AI Minds #054 | Brent Pretty, CEO and Founder at Retellio

About this episode

Brent Pretty, CEO and Founder at Retellio. Retellio distills thousands of hours of calls into 30 minute podcasts. You don't have to stay tethered to your computer. You can listen to customers where and when it's convenient for you.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

In this episode of the AIMinds Podcast, Brent Petty, CEO and Founder of Retellio, shares his unconventional journey from dropping out of high school in rural Newfoundland to becoming a strategy consultant and eventually a prolific startup founder.

Brent discusses his transition from strategy consulting to the AI-driven tech world, which led him to Verafin—a powerhouse in anti-money laundering and fraud detection technology. He reflects on Verafin’s mission-focused corporate strategy and how it contributed to the company's acquisition by NASDAQ for $3 billion.

He also introduces Retellio, his latest venture, which turns extensive customer call recordings into condensed, actionable podcasts. This innovative solution helps corporate teams quickly digest customer insights, enabling better decision-making.

Throughout the conversation, Brent provides valuable insights into leveraging technology for business success, making this episode a must-listen for tech enthusiasts, startup founders, and anyone fascinated by AI’s potential.

Fun Fact: Brent Pretty describes growing up in rural Newfoundland, a remote island in the North Atlantic, famously known for the Titanic sinking nearby. This setting influenced his early self-taught experiences with technology and gaming, leading to his significant interest in computers and coding.

Show Notes:

00:00 Hacker Kid from Newfoundland

05:39 Life-Changing Career Experience

08:40 AI Pioneers with Customer Focus

09:21 AI-Driven Customer Insights Evolution

14:56 Reevaluating Product Development Strategy

15:52 Maximizing Data Utilization

19:16 Balancing Strategy and Customer Feedback

21:51 Cross-Functional Insight From Customer Calls

More Quotes from Brent:

Transcript:

Demetrios:

Welcome back to another AI Minds Podcast is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built AI first. I'm your host, Demetrios, and this episode is brought to you by Deepgram. The number one speech to text and text to speech API on the Internet today. Trusted by the world's top enterprises, startups and conversational AI leaders, some of which you may have heard of like Spotify, Twilio, NASA and Citibank. In this episode, I am honored to be joined by the CEO and founder of Retellio. Brent, how you doing, man?

Brent Pretty:

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Demetrios.

Demetrios:

Well, let's give a quick overview of what Retellio is before we jump into your story and how you came to found the company. I know you're turning customer call recordings into 30 minute podcasts. We're gonna dive into how you came and landed on this product, but I want to hear a little bit more about you. And I think from my research. You dropped out of high school. What's going on there?

Brent Pretty:

Yeah, so when I was, I grew up in rural Newfoundland, kind of in the middle of nowhere. So Newfoundland first is island in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Demetrios:

You know, it's for those that are not in Canada.

Brent Pretty:

It's where the Titanic sank, think icebergs, cold water. I grew up there. And then I kind of was bored in high school, so I kind of dropped out, meandered around for a while before I found my way back to university and grad school. But I was like stereotypical hacker kid. Grew up playing Starcraft, learning how to code, build websites, grew up skateboarding, learning how to edit videos, kind of anything to do with a computer. And high school and rural Newfoundland doesn't have a lot of computer stuff, so I just stayed home and stayed up all night playing Starcraft and making websites.

Demetrios:

Excellent. And after university, after your master's, what you went and you decided to become a strategy consultant? That doesn't sound aligned with the hacker lifestyle.

Brent Pretty:

No, not at all. I had a great professor in university, in grad school, and, coming from a rural place that's kind of in the middle of nowhere, you don't really understand the paths that are available to you a lot of the time in life. Your dad's a butcher, you're probably going to be a butcher. My dad was a park ranger and he owned this sawmill. And that's great, but I didn't want to do Those things, but you don't really know. I'm I had no idea about being a startup founder.

Brent Pretty:

I didn't even know that was an option. I had no idea of the landscape and what I could do. So I had a professor in grad school, and he was essentially you're really good at strategy. You should go do that. So I just took him at his word. I went on to indeed. And I looked up strategy and found a job, and I applied to it and I got it. And I was that's great.

Demetrios:

Yeah, man, I am a hundred percent with you on that. I just interviewed a researcher at Harvard the other day for the other podcast that I do, and he explores the night sky, and he uses AI to try and find anomalies in the night sky. And the whole time I was interviewing him, I was thinking, why didn't anybody tell me that this is a possible career path? Because I would have loved to do something like that.

Brent Pretty:

Yeah. And it's true. And so most people end up defaulting to what's around them, and that can be really good. And it can be also limiting as well. If you grow up and your parents and the people around you are incredibly impressive. I think there's this weird small town in Finland which has, a disproportionate amount of hockey goalies, and it's because that are in the NHL.

Brent Pretty:

It's because they all see the success. All the skateboarders are in California. It's because they see that as being possible. So that's really it, I think that's a really hard thing, is understanding the scope and potential of possibilities. And ultimately, no one's going to do it for you. So you kind of, if you want to do something interesting in life, you got to be high agency and see that for yourself.

Demetrios:

Yeah. So you cut your teeth as a strategy consultant for how long? And then what?

Brent Pretty:

Just for three years. And immediately, the second I started doing it, I realized I was like I don't want to do this. I want to do this other thing that's like product management. That sounds really fun. That sounds cool. and so specifically, I think what drew me to that was kind of a blend of being able to do and have fingers on the pulse of everything. I'm a developer. I'm not a great developer.

Brent Pretty:

I like doing strategy. I like doing marketing. I like doing sales. I kind of like having my Fingers in all these pies. And product management seemed like a really great synthesis of all of those things that. Where I could harness the things that I were really good at and have a nice variety. So that's kind of where I went. So I joined a company called Verifin which was my next.

Brent Pretty:

It was my next endeavor. And so Verifin is a AML and fraud detection software provider. They're based out here in Newfoundland and they are one of. They ended up being. While I was there, they got acquired by NASDAQ for $3 billion and they ended up being. Wow.

Demetrios:

One of three with a B Freebie.

Brent Pretty:

Wow. So that's one of the largest acquisitions of a software company in Canadian history. And it's funny, Like even we just recently raised around Retellio. If you talk to even Canadian VCs, they have no idea who they are. And that's just, that is shocking.

Demetrios:

Best success case ever and nobody's heard of them.

Brent Pretty:

So I ended up there and it was honestly the best thing that's ever happened to me. I think honest, like on a scale of well, my wife, wonderful kids, wonderful. Other than those like family oriented things, I think it's the best thing that's ever happened to me career wise because it really gave me a view of what success looked like and what an outlier organization that is hyper competent and hyper focused look like. And prior to this I was a strategy consultant and I had been in like a lot of different businesses and seen how they ran and this is just. It was just so different. And you could tell, I could tell right away in the first meeting I walked into. It was shocking.

Demetrios:

You probably had that same feeling for the rest of the time you were there. So what are the meetings just being hyper efficient? Is it that people in these meetings are of a different caliber? What. What are these things?

Brent Pretty:

So it's a combination of all of it. But I really do think if you build an amazing organization, people rise to that level in the same way that like if you don't know the possibilities of what you want to do for your career growing up, you'll just rise to the level of the things you see so specifically. I walk in like my first day, I walk in the room and there's this meeting. It's the level of candor and honesty. A lot of the time in like cor. In corporations and in business, people lie and they don't lie on purpose. They just like, it's hard to tell the truth. Right.

Brent Pretty:

Like it is hard to be honest with yourself and with the people around you because you have an incentive to try to do things that are really good for you personally. And so you might want to like sugarcoat something. It was the level of directness of we're all here attacking this problem. And like this isn't working. This is good. That's a crap solution. You should rethink that. Do you really want to be on this team? Like just the level of directness, the level of candor, but not in a bet, maybe there's another job here for you that would be better.

Brent Pretty:

This one's not really. I don't think it's working.

Demetrios:

Yeah, in the mail room. Get out of here.

Brent Pretty:

Yeah. And but hyper competence. And I would define of like having a very explicit strategy, having that waterfall down and having everyone at every part of the organization be able to one, recite it and then two, follow it to the ladder.

Demetrios:

Uh huh. Fascinating. So it was very mission driven in that regard.

Brent Pretty:

Extremely. And so they used a strategy framework which started like mission vision at the top. And that cascaded down to what's our annual kind of our thematic goal? Which cascaded down to kind of what are our objectives in this place? And it was all built around a playbook that they had created around they progressively march up market and to do that they acquire like they have a bowling pin strategy. We acquire five customers, we make them referenceable, then we acquire 10, then we acquire a hundred and they just rinse, lather, repeat of how this worked and had everyone kind of working in the same, marching to the beat of the same drum. And with that came just like an incredibly efficient product organization and sales organization. And it worked again and again and again and again.

Demetrios:

And so how did you get into the AI side of product?

Brent Pretty:

Yeah, so I would say that They've been an AI company for 20 years, which is they've been like one of the reasons they were successful. I would say that there are two real reasons that they're successful. One, they were at the forefront of artificial intelligence 20 years ago. They were building Beijing nets to predict money laundering, fraud, so on and so forth. Two was kind of their customer obsession. And so every single before, long before gong existed, they recorded every single call they did with customers. And you had to listen to them. If you were on a team, if you're on a development team and you're in a meeting, if you didn't listen to the call, you don't get to talk, you don't really get to have an opinion on you didn't listen to the customer.

Brent Pretty:

So like people will be listening to calls on their way to work. They'd be listening while they ate super, they'd be listening. They would just be completely obsessed with listening to what customers were saying at all times. And so how I ended up in that kind of the AI side was being so forward focus they had when kind of language models first came out like GP2, GPT2 and then GPT3, they saw kind of immediately like this might be something. So can you go and check it up? I had been on a prior team, I was on a new markets initiative with my co founder Andrea there at the time. And that project hadn't worked out. And so we were just kind of like waiting to see what our next thing at the company was going to be. So I wrote a proposal around the product that ended up being what's called their entity research project, which was, you get alerted on suspicious activity, let's say like on Brent.

Brent Pretty:

And Brent had sent like thousands of dollars to a hundred different people. The analyst at the bank has to go through and manually research every single one of those people or companies and they've got to write a report about it. What if we had. What if we used a language model combined with like databases and open web search and so on and so forth and actually got the language model to do the research and summarize the results and bring it back and disposition them, make a decision on whether this is suspicious or not. So we started playing with. I wrote a proposal and I built a demo for that and it just immediately had legs. Yeah, it was crazy how quickly.

Demetrios:

Three days. Wow.

Brent Pretty:

Yeah.

Demetrios:

You were giving agents tools before there was a notion of what an agent was and what a tool was.

Brent Pretty:

Yeah. So we were one of the first beta customers for AWS Bedrock at that time. And so this was after NASDAQ had acquired Verifin and. and we were off to the races there and we were really early and it was great. And we were, I would say we would have been one of the first enterprise solutions that were deployed in production at like a large scale.

Demetrios:

Yeah, it seems like such a good use case too, because that is a lot of work, especially if you're sending 2000s of customers or you're selling, you're sending money to thousands of your friends. If you have thousands of friends that you would send money to, which already seems suspicious, but you need to prove that that suspicious is that suspicion is warranted. I imagine. So creating that report and automating some of it would be immensely helpful.

Brent Pretty:

It saved significant amount of time. And so it's been wide like that product now has been widely adopted and it's in use at approaching 2,000 financial institutions across North America.

Demetrios:

That's incredible. And you didn't want to just spin out a company that was doing like kind of know your customer type of stuff.

Brent Pretty:

Great question. Contractually prohibited, non compete.

Demetrios:

You signed some non competes or what?

Brent Pretty:

A hundred percent. I think that's in every employment agreement. But also at the same time and when you explore the space for a while, you kind of want to go to the next thing. A big thing in my life is variety and kind of knowing when to, when to stop. And so that's kind of where we are today is like we decided ultimately to go after a different market with a different product, but utilizing a lot of the techniques and the learnings, like you said. we were using agents and function calling long before that was like an established paradigm. We also we just built out so many different hacks for embeddings and like for different techniques long before there was anything published on them.

Brent Pretty:

So you. We've got this wealth of knowledge that we've kind of accumulated that we're leveraging.

Demetrios:

And that inevitably grows your confidence to be able to go out and create more products. What made you land on Retellio?

Brent Pretty:

Yeah, so our initial idea, the initial impetus for landing on Retellio was just seeing like understanding that Verifin was a kind of a 0.001 percentile company of what. And looking at it and what made these guys so successful? Because like I had very little to do with Verify. Ultimately I joined when there was like 400 people. I didn't set up any of the systems or anything like that. I was just at the absolute privilege of being able to learn there and learn what they did. And when I look at it more than anything, I think the thing that propelled them to success was complete and utter customer obsession. And the way that that played itself out at Verafin in a big way were the calls. It was doing the calls, it was recording the calls and listening to them.

Brent Pretty:

And our initial product, actually we're gonna do an an AI user interviewer, which we still might in the future, but we were gonna do like a user research. You deploy it and we go interview your customers and we bring it back and we bring all the Results. And because we just saw it as so important for Verifin the ultimate impetus of it was, was just connecting the dots of this seems really important here. And watch the success. We talked to a lot of people at a lot of different companies and the trend that we saw was the companies that were the most successful at who we talked to, they did this too. And the companies that weren't successful, they didn't do this. They weren't like obsessed with doing it. And we're there's a through line here that makes a lot of sense.

Brent Pretty:

So what we ended up doing and thinking about was how do we productize that in some way? And our first idea of that was the, we're going to do like this user interviewer. And then we thought about it a little more and we started talking to people and they're what we actually we've got more than enough data. Because the hard part about startups too, and that we've realized and product development is a lot of the time you think you want to build a product to make up for someone's shortcomings, but what you actually wanted, what you actually should do is the people that have the shortcoming don't value the thing anyway, so they're not going to do the thing. So if you build them a tool to do more interviews and you don't do interviews to begin with, you're probably not going to use it.

Demetrios:

Yeah, if you don't have that culture exactly like you're saying, where meetings are run and people can speak in meetings because they've listened to the calls. If that is devoid of the culture, then it doesn't matter. They're not going to value it.

Brent Pretty:

Exactly. So what we ended up realizing was there is a treasure trove. Like the companies that do value is what they're telling us is we have too much data. We don't actually, we're not able to do anything with it and we know it's useful and we value it highly. And we listen to calls every chance we get. I'm running on the treadmill listening to GONG calls, I'm driving to work listening to GONG calls. How do I increase the density of that of how can I increase the information density of that interaction of how can I listen to more things in that 45 sec or in that 45 minutes? And we're that is something we can then work from. We have people that are customer Obsessed.

Brent Pretty:

We have people that already do this behavior. How do we make that behavior ten times more efficient? And so that's where the impetus for Tundra Retellio and the inspiration came from. And that's what we're working towards.

Demetrios:

So really, it's not that you're creating podcasts for anyone outside of the company. It's more for the internal company.

Brent Pretty:

It's completely internal. So essentially it's for, we call it founders, leaders, and keeners. And keeners is like a Canadian word, I think, because when we say it to people outside of Canada, they're what are you talking about? But it's like the people in the company that are really gung ho and have that drive it might be like a customer success manager, but they're staying up like they're working 70 hours a week, and they're obsessed. That's who our target market. And these people are already listening to Gong calls on the treadmill. They're already listening to Fireflies calls, the Fathom recordings, all this stuff.

Brent Pretty:

They're already doing this. They just want to do it better. and so we deploy, we create these podcasts. if I'm a CEO, I can only, I'm rate limited by the amount of hours I have in a day. I can be on eight calls a day. Let's say if they're all an hour long each, and then in my spare time, I can probably listen to two or three more. And that's without even doing any work. That's just the amount of.

Brent Pretty:

That's the possibility space. What we want to enable them to do is those are the calls you can listen to. What if the 400 calls that happen in your organization that day, what if we could listen to all of them for you and just tell you the highlights? It's like the SportsCenter top 10. You can't watch all the sports, but we can give you kind of the plays of the day that were the most important. And that's a dated analogy. Anyone that's like 30 or younger is probably what are you talking about?

Demetrios:

But the TikTok highlights.

Brent Pretty:

Yeah, it's the TikTok highlights, And so it's internal. It's for we find the most important moments that your customers were saying, and we give them to you and your team, and you can distribute that throughout your organization. So, your whole team can listen to this on the way to work, and then you can get in a room and Be we have a hive mind about this. We all heard the same thing. That customer was pissed and it was pissed because we did this thing wrong.

Demetrios:

And are you triaging topics? Are you seeing if there's trends? I can only imagine your mind has thought about that, right?

Brent Pretty:

So we look at it. There's two ways that we go about it. There are two motions. We like to think about it as bottom up and top down. So bottom up is like looking for trends across all the customers, across all the calls that are happening. And we find 10 customers asked for dark mode that's a trend that happened. And so we look for those and then what we find is the top tail motion is a little more valuable because like you might have already heard, you might already know.

Brent Pretty:

Chances are if you're good and you're a customer obsessed organization all the most popular things your customer 10 people asked for dark mode and you're but that's not our priority because you probably have a set of strategic priorities that have been set by your leadership team that are our goal is like expansion into this market or to launch this product. And we don't care about feedback about anything else other than those things. So that's kind of the top down motion. So we try to combine the two and give like a combination. But you can set priorities of I want to find these things. I want to hear about we just launched noise cancellation or something on like our, our platform or something like that. I want to hear all the feedback about. You can say that.

Brent Pretty:

And then we'll, we will find just kind of the agnostic or secular trends as well.

Demetrios:

Well, yeah, I'm thinking about if I, as a founder, I want to hear all the bad stuff that people are saying and so just give me the, the complaints. Can I do that? Can I highlight those?

Brent Pretty:

Yeah, absolutely. We, we're launching create a podcast builder as well, where you can even like create custom podcasts and send it out. So if you just want to hear I just want to hear pricing discussions, you'll be able to build that. If you just want to hear cancellations, no problem. We'll go find all that for you. We've already indexed that, created, extracted the clips. We pre process all of it. Right.

Brent Pretty:

So like when you process a call, when we ingest it, we cut out the actual moments and the snippets. Like, it's like, here's three minutes of someone complaining about the pricing. and that's what we compiled in into the podcast.

Demetrios:

That's beautiful. That is so useful for a founder, especially if you have thousands of clients and you're trying to get those insights. You can rely on the raw recordings, but like you said, that takes a ton of time. You can rely on your sales team or your customer success team, but they have biases or they have agendas maybe that they're trying to push. And so this gives you so many different moments packed into one. And I really like the idea of trends, man. That feels like something that you can, if you haven't heard about it or if you haven't seen it and it comes up as a trend. That has to be so satisfying for a founder to.

Demetrios:

Or just anyone working, even a product manager working in the organization and thinking I didn't realize that, but it seems like a few people are asking for it.

Brent Pretty:

And a lot of the time the most impactful things from a lot of listening to customer calls is a lot of the time when you hear things outside of your silo. So in an organization, let's say, I'm the product manager and I'm responsible for I don't know if I met YouTube the sidebar or something, like the recommendations. I probably don't know anything about subscriptions or growth or any of that. So, sometimes if i But then if I listen to this podcast and I hear stuff about that, I might make connections in a novel way and come up with something that like. And that's what I think the beauty is more than anything.

Demetrios:

Cross pollination. Yeah, that is exactly it. I mean, some organizations don't want that famously apple. Right. They want everybody to be focused on their one little piece of the pie. But for organizations that are more transparent and they want that, this is a perfect tool for them.

Brent Pretty:

Yeah, absolutely.