Tsavo Knott - Co-Founder and CEO of Pieces: Building a Community, Trusting your Gut, and Company Events

Tsavo Knott 00:01
Yeah, so when we think about how to increase the top of the funnel, it’s all about maximizing our digital footprint. What I mean by that is we have a blog at Pieces that’s somewhat unrelated to our product, but we have a lot of authors, including ourselves, who write technical guides—like how to build something with React or how to implement a Python database, or whatever. Over time, we drive a lot of traffic to that blog, and then developers think, “Okay, what's the company behind this blog? Let me go check out their product or whatever else.” We started with a focus on helpfulness.

Callan Harrington 00:34
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out the key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Tsavo Knott. Tsavo is the CEO and co-founder of Pieces. Pieces is a suite of on-device developer tools that boost productivity by helping you solve complex development tasks through a contextual understanding of your entire workflow. Tsavo has been an entrepreneur from the jump; he founded his first company, Accent.ai, straight out of high school. I have to tell you, this was super interesting. With Tsavo starting that young, he’s incredibly motivated to build things, and that became very apparent very quickly as we kicked off this interview. We talked about how he learned to balance his gut instincts with market feedback to know when he was on the right track. Trusting your gut is something that comes up all the time on the show, and it’s something I’m personally working on, so I love discussing this. We also discussed how he utilizes company events to generate a positive company culture. A through line throughout this entire conversation was how great of a community builder Tsavo is, which I think is a tremendous skill to have as an entrepreneur. My favorite part of the conversation was discussing the challenge of reaching engineers in the sales process. It’s not a stretch to say that nobody loves being sold to, but engineers really don’t love being sold to. I loved how he uses empathy, community, and a go-to-market strategy to overcome those challenges. I’m not going to give away all the details here, but I thought it was an excellent playbook that can be used not only for selling to engineering teams but honestly for any prospect. I think this is where a lot of go-to-markets are headed, and I loved hearing him talk through this. So with that, let’s get to the show. I’m excited to jump into this. Tell me how you got into Pieces.

Tsavo Knott 03:09
It's a little bit of an entrepreneur’s journey from company to company, pivoting and figuring out the proper timing to flip ideas on their head. Pieces was an idea from company number two that we ended up flipping on its head. Right around my junior and senior year of college, we were building out company number two, which was an ed tech platform. This was around 2017-2018, and it was basically Slack for higher education. We plugged into the school's database and automatically created group chats for all your classes, clubs, dorms, teams, etc. But as it turned out, there were a lot of nuances in doing this, especially regarding supporting group chats of 5,000, 20,000, or even 100,000 people. At the time, Apple Messages was limited to 15 or 20 people, and GroupMe could handle maybe 50 or 100. We had to build a web application that was quite high-performing, with push notifications, read receipts, typing indicators—all of that for really large group chats. Another component was that a lot of file sharing goes on in an education environment, and you're sharing these large projects. As it turned out, the ed tech space was, at least pre-COVID, kind of under-invested and not very interesting, and the sales cycle was long too. It was a great product for the end user—the student—but the administration was asking, “Why do we need group chats for our classes?” So we ended up pivoting and said, “All right, let’s not focus on how people communicate and collaborate, but let’s focus on what people are actually trying to share with each other.” We did a services project called Cloud Sync, which embedded deeply into this native application called UltraEdit to stabilize configuration fragments, if you will, and reinject them into another instance on another device. So, pieces.app was born, out of this concept of reinventing the way that people save things, share them, reference them, reuse them, and find them later—not at the file level but at the file fragment level. Hence the name Pieces.

Callan Harrington 05:15
You said this was the second company you founded and raised capital for. You did this as a junior and senior in college, is that correct?

Tsavo Knott 05:23
Yeah, that’s right. It really got started conceptually with my other co-founder, Mac, during my sophomore year. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and I was still involved with company number one, which was Accent.ai. We raised money for that as well, which was a language-learning startup, but that one didn’t pan out. I met Mac, and that’s when we jumped into this mesh of my campus stuff.

Callan Harrington 05:45
How did you raise capital right out of high school?

Tsavo Knott 05:49
We did a Kickstarter, believe it or not. It was a $25,000 Kickstarter where we showcased the software, showcased the vision, and put a pitch deck together. We did all kinds of pitch competitions. I was a senior in high school, engaging the ecosystem as best we could. The Kickstarter was really great, and then we started to build a community around the idea. There was a firm here in Cincinnati, an accelerator called Brandery, and I remember the ultimatum was, “Hey, go into the Brandery accelerator, where we were one of the youngest groups ever to get accepted, or go to college.” And I was like, “Well, there’s no shot any of our parents are going to say, ‘Hey, you’re allowed to not go to college.’” Maybe we should have taken a gap year, but you never know, right? Everything is serendipitous and leads to something else. But we said, “No thanks,” and ended up raising about a quarter of a million dollars, allocated in two tranches—$100K and $150K. We were like, “All right, we should give the rest of the money back to the investors. Let them know it was the wrong place, wrong time.”

Callan Harrington 06:56
One of the things I heard with this company, particularly in the ed tech space, was that you said in that company, you weren’t in your happy place, and now at Pieces, you are. Can you walk me through why that is?

Tsavo Knott 07:07
All I want to do is delight customers, right? I want to build software experiences that move the ball forward from a place of genuine empathy. I was a student in university and saw a lot of problems with how we did classwork. It’s funny because you get into class and have projects, and you really need to go and get everyone’s phone number to create a GroupMe. For students who aren’t super outgoing, that can be a large barrier to entry for group collaboration. We thought there was a super simple way around this—plug into the school’s database and create web-based group chats for everything. We built a world-class product; it was really awesome. We ended up open-sourcing a bunch of that and became very close with the core engineering team at Google throughout that process. But yeah, the sales cycle was a huge wake-up call. There was a disconnect between how universities are run and the actual needs of students. I will say if COVID had hit a year earlier, that company would have been explosive because there was a massive, rapid need for online capabilities, collaboration, and teaching. Timing is just one of those things in the startup world; we were just a little early.

Callan Harrington 08:20
So you moved into Pieces after going through two startups. Has this always been an obsession for you, just in general?

Tsavo Knott 08:28
I grew up building Legos and never followed any Lego instruction kits. I would always have a vision for what I wanted to build, and I would buy a Lego kit for a particular set of parts. I’d think, “I need that Lego piece very specifically for my project.” Then you realize that the whole world of software is exactly that—it’s up to your imagination. Of course, there’s a lot of willpower involved as well, but once you build something, it’s like magic, and then you put it in the hands of someone else, and it’s even more magical. So, yeah, it’s certainly an obsession.

Callan Harrington 09:04
When you started Pieces, having been through two capital-backed companies previously, did you do anything differently when you were starting this business?

Tsavo Knott 09:14
We went a lot more out of the box with a much more radical idea—so a very large vision, things like that. I would say company number one and company number two were excellent training processes or boot camps for articulating the vision, building products, refining the product, talking to customers, and doing all that. By the time we got to Pieces, we had those skill sets locked in. We also had another co-founder, Suresh, who was very well connected on the West Coast, and that was a boot camp for institutional capital—getting into these large VCs, etc. Every company, I will say, has its learning experiences and a learning curve. Each has a different audience, different product, and a different set of investors. The underlying theme is that my team and I just got really good at reinventing ourselves. You really have to do that at every stage. Building that muscle early on set me up for this type of game.

Callan Harrington 10:26
How do you get yourself up to speed on this? When I started a business, I had 10-plus years of experience and had been in a lot of startups. There were a number of things I almost had to unlearn. Some things really helped, but there were also things I had to unlearn. What do you do to get up to speed? Is it going out? Is it researching things, or is it exactly what you just described about Legos, where you're like, "Here's my vision, and I'm just going to find all these pieces to help put this vision together"? And I don't really want to research anything or do anything conventionally.

Tsavo Knott 10:58
One of the big advantages I had was that I raced through college. I graduated in three years with almost two degrees—computer science and interactive media studies. That covers all the backend building and technology, but also the design, product, and animation. My fourth year was completely free, and I spent it heads down, fitting two weeks into one week. I also allow my decision-making framework to be very intuitively driven. There are two books I’ve really read and taken notes from: The Lean Startup and Zero to One. After I read Zero to One, my whole framework changed. I don’t really watch many podcasts or YouTube videos or read a lot; I really just intuitively put things together. You can have biases about how something worked in the past, but especially in the technology space, how you built companies from 1990 to 2020 is going to be very different from how you build them from 2020 to 2040. There’s a lot of great wisdom out there, but I try not to over-bias myself.

Callan Harrington 12:13
How do you balance pure gut feel and intuition versus live feedback that you’re getting from the market and from the audience?

Tsavo Knott 12:20
I take a bit of a Jobsian approach, where we know where we’re going and have a very large vision of where things need to land. However, there are small details worth a million bucks that you get from talking to customers or rolling out of beta and getting a lot of feedback cycles in. In the hyperscale space, where you're trying to build a large venture-backed company, you have to say, “All right, this is what we’re building,” and refine that. I’d say start with the largest vision, then work it backwards into a couple of sub-problems, and execute on those sub-problems really well. What I mean by Jobsian is that Steve Jobs was very obsessed with where things were going, as well as small details from his perspective. It’s a balance between what people actually want and what’s out there. There’s that classic phrase: if you ask someone in 1905 what they wanted, they might have said a faster horse, but what they really wanted was a car.

Callan Harrington 13:28
Do you find that having such a big vision makes things easier because it eliminates a ton of options?

Tsavo Knott 13:34
Absolutely. Reducing the option set is a key component of a high-performance decision-making framework. One of the core components is the process of elimination as fast as possible. There’s an infinite number of options and directions you can take, and especially on the technical debt side, consolidating how you do things can simplify decisions in the short and long term. Of course, sometimes you need to explore radically different options, but that’s generally considered a pivot.

Callan Harrington 14:13
Do you have an actual example you can share regarding going through this decision framework?

Tsavo Knott 14:19
Sure. When we first started Pieces, we were building it entirely on web technologies. Web technologies are a super open space with lots of options regarding which framework you use, which CSS framework, which compiler, and all types of stuff. We hired many engineers who all had opinions about these technologies. After the Series Seed, we decided to scrap everything we built with web technologies and consolidate down to one language and framework—Dart and Flutter. We ended up building a native application, which significantly reduced the options set intuitively. It also minimized technical debt, and it meant that when it comes to hiring, it was like, “Hey, this is the stack we’re using.” In the early days, when you start hiring senior engineers, they often have strong opinions, so we wanted to simplify that to focus our energy on what we were building.

Callan Harrington 15:24
Was that driven by aligning more closely with your grand vision, or was it more about what would get you the most success in the short term? Or is it something totally different?

Tsavo Knott 15:36
It’s not the fastest route, but it’s the most stable route. It was less about getting to an MVP as fast as possible and more about taking a step back to simplify things so we could build a strong foundation and scale from there. It’s worked out well; we are now multiple steps ahead of anyone else in this space. We don’t have a lot of competitors right now.

Callan Harrington 16:05
As you go into Pieces and raise capital, eclipsing where you were at your previous businesses, what challenges popped up for you personally that you just didn’t expect?

Tsavo Knott 16:17
Building stuff is challenging, but building teams is even more challenging. You transition from actual engineering to a bit of social engineering in a positive way. At the end of the day, building a high-performance team is really important. When you go from five people to 14 to 26 in a short period, it becomes intricate. I found myself focusing on the fact that it’s not necessarily about the technology itself; it’s about the team behind it. If you build a high-performance team, your ability to pivot, rebuild, or do whatever you need to do is unlocked. That was something I didn’t anticipate being so difficult, as well as figuring out who works best together and what types of pods are well-structured and performant. It’s been a huge learning curve, and I’m still learning. We’re only at 23 people right now; I can only imagine how different it will be at 50, and then again at 100.

Callan Harrington 17:16
Although you were the founder and had an executive position in these previous companies, how has the transition been for you from being an individual contributor and actually doing the work to working on the business and building the team?

Tsavo Knott 17:32
I think it’s very important for the executive team to stay close to the front lines. I organize my time in sprints. I’ll take a quarter and set up all the hiring and get that done for the year. The same goes for funding; I’ll focus on that for a quarter or two. However, I spend a lot of time deeply embedded with product infrastructure, machine learning, growth, etc. I cycle through each of the pods for four to six weeks and then move on to another pod. I see myself as the cohesion layer, rather than being in charge of one particular task as an individual contributor. For a product like ours, to stay in tune with what you’re building, who you’re building it for, and why, you have to have heads-down periods where you use your product and dogfood it as much as you can. A few weeks later, you’ll come out with nuances that need to be folded in. I think dogfooding is equally important as talking to customers.

Callan Harrington 18:44
How long do you think you can do that before you can’t anymore?

Tsavo Knott 18:48
I think for quite some time—probably into the Series B—I will be focused on founder-led growth, delivering on the vision, and communicating the vision. I’ll also need to stay in tune with who’s building what, what we’re building, and what we’re missing. There’s a founder’s touch that can take things a long way.

Callan Harrington 19:10
Let’s switch gears a little bit. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the main customers you’re going after are engineering teams, right?

Tsavo Knott 19:37
That’s right.

Callan Harrington
Engineering teams are traditionally hard to acquire as clients because engineers don’t like to be cold-called and don’t respond to a lot of cold emails. What have you found success in? Where did you see early success in your go-to-market motion, and what really started to build steam for your success?

Tsavo Knott 19:37
You’re exactly right—you cannot sell to developers. All traditional sales tactics for developers just won’t work. The bar for products that developers use and appreciate is really high. They see right through things, how they’re built, the performance of them, and what they actually do. If that product gets in their way, they’ll notice. There’s a ton of empathy that goes into a go-to-market cycle for a developer-specific product. On our side, it involves a lot of helpful content. When we think about how to increase the top of the funnel, it’s about maximizing our digital footprint. We have a blog at Pieces that’s somewhat unrelated to the product, but we have many authors, including ourselves, who write technical guides—like how to build something with React or how to implement a Python database. Over time, we drive a lot of traffic to that blog, and then developers think, “Okay, what’s the company behind this blog? Let me check out their product.” We started with a focus on helpfulness. Once you build that trust—where it’s clear this is a very technical company that knows what they’re talking about, puts out educational content, and engages in open source—that’s phase one. Phase two is about building community—growing your Discord, Reddit, Twitter, and other platforms. You want a developer base, an early user base, that’s insatiable not only about what you’re building but also about the team behind it. We try to move anyone building a product for the end user as close to that end user as possible. Community is about a sense of belonging and contribution. Developers love to say, “Hey, here’s something I’d like to see in the product,” and then watch that feature ship a few weeks later. Community is the second pillar. Once you have a great community and a sturdy digital footprint, you’ll start to see word-of-mouth marketing. Word of mouth is powerful in the developer community because everyone is looking for an edge to improve their workflows. If you have a product that’s viral by word of mouth and helpful for the end developer, the adoption curve will go up even further. Finally, once you have individual developers using the product and you see organic upticks inside companies, you can pursue that middle-out, top-down approach through a land-and-expand go-to-market motion. It’s a process that takes time. You cannot force trust or community. If you try, they’ll pick up on that quickly and think, “Okay, they’re just doing this to sell us a product,” instead of “This is a group of talented developers who want to build something for us.” That’s been the road so far.

Callan Harrington 22:36
Boy, do I have a lot to unpack on this. That was an awesome playbook. When you're getting involved in the community, are you participating in existing groups, or are you creating your own channels and things like that to establish your own micro-communities?

Tsavo Knott 22:57
It’s both. We’ve invested a lot in our YouTube channel, Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and things like that. The easiest way to interact with existing communities is to say, “Here’s what we’re building, and we’re using this stack or this technology to build it.” You ask questions about the stack, and it’s a very passive placement of the product. For example, “Hey, I need to use this Flutter module.” You join the Flutter Discord and say, “I’m working on this project. I’m trying to implement this feature. Does anyone know about this issue I’m running into?” Naturally, it becomes, “Oh, this project is using Flutter; let me check it out.” The same goes for Rust and other backend technologies. Another great way to interact with communities is through developer conferences. Sharing your learnings in that environment is important, and being helpful is key. It’s a give-and-take with these communities. From there, you start getting people who are really excited about not just the technology but also the product. That’s how you can bring people from disparate communities into a centralized community, which is Pieces for developers. It’s a vibrant community centered on developer productivity and experience rather than just the technology itself.

Callan Harrington 24:24
You have a number of users, and you’re using that as a reason to reach out to the people making the buying decisions within these engineering teams. How are you converting people from the blog and the community? Are they going on to trials, or are they using the product?

Tsavo Knott 24:43
There are two parts to this. First, you have organic adoption within a company—developers using Pieces. You create champions within that company. These champions bring it to their team members and eventually surface it to their manager. If it’s interesting, that champion connects us with the manager directly. We’ll say, “We’d love to bring this to the team,” which might involve product features that haven’t shipped yet. It’s more about how we can understand the needs of your team, the product we have today, and where it needs to go to meet those needs. That champion is a power user of Pieces with whom we’ve built a great rapport, paving the way and unblocking the gates. That’s the natural land-and-expand process, but you need to insulate those relationships within those companies for it to work. From my perspective as CEO, I network with executives at these companies—CIOs, CTOs, and so on. This isn’t about saying, “Hey, I want to sell you our product.” It’s more like, “Let’s do a podcast. Let’s do some thought leadership stuff. Let’s showcase how you’re building out your large organization and transitioning from the era of no AI tools to the era of AI tools.” We’re the facilitators of that thought leadership, which is a great way to build relationships at the top. This way, you can coordinate bottom-up, middle-out, and top-down to achieve an efficient B2B sale—an efficient strategy for a company like ours, where we don’t have many resources to invest in business development.

Callan Harrington 26:25
It sounds like you’re using versions of content-based networking. Is that right? You’re providing value to these C-level executives by partnering on content and helping get their names out there.

Tsavo Knott 26:38
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Engaging with their content is also important—reading their posts, replying, and putting some thought into your responses. Over time, they notice this. Showing up at speaker events where someone from your local community is giving a tech talk is another great opportunity. Be attentive and engaged; they remember that. You do this a few times, and it becomes, “Hey, I’ve heard you talk a couple of times. I really appreciate how you think about things; I’d love to grab coffee sometime.” That’s how you build relationships—likability goes a long way in this space.

Callan Harrington 27:26
So you’re having these one-on-one coffees. Are you doing anything else to deepen that relationship, like group dinners or events?

Tsavo Knott 27:35
Sometimes we invite people to grab coffee when we’re at conferences or events. But nothing super formal like wine and dine; I think that might come off as too aggressive. They prefer organic, low-key interactions. They already get plenty of the wine-and-dine stuff.

Callan Harrington 27:55
I know one of the things you’re passionate about is building a world-class team, especially in Ohio. How do you approach that? How do you recruit for that? What does that look like for you?

Tsavo Knott 28:08
Building in Ohio is intricate, especially these days. You cannot limit yourself to your geography. It’s important to have a good core. We have a headquarters here with about 14 people in Ohio. Most of the time, they’re recent grads looking for something engaging, interesting, and visionary in their backyard. Once you have that core set up, you need to balance it with great talent from throughout the world. We have team members in Europe, Canada, and out on the West Coast, so a good amount of remotely located talent. We also do events like innovation summits, ML summits, and meetups where the team can come into Cincinnati. Over time, if you don’t force it by requiring people to move to Cincinnati or Columbus, it becomes more attractive. Importing talent is something you don’t want to force but want to incentivize and set up organically for the future.

Callan Harrington 29:13
Talk to me about those events. I’m personally most impressed with how you’ve built these communities. Are these for current employees, recruits, or everybody?

Tsavo Knott 29:22
During the recruiting process, we’re a very open and sociable company. Even if we have a company event, we’ll invite people close to the company who have been following us. We say, “Hey, meet us out for drinks.” It’s a very disarming way of exposing them to our company culture and allowing them to interact with teammates who might not be on the hiring panel. I think that’s a strategic move for acquiring high talent. For events like the Innovation Summit, we have a week or two weeks to shut down the company and let people work on things they typically wouldn’t. We like to think about the stuff you need to do versus the stuff you want to do, giving time to do the things you want to do. Refreshing that creative energy is super important. Lastly, we engage with the local community—doing code and coffees, and participating in events with local startup organizations. Our team is very involved in that. When we travel to developer conferences, we do meetups and invite a wide range of people. We maintain an open group rather than having teams that say, “You’re on the team; you can hang out with us. If not, we don’t know you.” This approach can intimidate people, especially talented individuals who may be more introverted. Creating spaces for engagement allows us to interact with those individuals, and we’ve had some fantastic talent wins just from that alone.

Callan Harrington 31:04
I love that. So, Tsavo, you’ve already had a ton of success early in your career. What comes next? What happens once you hit this goal?

Tsavo Knott 31:15
A lot of my close friends and people who know me know that I fully intend to build Pieces into a multi-billion-dollar company. I’m 27 now, so I’ll probably get there when I’m 36 or 37. I’m committed to this for another 10 years. After that, I want to build a recycling company. Believe it or not, I want to leverage sound waves to particle-ize certain materials. The problem with recycling has a few challenges. First, it requires a lot of water, and second, sorting is really difficult. Sound is effective at targeting specific materials and breaking them down. If you’ve ever seen someone break glass with their voice, that’s the principle. Everything has a DIN number, which is the resonance frequency at which that material begins to particle-ize. So, yeah, I’ll probably put out a massive recycling company powered by sound in the middle of nowhere, just blowing things up with sound waves.

Callan Harrington 32:18
That might be my favorite answer I’ve heard on the podcast today. I love it. Last question, Tsavo: if you could have a conversation with your younger self—age is totally up to you—what advice would you give them?

Tsavo Knott 32:30
The most important thing is managing the right headspace. I’ve discovered that building a company is one of the most selective processes in the world, especially during the hardest times. After an 80 to 100-hour work week, all your willpower is extinguished, and you’re down for the count. Bracing for impact on those next big sprints or challenges is crucial. Keep in mind that this process is supposed to be hard; it’s not always fun, and many challenges will come your way. But you can solve them and get through them. It’s essential to understand that this journey can be lonely and difficult. When you’re younger, you like the idea of doing all this but don’t know about the darker components. This process can be emotionally trying, and setting up that expectation early on in life is really important.

Callan Harrington 33:27
I couldn’t agree more with that. It’s something I underestimated. I knew about it, but I was like, “Yeah, it won’t happen to me.” But it did, 100% to the letter, just as you described. Tsavo, this was awesome. I really appreciate you coming on. I had a ton of fun, and I’m still a little blown away by the go-to-market breakdown. Thank you for coming on today.

Tsavo Knott 33:48
Thank you so much, Callan. I really appreciate you having me.

Callan Harrington 33:52
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Tsavo. I loved hearing him walk us through how they execute their sales playbook. If you want to learn more about Tsavo, you can find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn to let me know. If you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I’ll see you next time.