the simple rules, but so powerful that make the culture super, super competitive and innovative.
One of the things that actually relate to us as well is I found that whiteboard is ultimate symbol of the unique whole chat in video. From the day one, and that’s a preferred medium of communication for Jensen and how he rolled it out to whole entire company. every single room.
Jason Niedle (02:35)
Mmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (02:47)
in both headquarters of India and any other offices, know, surrounded with whiteboards and Jensen even has his own specific marker. He just bought from Taiwan and he uses it all the time. Even he travels and goes anywhere. That’s right. And he he made
Jason Niedle (03:05)
I love that. He has to have his own exact marker for his whiteboard.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (03:11)
Every meeting himself and all other employees to use a whiteboard in a meeting and no no slides, no PowerPoint. And the reason for that is basically it forces people, the whiteboard forces people to think and be rigorous, transparent and logical every time they start from scratch and they have to,
draw down the logic all behind it. And basically they start from point zero every time without looking at the past. was the And they cannot hide any, faulty assumptions in these kinds of processes. Whereas in pretty slides, you can go through it easily without going through all the details and things can get missed or misleaded. So that was,
Jason Niedle (03:43)
Mmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (03:59)
very very powerful way I see working there and I just want to read a small quote from the book and it says at the whiteboard there’s no place to hide and when you finish no matter how brilliant your thoughts are you must always wipe them away and start anew and that’s how they basically innovate every single time because they said this is what what the past let’s wipe it out let’s start again
Jason Niedle (04:17)
Hmm
Start over.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (04:28)
And that actually encouraged me to even use it more and the whiteboard and also use it in different ways that I never thought about it. And something else has happened, obviously recently with AI and these AI models getting more and powerful. And in our company also, our company is based on AI and we’re using vision AI and now gen AI.
make things more powerful and one of the things I’ve done in a system that works really nice with the whiteboard is now I’ve done some sketching on the board and then I use that sketching to and also I’ll put some you know plan around it and put that in Chat GPT
Jason Niedle (05:10)
Mmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (05:10)
I
asked it to act as a product manager and also details the product requirements. And I’ve done that and I use that to put it again back to AI to generate codes for the prototype out of it. So I create the prototype, I test it in matter of day and the team really liked it and now we build upon it. So basically the dev team has created that product.
Jason Niedle (05:23)
well.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (05:37)
that we’re about to release. So the takeaway for me was if I wanted to do this, it would have taken me probably month to do it. Now with AI, I could done it in a matter of day. And
Jason Niedle (05:49)
Right,
whiteboard it, have it scanned by JIBB, put it in an AI, tell the AI to build a prototype and you’re done. That’s amazing.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (05:59)
Yeah, it was something that it wasn’t possible before and yeah, it was the way that we like to be, you know, that we would like to be creative
Jason Niedle (06:09)
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about JIBB and tell our listeners about JIBB.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (06:12)
Basically, we use an AI to digitize any kind of analog surface, whether it’s paper, whiteboard, in real time, for any hybrid meeting that people can join and even interact remotely with the physical whiteboard, which makes it super interesting.
Jason Niedle (06:27)
Hmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (06:29)
And we bring in that simple medium inside any online meeting.
Jason Niedle (06:34)
So what brought you to JIBB in the first place? Where do you see this going? Like how do you see this transforming business?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (06:41)
Let me go through the AI and power of AI. So we know, AI is going to change so many things in coming future, coming years. And the impact has already started, but I believe the actual impact, the massive impact is going to come in a bit of
medium, longer term, maybe about 5-10 years time. One of the big things that’s happening in AI is agentic AI or AI agents. And what does that mean when we’re working with AI, for example, with chat GPT, we have a very, very specific, small task.
or question and answer, we throw it to the AI, give us the answer, and then we have to refine it. We have to go back and talk to AI back and forth because we know it’s not 100%. It might not get to what exactly we want or it might hallucinate and other things. And it cannot complete the whole task. For example, if I’m going to write an email,
and I want an AI to help me to write it. So I go and basically back and forth with the get for example, Chat GPT to help me to write it. And then I go to my Gmail and put down the name of the person I want to send. Then I’ll copy paste the email in the body and I’ll put it in the subject and then press send.
Each task involve many, many steps that human do and AI cannot do it in a way that currently exists through, for example, Chat GPT. So the aim of the agents are, so these agents means there multiple AI models working together in different ways and very, sometimes very, very complex to accomplish the whole task. For example, this email sending
does it by its own. So I said this is what I want to send Just go and send it. Okay without maybe Even my final approval or with my final approval you show me everything if I’m happy with it You go and send it so they I probably even can go search a person understand what it is who he is write the content based on what I want and just go and put the email on my inbox and
send it so without me doing anything. So these are this is one example. Another example for example I want to book a trip somewhere at the end of the year and it goes understand what are my preferences of budget and type of hotels or airplane and book for me you know it pays for it and it’s done. So with us
the value comes when what we see it is you do all your brainstorming on the whiteboard your meeting your planning to your whiteboard and basically the whiteboard is simple tool to make us more creative and as I mentioned earlier you don’t want to do taking a photo of it
and then come and retype it and then from base on that, sometimes you have to redraw it. So it’s very time consuming. And then you want to go to any specific platform you want to use and make the changes and build upon it. Right. So what we offering now, we see that’s going to be more and powerful is we see the whiteboard as a simple tool that we can
plan or make ideas and from the ideas the actual action gonna happen through JIBB. So everything else could be automated. I give some examples. So I go and draw some y-frames on my board and I wanna say I wanna create a new website and these are the components. This is how I wanna be. This is how
I want to look for my target audience and I do some sketches and from there as soon as I stop and tell AI to redraw it for example in Figma and even put the components and then text and take it for example from Figma to website builder like Webflow and put all the components and even publish it right or I’m doing planning with my team
Jason Niedle (10:43)
Hmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (10:46)
Everyone in the meeting, we allocate the tasks and we plan it together on the board. And at the end of the session, I don’t need to do anything. All the tasks allocated on Jira to a specific people. So this is where we’re going right now. So the reason is that we
Jason Niedle (10:58)
Mm-hmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (11:04)
helping people to do the things they like to be more creative and give away all the, boring tasks or hand doing and typing to the AI. And this is something we’re gonna release in very soon. And we call this product also complimentary to JIBB. It’s like Comac and I’m offering a
Jason Niedle (11:15)
Yeah, of course.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (11:28)
any podcast listeners here to sign up for it for free access that we offer to people.
Jason Niedle (11:35)
Nice free access. So I’ll make sure to put a link in the description for anybody.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (11:37)
Yeah.
And this is exclusive to podcasts.
Jason Niedle (11:41)
Nice podcast listener exclusive. It’s making me think for me, I have this blank wall on my right and I’ve kept saying I need a whiteboard, I need a whiteboard, but a lot of times my team doesn’t come in anymore and so the whiteboard is a little bit useless because it hasn’t been something that I could share before, right? If my team’s not here, but if there’s a camera over there and I can write on it and my team can see what I’m doing and we can talk about it, then that’s a completely different, that’s a real purpose for it instead of it just being like my
My sounding board right there.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (12:07)
Yeah, exactly. So if you’re Whiteboard user or you like using Whiteboard or even pen and paper and you take in your notes or you do your stuff on the paper, this is a product for you that speed off your process a lot and basically boosts your productivity massively.
Jason Niedle (12:14)
Mm.
I see why Cisco would like it too, because I’m thinking as I sit here and think about it, I’m like, if I do that, I need another camera, right? So they’re happy because they’re going to be selling a bunch of cameras.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (12:34)
That’s great. That’s great.
Jason Niedle (12:36)
Yeah. So let’s talk
about growth. How are you guys looking at growth? Is it user adoption? Is it revenue? And what are you guys looking to grow this year? How are you trying to grow?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (12:45)
So the growth for us has been through partnership. And now we have, a few companies that we partner, but the major ones that we’re working on right now is Cisco and also Lucid recently. And Lucid Charted.
You you’re doing all the online whiteboarding with them as well. So we are actually complimentary on the product. With Cisco, as you mentioned, they are selling these Cisco room devices that you use for video conferencing. And the reason they were super interested in what we’re offering is, and they made us a partner and they made us Solution Plus partners because
we add in very, very unique value to all these cameras. So we are the only one as a software that could be integrated with any camera And we’ve gone with the model of partnership because we can access to a lot of the customers of, for example, Cisco that we couldn’t do before. So they can
see JIBB on the global price list of Cisco, they can see our JIBB exists, we can order it. So the procurement, all the invoicing still happens through Cisco for us and make it a lot easier. We have access to them. They can trust us whether, you we’re a very small company and, you know, these massive enterprises, they won’t easily trust, the small companies. And that’s how we see it.
Jason Niedle (13:48)
Mmm.
Right.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (14:11)
that we can build the trust with Cisco because they’ve done all the security check and all other things on us. And that’s one part of it. Also with Cisco, especially, they have access to 60,000 partners.
And we’ve been introduced to some of these and we’re going to do more and more to have access to these partners that they sell these, then they can also sell JIBB alongside it too. So imagine we’re building, you know, even 10 % of those partners also working with us is like 6,000 partners all around the globe.
Jason Niedle (14:48)
Mm-hmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (14:48)
That,
for example, is not only US. Let’s say Latin America, they can’t even speak English. We don’t need to hire a Spanish salesperson So they do the whole the sales for us. So make it super scalable and easy for us. And not only that, if there’s a competitor also coming to this space,
Jason Niedle (14:56)
Yeah.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (15:07)
the network that we build, it protects us heavily against any of them because they have to, say they want to sell to these people or to these companies. So if we are there, why they want to work with someone else?
Jason Niedle (15:18)
Mm-hmm.
like to look at the problem and say, so you have these ideal customer profiles and one of them are the big partners like Cisco. And then another one is clearly going to be businesses who want to use this, right? And those are very different audiences, right? One is a giant enterprise or partner program, right? And then you have enterprise programs and then you have smaller companies like mine, for example, that could use that.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (15:43)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jason Niedle (15:45)
Are you marketing actively to all of those or are just really looking through the partnership side of things right now?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (15:50)
So working with these massive enterprises and going to the IT departments and for us, especially for the big ones is called Unified Communication Departments. And we thought, okay, we got them. Now the deal
is done. And what we realized is it wasn’t as simple as we thought, because there are a lot of them, when they come to the decision and budgeting, they need to get the budget approval or multiple stakeholders to say yes as well. And that, added to the sales cycle. So we thought, okay, now we need to take another approach. And that’s what, for example, we’re doing with Lucid, because Lucid
Jason Niedle (16:19)
Yeah.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (16:30)
they focus is a lot of individuals and professionals and smaller companies and that partnership with going after, anyone basically and from the bottom up strategy of going to the end users and customers.
Basically all the companies ultimately defined by their employees. ⁓ Employees ultimately say, okay, how good is this product? And once we get to these end users, they also vouch for us, especially in big companies, with the IT department, and that’s going to help us even shorten the sales cycle that exists with them, because that’s going to force them
Jason Niedle (16:53)
Thanks.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (17:16)
have an urgency to close the deal. So this is how we’re going to combine it and especially this year, combine these two strategies and to make things faster.
Jason Niedle (17:27)
Yeah, I love that.
What’s holding you back in terms of growth and how you’re reaching? Is it these long enterprise cycles? Is it reaching the right people? Is it that in some ways the partners are a smaller market? What are the constraints to hypergrowth?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (17:41)
So we were the first ever pre-revenue company that became a Solution Plus partner of Cisco. And the reason for that was, and there are about a hundred companies that they have the badge of solution plus partner all around the globe. And in every kind of
Jason Niedle (17:57)
Mm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (18:01)
different businesses that Cisco has from security, network, collaboration, etc. That I mentioned. And there are very few in collaboration and we are one of them. And the reason they chose us because we add in specific unique value that no one else does. And that’s why they’ve done it. We know, for example, there are many companies that actually they’ve generated millions and millions of dollars in revenue.
And they come to us and say, how the hell you guys got to it’s solution plus partner. So that would be awesome. And we work on it for a couple of years to get there. And we thought, okay, that is now we’ve done that everything going to be super fast, super easy, etc. But the problem was, Cisco is a giant machine. So big.
Jason Niedle (18:30)
Right.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (18:47)
So many different departments, so many different teams that don’t even know each other, talk to each other. We’re such a small company and we need to make that awareness within the Cisco sales teams all around the globe. And even the product team and marketing team to know about us. And so they can sell when they see the customer and have a problem with the whiteboard or a JIBB exists. So they can offer them, right?
Jason Niedle (19:03)
Mmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (19:13)
Otherwise, they don’t know about us. They cannot even make the offer.
Jason Niedle (19:17)
Yeah,
just because you’re a partner doesn’t mean they’re selling it every day.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (19:19)
Yeah. So, and then a lot of them don’t know. So we had to make a lot of awareness and we keep still doing it. Still it happens to us. We talk to someone and say, we don’t, I wish I knew, I had a client a month ago. I was talking, they have these problems. I didn’t know about it. So this been some challenge for us, you know, working with these big companies and they’re constrained for us to have more resources.
And more investment as a matter of fact, we’re fund to have more money so we can hire, two or three people to work more closely with these partners and Cisco to make sure things happens. So it wasn’t like, okay, it’s to happen by its own. We still need to make that push. once, you know, by the time is it basically a patient game? So
after probably another two years or so, one year, two years, we create more and more awareness, then it’s gonna be rollover and gonna be more and more people know about us within the community without even, much less effort from our side.
Jason Niedle (20:22)
Yeah, awareness is the big key. What are you doing right now for awareness in terms of campaigns? Do have any campaigns out there or are you using, providing sales enablement tools for the Cisco team like marketing literature? Like how are you getting the word out to Cisco and your partners?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (20:40)
So for Cisco, any events that they have, we’re trying to be in that events. They have multiple events like Cisco Live. Also virtual events, connecting to key decision makers and organizers.
And once there is a webinar to their team or to others, they inviting us. Ultimately, we’re humans and salespeople, there’s enterprise sales that must know you and that we realize is not like
you know, going virtually and sending some materials or, you know, a campaign on the social media, it’s to help us much. Not really. But with the Lucid, I think it’s going to be different because there are a lot more agile, there are startup culture and with them, we can do a lot more join campaign and that it could be on the social media or other platforms or using influencers.
to spread the word.
Jason Niedle (21:34)
sure that makes
So you have a company, you’re based in Australia and your company’s here in the United States and California like me. The world’s pretty turbulent, trade is difficult. There’s crazy stuff going on at least one of your two countries. What trends do you see ahead and how are you planning for that?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (21:53)
I don’t think the tariffs gonna affect us in particular because we are a US based company as well and we are software so I don’t think and we have our servers based on the region and for US it’s all you know servers on AWS on the region so it’s all good and we’ve been passing through a lot of security checks.
So I don’t think in regard we’re going to affect us. In terms of where, I don’t know, Donald Trump, I have no clue where you’re going from here in terms of global trades and it seems it’s changing every day. So I hope it’s going to come to conclusion soon because…
Jason Niedle (22:32)
How do you guys power
through that? You have a company to run with turbulence ahead. Are you doing anything differently?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (22:39)
Not really. I think the ones that might affect us in some ways because now there’s uncertainty in the market. It might affect some fundings because some people I know that stopped investing very recently because of uncertainty in the market. But I think it’s going to calm down hopefully soon in a matter of months. Rather than that, nothing really.
that it’s gonna affect us in that regard. The other thing that might affect us because we don’t know yet, honestly, we work in, also we got huge interest for federal agencies in US. And obviously there is a lot of changes happening right now within agencies. And they love the whiteboard, we even started creating the solution for them because they solutions, they don’t wanna be on
Jason Niedle (23:18)
Mmm.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (23:27)
on the cloud, they want to be on-prem, on their own servers. We’ve done that. We’re working with a partner, a couple of partners actually, to roll out to these guys. But it might actually affect us in that way because federal agencies now also going to a lot of, that’s nothing to do with trade perhaps, but also they going through some changes now. So that might delay the whole process.
Jason Niedle (23:49)
Although maybe in some way if there’s less bureaucracy down the line it might be easier to get in, who knows, right? Who knows? Well this has really been fun. Where can our audience find you?
Vahid Kolahdouzan (23:54)
True, true, who knows? Who knows?
I’m on LinkedIn myself primarily and they can find our company at www.jibb.ai
Jason Niedle (24:07)
J-I-B-B.A-I. And I’ll put a link in our description down here with an offer for just our listeners for your new product. I appreciate that. Vahid, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For our tech leadership out there, we are committed to your growth. So we drop episodes twice a week. That’s Tuesday and Thursday. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, T-E-T-H-O-S.com, where you can also grab that hyperscale playbook. I promise it’s useful.
Vahid Kolahdouzan (24:16)
Thanks so much.
Jason Niedle (24:35)
real battle-tested strategies, and that’s at tethos.com/podcast. So if you got some value today, please go ahead and share the episode, I appreciate that. And I love questions for me or future guests or any comments or feedback. And don’t forget to grab your link for JIBB. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS
