"I wish someone had told me to focus more on long-term goals rather than short-term objectives."
Peter Solimine is founder and CEO of Beulr, Inc., an AI productivity platform that records and transcribes online meetings and classes for users. Prior to starting Beulr, Solimine was a software engineer at financial technology company Ponto and an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
He founded Beulr while studying economics and computer science at Tulane University as a solution for students to capture videos and get transcripts of online classes during the pandemic. Solimine named the company after the main character in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The company has since grown to be a provider of meeting productivity software for both consumers and businesses.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Peter Solimine: When the pandemic started, classes at Tulane, where I attended, began moving online. I had just finished an IBM cybersecurity internship and had been spending time between classes researching distributed software systems. I was also reading “Why We Sleep” by Dr. Matthew Walker and becoming concerned about my sleeping habits and worried that I was not getting as much value out of my education as I had hoped.
The student body at Tulane eventually received an email that classes would be held on Zoom indefinitely. My first thought was I could find a way to automate my attendance in large lectures and watch the recording later in the day so I can get the sleep I need to learn. I wrote a python script that ran as an executable on my laptop to join my morning classes each day at the scheduled time. When my roommates found out about it, they all wanted a copy, so I installed it on their computers. Other students started asking me for it and I realized there could be a scalable business opportunity here. I love the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and thought this was something Ferris might have used, so I named it Beulr.
2020 and 2021 threw a lot of curve balls into business on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past couple years, how can businesses thrive in 2022? What lessons have you learned?
Peter Solimine: The main lesson I learned was to keep your finger on the pulse of society when it comes to media, marketing and advertising. The landscape is changing so quickly that you can’t just sit back and use the same strategies and tactics you did a month ago. With the market the way it is, I would recommend exploring scrappy marketing tactics and viral forms of growth.
The pandemic seems to keep on disrupting the economy, what should businesses focus on in 2022? What advice would you share?
Peter Solimine: For venture-backed startups, the market is getting less founder friendly. A recent story in TechCrunch indicated that there is going to be a power shift in the venture capital market from founders to investors. DocSend, which is used by founders to send information about their companies to investors, is rapidly decreasing. Companies are making staffing cuts and will soon start freezing budgets. Profitability is going to be paramount more than it has ever been during the past decade.
How has the pandemic changed your industry and how have you adapted?
Peter Solimine: The interesting thing here is that the pandemic actually created our industry. Online meetings became the norm with user bases and adoption of these platforms ballooning. This created a market that was big enough for third-party products like Beulr to build on top of the existing platforms. Now that we are hopefully on the back end of the pandemic, we believe business professionals and consumers will continue to embrace and regularly use online meeting platforms at a rate similar to what we saw during the pandemic.
What advice do you wish you received when the pandemic started and what do you intend on improving in 2022?
Peter Solimine: I wish someone had told me to focus more on long-term goals rather than short-term objectives. Because our business was born out of the pandemic, we felt a certain sense of urgency to push things out as fast as possible to capitalize on the fact that people were using these platforms in record numbers. As much as it was important to seize the moment, it was also important for us to map out where we were going long-term. In 2022 we are looking at a business-to-business product offering that will be geared toward large companies with a need to better manage their online meetings.
Online business surged higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for 2022?
Peter Solimine: Never before has it been this easy to build and scale digital products. If you can identify and solve a real problem with software, it just becomes a matter of finding users at scale. As far as the virtual world goes, it’s almost always the most economical approach to offer services virtually. The software is only going to get better.
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a screen?
Peter Solimine: At least 10, which is far too many. I try to take a “barbell-strategy approach,” here; since I am working all day on my computer, I make sure all my downtime is spent outdoors and away from screens. I personally could never go from 10 hours of working on a laptop to three hours of watching Netflix or scrolling social media.
The majority of executives use stories to persuade and communicate in the workplace. Can you share with our readers examples of how you implement that in your business to communicate effectively with your team?
Peter Solimine: What is interesting about our company is that the name, Beulr, tells a story because of how familiar everyone is with the movie. When we first started the company, it was very easy to communicate about our mission by that association. Now that we are rolling out some new products, we’re going to have to find effective ways in which to tell that story from more of a corporate or business-to-business perspective.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Peter Solimine: One of our biggest challenges right now is also one of our biggest opportunities, and that is the incredible saturation of online meeting platforms. Every business, whether a small three-person company or a large international conglomerate with tens of thousands of employees, uses online meeting platforms. The challenge here is to be able to provide users with a technology that will enhance their experience and add to the capabilities of whatever platform they use. For example, if someone uses Zoom for all their online meetings, we must be able to offer capabilities that will make them want to use Beulr as part of their Zoom experience.
In 2022, what are you most interested in learning about? Crypto, NFTs, online marketing, or any other skill sets? Please share your motivations.
Peter Solimine: NLP (natural language processing) will be my big focus for the remainder of 2022. My thesis when it comes to meeting productivity tools during the next 5-10 years is that the efficacy of AI-generated meeting summarizations will be the factor that differentiates the winners from the losers.
A record 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September in 2021, accelerating a trend that has become known as the Great Resignation. 47% of people plan to leave their job during 2022. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. Do you think leaders see the data and think “that’s not me – I’m not that boss they don’t want to work for? What changes do you think need to happen?
Peter Solimine: We consistently think that being “good” or “bad” as a leader is a stable trait. Not true. Individual leadership performance differs dramatically daily, and the magnitude of that difference far exceeds the average difference from one individual leader to another.
Numerous studies have been done to look at this issue more closely. The amount of sleep a person gets each night is a clear factor affecting leadership performance. One study tracked the sleep of supervisors across several weeks and compared that with their leadership abilities. Lower sleep quality accurately predicted poor self-control and a more abusive nature toward teammates the following day. In the days after a supervisor slept poorly, the employees themselves became less engaged in their jobs throughout that day. It’s a chain reaction effect that reduces productivity even amongst well-rested employees. Sleeping more won’t solve the problem, but it’s a start and certainly one that we can all get behind.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Peter Solimine: In the digital age, product has become commoditized, and marketing has become the most pertinent challenge. If I had one business superpower, it would be the ability to instantly put a product in the hands of every potential user. Once someone achieves product market fit, I would sprinkle my magic fairy dust, acquire all their users for them and they would never need to raise dilutive growth capital.
What does “success” in 2022 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Peter Solimine: In 2021, the Beulr bots saved users more than 1 million hours of unnecessary meetings. We are on a trajectory in 2022 to achieve that number tenfold.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Peter Solimine for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Peter Solimine or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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