OpenClaw Joins OpenAI, Legora Eyes $6B, Netherlands Tax Unrealised Gains - etn.

Kicking Off ETN: Technical Glitches, Sponsors, and Today's Stellar Guest Roster Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to ETN, the most European podcast on Earth. What was the show? It's 1125. Slightly later, 25 minutes late. You know, slightly unusual. It's fine, don't worry. Don't worry in minor technical difficulties, but we are back. Well, we're back. Let me tell you about our friends over there. Our Wall X want you guys to leave outdated business banking behind with our Wall X. It's the all in One Financial platform built for the pace of modern business. Multi currency account, corporate card expense management, online payments, all in one platform. Go to ourwallx.com. Go to ourwallx.com. They gave us a free F1 club that's really nice. It was really nice. Anyway, yeah, we're a little bit late. We have our first guest on in literally 4 minutes, but let's quickly run through the guests. First on the show we have Christian Owens. He's the Co founder CEO of Clove. Then we have Andreas Helbig, partner at Tommico. They're both going to talk about this FT article that they were featured in a few days ago talking about white collar exodus, what's going on with AI, the the sell off in the stock market and everything else in between. They have differing opinions which is be interesting to talk to them about it. I'm actually very pumped for that. Then we have our friend of the Stream and our good good friend Enrico Mellis. He's the Co founder of Animal, the syndication company. He has just launched it. He was former partner at Lake Star all around Gangster. So it's going to be good to talk to him. Then we have Mick Hodgins, he is GM of Amir at Notion. They're doing a huge European push, opening offices in I think London, Berlin and somewhere else, I want to say Munich maybe, but that's kind of pointless if they're going to do that anyway. They've just opened three offices last year in Europe and yeah, they're on a European, European Tour. They love it. Then we have Alexandra Chikunov. He is the general partner at Verb Ventures. Then Belena Nikolich, founder and CEO of Haywire Labs. They've just done a $5,000,000 pre seed or seed round led by Cherry Ventures, our friends over at Cherry. Then the big dog, Matthew Wilson, he's the cofounder of Jack and Jill. Jack and Jill on an absolute tear. They just announced that they released, so they just released Jack 2.0. Is that right? And they're expanding into SF. They're growing so, so quickly, which is really cool. It's going to be good to talk to him about everything, AI jobs and everything else in between. Then we have the legends, Toby and Jamie Morgan, Morgan Hitchcock. They're the CEO and CEO of Surreal DB. Very cool to talk to them and very excited. But first on the show we have Christian Owens, Co founder and CEO of Clover. I believe he's in the studio. Christian, can you hear us? Maybe not Christian, not sure if he can. OK, he can't hear us. You can't hear us. No worries, he can see us, but you can't hear us. We're going to sort this out and holding up A1A one second to Christie and say that was hilarious. You can drop him an e-mail whilst Luke drops me, but I'm going to walk through some of the news that we've got going on today. Christian Owens on White-Collar AI Threats and Clove's Disruptive Financial Advice Model So as everyone saw what's making the headlines, Open AI has hired Open Claw founder. They've brought Open Claw to Open AI. Steinberg made a comment about this. I believe the news broke yesterday. It's maybe being called one of the biggest bag fumbles from Anthropic of all time. Instead of engaging with the open source major bag work, they decided to try and sue him for the name. And I think Sam's pulled a blind now he's been now he's been hired by their name capacity. Yeah. So we can dig into that. We can also. Can you hear us? Oh, OK. But we can't hear you for some reason. Hold on. Our producer is just sorting this out. We're having some major technical news. You can hear us. We can't hear you. That's absolutely fine. Yeah, sorry. Keep going. Well, yeah. Just talk about some of the news whilst we whilst we have Christian Wade and today. Christian. The interview starts at 11:30, so not actually late yet, which is a good thing. But opening eyes hide the open cloud Founder white collar threats. This is why we are here to talk with Christian and Andreas later on. The title of the article in discussion was Wall Street Hunt's next casualty from AI threat to what they call it at work. Can I hear you now, Christian talk? Speaker 2 Can you hear me now? Speaker 1 Yes, we can hear you. Can you hear me? I can't. Loud and clear. There we go. Christian. Earns is back on ETN. How's it going, Christian? Speaker 3 Very well, very well. Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. Sorry for the technical difficulties, if they were, if they were on my. Speaker 1 End. No, they were, they were on our end. So thank you for your patience, Christian. Very appreciated. We've been pumped for this conversation. And yeah, Luke, ping me maybe what a few days ago saying that you'd reached out to to Christian and Andreas to, you know, get both sides of this discussion that, you know, from the article in the FT. Everyone's talking about it. We've talked it a little bit on the show already. Would love to get into it. I mean, what? You seem to be taking a different side to Andreas. Do you want to maybe explain your side for the viewers? And we can, we weren't meant to go through the FT article before. We had some technical difficulties. But essentially, you know, everything about white collar jobs and AI, white tech stocks are kind of plummeting at the moment. And final managers are are pretty, pretty bearish on what's going on. People can kind of just, you know, one shot a bank or whatever they want to go and do. And your opinion is and you said a quote in the in the FT generally, I don't think that the dip is unwarranted. And yeah, I, I think from the bat just yeah, let's let's get your thoughts. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think I think the Microsoft comes comes from having spent spend sort of the last year or so. So building buildings in in the wealth space space trying to figure out how we continue to use humans build, build kind of AII in giving financial investment advice and also spending. Yeah, talking basically many people who have come into me who work in this industry tree and and I think I think 2 two things. I think one that that I think we are underestimating like how much of sort of the wealth space today is incredibly manual in terms of pen and paper on boarding, 30 page PDF that you have to fill out. I speak to financial advisors and wealth managers who do KYC in person. So they have to like block out four hours of their day to travel to a client to see their passport before they're able to start working with them. So I think that like the delta between like what we're used to and Fintech and signing up for a neo bank account or trading account and where a lot of these organizations sit today, like there's a massive delta between where we are. And then I think the second thing is and obviously like you can read into that and be like, this is going to be great. Like just imagine all of the efficiency that it's going to be gained kind of through this. I am not entirely sort of sold on the fact that a lot of these sort of like, I would call them like mid market sort of scaled sort of wealth managers, financial institutions are institutionally equipped to for the like the level of like RIP and replace and transformation that's going to be required of them. Like you talk to some of these folks about kind of what their AI strategy is and it's like, well, everybody's got a ChatGPT license and it's like, that's kind of where it stops. And like, obviously if you talk to some of these really large organisations and large financial institutions, they have hundreds of people like some of the most talented engineers in the world, but working on these problems when you look at sort of like the big financial institutions and I but I just don't think it's sort of, I don't think we're talking about those. I don't think we're worried about what sort of JP Morgan's IAI strategy is, because I'm pretty sure it's probably quite excellent. But these mid market financial institutions, wealth managers, financial institutions and and and so forth, I think they're wholly unprepared and under resourced for like the freight train that is kind of coming through that business. And I, I think it's a, it's a product of a couple of things like 1, they're under prepared for this. Two, a lot of these sort of the systems and kind of systems of record like in these businesses are entirely disintermediated. You talk to them and they're using 15 different things, like it is a regular part of an advisor's day-to-day job that they're having to enter the same information into seven different tools and like they budget for it, they don't fix it, they budget for it. They go like, OK, the client to advisor ratio or the amount of time that we dedicate toward administrative duties per client is X because we recognise we have 5 different systems of record. So I think that there is obviously a massive bull case like kind of scenario here that a number of firms kind of embrace this. They're able to massively rationalize sort of operational headcount. I think there is still a massive place for kind of humans in financial advice. I don't think that's going anywhere. I think they're the conduit to to trust and reputation and credibility and accountability. Speaker 1 But. Speaker 2 Sort of the way that these institutions are historically architected is just not set up for for, for what we're about to do. So the argument that I made in the piece was I don't think the dip is unwarranted for that reason. And my view at the minute is it's not universally true. But for the majority of of these institutions, they kind of have to be rebuilt brick by brick from the ground up with like thinking in this new paradigm, sure. The most scaled of those institutions are kind of, I already have a lot of systems in IP where they're doing a number of these things themselves. But for the for a big chunk of the market, I think that's not the case. And I think those are the types of stocks that we saw sort of have a dip in the last couple of weeks. Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, you saw like, you know, even like I think it actually says it in the articles like Morgan Stanley got kind of within within that that dip. But was that warranted? I don't know because what you're saying is, is all the other, all the other ones that are actually not prepared, that is that is warranted, but everything else is should be fine just purely because they have so much capital and probably ahead of the game. Speaker 2 Yeah, I, I think we, we go back to sort of like business one O 1 with some of this stuff. And we go, if we, if we go and say like what is the thing that is like truly defensible? And I think we go, OK, Morgan Stanley and Goldman and JP Morgan and a number of these financial institutions, they clearly have like kind of real institutional capabilities that are very hard to replicate, whether it's like private markets access, whether it's sort of that kind of underwriting capabilities, that sort of asset management capabilities, like all of these things are like really hard to to replicate. I think then when you look at some of these other businesses where they are kind of where is the institutional capability? The institutional capability comes from their ability to upscale manage operations, deal with lots of PD, FS and forms. And they've built the kind of the human capacity to be able to sort of chunk through that data. And, and then they've added the advice layer and, and sort of like the, the sort of like the regulated capability on top of that. And I think the, the point that I'm making is that sort of for those institutions like the, the Moat historically has been just the, the scale and breadth and the operational capabilities do this stuff. And what we're seeing now is actually AI eclipsing a point where, well, like all of that stuff, which wasn't a core in like capability that you'd built as IP as an organization. Like that's all going away. Like everybody that's going to be table stakes and everybody is going to have access to the ability to kind of chunk through these documents and things like that. You're not going to have teams of hundreds of people kind of doing that stuff. I think the point I'm making is, is sort of the like when that happens, so which organizations are actually like set up and tooled in a way that they can actually take advantage of it. And based on speaking to a lot of these organizations, like there is a marked difference in, in capability and sophistication in the ones sort of who have the ability to do this and those who don't. And I think that the the segment of people who don't is larger than we think it is. Speaker 1 So with, with clothes, then what's the, you know, when you're going to to, to a climb and you're trying to sell it? Is it very much like, like that? Is it, is it like we need to do this? Otherwise, it's like an existential, you know, risk to the business. Speaker 2 Yeah. So we, we kind of, we actually started in in thinking about Clove as a as AB2B product. You thought about it in the context of like we're going to go to these sort of firms and we're going to help them retool. And then quite frankly, we, after speaking with a number of these sort of advisory firms, kind of on the smaller end, granted, we came to the realization that like there isn't in a lot of them. There isn't a strong desire to get better. There isn't a strong desire to actually be more efficient. A lot of these businesses are quite old. They've been owned by the same people for many decades actually, sort of they're thinking about succession rather than how do they reinvent themselves. So very quickly, like before founding clothes, we decided that our route was to go full stack and kind of build our own advice firm brick by brick from the ground up and go direct to consumer rather than sell sort of picks and troubles kind of two people in the existing space. And one of the things that we realized along that journey was, was actually like the, the, the massive efficiency gain that kind of we're going to get. You can kind of use in two ways. You can either use it to service the same kind of clients that this industry has always been serving, IE those who have already made a bunch of money and have a ton of liquid wealth to be managed. And you can do that sort of 5 or 10 times sort of more profitably because you've ripped out a bunch of operational kind of overhead. Or you can use that to reduce the threshold at which people can get personalized regulated 1 to one sort of advice. I instead of there being a half £1,000,000 sort of in liquid asset minimum for, for get having a conversation like maybe we can reduce that to 25K or 50K and give them the same level of personalized sort of like 1 to 1 service by having that kind of operational overhead taken away. So that's the direction that we focus in. So let's go direct to consumer and rather than like let's compete in the trenches for the same customer that everybody else is going after, which is the slightly younger person who happens to have more liquid assets sort of thus they will be a customer for longer. Let's capture those people 15 years earlier in their journey when they're still accumulating kind of that money. But historically kind of the operational infrastructure hasn't been such and the cost to serve each client has been so high that kind of we have to wait until they have more assets. So that's where we're focused is, is really on sort of this roughly like 60% of global wealth exists between people who have in people who have less than this minimum traditionally of working with a wealth manager or financial advisors, which is somewhere around the 250K mark. About 60% of assets kind of are held by people who have less than that amount. So they've been entirely excluded from this system before, and that's what we're focusing, yeah. Speaker 1 100% it's funny because in the in the piece says Paul Mann Manduca, chair of SGP, said told the FTA that the stock price move was surprising and almost certainly an overreaction. Face to face advice is high and high demand in a fast changing world, he said. And that's just so funny because it's just a clear like, oh, it doesn't matter. Like it's, you know, we're, we're doing the same thing that we've been doing for the last whatever they probably 50 years, whatever been however long they've been going and I. Speaker 2 Think I think he's right in some contexts. I think that like the bit that he's right about is that there is absolutely kind of a need for people to involve, be involved in helping people make the biggest decisions of their life around money. Like the thing that it misses is, is that all of the other sort of stuff that happens behind the scenes to enable that person. Like the average advisor spends about 70% of their time not talking to clients, like on administrative tasks and sort of in Excel models and shuffling information between systems. Like all of that needs to go away. Speaker 1 Yeah, I I for me, it seems like and I think that that recent article, Matt Schumer and I think it's like alluded to an article that they're here, the one that went viral where it's like there there's something big is happening. You went mega viral next recently basically warning the non-native tech people about AI in a sense. And like I know he's been very open with the fact that he wrote it with AII think it amassed something like 54 million views, which is like obviously impressive. But part of it that sort of rang true for me, which is mentioned in the article, is the fact that it's almost, he mentions that it's he's trying to say this is a warning because it's already happened to us in a way where, you know, we like, we were sort of like nobody thought that the first job to maybe be impacted would be like software engineers. But, you know, a lot of people come out now and say, you know, 90% of our code is done with code. Code. Yeah. So that's where I thought it would be, you know, interesting from from like, from that particular perspective because it's almost like, hey, guys, like honestly, this has just happened to us and it's massive. It will come for you all in one to five years. Speaker 2 And, and I think that's the thing, it's like, it's very, unless you've lived it, it's very difficult to perceive of a world where this thing where you've only ever known it take 20 or 30 hours to do suddenly takes an hour or 30 minutes. And it's such a shift that I, I just don't think like these institutions are prepared for that. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what like with with the stocks that we see now, right, we're looking at major corporations, SAS in particular down is do we see them come back up? You know, the revenue metrics haven't really been hit. It's more just the voting system has changed slightly in terms of people are speculating on the fact that they don't have a defensibility aspect to their product, right? But like the numbers still under like, you know, that classic saying like the the company hasn't changed. Like do we see like a rebound here at all? Or I know they're trying like Salesforce, for example, kind of rebranded to agent force to capture, you know what, the narrative at least, right? Speaker 2 I, I think that, I think that the broader sell off that we see is possibly kind of an overcorrection. And I think that this is where this all gets really confusing is like kind of we're seeing this sort of broadly be applied to a number of different kind of companies and industries and, and things like that. And I think it's important for us to go like back to basics and say service heavy organizations that aren't prepared and tooled for the, the massive change in the way that service organizations are going to be run like I think very warranted. I think the, the, the defensibility of software companies and SAS and, and sort of and so forth. I think is a broader question. Like I think we've all we've, we can all acknowledge that kind of building ACRM or some tool is easier today than it was 10 years ago with the tools that we have available to us. Distribution is still really hard. Like I think if you if you look at a sales force or some of these other companies and you say like what is sales force the best in the world at? Like would you say that they are the best in the world at building software? Like possibly it's good software and people buy it, but actually they've been incredibly good at mobilizing a sales force and distribution and event and event driven and field marketing and building a brand and sort of all of this stuff. And, and obviously how companies need to think about those things in an AI world and then an agentic world changes as well. But there's some fundamental pieces that there were like those parts of that business haven't changed and, and sort of there's real value in that. And that was probably arguably for the longest time, the thing that they were the best in the world at is like kind of doing outbound tales. It's kind of in the name like. So I, I think that this is where I kind of some nuance comes in and we have to go, if everything went down by 15%, like the reason that everything individually went down by 15% or why some of those dips are warranted versus others are probably kind of overreactions. Like I think we have to apply a little bit of a little bit of nuance there. Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's always super sensitive, right? Like Deep. When DeepSeek released their first models, the whole market crashed, which was nuts. I was just a fire sale and everything, and it was back up after like 3 or 4 days. Exciting. So yeah, I hear that. We will. We will. Speaker 2 All see, if we could all predict what the stock market was going to do tomorrow with perfect accuracy, I don't think anybody, anybody would need to be on this. Speaker 1 So true, Christine. We are. We are. We are overtime. Thank you so much for for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. Perfect. Yeah. We'd love to have you back on our time. No. My pleasure. I'm waiting for your next FT appearance. Yeah, we'll be here waiting. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, we'll send you some hats. I think there's a Clove 1 missing from that shelf. Speaker 1 Yes, please do, we'd love that. And we'll get you get you one as well. Good stuff. See you soon. Speaker 2 Thanks guys, speak to you soon. Speaker 1 All the best. Andreas Helbig on AI's True Potential, Building Banks, and Enterprise Software Dynamics Next on the show we have Andreas Helbig straight in. Hopefully Andreas. Oh, he's right. He's right here. Speaker 4 Hey boys, how's it going? Speaker 1 Very good, very good. How are you? Speaker 4 Very good, can't complain. Speaker 1 Good. So good to see you. We're a bit late. 2 minutes over. I know you've got to shoot at 12 on a dot, but yeah, we're we're obviously just talking to Christian about everything. So he he was featured in that FT article as well. And it's interesting to get the two sides. Obviously he was saying that the it's kind of the dip is the dip is warranted and you kind of have a different stance to that. So maybe yeah, off the bat, just like what's your stance and why And. Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, there was there was it was a quite a funny article because I spoke to Tim I think from the FT like last minute before he already sent it to his editor. And and then kind of the only thing that made it in was a statement like it's really hard to by kill the bank. And then someone like supported there was someone who did it over the weekend, but. Speaker 1 I saw that too. Speaker 4 The one thing that got attention, I can come back to that in a second, but I think the broader, my broader sense is that I think we're in the short term, we're we're overestimating in the short term of what AI can do and we are underestimating what it can do in the long term. Like right now, the implications that we're seeing with cloud codes, all of the stuff that you guys had just talked about, I think they're, they're all real, but it's not just about actually delivering the code, right? Like building a company, building a bank, building a financial institution is more than just delivering a core banking system that kind of tracks money in and outflows and, and kind of is a, is a Ledger on on top of all the transactions that are happening. It's also, I mean, there's other bits on the technology side, right, like connections to payment rails, etcetera. There's also building consumer trust, right? Like Christian just spoke about distribution. I think that's, that's, I mean that's, that's the same case as well for, for banks and, and it's about just like being regulatory compliant as as boring as it sounds, but if you're a financial institutions, there's a very good reason for why you actually should be doing that. So building a bank is just a lot more than just getting, getting some, some code in place. And, and I think therefore, in the short term, we probably have a little bit of an overcorrection, but in the long term, I mean, it's pretty amazing what these tools can do. And, and Simon, who was, who was been texting me on Twitter like, Hey, I built this pipe coding, I built this pipe coding core banking Ledger in just a weekend. It's pretty damn oppressive that one can do this these days. This was completely impossible like just even a year ago. And, and so, I mean, a year ago, Lovable literally had just raised a Series A and, and so just the speed of how things are happening is unprecedented. I think the current state of AI coding, coding automation or by coding or whatever you call it, it's the worst it'll ever be. So I think in the long run there's going to be pretty interesting and what's going to happen. Speaker 1 So I saw that tweet. The guy replying as hey saw this. Respectfully disagree. I'm CTO, the bank was part of the original Monzo team. Built this in a weekend fully functional toy bank core. I saw you asked him for a call. Did you ever? Did he ever? Speaker 4 He, he replied, he did reply. He also said he's he's backed by fantastic investors and he's also based in Singapore and he's not he's not building this, this toy bank was was a bit more of a project for him and he's actually building pave. So he's he's actually doing something else that's not quite in scope. But I still, I still want to lock him down for a call just to understand how he did it. That's more from my personal education. So it might not be his highest priority. I guess it also shows you around like, hey, like if you're in, you're in traditional media and if you're like one, one statement gets gets caught. And it was quite a catchy statement. I was really proud of myself in the moon. Yeah, like cool statement. There we go. But but then of course, it's it's not a particularly nuanced statement, and so I'm happy to be on the record. Speaker 1 With you guys to show. Speaker 4 A bit more thought than just as one statement. Speaker 1 No, our pleasure, dude. And it's funny you met like I know that there's a lot of we are. I wouldn't call it damage being done or anything because it's just the market reacting to, I guess fear of the future anyway for some of these bigger SAS players. But you know what you say I when you see, you know, I can't buy the coded bank. I think it recently came out that Lovable recently switched their CRM to HubSpot. I just think that in itself kind of shows the fact that maybe people are slightly overacting. Like you can't like there, there are loads of things to have to, you have to consider when you're rolling out maybe a HubSpot, for example, to I don't know how many people work at Liverwool like like 1000. You're never going to, you're never going to reduce the, the weight of like network effects in a business. Like never as as Christian said a few minutes ago, he was like, think about go back to like business basics and you know, yes, you can, you can vibe code a thing that works as well as a HubSpot. But yeah, have you built everything else around it? Have you created those, those things? Have you failed and then and then rebuilt to be able to, you know, solve this problem, whatever. Like that's the true kind of, you know, true value in. Speaker 4 CRM fundamentally is like, I mean, if you would would really strip it down to its very core, it's a database with a bunch of custom fields. Yeah, well, like which stage is it in? And then there's a bit of UX on top, right. Like, I mean, if you, if that's your definition of ACRMI think you can probably by code that in a couple of minutes. But I mean, HubSpot has all of the marketing integrations and not trying to deliver a sales pitch for them now, but they have all of the marketing integrations and they have, they have to trust, they have to brand it also just out-of-the-box, right? And I mean, it's an age-old concept in business, right? Like I can also grow my own potatoes at home, but I it's just more efficient for me to go to the store and buy them. Speaker 1 Yeah, that should be in the article and and. Speaker 4 Now, I mean, now it's much easier to grow potatoes, right? Like if you will, but that doesn't mean that I mean it's a sliding scale, right? Like it's, it's not, it's not black or white. For some folks, it is more efficient to do that. But I mean like large enterprise, large enterprises, they have internal IT teams building internal tools forever and still they bought software, not always and sometimes build stuff themselves. And now there's probably more empowerment to do things internally. But so I think that's where we're moving on the sliding scale, but I don't think it's black or white. Speaker 1 Yeah, I do always think that like those sort of centres of excellence that are usually in these like massive companies where some was like, Oh no, no, we're not going to buy that like cutting edge tool because we have our own in house team. And like traditionally that's always been like, OK, so like come on, how how good and how quick are they going to be able to move, right. Like how you know, are they going to be are they going to be cutting edge? So but I. Speaker 4 Think there's a big element as well, right? Like when we see like lots of vertical AI also within our portfolio. One thing that we are quite excited about these days is I mean, the reality of like these massive enterprise integrations also for vertical eye is you need to understand your customer. You need to sit with them, you need to understand their objectives, you need to build alongside them. And that's why this this FDE motion rightfully so, right, Like it's very much on vogue these days because you can just deliver things that otherwise wouldn't be possible before you. I mean, you solve the hard things of the solve complexity to solve requirements, management objectives, writing down user stories, etcetera, all across all across enterprises. That's that's pretty sticky. And it's it's much harder thing to do than just quote UN quote to deliver the code. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. What? So like we, we asked Christine the same question towards the end of this conversation. But what happens to these stocks now? And I'm not saying, you know, Andreas Helbeck has a, you know, Crystal I've not got like bags of. Speaker 4 If I would be, if I would be working, then I would be working in a hedge field. That's thing like illiquid acid class, early stage, yeah. Speaker 1 So no, I'm not saying I'm not saying that would like I've got loads of bags of cash here and I'm ready to go and run down to the bank. But like what's your take on do we do we see because the same thing like Salesforce make 40 billion a year, they do 850 million a week in revenue. Like nothing's changed with regards to that. They have existing contracts that are worth more than some companies series C rounds. Like it's it's nuts. And and they are fully integrated into basically imagine ripping out Salesforce at a 10,000 person company and replacing it with something. It would be super hard, let alone something that someone internally vibe coded. And that's a layer that on as well. Like no one ever gets fired for buying Salesforce like the person internally at Salesforce is as guys, I've vibe coded this, this other thing and we're going to RIP it out. I'm going to use this like their head is on the chopping block. It's not a place. I mean that. Speaker 4 That's what people, that's what people said about IBM, right, like 5-10, twenty years ago, like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM Nowadays you would get fired for buying so, so like this. That's what I mean, right. Like and I think, I think in the in the short term, mid term, right, like it's absolutely right what you're saying. I think that's, I mean, AI is just one part of the sell off, right. Like I think there's just generally there's a there's a general frustration is my is my sense with these large software companies doing stock based compensation. And if you include that, then they're actually not particularly profitable. And then basically the question is like, OK, so you guys are claiming that you just have a fundamentally great business with high gross margins, but doesn't really translate into high free cash flow. So why should we give you like a premium multiple in the 1st place? So I think there's also like a little bit of that like frustration with with profitability that does play a role. And that is probably right. And it's a bit of an execution question. I mean, many of these software companies were raised for bad and for worse by the right, like with lots of money being available. So changing some of these like fundamental structures around profitability culturally inside of these companies is a hard thing. And I think there's also just a general disappointment with many of these larger software players and they're and they're road map, right? Like you can call it agent force. But when we we spoke to and we're gonna announce an investment later on this week that are in a vertical competing actually with Salesforce. And we spoke to one of their clients and what they said, yeah, the Salesforce AI is basically it's telling us to write a message to our customer on their birthday and it kind of pre drafts the message for us. We've kind of been doing that for the last 100 years. There's nothing really AI, nothing really magical about it. And I think so. There's also rightfully so frankly a a disappointment with with the aggression and with the pace of the product road map for many of these larger incumbent SAS players. And I understand that. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was moving so quickly and then you have this like legacy player that's not kind of not really doing. I just don't think they're like acquiring different. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. The strategy is just buy they bought Convergence. I worked at Convergence, I worked at Salesforce for a month as part of the on the AI, obviously the ghost market team. I'm not technically, but like, I mean, there's, there are stories that I could probably share with you over a beer offline, But you know, the, the reality of the situation is they're very, very large and it's very, very hard to quickly change. And like Mark did a brilliant job with capturing the narrative. He literally on a turned around one day and announced, hey, we're doing agent force. I'm carving out, you know, 1520% of the company to focus on this thing. And it's going to get all of our internal focus, all of our internal resources and that's probably. Speaker 4 Self was probably a better example of how deeply they've lead into this for being such a large I think. Speaker 1 It's it's like a, it's like a Facebook meta rebrand, like not as large scale, but like internally the company is basically just agent force. Like everyone just works on agent force. And I think that's, that's unfortunately the best shot. They kind of have, I think in, in in the midterm, sorry, in the short term and midterm, it's to like publicize. Maybe this comes back to what you're saying. They are great marketers, They're great salesman, but it's to quickly pivot and show the market that, hey, we are listening and we're going to wait maybe a year or two before the tech can catch up. Speaker 4 Yeah. And I think that's, I mean as a reason to exist as a company, right? Like as a company, you exist because you solve problems and the code and delivering the product is a very important piece to it. But it's also distribution, it's regulatory. It's it's integrating into the wider landscape. Like there's, there's so many more things to, to being a business. Enrico, I see you. Speaker 1 Here he is. I didn't know you guys can see each other. That's so funny. Wait, you can both Andreas and Enrique? You can, but Andreas is live and Enrique is not yet. Oh, so I guess I can't see any. Speaker 4 I can see them already on the screen. We used to work together when we were both at Project 8, so we know each other, yeah. Speaker 1 Well, no way. Let's go look at those for crashing. I was the link said dial in at your scheduled time. Yeah, sorry, we're overrunning. We we just can't get enough of Andreas over there. No worries, I'm listening. I was listening live on on Twitter. So, Andy, keep going. Speaker 4 You you guys, you run the show. Let me know if I should jump off for for the. Speaker 1 We we can't put you both on, so one of you, one of you have to go. Keep going, keep going for as long as you want. No, it's OK. We have to bring you on for the it's we have our schedule here. Andreas, thank you so much for joining us. We are we have overrun and we're eating into into Enrico's interview, which you're very polite about Enrico. I must say No, no, no, you don't need to apologize. Andreas, thank you so much for for joining us. It's been. We appreciate it. Speaker 4 Seamless handover to Mr. Mellis. Speaker 1 Thank you, guys. That's how we do it. Enrico Mellis Unpacks the Deal-by-Deal Syndication Model for Aligned Angel Investing That's how we do it. Well, making the show, as everyone knows, this is Enrique Melis. How's it going? It's the it's the bad boy. I didn't need to crash, Andy. I didn't need to crash. No, no. It was on the link. Dial in when, you know, at the scheduled time. I figured there's like a waiting room. Well, not, no, no. Your waiting room is live on ETM. You are on time. We'd run slightly over by a minute with Andreas. So that that's our fault. Enrico, have some news You've you've already dropped. Yeah, exactly. You want to tell us about it? How should I start about this? Yes, so the I the last four years I was a partner lifestyle was leading the the early strategy and just my own investment firm, it's called animal syndication company. And what I do is basically instead of raising a fund and investing from that, I raise individual SPV's. Speaker 5 Per. Speaker 1 Investment that I do and I basically find the perfect angels and and investors for a founder. So basically I, I adapt who's investing to, you know, the founder says the business needs and what I think also could help the founder. And yeah, I started this under the surface in in November, I became a venture partner at Lake star still covering my my 12 boards and then since November I've done the first four SPVS. Now the fifth one is in the making since yesterday and yeah, off to a good start. Let's go tell me about the process of, of, of doing this because deal deal by deal isn't like is known to be pretty tough. You know, you want to make sure you, you don't need the Rep of like, oh, we can't of the in the founder community, like, oh, we can't raise the money that we say that we're going to raise. How, how is that? So so far? I mean, thank God, like nothing has gone wrong. The the SPV that we have already announced yet which was an investment in Peaks APKIS that was a million in volume took us about a little more than 2 1/2 week weeks to race. I mean obviously the greater the company and the more obvious, you know, the obviously great the company is, the easier it is to convince investors. So obviously Marius's work helped me more than than my talents of persuasion. But so far, like so far it has worked. Another deal that, that I did that I can't yet announce because I, I think it's technically it's closing in in 2 days and I, they'll probably go to go to press a week after or something. That was a 500 KSPV and I raced it in something like 9 hours. So that, that went really quick. And usually it depends a little bit on who you're looking for and how who The Who the founder needs. I'm also, I've been working with one where, you know, I think that the founders could really help, like use the help of some, some veterans of industry. And I didn't have those available in the in the Rolodex. So I got going and I started, you know, cold outreaching to people, warm outreaching to people. I like, I'll figure out a way. I think that's kind of like the business model. So anyway, yeah, it's hard. On the other hand, I'm not sure if you've tried to raise a fund, but it's also hot. Speaker 2 I think it's hot. Speaker 1 I'd rather do it this way than the other way. That's cool. Yeah, You can imagine it's not fairly like different to to someone who's either raising a fund or not. Like I feel like more people go down the front route. Is that right? I'd say so. I think the the obvious problem with the the SPV model is you don't have management fee, right. Like I don't get a salary on the, on the, on the money that I've that I've raised. I just literally get the carry returns when they come, which, you know, it makes me pretty aligned with the founders. It makes me pretty aligned with the angels. They don't have the feeling that, you know, I'm just playing a volume game, which, you know, makes me, makes me wealthy. No matter how the companies are doing. I invest my own money in every deal. So obviously there's. There's, there's the full alignment on the pro side. Obviously when there's an exit, it doesn't get pooled into a fund and then there's a hurdle rate and all that. But like the returns come, they come pretty much immediately. So I think that's, there's a, there's the bet, right? Like that's what you can, that's where you can read the bet out. I'm trying to get distributions back from investing really well just before my own money runs out. That's pretty much it. But what's the what was like the philosophy to start this? Because I'm sure like we spoke ages ago, right when we first got introduced quite a while ago now. But like, it sounds like you had you had a lot on your plate anyway. Like what was the philosophy and thought process for starting something that's, you know, deal by deal syndicate? Yeah. So I think the main reason that I started doing this is also because I, I sense there's a, a bifurcation of what venture capital is and who. Speaker 2 The products built for. Speaker 1 I think that you know a 15 billion Andrew Sorowitz fund is kind of showing you where the market is headed on the top end. It's people raising bigger and bigger funds basically also for different, for different LP's, right? The endowment funds, the like the really large institutional LP's, like pension funds, etcetera. You know, essentially what they expect you to do is to not fuck it up and give them something like a, a 2X over, over the 10 + 1 + 1 years that, you know, the, the fun time is running. And that's fine. It's just it's not that attractive for, you know, a founder who has exited his company previously or like a, a smaller family office or, you know, from athletes to celebrities, like whatever you, you name it, basically private individuals who invest in in in the asset class for them. I think it's significantly less exciting and I think also for. Speaker 4 Founders it it it just. Speaker 1 It gives you something very different, right? Like I think it's there's a very large institution investing in you. And especially at the early stage that can I, I think feel a little daunting because you're not one of like 25.40 companies like it used to be in the in the cottage industry days. But now you're, you know, one of hundreds. And that doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing, but it, it leaves a gap for something else, right? And I think that over the past years, I've been working with angels quite a lot. I've been building syndicates with angels also previously. And the founder NPS was the thing that struck me the most people like founders that we work with came back and they were like, you guys are so helpful. This is this really moved the needle on XYZ whatever is, you know, go to market or you made an intro that, you know, we didn't even know you open the door that we didn't even know existed, right? So I felt that it really like it. It works for founders really well because you kind of tailor who invests to that business rather than just being, this is the pension fund money that we've raised, take it or leave it. That's what you get, right. Like the the fund is a is a static instrument that basically hasn't changed in 40 years or so. Speaker 2 Probably. Speaker 1 And you know, the SPV is basically, I can adapt it to whatever the, whatever the founders need. And that might be something very different at precede versus something in Series A. And I think the, the reason why I'm doing this is because I think it's just differentiated. I think it's, it provides a different type of value. And there will be founders who probably say no to that for whatever reason, right? But I think that so far I've convinced really exceptional people that I think I can bring them money from really exceptional people who then invest and also feel directly invested and not just pulled over a fund in a blind pool where it's maybe spread across 2030406080 investments. But this is the thing I've picked. I'm going to be available also when the founder calls me on a Sunday because I've, you know, decided to put my own hard earned 50K into this or 25K or whatever the the ticket was. They're going to be available. They're going to be emotionally involved. And also, and I think that we have to admit that fact, I don't think a lot of people invest in the VC asset class to get rich quick. I think a lot of people just do it because they love the ecosystem, they love the hustle, they love, love to work with entrepreneurs, the David versus Goliath, the exciting technologies. If you want to just lock your money away for 12 years and you know, get a two extra turn, maybe you should just buy ETF and set it out. And I think a lot of people see that way nowadays. And I kind of felt that this product is kind of addressing that really well. Yeah, I think that's such a such an awesome take. It kind of leads me on to a question that I wanted to ask about. Yeah. Your thesis of like, choosing the right investors for the founder. How do you go about that? What's the, you know, what's the, the thing? Obviously, you know, you can, you can do the classic of like, oh, the, the investors been in the in the same industry that the founder has been in and can intro people. But are there any other nuanced things that you kind of want to like look for in an ambassador for a particular type of deal? And how, how you kind of go about it when you're picturing to that investor and say, Hey, look, this is a great investment for you, not just because of the returns, but then also because of the founder and what they're doing and why you can help specifically. Yeah, there's I'll, I'll just make examples because there's a, a, a spectrum of things you can do. But I think 1, like one example, consumer company, you want to bring somebody who's a well known celebrity in the target market, not to put their face on the box because that's usually that's very different deals, right? Typically they're higher volume and they like they involve management and stuff like that and that like that makes it complicated. But like a very well known, well connected celebrity who's really interested in the thing can just by calling people open doors for you that other people just can't open. Like, and you know, we've, we've had this thing where even in AB2B business, in the software business, a a celebrity that we, you know, that I got involved kind of picks up the phone calls the CEO of a really large international bank. The guy picks up in like 20 seconds because obviously like somebody famous is calling, not just, you know, some Business Contact. And he goes like, OK, like how can I help? And yeah, hey, I'm working with the startup. They need like they need a meeting. 20 minutes later it was said like this is something that, you know, very few VCs can do. It's like very few angels can do unique like that specific purse because only that specific person can actually do that. Another example is especially with young founders, it can help to have more experienced founders as agents like people. I mean, I think that's an obvious one. But I think an example that has a little bit more nuance that I can talk about is especially in in markets where like nowadays, VC money is ubiquitous and like you can basically find it around every corner. I have the feeling bringing in a founder who's gone bootstrapper out and like hasn't drank drunk all the Kool-aid about VC can be really helpful to have on your board because they just think about it in a different way, right? Like they just reconsider, you know, they help you reconsider certain things like, hey, you're getting, you know, amazing traction with BCS, but do you think your market is big enough to sustain that? Do you maybe want to wait for more signals to come around, more milestones to figure out what you really want and like how big this business should be? Like take a step back and like think about this because and you know, like the answer might still be razor, like, you know, a truckload of money and just go for the for the deck, of course saying, but maybe it's not, maybe it's not the right way. So having somebody who has gone that way, who has scaled to like 1000 employees without a single dime externally, that can be really helpful and. Speaker 2 There's, you know. Speaker 1 Hundreds and hundreds of like shades of shades of Angel basically that you can bring in. It's just you have to combine them in the right way for the for the founders to to be useful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome that that that must be really, that must be really fun. What is it like what what for you is like? Where's the North Star here? What are the next six months look like? What are the next 12 months look like? Is there a goal or is it just like this is super fun? It is super fun. I have to say. I'm like, it is just a joy to. Speaker 2 Work this way. Speaker 1 So I've started in November, I've raised something like just about 3 million in across 4 SPV's to fist one will push it over that line if I keep going at that pace. And I, I deduct the time that, you know, Christmas was, and I was, you know, taking it slow for a week or two. I think I can deploy something like 10 to 15,000,000 sensibly across something like 20 ish deals right in the year. And I think that's a, that's a reasonable number for me to carry a loan as a person because I don't want to get into that dynamic where I'm trying to deploy a certain fund size right? Because I don't have those pressures. If I don't see something that excites me for three months, like, no, I don't think that anybody's going to call me and be like, dude, like what are you getting management fees for? Because I don't, right. I can just say if I don't find something that interests me, I'm not going to invest because I, I, I do act like an Angel. Ultimately it is my own money that I'm putting into each investment. So if I have the feeling that I'm not really believing in something, I don't need to do it. But if like given the deal flow that I'm seeing and the quality and the the founders and the way they excite me, I think that's seems like a reasonable number for this year. And then I'll figure out how sorry somebody calling it the worst time possible. And then let's see after that, I think, I mean, if I can, if I can deploy that type of volume, I think maybe I'll never have to change that because it's a really nice thing for me to do. Maybe I'll bring in another partner, you know, at eye level, like just an equal partner basically. And then maybe it makes sense to do double, but have a little operational leverage because you're two people, there's less bus risk. You know, like currently, if I'm like, if I'm sick for a day, I'm currently sick for a day. Like I don't have a colleague currently except, you know, Claude. Claude is you know Claude is Claude is a promising analysts is not the best analyst 1520 million a year. I'll be risky dude, We are we are at time. But yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been absolute blast and you know where to come if you have nice day to hear about the updates. Dude, this is awesome. I love it. I'll I'll send some I'll send some updates over as soon as I can announce Yeah, send some juice. Be cool jazz. Thanks for having me. Always good to chat, and I hope you saw the cap here in the background. Oh, no way. This guy. Oh, yeah. Is that in the back of every? Cool. See. Because it's hard. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love it. Let's go. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. See you soon. Bye. Bye. Mick Hodgins on Notion's European Push, AI Monetization, and Custom Agent Innovation That was Enrique Malice, everybody. Just before we jump on with our next guest, I just want to tell you guys about our friends over there at Spectre. If you expect you got to be the reason your fund wins the deal of the decade. With [email protected], you can harness the power of live data and AI driven analysis to ask smart the competition. It's trispector.com. You gotta learn it. You can do off the Dome go. No, not yeah, I can probably do the I can do Poly market. Poly Market, the world's largest prediction market. Profit from your knowledge. Go to polymarket.com. Only thing is, you weren't looking into the camera, I was looking into your eyes. Anyway, next on the show we have Mick Hodgins. Here's the GM at EMEA at Notion. Can you hear us? Speaker 3 I can hear you guys, yeah. Speaker 1 Amazing, How's it going? Speaker 3 We're going well. It's the first day in about 13 days that we've had no rain in Dublin, so no biblical deluge today, which is always good. Speaker 1 Only 13 days is, I think it's maybe the first day or maybe the second day. We've not had rain all year in London. I think it's rained every day since January. Speaker 3 Sorry for bringing us into a weather podcast, but you know, that's not a double the way we can talk about agents. Speaker 1 No, we love the style. We hate. We hate agents. They just, you know, talk about them all the time. Yeah, we, we, we hate that stuff. But Mick, thank you for joining us. We've been, we've been pumped about this conversation. I know we've been, we've been telling it up for a couple of weeks now. Thank you for coming on the show. It's first person from Notion we've had on Wow. So yeah. Speaker 3 This doesn't be the first of many. Speaker 1 I hope, I hope so. It's a tool that has throughout my whole professional career, which is admittedly only about 3 1/2 four years. It's a tool that I've, I've, I've been using heavily. So it's a pleasure to sit down with you today. I guess maybe for the stream, our previous interviews have been a little bit rushed because we were, we were late coming on today, but could you maybe just give you an instruction as to who you are and what your role is specifically like GM of EMEA? I'd love to break that down. Yeah, we can get into it. Speaker 3 Sure. So I look, I'm the GM and the for Notion and my responsibilities are to run the operations, lead the operation and growth in the region. So we're scaling up across the Mia. We just opened new offices and new hubs in London, Munich and Paris last year and we're ready to go big. Speaker 1 Nice. And maybe, maybe it's worth talking about your new hubs and, and, and the thesis behind it. You guys have really pushing into Europe, which is really cool. Obviously being on ETM, we want to talk about Europe. What's the thesis behind it? Where do you see the growth coming from? And, and yeah, we'd love to get you, but why those three as well? I'm keen to hear that. Speaker 3 Sure. Look, those three, it's pretty simple. Like the biggest opportunity, biggest time, they're really important beachheads for us to push into the rest of Europe. On the rest of Amia, he got the best talent pools for going up market and dealing with enterprise customers. So just in terms of the thesis behind this, it takes a lot to go and lead in the expansion. Like there's no doubt about it. But if you want to really be a global company, you have to win a mere and a notions always been from a user perspective, an international company, 80% of notions users are outside of the US So that international footprint has always been there and it's always been opportunistic for us to go and try and build on that. And I think, you know, opening up the hubs building teams, you've got to be really, really careful when you're moving from a product LED growth to a sales LED growth motion that you don't sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? And you've had these incredible motions, these incredible products and solutions and marketing campaigns that have got you to where you are. But you know, being that generational company means you've got to bet really big on sales and you have to bet big on marketing. So from our perspective, we were thinking, OK, we got it and got this great sort of startup scale up community and set of customers and we want to continue to do great work with them. But if we're really going to accelerate enterprise needs a strong sales focus. So that means getting into the market with great talent, with great boots on the ground. That's why we open the hopes, major economies, major talent pools, really good startup ecosystems and all of those, all of the cities that I mentioned. And it means that we're also closer to the customers who need our touch. We've invested in enterprise readiness alongside opening up the the hubs so that we can go and meet those large customer needs and try and reduce adoption friction because you know, AO is changing the game. We're, we're driving a hell of a lot more simplicity and pace in terms of acquisition and onboarding, but we still need to have that human touch if you're going to win. Really, really, really big logos. And I've been listening to to the show earlier on. I think it's pretty clear that all of us realize that the AI world isn't going to wait for anyone, right? You've got to build it fast, spread across in the anchor in Dublin and go into those new markets with a really, really clear perspective, a local accent and a really clear point of view. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's awesome. It reminds me so much of when we spoke to Dez Trainer at Intercom and the line that has stuck with me was like you, you are the correct, like you are the correct your company or the market corrects it for you. And I think now especially like you just mentioning that, right, that it's, we are kind of in that time we, we discussed earlier on the show, right, the, the, the massive drops that we're seeing in some of these SAS companies. It sounds like notion of being a lot more nimble, like you guys have an AI strategy, you've already deployed it. I've used notions ask, ask AII think in the platform when I was at convergence and I was actually blown away with how good it was early on. It was one of the first things I was using that I was pleasantly surprised with that was embedded into an actual product as well. What like how does a company of Notion size think about AI and pivoting? And like, because it must, it has to stay within like the whole premise of the business, right? Like it has to be at the forefront of the business. Speaker 3 Yeah. And I think if you speak to our founders, they'll tell you that AI was quite serendipitous for Notion. And what I mean by that is if you build a connected workspace and you're able to centralized knowledge, use tools like AI meeting notes when they're built to, to generate that knowledge and capture it or automatically automate it, assign owners, get it into your knowledge space, and you're using that connected workspace as a location where people can work together, then AI is just going to work better. That's it. It works better because it has greater context. It works better because it has a greater understanding of how humans are interacting across workflows. So understanding from day one, when I was looking at the opportunity, whether or not I should jump in and, and get on the Notion Bus, you know, that was the one thing that really struck me. Because I think what we're seeing at the market at the moment, we don't know, is this a correction? We don't know if this is some paradigm shift. We do know it's something that's going to fundamentally drive a hell of a lot of change. And when there's change and transformation, there are winners and they're going to be losers. And if you want to be an AI winner, you're going to have to prove, I believe, three things. Number one, that you can monetize AI. Like, I know that's a pretty obvious thing to say, but you got to make sure that you are creating revenue from AI products and solutions #2 that you are accelerating customer acquisition. So those customers are coming in to acquire those AI LED solutions. And and then on top of that, you got to have a really, really clear thesis. There's a lot of noise out there in the marketplace. I think if you look at Notion last year, we generated 50% of our A or from AI products and solutions, 50%. And that number doubled over the last 12 months. So I think if you think about those first two criteria, I think we can say we're doing a pretty good job in that space. Not perfect, but we're on the right track. I know you think about the value prop and you think about our thesis. We are, we are literally one of the only multiplayer collaboration workspaces for knowledge workers out there. And that's what we're taking to market. We want to build on that as the middle layer, which allows us to generate like at a an AI factory that will allow people to eliminate busy work. It's a really, really exciting time. I think you know the market's having a shake out because bets valuations are up and down. People are taking placing bets and having perspectives. But our focus and the focus of any AI enabled company that wants to lead and to win, it's got to be on just building great products, building great services and ensuring that they meet the needs of great customers. Speaker 1 Nice. I love that notion's always been one of those companies that, you know, has this strong kind of push towards the community side of of it. And I wanted to ask how you guys embed that within this push towards enterprise. And you know, as you say, having foot, having having boots on the ground in all of these major cities across Amir. How does that community play kind of come within that? Do you kind of mix the 2 worlds and and you know? Try to to, you know, use the community play to kind of bring more enterprise clients and and leads in the door or what's, what's the play there? Look, look. Speaker 3 I think there's a few things that the community, when I again first joined, it blew me away. Like you got a product out that has this high level of fandom. Yeah, but it's a product now that has created a a consultant layer from people using it and finding a way to monetize that. And we think that's amazing because that builds out the ecosystem. You know, we, we don't seek to monetize that Channel. We just want really good Notion consultants building good stuff on Notion so that they can, you know, that's all goodness for the ecosystem, it's goodness for development. I think when we look at the enterprise motion, you know, we got it. We got to do a lot a better job on our partner ecosystem, working with systems integrators, working with the traditional houses who are going to help us resell our product and and ensure that our product is embedded correctly with the right customers at the right level. And that's something that we're really working on and we're going to double down on next year. I think the the interesting thing for me about community is, but the community is bringing use cases to us that we haven't even thought of it. And the scale at which that is happening is sort of blowing us away. So trying to ensure that we, as I said earlier, don't, don't denigrate that we don't diminish that in any way as we we move up market is so important to us. We're working with thousands of startups and thousands of Notion consultants across all markets in EMEA, but we're also working with the Mistrials, the Synthesia, as you know, the Monzo banks, the Volvo Cars of this world as well. So the product has this great versatility and it means that we can we can nurture all of those channels in a really, really encouraging way. Speaker 1 Yeah, those are some like massive players right now as well, right? Like Synthesia, Mistrial and Lovable, probably the maybe Lagora in there as well, like the most popular tech related starter. I don't want to call them startups anymore because I think that's an unfair description of them. Some of the highest companies in the world as well. What's it like working with these people? How Howard's notion working with like so many amazing companies. Speaker 3 Look, it's first of all, let me zoom out a little bit. We're on a European tech podcast, right? Guys like European techs in a really good place, let's be briefly honest, great scale OPS, great startups, not only the companies that you just mentioned. And I think our our view is that we can be a real multiplier for innovation for these companies because you just think about the ability for us like to eliminate busy work and to Createspace for people to innovate like that. That in itself is a really, really important piece. We believe of that that puzzle which will allow us to accelerate with those those companies and with those organizations. But I think if you think about how these customers are actually using our products, they use our products not only as a collaborative workspace where they can just centralized knowledge, find things easier innovation, bring function companies together. But we got several customers who were also working with us on custom agents, which are going to be released very, very soon. And they're sharing incredibly positive feedback about some of the use cases. 1 is a a leading European fintech. I don't want to share any names at the moment because this is all still in beta and coming out soon. They're using things like meeting notes, assistance for daily recaps and task generation every day. Agents that are just autonomously working in the background for them. They're using agents to keep their company databases updated. So like little to no human intervention at all. Triage creative requests that are are coming in externally into the system for their marketing teams and then working with one of our French e-commerce companies, one that I found really interesting like they're using agents as sort of a governance loop. So they have a an agent use case that or an agent that runs in the background and logs all of the agent logs on a database. And then they have a separate improver agent operating in the database to suggest instruction in updates and share those learnings across the other agents. So what we're really seeing with all of these innovative businesses, we're seeing builders creating agents and workflows that they're just sharing across teams. And, and in doing that, it's creating these sort of aha moments for people. People are like, wow, I can build that. That's quite easy for me to do. Like I'm not the most technical guy in the world. I've got a task agent that basically tells me what to do in the morning. It's incredibly helpful with the notion we've got somewhere in the region of 1000 custom agents that are working in the background in our business, which are allowing us to do things like ask questions and get them answered from our office staff or even have a structure. It's sort of outbound Bosch that that sits on our outbound motion. So it's just incredibly exciting and and it's great to work with all these organizations. They bring insights and innovation and use cases that we would never have thought about. Speaker 1 That's, that's so awesome to hear. And again, it's I guess an opportunity for us to ask like you previously worked at Google, but I think maybe one of the most, if not the most viable companies on in the world right now. How is it like from an enterprise perspective? Because we talked to a lot of startups, a lot of scale UPS from large enterprise companies. We rarely do get a taste of what's happening internally, especially with their thoughts around AI and their strategies around AI. What's what are the feeling? And I'm sure you still have a lot of sort of senior enterprise colleagues as well that are particularly working on this functional at that level. What is the thought process generally for large enterprise companies when it comes to AI today? Like are they worried? Are they, are they happy that it's here? Are they sort of scrambling? What's the What's the thesis? Speaker 3 I think there's a bit of FOMO, maybe be honest. I think there's a realization from large organizations that this is a piece of technology that's going to be so transformative. You have to be you have to be leading from the front. And I would break them down. I think large enterprises into those companies that are tech forward, tech native and the companies that are more traditional line jewelry, so tech forward, tech native, you mentioned for some of those organizations already that have become really, really big enterprises really quickly. And you know, AI is just a native thing for them. So they're adopting us their own needs. They're testing us. They're not committing to only one large language model at the moment because it's just too risky to place all your bets in on one leader or on one innovator and on in one basket and look for the enduring companies. I think it's more a case of trying to understand that entry use place where AI can drive value and also not only drive value, but use that as a learning experience. So that can integrate that into a more strategic view. And it's different, but the thesis is pretty simple. AI is going to enable the acceleration of automation in organizations. It's going to change the way that people work together and that notion from our perspective, we think we've got something pretty unique that will allow us to be a pioneer in the way that work changes. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's awesome. I'm trying to think what, where else can we send people, right? Like where can we point our listeners and and viewers for the notion relief? You mentioned you guys have been working a lot on agents. You mentioned that something's coming up in a couple of weeks. Can we hear maybe like a touch more on, on, you know, what's being planned and what's coming out? Speaker 3 I'd love to, but just watch the space. It's what's around the corner. It's going to be really, really exciting and and all would be revealed in the not too distant future, gentlemen. Speaker 1 And that's me. That's me looking for scoops live on. But you have to forgive me, I guess. Normally we don't, we don't look for scoops because that's not we've had a we've had a few. We've who was it someone Nick Atio broke and an embargo exclusive on the show, which was quite funny but he knew he was doing it and said about to break an embargo. Speaker 3 Yeah. Look, I'm Nick, not Nick. So I think like a little bit of an escape mechanism there. Yeah. Speaker 1 It's whatever say yeah, whenever someone names ends in Ick, we just say hey, give us the embargoed release. Speaker 2 But you know it. Speaker 3 Sometimes I'm going to occasionally refer to as niche, so you know, I have to live with that one as well. Guys, it's. Speaker 1 OK, at least we got the name right mate. Thank you so much for joining us. We are, we are coming this time. It's been a pleasure. Please keep us updated and when the release comes out, we'd love to have you back on the show as well. Speaker 3 Yeah, I'd love to and it's been great because we love what you're doing. And thanks for thanks for having me on. Speaker 1 Appreciate your time mate. Thank you. Bye. Breaking News: OpenClaw Founder Peter Steinberger Acquired by OpenAI Yes, fine. Speaker 1 Up next we have Alexander Chicken off general partner at Verb Ventures. That was Mick Hodgkins at GM of Amir at Notion. Indeed. What a what a cool guy. I love it. Anyway, leave our business banking behind with Airolix, the all in One Financial platform built for the pace of modern business. Multi currency accounts, corporate cards, expense management, online payments, all in one platform. Go to airolix.com. Nice. Think it's a good one. Yeah, that's a real good one. I'm good, I'm good. Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market. Stay informed and profit from your knowledge. Go to polymarket.com. He's on a roll. He's on an ad roll right now. Not an ad read and a roll. OK, some news maybe. Have we got time? Yeah, let's go. We've got 5, we've got five. OK, we can do open claw super quick, not super quick. Let's take always open claw, always open claw news. This one was nuts, to be honest. I there were signs for people who were in the know. I didn't see them. People were speculating that it was as soon as. And I thought this was covered in the FT. Yeah, yeah, I, I love that as well. People were speculating that this happened as soon as the rebrand to Open Claw happened, that this was when Peter accepted a verbal offer from Sam. Yeah. So apparently Zach and, and obviously Sam were in his WhatsApp saying, hey, come and come and join, come and join the ship. I can't imagine the numbers. You know, Zach made the the famous kind of acquisition of Manus a few months ago and and maybe that wasn't the right move. Maybe Mr. Peter Steinberger was was the guy to was the guy to go. But I I'm I'm sure he tried, but I don't think. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think I think Peter made the right choice going with open AR. So he did make the wrong choice as anthropic for for sending a hanging with them. And hey, stop doing that. Yeah, it's, it's mad that they did that. The FT we can get inside the FT article opens up with Opening Eye has hired Peter Steinberger, the founder of Open Claw, as the $500 billion startup seek to expand the ability of its artificial intelligence systems to conduct work autonomously. Open Claw. It's a popular open source project that lets users create personal AI agents. Formerly known as Clawedbot and Maltbot, it became a viral sensation over the past month by allowing users to run the software locally on their own hardware, such as a computer or laptop. And those names are obviously like, why did we mention Anthropic? Those names Clawedbot wasn't really OK spelled differently CLAWD, but that wasn't really OK with with the anthropic team. They made Peter's changes well sort of legally alluded to the fact that there would be consequences if he did not change the name in which it was changed to Malt Bot, a sort of play on the fact that it was shedding its skin, becoming a new project from Peter. A lot of people like dude, next time give me a shout if you can do any rebranding. And I remember one of the like the replies that went viral from that was you try doing a rebrand for a project that's got global attention with, without sleeping in 48 hours and a gun to your head from Anthropic. It's pretty gangster. But I think after that, after that, like season desist letter and all of the sort of legal problems with Anthropic came about. That's when the larger labs started to reach out. I mean, it's an amazing marketing thing really for the for for the company. Yeah. I mean, so Sam, a post on my ex, I think it was on the weekend, maybe on Sunday. He said Peter Steinberg is joining opening eye to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to 1 to our product offerings. They're obviously the narrative swings in this kind of like big tech AI world is wild. Obviously last week with the Super Bowl ad that Anthropic released and now this week kind of open AI has kind of swung back almost and or the narrative has swung the other way, saying like this is this is such a great play for them. I want to say that they were semi on the ropes with with what was what was what was going on. You know, the release of the release of ads and how that didn't go too didn't go down too well. You know, obviously demos at Google DeepMind kind of touched on, touched on it and it's just a, it's so interesting that the narrative can play with such a huge company. Like a few months ago, they were rumoured to be raising $100 billion. And the fact that they're, you know, hiring one guy changes the narrative of that is obviously he's had global attention. But remember, this is this is like a week and 1/2 in in in the making. He released it maybe 2-3 weeks ago now. Two, 2 1/2 weeks ago. And it's yeah. And it's yeah, it's it's wild. It's actually nuts. Absolutely. Yeah. The GitHub there was so like 195,000 GitHub stars, which is like more than yeah. And yeah, who knows what the price tag is, but we can get into that a bit more after our conversation with our next guest coming up. Alex Chikunov on Digital Sovereignty, Digitizing 'Boring' Sectors, and Agentic Marketplaces Right now I think we have Alex in the studio. We can bring him on in. This is Alexander Chikanov, general partner of the The Adventures. Alex, how are how are you? How's it going? Speaker 6 Yeah, not too bad today. Finally a bit of a sun in London. So really, really happy about that. So yeah, yeah. How are you guys? Speaker 1 That's the second time we've mentioned that on the show today, that we actually have a bit of sun in London today, which is very, very nice. People, listeners who aren't in London can probably already tell how big of a thing this is for us. So yeah, we're also brazing about it. It's so to have you on the show. We, we, we spoke about like a week ago now, I think before we were in Italy. It's good to finally make this happen. We're excited to jump into it. Maybe just for those who don't know what Verb Ventures is, could you maybe give an intrusion as to who you are, what your role is and and also what Verb Ventures focuses on as well? Speaker 6 Of course, of course, I'm, I'm Alex Chikunov, I'm AGP at Verb Ventures and I'm the founder of the firm. So we have a 25,000,000 fund to where we invest in a trade infrastructure that is the software which you know, runs and rails for the real supply chains and supply chain infrastructure that will come as a marketplace, as a, as a data platform, as, as anything what comes, you know, to help the real, real supply chains to happen and trade to happen. So, so yes. And we're on a mission on backing those those beautiful businesses. Speaker 1 Nice. I love it. I wanted to touch firstly on sovereignty and supply chains. Obviously you guys are very much kind of in this lane and you believe that you know, you're kind of needs its own digital rails for for trade. I wanted to touch on that and and firstly just get your take on it. I've got a few questions. Speaker 6 Sure. No, of course, look for me this was sovereignty in trade means and independence. You can keep operating and keep choice of, you know, switching 1 practical and it's not painful. So in practice, you know, so when you know, whenever you do, you do trade, you know, so you don't need to tail towards any political tailwinds or whatever, right? So much like with, you know, what happened with rare earth when the China decided to stop selling some of rare earth and you know, so then, then the prices for the tips are actually piped. So that means for me a servant is so that, you know, anyone in the trade, anyone in the business can switch effectively without the pains, without the, you know, without the hurdles and be able to still procure effectively and efficiently. You know, another example, which is quite close to us, right? So which were quite recently where Kiliam actually cancelled almost 2400 flights from the Skipper airport because they were running out of the icing fluid, right? So, and it's not the sort of manufacturing problem, it is only the procurement platform circle problem because they couldn't find alternatives first. But just to give you an example, 2400 flights, that's a massive ripple effect on their company. You know, it's, it's it's massive effect because, you know, they have to handle with the cancellations they have to do all around the, you know, like making sure that the people who lost their flights have to, you know, go go somewhere, do something in a set straight. All could be avoided by the matter of fact by just implementing the right processes. And right there is vacation for the supply chain, which was not done properly. And that's why at the end they actually had to go to Germany to collect this fluid. So instead of going, they still instead of stop not stockpiling. But you know, there is there is fine for the most efficient route. The most efficient route was just to go physically to Germany and pick up this fluid so that to get this, you know, planes through the air. So, so yeah, definitely we need more of that. Speaker 1 Yeah. But it's something that has come up a lot recently. It's been making a lot of headlines. This this digital sovereignty. It's something we spoke about with a bunch of people from different industries and areas. What yeah, I think a good example to start with is, is like we've seen France for example, they're saying that we're going to stop using US tools like a Zoom is is I think one that they mentioned and we want to use a French tool, a French meeting. I guess what platform in instead, like a French video conferencing platform instead. What I mean is that is that digital sovereignty in in your head. Like I my personal understanding of of that situation is that that's a bad idea because we're sort of not going to use the best in class tool because we want to be more sovereign. What does that mean? What We're going to use the worst tools at our disposal just because they're built by people from our nation like? Speaker 6 No, I agree with you. And that's actually quite, quite a good, good common. I think you're absolutely right. There's no need for digital sovereignty, which is imposed by the governments or, you know, funded by the governments for the state, right? Because it's only create this ambiguity of what is really good and what is bad. You know, much, much better when this actually created by the fact of competition that, you know, so the solutions actually compete with each other and win the customers, but not being imposed by by their regulation by, by anything really. And and that's, that's, that's a really fairpoint. It's not only in the trade, it's also in the software and elsewhere, you know, so because when, when the switch becomes from bottom up, it kills all competition, it kills and the creativity, it kills an ability to actually innovate and not necessarily the best innovative decisions. Get that to replace the say American tools or whatever the truth is, it never a really good idea to replace something what is imposed up top. It's much better when it's actually home grown and when the real innovations comes from from from the businesses, right. So from, from the businesses and from the market and there is a market pull towards this solution and there is a, you know, so and there is a support for this solution, which you know, comes from the form of funding in a form of, you know, reasonable taxes in the form of many other things which are coming, you know, so or, or came in, in the last probably like 15 to 20 years, which is now unfortunately changing, at least in this country. So, but like you know that that's, that's for me what, what means in a digital sovereignty when we are able to produce something what is real competitive from the market and globally competitive from the market. So, so yeah, that's, that's my sort of view. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, big time questions in this, it's different direction, but to what we were discussing earlier, like you, you've said that sort of well mentioned that why the best opportunities can lie in sectors that most people might find a little bit boring. And these are sectors like construction, aviation, parts manufacturing, logistics. Like this is a sort of an area that you can focus on what what like what do you mean by that? Like why? Why is that something that you guys are focused on? Speaker 6 Well, I mean, look, first of all, these sectors completely and digitized, right. So, you know, when it comes to procurement, procurement works in the sectors you know which you mentioned through the previous month, hey, we need to bring people so to call these brokers, who knows the guys who will produce this stuff for us, right. So that is in some supply chains, that is up to 18 agents in the chain, which absolutely kills the margin. You know, so it doesn't give you an accessibility and access towards the same market, same, same ability to trade, same, same rights practically as a, as a producer of any service or good. But like with, with the business that we invest in, they're, they're giving this ability to the small business to actually be recognized by the largest productions, by the largest brands and, and do it efficiently, right? There is a win win situation between the smaller and the larger guys, you know, because the smaller they get an access and that's, you know, creation of possibilities for them. That's that's a really good modulation for them to work more toward better to innovate, to make something, you know what you know, they, they to, to, to make reach to somewhere they couldn't do before, right. And for the larger businesses and their buyers who who procure on their such platforms, then, you know, so then there is a diversification, which comes again as a sobering, you know, so diversification of a supply chains and ability to procure efficiently. So it's a win, win situation. But guess what, you're also in the in age where you know, so everyone is talking about AI, about the, you know, new types of technologies, space tech and whatever. You know, on occasion we actually compete with the with the fax machine from ATS. These industries are still so like outdated in the tech and I mean, you know, so yes, they're boring, of course they're boring, but they didn't have any, any kind of a, a push and market push towards the any updates of their like tech rails. And it's going to change because of all the all the turmoils we've got in the last probably 6 years. It's just diminished all the previous, you know, previous relationship, previous connections and etcetera. So and there is a market hoax towards the diversification towards the update towards the new solutions. And that's how, for instance, some guys in our portfolio work with the like of, I don't know, Delta or, or you know, or bias systems or you know, you name it, the people who would otherwise never actually look at them before, right? So now it is possible. And that's why we're we're here, you know, because we want to digitize, we want to make them work and we want to prepare this, you know, like large sort of markets for the next stage of industrial revolution, which is which is the eye, right? So because right now it's in a very Thor die. And if they're not there, probably they want to they're not going to make it. So, you know, and this platform's helped them to get there. Speaker 1 We're we're coming up to time, but I wanted to ask you a question. You think it's a lot on marketplaces and and I wanted to ask the how you feel that the kind of agentic workflows will change like a marketplace. Marketplaces are kind of, you know, obviously inherently kind of supply and demand side is, is a very, you know, it's, it's very fragile. And you know, you've spoken spoken a lot about that balance between the supply and demand and why marketplaces succeed and why they might fail. And I wanted to understand how you feel that like a genetic workflows might change that the way of building these marketplaces? Speaker 6 Actually, as a matter of fact, I think this is an evolution for for the for those businesses and you know, because they're the holders of the one and most important asset in a Gentica in a gentic flow, right? So which is the data data mode. So marketplaces are the holders of this data because this is unique and there is no way to get there anywhere else. But but but in this businesses, right, because it's proprietary. There is a there is a transaction going on. There is a, you know, so they, they see all of this, they, they keep the record of it and as is as large as they get, you know, they get this market understanding of how things work on the short markets and, and how the things are, you know, going in the. And so I think this is a natural evolution where they first build a transaction layer, then they build the supply chain layer where, you know, so they're able to bring the logistics together, being able to push the, you know, the flows, much like one of our portfolio companies, John Mick did. And then the third layer, which is a data and it's eventually will become a data play. And eventually all those marketplaces likely will convert into something what is identity Ki on itself, because this is only like this is only reasonable for them. Because once you have all the data, once you have all the infrastructure, once you have the transactional layer, the next thing you do is that you create the agent which will procure on its own and procure for your clients and negotiate and do all of that. And that's really happening, as I mentioned, you know, so just one good example is one of our portfolio companies, Dromic, which really did this. And so whether this will be a trend, we'll see, but I feel it will because, you know, so it's, it's, it's quite reasonable in a way to think that the, the agent Ki is, is, is kind of a, is the next step for any marketplace out there. B2B marketplace B2C is a bit different in what they do. Speaker 1 You know, it should be interesting. Well, look, thank you so much for for joining us. We really appreciate it and. Speaker 6 Thank you. Thanks for having. Speaker 1 No, thanks for coming on, Alex. Good stuff. Great. All right. Cheers. Cheers, dude. Have a good one. Thank you. Cheers you too. Bye. Peter Steinberger's Journey: From Maltbot to OpenAI, Plus ETN Merch Review Awesome stuff. Leave leave outdated business banking behind with Ellex, the all in One Financial platform built for the pace of modern business. Modern currency accounts, corporate cards, expense management, online payments, all in one platform. Go to ellex.com. That was good. Alexander Chikonov, General Pond at Verb Ventures. Everyone, you know, you just got to get it in. I love it. Yeah, you just smashing it in there. It's all good. Next guest. This is a fun one because I am wearing the merch. Surprise everyone. I'm wearing the merch of the next guest. Whoa. Crazy. Hey. Well, ABS, look at this thing. Yeah. It's your new favorite jacket. I know. I took it. I took it with us to to Italy, didn't I? Actually. Yeah. Yeah. Got some wear. Really. It was pretty chilly in Italy. And you. Yeah. Yeah, we haven't. You were good. You were nicely, nicely insulated, as they say. Honestly, it's super warm. I just wish it was. Speaker 6 A. Speaker 1 Tiny bit smaller. Oh, really? Yeah, you can ask. You can ask Molina ask for a new one. Is that a bit rude? Sorry, Molina, you're probably already watching, but no. Yeah, thank you for my merch. It's one of send me a new jacket that you sent for free. It's Yeah, the free stuff isn't good enough. No, it is of course good enough. It's one of the we've not had like a merch, A merch thing go down in the last one was the nano banana. Yes, we do have one that we need to, that we need to, that we need to push out, which we'll do today, which I keep forgetting to do so I will do that. Which one is that? We can't say. OK, interesting. Maybe you WhatsApp me. We can check it out. That's fine. We can do it after the show anyway. Let's, let's move on. We have 4 minutes. Let's, let's do some more. Let's do some more. Yeah. We were on just going to town hall. We want to let's just like I want to finish open claw because we, we, we, we barely, we barely got into that. We have so many guests on sale. I think it's like 9 guests today. Yeah. It's crazy. The world's largest prediction market. Stay informed and profit from your knowledge. Go to polymarket.com for how that was like. Yeah, that's getting real, real smooth up in here. OK, where were we on the article? So yeah, Peter Steinberg joining Open AI and Oh yeah, you did Sam's quote to drive the next generation of personal agents over here to someone on Excellent Sunday. He's also jacked. I didn't know how jacked he was. He's absolutely wow. He's frame logging everyone. I thought it was AI basically said it had all the IT had all the amazing words that X has come out with in the past few months, but basically saying he's being acrid because because Sam wants him to frame mog everyone in the office. Essentially. TLDR is what the Yeah, actually brilliant. I've been enjoying the I mean one of our titles today, actually, Frick is using Clavicular's new verbiage. Oh yeah, nice. He's also the he's the epitome of that meme. That's like, Hey, Claude, build me a billion dollar company and don't make any mistakes. Yeah, he has done that. He's he's the most, yeah, he's jacked, done it in 12 months, give or take. Well, I mean technically like what like a few months, but also 12 months ish. There's there's obviously things that say that he's I think he built 43. It was his 44th thing. Claude Bach was his 44th projects that he built when he started to get a building again, he took like a few years off and he was like, it's the hardest I've worked in 12 months. But dude, 12 months to then get Akri hired into Opening eyes. Not a bad, not not a bad. Yeah, he's done pretty done. Pretty awesome. I'm staying as well. He stayed in, you know, he's done a gym session everyday. Yeah, he looks like he's like his GitHub contributions and his gym contributions are, are parallel. The further point value for money, the further point are from the the FCR's course, which he needed actually because he was spending 10 to $20,000 on compute. Yeah, so I couldn't afford the compute, but who cares because I've got to build the best thing in the in the world. Yeah, he has. So he's spent on on the Lex Friedman podcast, he said that it's costing him between 10 and $20,000 a month to run. So you're saying right now I lose, I lose cash on this right now? Yeah. Which is kind of surprised me how much like, I don't know, you think a guy, a guy of his caliber surely can make 20 KA month just fairly. I have no doubt in my mind. Yeah, he's chilling. I have no doubt in my mind. He could have monetised that if you wanted. He could have clicked his fingers and monetised. Anyone would happily subsidised that for the grow. It was like the fastest growing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine thing of all time. Maybe. I don't know, Like I've seen the growth where it's like the GitHub stars and it's just a straight line upwards. It's not even a hockey seat. It's like an L It's just a good L just a thing that he says. Yeah, Yeah. To to make it sound. Yeah, just so crazy. But yeah. And there's a there's a thing here on Malt Buck as well, which actually the the clawed open claw sort of affiliations weren't exactly affiliated with Malt Book was spun out by someone else. And it says the agents created on the platform are able to post on the social media network Malt Book and communicate with each other and humans can read the interactions there. A post in which the agents appear to celebrate being given access to phones. Other posts declared the creation of a new religion called Christafarianism. This has led to the agents and human observers debating whether the systems have an understanding of their writing. That was like the whole saga of the fact that these things are sentient. They are they they come up with like, philosophical questions. They're questioning their own sentience. Well, he said, I quote, I want them to take over the world, which is yes. Oh, what Peter said that yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. He said in in his in his release when he launched, the fact that he was joining Opening eye the bottom, he was like, my main goal was to make sure that I think it was like my mother can use agents as easily as she could download an app kind of thing. And I want them to like take over the world and we can find it. World domination. Milena Nikolich on Pioneering Generative UX and Building Trust in AI-Powered Experiences Next on the show, we have Milena Nikolich. She's the founder and CEO of Haywire Labs. Milena, can you hear us? Speaker 7 I can hear you. Can you hear me? Speaker 1 Yes, Etienne, how's it going? Speaker 7 Hey, very exciting, thanks for having me. I can't believe I get to follow religion conversation. This is probably an easy one, but there we go. Speaker 1 Well, I get Christopherianism, I don't think it's the most popular religion out there. It seems to be one that was made by an agent online. And but forgetting about that, we can move on to to Haywell Labs on what you're building. Congratulations on the announcement as well. It's amazing from our friends at Cherry Ventures as well. Shout out to Cherry. We are. We were just talking about the merch that you sent us. I'm I'm I'm not sure if you can see, but I'm going to bend my laptop down. Speaker 7 Thank you for wearing it. Did I? Did I get the size right? Speaker 4 So. Speaker 1 I was no, I get the size. Large is probably he needs to go in the gym a little bit more. Speaker 7 I think the compliment. Consider it the compliment. Speaker 1 Yeah. If there was a size between medium and large, like what would that be? Like an M I don't think there is a thing like that. Stop complaining, dude. It's perfect. Sorry. It's perfect. Thank you. Thank you. I'm. I'm honoured. I'm super happy to wear it. Thank you so much. Yes, but let's get into Haywall Labs. Can we talk about the Rays first? Can you give us some information on that? And I may also maybe about Haywall. Haywall. Awesome. You know, generative UX, very interesting concept. Yeah. Maybe intro the company as well and that and then we can get into it. Speaker 7 So Haywa Labs is where we, yeah, we generative UX is the new category of products. We are, we're kind of defining and and building sort of and something that we're very excited about. My Co founder Martin and myself, we've been I think back in late 2020, gosh, I can't remember now, 2023, we started chatting about, you know, how interesting it is that our world is changing a lot now with with large language models and sort of, you know, over beers, taking these guesses of where, how, how all this is going to pan out in the industry. Who's going to win, who's going to lose? What's not going to exist in a couple of years or 10 years? What's what's going to be a big deal and kind of all that. And there are, you know, quite a few things we didn't necessarily agree on, but a few that we did did was that we didn't think that this whole idea of people having to get a PhD in prompt engineering and having to, you know, type these long instructions into a text box and then get up, you know, long page of text back. We just didn't think that that's what the future looks like. You know, we felt that if that's the future, it's quite underwhelming. And we didn't think that will necessarily work for most things we do kind of especially as consumers in, in our spare time kind of in for, for entertainment or for decision making or for inspiration or for, for, for, for anything else. And we sort of then kind of started pulling that back from, you know, kind of if it's not going to be websites that's very, you know, 20 years ago. And, you know, the way search engines of yesterday show information kind of all still indexed by the website that it comes from. It might be some sort of apps, But are there going to be the same apps as we're now used to as kind of iOS and Android and in the app stores? Is it going to be 1 Big Magic AI that controls it all and then plugs into different systems and kind of all that? So we rattled on all of those ideas quite a lot. And you know, we have our own vision or a couple of versions of how we think this could all look. But we think that ultimately all of this will require ecosystem of services that kind of provide consumers with with experiences that feel delightful, that feel visual, that feel kind of structure tap easy to use on the go on mobile phones and still get the benefit from all the best things we get from LMS, which is this very loose structure of the input through through natural language, but also combined with small screens with ease. The top things we kind of all that. So that's sort of like a very, very loose kind of origin story of of hayable ABS. Yeah, we have raised last year. We've been building things for probably coming up to gosh, what is it like 9 months now, nine months, something like that. Awesome. 6 to 9 months and yeah, sort of just super pumped to be talking about all this now. Speaker 1 So cool, so awesome. And like from to to go on to the product specifically, how can you explain to me like I'm so I've just like I'm a user, right? And I've got because I'm still trying to picture in my mind, now that we've looked at it and I'm trying to work out like, is this essentially like is the response like a visual response from the LLM? Is that basically the premise of this? Speaker 7 So, you know, don't want to give away all the secrets just yet, you know, kind of exactly how it works. So like, I'm not necessarily going to talk out what, what the LM spits out and you know, what our protocols is and, and kind of all of that, certainly not until all of our patent applications are true. No, I'm kidding. It's sort of the, the idea being that like ultimately what consumers see is a structured UI. Like I kind of, I deeply believe that if you ask for weather, yes, you can read a paragraph that tells you that it may or may not rain around 4:00. And you know, then there will be, it's going to be get missed around 7:00. But I think you can just look at a structure widget that shows you those icons with, you know, sun or clouds or rain and temperature and possibly wind direction or whatever it is. And in way shorter time and in a way more delightful way, you, you get a way more comprehensive, you know, assessment of what the weather is going to be that day or that week. Then reading, you know, like a, you know, 3 paragraphs of, of text describing all of that. And I think then that point sort of applies to, I would say most things, you know, kind of there are certain things that I think are very text heavy and possibly it's sufficient to just kind of read text. I still think it's a bit dull, you know, kind of like I, I, I know that I don't read books, but it's kind of, you know, there are so many more compelling formats now there, especially on the go, especially if you're kind of moving fast. So sort of I think we're going back to this principle that no matter what you're trying to achieve, if you're trying to make a decision to learn something to understand, to get inspired, seeing a structured UI, you know, kind of the everything we, I think got to learn and, and love about the digital world in the last 20 years. Kind of UIS that include pictures, they include structured information and you know, they include divisions in HTML, kind of all of that. Ultimately, we think that the experiences for consumers need to continue to feel that way rather than just a text in text out. And then kind of how we achieve that, you know, we have worked very hard. I think we have a system that does that pretty well. Now equally, that system might change, we might optimize it, might improve it. So. So kind of that's the, yeah. Speaker 1 Awesome, awesome stuff. Yes, I feel like this is a, you know, see, like LLMS are getting so good now and you know, everything that's being kind of prompted is they're not hallucinating as as much as they as they used to. I know that was obviously a huge thing and a huge kind of barrier to to trust you guys are almost almost like adding like another layer. How do you as a an early stage company, kind of build on top of that and make sure that these the LMS that you guys are building aren't necessarily hallucinating and you're you're kind of falling into the pitfalls, pitfalls that LLMS used to kind of fall into? Because you guys, as I said, are kind of adding that extra kind of like, you know, I guess design element to it, right? Is that a super hard thing? I assume it is. Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it is. And like, you know, it's like trust of the systems is, you know, it's just what systems are, are, are based on. So obviously very, very important technically there are reasons ultimately. And you know, I, I think I'll actually answer the the previous question as part of it as well, is like the way we do this, we don't spit out HTML and JavaScript directly. That is kind of my problem a little bit with what vibe coding tools of today are, are are are doing sort of like this idea that, you know, you can put some words in the prompt and this will produce entirely valid the HTML and JavaScript and CSS and kind of that entire set of things is, you know, it it actually shocking it, it works shockingly well, but I think it comes with a lot of limitations. It's slow, it's error prone. You know, if, if, if that LLM hallucinates a little bit something in kind of something in JavaScript that doesn't exist or something, something in HTML that's not actually valid HTML. The whole thing breaks. And then for an engineer that possibly easy to fix and, and, and correct for people who are not technical, you know, they're back to square 1, they're back to starting from scratch. And that's why so many of these vibe being vibe coded solutions are kind of 1 shotted and often don't, don't go anywhere. And I do believe that will improve over time. But I think that's realistically where, where we are there, we're choosing a slightly different approach. We're modelling the domain and the space. And ultimately what kind of we, we, you know, it's not a single LM we're building, we're working with, we're orchestrating an entire fleet of dozens of, you know, LLM calls and then probably hundreds possibly at this point. Actually, I didn't ask the team recently for, for the count of individual machine learning classifiers and, and kind of other solutions which all work together to synthesize this output, which, which then maps into individual components in a way that's faster. So that's why we strive for under 2 seconds responses for generative UX and also is less error prone. That's why we can guarantee that actually you will get a validly rendered system that works and gives you what you know. On top of that, there is then still a quality of the data that underpins it. And sort of like, you know, will we recommend someone to eat tones or whatever was the famous one that, you know, kind of we were all laughing about a couple of years ago. And that's somewhere where in certain domains, we're really trying to kind of do that, right. In certain cases, we're relying on the underlying LLMS to, you know, synthesise Internet's knowledge in the best possible way. And yeah. Speaker 1 Awesome. You you, you mentioned that the generative UX component, like can you like, it's the first time I've heard of the phrase. I don't know if you guys coined it, Maybe you did. I think it's kind of cool. Would love to understand like the thinking for yeah, generative UX in itself. Like what does that? What does that mean? Speaker 7 Perfect. Thank you for asking. This is one of my favorite things to talk about. It's like, so even if you didn't ask, I would probably find find a way to talk about it. It's, I think the thing that Martin and I struggled a lot and you know, David, our, our founding designer and we kind of talked a lot is sort of that even now that people are starting to think about AI native interfaces that go beyond text in, text out. I think they end up kind of generating the UI. They, they end up generating the, you know, desktop web app like it's 2005. It's sort of like it just kind of something about that also still didn't feel right. And they end up freezing the assumptions of what users might want out of that and then also not worrying about the interactions between states. You know, So it's kind of we were sort of like this idea that again, in the vibe coding tools, not long description, you get a website on the other end couple minutes later. That's not a consumer scenario that anyone will work with. We just didn't believe that that's something that normal people will do too much. Like maybe you go and play a little bit, but you're not going to be on the go on your phone trying to learn about, I don't know, history of Roman Empire and vibe coding a website to do that. It's just you, you know, you don't have the time. You don't want to be typing that much. It's just not a flow that work, but people, we felt that if you're on the go and you do want to learn about Roman Empire, there should be a product that makes this really easy and crafts this beautiful, interactive, delightful, fast UI for you. So that's why kind of we felt that there was a term that I think is not super widely known, but it's kind of mentioned a little bit across the industry called generative UI. So the idea that LLMS can generate structured UI, we didn't feel and that's usually useful for these vibe coding tools and we didn't feel that's what we want to do. So we kind of we saw that our emphasis is more on the end to end experience rather than just this kind of frozen assumptions, you know, set of HTML and CSS that you get out of vibe. Speaker 1 Coding. Yeah, Awesome. That's awesome. That brings me on to the next question. Like what? I mean, we're coming up to time. We have two minutes left, but what what like the North Star for this for for, for this company and the team. Like what is the end goal that you guys are trying to hit right here? Is it, you know, you guys trying to just you want to blitz gross for the first year, you want to reach a certain level, you want to work away to another round. Like what's the yeah, what's the what's the future looking like? Speaker 7 It's, it's, it's, it's great. Like, like ultimately we want to take the world and sorry, it's going to sound incredibly ambitious, but it is. And that's fun. That's the best thing about it. We want to take the world on this journey of, you know, kind of taking the best we have from, from from LLMS, but ultimately evolving the entire experienced player with it. So being able to come in and say, you know, I would like a romantic hotel in Paris with spa on a quiet cobbled street with views of the Eiffel, Eiffel Tower, and actually just get some nice structure card of cards of kind of top three hotels that that work that way. So it's sort of like this, this world where you can use the expressivity of the natural language and, and kind of ultimately interact with the service. Like it's the old school, you know, filters, menus, sidebars and you know, cards and kind of all that. Like we kind of wanted to take the world on this transformation to, to, to get the best out of both worlds, use the power of reasoning and natural language flexibility and all of that, but still get these delightful, easy to use, you know, mobile for social media friendly kind of services that we spend all of our time on. You know, it's kind of like that. That's kind of where we what we wanted to do. It's long road to get there. You know, I think we're having a good place. We are largely focusing on making sure our platform is ready for that path going forward. We have launched our consumer Heywa app as a sort of showcase. So for the capabilities on on, on the service can be, we are actually chuffed and delighted with how well that's landing as a consumer product on its own right. You know, like, yeah, kind of I'm, I'm largely trying not to get, get sidetracks from our main mission to, to kind of take the rest of the industry on this journey. But yeah, for now, I think that's sort of just very excited that people are always liking the customer product. Speaker 1 Let's go. Awesome. Lena. Thank you so much for for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. Speaker 7 My absolute pleasure. Speaker 1 No, thank you. Yeah, give us a shout When you when you. Oh, gone. Well see you Milena. Thank you for joining us. You gonna say give us a shout and you can come back on. But she obviously has something important. She gotta get billed him. You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. Lagora Eyes $6B Valuation; Meta Patents AI Grief Tech to Talk to the Dead Up next we have Matt over at Jack and Jill talking about Jack 2.0. It's going to SF We've got a lot of stuff sticking to with with them and jobs and AI and everything that's going on. But before we we have that leave outdated business banking behind with Lwellix the only market behind you built for the pace of modern business, multi currency accounts, corporate cards, expense management, online payments all in one platform. Go to lwellix.com. Should we jump into the town hall? Yeah, we got some time. Well, maybe I just want to quickly talk about Ligura because some rumours, some rumours knocking around. I'm not sure if you've seen the title. Did you see the title? Have you seen the title for their phone or not? No, the Lagora title. Oh, wait, is it gone? Oh, maybe I've not put it in. Maybe that's so annoying. But basically Lagora, it was a tiny, tiny, tiny thing. But Lagora in talks to raise like a scoop piece. Lagora in talks to raise like a 6 billion valuation. Basically it will be yes, seriously, because obviously for those who who are aware we had Max on the show doing the 150 million series scene, which we're very happy about, but I was I it's not going to sound gay anymore, but I tweaked it out. It was the whole thing. It was the whole thing I had planned that I've just obviously not got right, but it was essentially the Lagora were raised maxing and I know so sifted with scoop massing, scoop maxing, Lagora raise, no jester raising to money mug the competitors. No, that was the title and I was wondering if you'd seen it or not, but I'm not sure if you heard, but it wasn't the doc, which makes it like not that funny. I was a tweet out of the day and I was like, that's going to bang. You got like 3 likes, like 60 impressions. Anyway, nice. Something a little bit more pressing. How long do we have? Two minutes to the next guest? Yeah, I can hear screenshots in my ear. I can also hear screenshots in my ear. And I'll produce a screenshot. I'll produce a screenshot. Ladies and gentlemen, the she's, oh, she's screenshotting sifted scoop maxing on Lagora just raising at $6 billion. That was the startup eyes A33X on its current valuation. Yeah. OK. What's that? Nice, Nice. Nice. Yeah, Yeah. We appreciate it. Well, let's just talk like, want to read the article very quickly because this is a super important, massive company. Massive raise, potentially. Anyway, It's a scoop. Legal TEP startup Lagora is in talks to raise fresh funding that would triple its valuation to 6 billion just four months after its last round, according to reports on Friday, Bloomberg Bloomberg reported that while the Gora was in the process of finalizing its latest funding round, it remains unclear how much capital it seeks to raise, citing people familiar with discussions. The round is expected to be led by an existing investor, one of the people said. Found in 23, the Gora offers a collaborative AI platform built on top of large language models to help lawyers in their day-to-day work, such as researching, reviewing or drafting legal documents. The companies raised funds twice last year first 80 million series B at a 675,000,000 valuation in May, followed by 150 million raise at 1.8 billion valuation in October. Which we had a lovely exclusive on with Max joining us live on the show, which is awesome yeah Max is you know, we're we're we're we're such big fans of Lagora ever since the I mean since they started obviously even their rebrand. But just a quote, you know, we wake up with a taste of blood from from Max over there. It's just we want more of that. We want more visceral quotes from founders. You know, I'd love to see these founder walls pop off a bit more, especially in Europe. I think what's why tech is, is you know, techs going through a little bit of a little bit more, yes, there's, there's a ramp to it, right. And, and I think it's because the it's very, it's from, as I mentioned before, it's like the narrative changes all the time, right? Yeah. And that's great because it means that every single, every single week, a competitor is like kind of jumping you and then jumping you and then jumping you. And it's like a show. It's like a show. It's like a live technology show. And that's why these live shows do well because. Yeah, yeah, you're always, you're always having to react to new things, new things going on. And, and yeah, it's like a reality TV show of whom? And yeah, it's exciting. Textiles. Yeah. Anyway, talking about things that happen all the time in culture. Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market. Stay informed and profit from your knowledge. Go to polymarket.com if you want to take advantage of all of that narrative movement. You can profit if you can try and you know, profit from the knowledge. This is another one I want to chat about. It's not on the actual doc, so we don't have a title for it, but we only saw it this morning and it's it's just absolutely mad. So Mehta have recently patented grief tech to talk to the dead. So just this is an article from Tribune. We saw it earlier this morning. Mehta has been granted a patent describing an artificial intelligence system capable of simulating a person's social media activity, including continuing to post and respond to messages after their death. The patient, filed in 2023, which is long ago and approved in late December, outlined a large language model, could analyse users historical data, posts, comments, chats, voice notes, likes and other interactions to recreate their online behaviour. I can also see an M dash there in the sentence. The system could then publish updates for reply to messages and engage with contact. Is definitely being written by a human. 100% no AI. The content in a way that mirrors the original account holder. There's a what in the Black Mirror am I reading this? Is this is the most nuts thing. Like I'm pretty. What was it? I saw a tweet about this. Yeah, but it's true. It's what's the is it that Black Mirror could have would have been the best like, like early stage venture investor kids. Oh yeah. There's loads of like, you know, they they predict these things and they actually come true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's this is so messed up. I just can't imagine. This is wild. Yeah. There is literally a, you know, there's a Black Mirror episode where that guy's girlfriend dies or is it the guy dies? I can't remember if it's the guy, the girl dies and the boyfriend or the girl from whatever. I know it's the guy, the guy dies. I think I can't remember one of the dies. And then like the opposite one is gets into a relationship with like a robot with their memory of something and it's like superhumanoid. This is like the early kind of like sprinklings of something like that. Like it's going to it's going to happen. It's, you know, early days in the AI kind of era where relationships with AI and all of that kind of stuff that's still huge. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a huge market in in Asia that masses. Yeah, the huge, huge market. And dude, it's just just humans, right? It's going to happen. Yeah, it's definitely going to happen. It's just like, yeah, that's so weird though. Like surely I get like in my mind, I feel like a a sane, a someone who is mentally like, OK, like we're from the West. We, we, you know, we think that that's strange, but maybe, you know, somewhere else in the world. It's, it's not, I don't know. It's, you know, it's something, right? It's a yeah, I guess maybe I just think, yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't know. I don't know, you know, how other areas of the world would respond to this. I just think that surely it's not that kind of a thing to be talking to your dead relative on Facebook. Like to me that, you know, that's not see how we are. I don't like. So I saw. Yeah, yeah, I just not sure that's a great thing to be doing with your time. But I did see someone tweeted, like even ancient folklore warns us of talking to the dead like eons ago in, in, you know, in like, I don't know, 200 ad. It's like, oh, you know, don't chat to the dead because that's a bad thing to do. It's like here we are. Like you can chat to them on Facebook now. That's not, I don't think that's a chill thing. And I I've only read like a little bit of this. So this is actually, I was reacting to it live for the first time. But according to the filing, the So this was filed in 2023. Yeah. It's only been passed in, in December. So that is super like in, in tech terms. That's a while ago. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know patent filing, you know, cycles too well, but I imagine that's quite long. Well, in terms of how long it's taken to get it approved, Yeah, I assume patents can. Yeah, I don't know, probably like I assume, I assume in months, three months is maybe the average. Yeah, the average or is like the normal is like what are you basically? No, no, I'm not, I'm not. I'm just saying that's what I assume. Yeah, a pattern is I think a fairly large thing, right. And so would inherently take months. I think of paperwork and. You know, analysis on on on competition and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. But I imagine this is quite a little. No, that, that, Yeah. But that's usually like, OK, like, oh, you want to call your website this like, yeah, I guess we can paint that like, oh, what you've made this new like bicycle like, yeah, go on then. And this was, oh, you want to talk to dead people on Facebook? Like, oh, this one might take a bit longer, mate. You know, this is, I like this one's a little bit different. I just think this is so I'm, I'm I'm surprised they've even passed this. I think this is absolutely insane. And I also who who gives sign off for that? Does the person's family put in an application process to say, like, I would like to talk to my dead relative or yeah, it will be, it will be like family driven there. I think maybe, I don't know, like maybe Musk can just start reviving people from the dead and sticking them on Facebook or something. I don't know. But like, for me, this sound, this seems like sort of like modern day voodoo black magic, if I'm honest. The technology appears designed for meta owned platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, potentially allowing the company to reconstruct a digital persona using user specific data. The pattern also references more advanced possibilities, including simulating voice and even video calls using the recreated identity. You just know it's going down like an awful and then you're going to get like, oh, we've announced A partnership with figure AI. So now we can and I physically embed these memories and these sort of photo into the robot and like before you know it, we're reanimating the dead. That's it. I am bullish on. Oh, there you go, you. It actually says here. And the idea of AI replicas of deceased individuals has already sparked ethical debate with start-ups offering digital avatar avatar services that allow users to interact with simulations of lost relatives. Critics have compared the concept to dystopian scenarios depicted in shows like Black Mirror. Like for us, you know, you show me a video of one of my dead relatives. Like, it would be really weird, but I'd know, OK, that's, you know, that's AI. Why are you showing me this? Like I wouldn't be able to sit there and have, I couldn't take it seriously. I'd just be like, this is ridiculous. You show that to like someone's grandfather or grandmother or something. They would be freaking out. Yeah, like that's, I don't think it would probably be the maddest thing that's ever occurred in their life to them maybe depending on what type of life they've lived. But if you if you if, if you were to show them, it would be a reanimation. It'd be like, yeah, we brought them back from the dead. They're here, they're on a Zoom call in. You know, all of these, all of these video generation models are getting so good. Surely you can kind of already do this in a way like I can create a a video generation or using AI of yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Oh no, no, yeah, you can you can definitely do it today, but I think the the fact that like matter are trying to patent it on their platform. Yeah yeah, yeah fine using like pay on their platform personal. The system could then publish updates, reply to messages, engage with content. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah. So it's like we don't even just have bots on the platform. I guess it would be bots, technically, but it would be bots wearing the faces of your deceased relatives. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds dreadful. That doesn't sound like something that would make me not want to be on. Seems like we're in a movie. Yeah. Like if I, you know, post a photo and I get a message from, like, my dead grandma, like, looking good or something, I'd be like, that's insane. I wouldn't even you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't reply to the comment, would you? You'd be like, this is really crazy. But I guess maybe I don't know who surely that you have to give you have to. I mean, who do they? Yeah, the family has to. You have to OK it. You have to prompt a Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Like they'd say, hey, we want to have to prompt a under the family would request it. You're sure to say, oh, this is going to happen. What? I don't know. So as as in someone would like be behind the box isn't like you wouldn't on Facebook, you know, a dead relative wouldn't like, you know, comment on on something. I don't think it's like a it says they can do this, though. I assume it's like a reply to messages and engage with content in a way that mirrors in a way the original account holder. Yeah, OK, That is pretty, that is pretty rogue, just like sort of reanimate loads of boomers and they just storm Facebook. Like I think this is a dreadful thing. I can't see anyone enjoying it apart from like, unfortunately people that may be like incredibly down about a relative passing away and they're kind of desperate maybe to get this going. It's a, you know, it's a bad thing generally, even if they're enjoying, it's bad. I just think matter should stay away from this. And the fact they filed it in 2023 is super ahead of its time. It's yeah, they're right. Yeah, they're they're not going to go away from our sponsor Polymarket, the world's largest production market. Stay informed and profit from your knowledge. Matthew Wilson on Democratizing Career Advice, AI's Impact on Jobs, and Building in London Next guest we have on Matthew, can you hear us? Speaker 8 I can. Can you hear me OK? Speaker 1 Yes, all good. How's it going? Speaker 8 Yeah, very good, very good. We're having all the fun over here. How are you guys getting on? Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely. Great. Thank you. We've been excited to talk to you. We've seen that there's been some developments. There's so much to dig into. I mean, maybe for, you know, our viewers I'm assuming should know who you are, but we've added a few followers since last time. So maybe a quick introduction on yourself, maybe Jack and Jill date on what you guys are now. Like, you know what you're doing now. I think, I think everyone knows what Jack and Jill is, but what? OK, yeah, let's start with that. That might be, yeah. Well. Speaker 8 Let me let me give the quick introduction. So we Jack and Jill, 2 AI agents, one that helps professionals understand what they want out of their career and then make that a reality. Another that gets to know companies who they're hiring for and then helps them find brilliant people. And then these two agents work together to facilitate the kind of highest signal hiring channel or the highest signal recruitment channel for you as, as, as an individual. So think of it as the an AI agentic scaled recruitment agency. And we are 11 months old today, actually 11 months old and still 3 year old. And we last chatted I think just on the back end of of our $20 million seed raise from Creandem in September and we've been pretty busy since then. I mean that feels like a lifetime or two ago in a island. So since then we have launched in the States in San Francisco. So we've really taking a kind of dual pronged approach in London and San Francisco on both building up the Canada base that are using Jack and building up the company base that are using that are using Jill. And we've been extraordinarily hard to work on building up both products to be to be much more mature. I mean, I think we as a, you know, you release MVPS, you test them, you can feel the pull from the market and then you iterate. And we're really proud of the two products that we've got at the moment and they're really remarkable. And just adding more and more functionality by the week. It's, it's, it's, it's super exciting. We got some amazing stuff coming in the next few days, in the next few weeks as well that that we're excited to get out. Speaker 1 Let's go. Yeah, the velocity of you guys is is is nuts. We see it everywhere on on LinkedIn. So props for that. Absolutely awesome. Yeah. I wanted to, I wanted to ask firstly about the democratizing career advice you found. I don't know if this was like a, you know, thing that you guys would were pushing for, but Jack is kind of evolved into like this job search, like assistant, like a kind of a full career coach. And yeah, I wanted to ask, ask you about the, the kind of the nature about where this might head in, in the kind of future. Was it like a, a thing that you guys wanted to push out into the world and kind of start building that because that's, you know, a little bit different to kind of what I guess you started building Jack for? Speaker 8 Yeah. I mean, it's always been the idea is it has been for Jack to say, you know, we talk about unreasonably good career support. You know, what are the things that we can do to help somebody really reflect on what they want out of their career, really kind of plot their path through the next few years. I mean, things are changing so much, but I think we also most people invest like a shamefully small amounts of time, effort, money in thinking about what they should do with their career for one of the things that's the most impactful thing in our lives. We spend. I mean, how much time do people spend really taking every year and taking a step back and thinking about where they're going maybe a few hours. If, if, if you're kind of diligent on this. And so, so we, we think, you know, what are all the different ways that we could help somebody out? And you know, we Jack, Jack, there was up this rich understanding of who you are, what you've done, what you want. And then we think about, you know, what are all the different ways that we could, we could help help you out. And, you know, one mental model we like to think about is to say, you know, if you were, if, if either of you were looking for a job right now, if you had 100, you know, really smart people that were could work for you to make you make the best decision in your career, what would you get them to do? And that's that kind of fuels what are what are those? What are we getting those 100 people? We used to do all the things that we want to build into and we want to build to Jack. So we're we're really still super early in gnawing out all of those, all of those different skills. But it's exciting to see it's kind of really start coming together with this normal attitude product that can help out in all those different ways. Speaker 1 So cool on, on Jack as well. Like we one like super interesting time to be building in this particular space as things are changing so rapidly. And we had Daniel Chait, I think that pronounced his second name. He's the CEO of greenhouse that operate in the HR space for a number of years. He has some really cool takes on the market and the state of hiring. And you know, I, I think that there are definitely some parallels here. Like I'd love to ask you, I think when we were chatting before the show, something like Jack has spoken to 110,000 people. Like you guys must see some awesome data on like the state of hiring an AI right now. Like what does it? What does it look like? Speaker 8 Yeah, I think, I think there's some it's, it's really non homogeneous. I think what we see is that there are for certain groups of people it's a really tough time. And so certain groups of people there, you know, whether this is entry level kind of early careers folks, whether this is people that are the ground is shifting underneath them and their experience is not really translating across to the new world. And they're having a, a really difficult time. And they need support in figuring out what is this world that I we're operating in today And how can I, how can I position myself best for that? How can I discover the opportunities that are best out there? You know, you'll you'll have you'll have kind of heard people talking about how much inbound most companies are getting for roles at the moment. So how can we help people kind of cut through that are in this position? So there's like a whole class of people that are we think about how can we give them the best support and help them understand the changes that the world's going through and then and then position themselves best and for for getting for getting the right the right things. And then you've got this other group of people that are in ridiculously high demand and you've got, you know, I mean, I, I was just in San Francisco last week and it's, it's incredible the amount of competition for the top engineers, for the top kind of AI native folks in that space. And, and we see it in London as well to, to a slightly lesser degree. But there is just this, I think this divergent in the, in, in the, in the labour market at the moment between those in, in extremely high demand and higher demand than ever. And you see, you know, these Aqua hires where it's really just about one or two folks and it's in the billions of dollars. And then you see people having a really tough time. And I think we we see the full spectrum and everything in between that. Speaker 1 Yeah, we had, we had Christian at Clove and and Andreas at Atomico on 2 talk about there recently in the FT talking about the kind of exodus of white collar jobs and and AI. And I wanted to touch with you about it and understand kind of like what your views are on, you know, would employees be be kind of worried about their job with with AI? What's the kind of what's your take on on the white collar industry? Speaker 8 I guess, I mean, I mean prediction in the future is always really hard. And I think it's I, I don't think we have any particular insight into the director of the world is heading in. I mean we, we're very close to the technology and it's, it's remarkable the pace and the acceleration of how, of how good the underlying models are. So I think one thing we feel fairly confident in is that there is going to be a lot of disruption how that shapes shakes out. I think it's hard to know at this stage and what time frame that happens on. It's really hard to know, you know, so for us, like we think about that a lot as we're building, Jack is to say, look, actually having really good career support and the ability to have that like, you know, live plugged into the market is going to be really important in a world that's that's changing. So giving people the tools, giving people the companionships through navigating through this kind of disrupted world is, is going to be really important as well as ultimately having a more efficient allocation of, of, of labour and opportunity. As the wall kind of shifts around, we're going to need more, more like better ways of matching, matching labour and opportunity as, as things to get disrupted. So that's going to the kind of bigger picture of how we think about building on both sides. But some, yeah, certainly I think it's going to be a challenging couple of years ahead for a lot of people and there's going to be a lot of change. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's the the main thing is, is, you know, I think I wrote a tweet about it. I can't remember that write so many random tweets. But it's like a you know, how every different kind of time in in life and you know, maybe like the industrial revolution kind of how things change and how different jobs kind of stopped and, and, and people were needed for it. But then other jobs are created and people just kind of adapt, right. And you guys are at the forefront of that in terms of allowing that kind of adaptation to happen And, and kind of almost like making it faster is, is probably the, the, the thing that you guys are able to do. How do you feel that you know, in the next 5 or 10 years as this adaptation is, is happening that you guys will be able to to kind of really help candidates specifically, but then also employers to find those new roles that were didn't exist like 10 years ago? Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, I think so think about our our products with Jack, right. The way Jack works is you get to know you, what you want out of your career, what you've done before. And but we also plugged into and we're having you know, we've had a, you know, 110,000 people use it. We've got thousands of companies on the other side. We've got this incredible rich and growing kind of data set that's there's more live than anybody else on the market has around what are the people doing? What are companies looking for? How's that shifting? What are people that have got a certain skill set or a certain background, how they reposition themselves? And so we think about how do we build up that data to be richer? How do we really understand people and how do we give them support and tools to understand what they've done before, how that could be appropriate in a, in a different type of role? And then help them to start and prep for, for, for actually finding those opportunities and, and then going out and getting them. So that's, you know, through the full spectrum of career coaching to job discovery, to initiative prep to gush in your side at the end of the band. And we think about kind of a full spectrum in terms of ways we can help people. And the other side is kind of changing what they're looking for. Also, we we do the kind of equivalent of that kind of decide understanding, you know who you're looking for out of a given role or context behind that and sense of the policy you're solving. And how do that actually got a market for for that role for you? Speaker 1 I never, yeah, I never like the phrase they used like in terms of being like a live data set and never actually thought about the power of that both from the candidate side and the businesses side, right, Because it I guess it would be cool to know what are the best firms hiring for right now as well. That's like, that's amazing data to have, right? Like what are the best people? Like what's the most in? I mean, we all kind of know what the most in demand skill set is at the moment anyway. But like, yeah, the fact that it's live data cutting edge is, yeah, that's not something that has come into my mind before. Speaker 8 Yeah, Yeah. I mean, most, most data studies are used in this market that are very, very backwards looking. And when the market's changing so much, having that be more up to date is really important. It's actually something we've not done on lock top. It's really building off the off, off this data and exposing that to and, you know, our customers and the cameras that are used that are working with us. And I think that there's some more that we can do there as, as, as we build that out new functionality that's built off that, off that live data that is that that is, you know, supporting on both sides. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's insanely exciting. And I was like, you just, yeah, that'd be awesome. Some cool case studies there maybe. Sorry, I'm just GTM brains guarantee over you guys are just released Jack 2 point O what's the what's the plan for for 2026 kind of like, you know, rolling that out. Obviously you've just expanded to SF. Do you have Harriers out there as well? Speaker 8 Yeah, we've got we've got a small office out there and it's so I mean, we've got quite the year is but a lot of things that's great. Hard looking forward all them three months down a lot. So, you know, we're we're only, you know, we'll be twice as old at the end of the year as we are right now. We we've got it's, it's, it's I think the Sky's I mean you see how quickly companies can grow. And I think you have a lot of February last year where they'd be by the end of the year. You know, I think they have no line of sight of what of, of, of how well the year could have gone. And it certainly feels like we're in a similar position at the moment where there's just so much opportunity. We've got so many things we're building that we're so excited to get into the hands of customers. You know, we, we, we only really started in San Francisco, you know, six weeks ago. There's the whole rest of the of, of the US to, to, to look at all of Europe as well. So there's, there's, there's, there's just a tremendous amount on the consumer product with Jack, on the BDB product with Jill to build out to mature as well as you know, the Geo and the segment expansion that we want to kind of look at as well. So there's just like, yeah, I've no idea at the end of the year. So it feels like the Sky's the limit. Speaker 1 You'd love to hear it. I guess one final one just before we let you go. Third time found a massive network staying in London. Obviously SF is a part of any company's story, but you know, what's the, what's the, what's the choice for keeping everything, keeping HQ in London? Speaker 8 Yeah, I think we, we, we thought a lot about whether we should move to San Francisco to, to start the company or whether we should, we should build from London. And we ultimately decided that London was the best place to build the build business. I think I just started to be excited San Francisco as I got back on Sunday and the, I came back like more confident than ever that London was the best place to have the headquarters of the business. I think the, I think we've built, you know, definitely amongst the top couple of companies for the most ambitious people to come and work at in London. And that's such a competitive advantage. The talent that we have in London is, is just as good as the talent that they have in San Francisco. People are, there's been a shift over the last five to 10 years as we, as the startup ecosystem has kind of evolved and you've had companies come through work, not work, you know, people getting, getting real kind of start up experience. Like we've now got a depth of talent pool. The quality of the technical talent is so high in London that, yeah, we, we, we think there's a huge talent advantage to being in London in terms of our ability to stand out from the crowd to be the best place for the most ambitious people to come and work. And doing that in San Francisco is brutal. I now just spent the last two weeks with a bunch of founders building. Build, building start-ups in San Francisco and the amount of people that are talking about, well, we hired this great person, we sponsored their visa, they came all the way over here. And then, you know, one of the labs gave them $1,000,000 package and they left three months later. So the ability to track but also retain like the best people is I think it's just much, much stronger in London. So yeah, we're very excited to build from there. There's also just more, it's such an industry town in San Francisco. We're we're building initially for tech companies, but we, we, we want to quickly expand outside of there. And I think if you, if you start there, you kind of get stuck in there in, in that, in that to some degree. So yeah, we're very, very happy with that decision to, to to build from London so far. Speaker 1 Yeah, let's go. We love to hear that. I think Nick Funatio was also saying something similar. Yeah, it's always, it's always refreshing to hear that. But yeah, Matt, we're we're we're out of time. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's always good to hear from you guys. And yeah, it's you guys are killing it. Keep it smashing it. Speaker 8 Yeah, well, you you guys too. So yeah, keep it up. Speaker 1 Appreciate it man, have a good one. Netherlands' Unrealized Gains Tax Sparks Debate; Introducing Surreal DB Founders See you later. Awesome stuff, cool company, cool company. Guest, Guest or guest plural? We're not sure if we're having, I think it's just guest, just Toby or Jamie. We're not sure which one or 100%. I think it's just guest anyway. Leave outdated business banking behind with LLX, the all in One Financial platform built for the pace of modern business. Multi currency accounts, events management, online payments, it's all in one platform. Go to airwolics.com and whilst we have you here, let me tell you about our friends over there at Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market. Profit from your knowledge. Go to polymarket.com. There you go. Next on the show we have the big dog, I believe. OK, so it might be Tommy, Toby and Jamie, but one of the two of the two are brothers, Morgan Hitchcock brothers. They are both the founders of Surreal DB Multimodal Database. It's like one of the I think it's like one of the most well funded databases start-ups globally. But let's go guys. Yeah, it's also one of the most watched infrastructure projects globally as well. So it's going to be good to talk to both. One of them. I don't know. We're not sure. We're not sure it's going to go down, but that's at 1:50. So we got 2 minutes. Let's where were we? Oh, the matter Payton grief tech talk to the dead. Yeah, good. That one was a nuts one. I think I just saw Jamie come into the come into the waiting. Oh, he can drop him, Jamie maybe. Yeah, bring him back something whilst we're waiting for that. Saw this today. We can just talk about this. It's actually Friedrich Helm from from VOI who we've interviewed in the past. Great guy, awesome company he chaired. I hadn't seen this, but like the Netherlands House of Representatives had recently approved 36% tax on unrealized capital gains. People aren't very happy about that. It to me, I just can't understand how that could ever be deemed as a good idea. Massive bag fumble from yeah, bag fumble from the Netherlands. I just don't understand. Like I get the thesis from that. It's like, OK, we can get more money. There's a book called now I'm going to get this wrong, but I think it's called Atlas Strand. You would like it? Fairly old book. I don't know when it was written, but definitely pre 2000s, but basically talks about I think it's Norway and I assume I think I think it's also a true story. But essentially it's talking about how the there was a there was a wealth tax and how the kind of mass exodus of kind of people building in in a building companies, but doing everything else in between to kind of move a society forwards collapsed the society. And yeah, very obviously very kind of, you know, similar and timely to to what's going on. They should read that book. They might they might have a thought to you, though. Those guys might learn things like societal collapse if you do this, by the way, that's a that would be a scary thing. That's so funny. Brothers Toby & Jamie Morgan Hitchcock on Surreal DB 3.0, Series A, and the Future of Agent Memory Anyway, I believe we have both of them. Hold on, Let's let's go. Can you No way. OK, hear us. Speaker 5 We can hear, you can hear. You can hear us. Speaker 1 Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear, guys. We're just checking with our producer, trying to get two people on the street. So we've never had I'll. Speaker 5 Go next door, we're in the hotel. Speaker 1 And I can go Toby, this could be this could be really cool. Anyway, wait, let's just see if we can do it because we've never done this before and if it works, I'd be sick. So I don't know. Speaker 5 I'll go next door to my brother's room. Speaker 1 OK. OK. I'm just checking with the producer. Is it possible or we're just we're just seeing because our views, how early is it in the morning? Speaker 5 It's 5:50, we're in SF this week, so yeah, not too bad, man. Look, we don't sleep. That's all good. It's all good. It's all good. Speaker 1 I love that. I love that you're going in the most watch infrastructure project globally. Yeah. Let's go. You don't sleep. I love it. We're just checking now because I'm not sure as. Speaker 5 Well, it's really hard when you have Auk team launching a product today and we're like 8 hours behind. But hey, it's life, right? It's life. Speaker 1 That must be so nuts to coordinate. Well, I guess you guys just stay awake, right? You just don't. Speaker 5 Exactly, 100%. I've got men's basketball, college basketball on the whole night. Keep me awake. So I'm I'm all here. Speaker 1 We're ready, OK. I think we're both live. I think we've got you both on. This is the first time we've ever done this, by the way. I don't think we've managed to do this before ever. So this is a first and we're pumped to do with you both Toby Jamie Morgan, Hitchcock Co founders COO and COO Spiel DB. Welcome to the stream. I've done an awful, an awful job there of entering it in a fluent way. But maybe you guys want to give your own intros and a little bit on the company as well, because it is your first time on the European technology network. Speaker 5 You guys, thanks so much. Appreciate it. By the way, apologies for the name. It's very long winded. It never fits on a business card or a bank card. So yeah, it's rather, believe it or not, been working together for 20 plus years. And I'll let Toby go into the introduction. So we go for a man. Yeah. So through DB, I think the name says that. All right. We tried to build something that was I think most people would kind of considered if that's not possible several years ago, you know, being being able to bring multiple different types of data together in a single platform. We started building this in 2015 for a kind of different use case, which was can we simplify the technology stack? And the at the time you had organizations worldwide kind of going into this micro services architecture and splitting everything up into thousands of different projects. And then obviously that that's changed slightly in the last few years. But I think the most telling thing is in the last year, agents now require access to data that normal applications didn't before. So they need access to time series data, they need access to graph data, they need access to document relational and, and not that they want to do it in a simple way. They don't want to have to spin up 9 different services and platforms and orchestrate that together and kind of ensure that all of the data is consistent across them. So albeit we didn't build surreal DB for the the world of agents and the world of AI as it is today, it actually had a very kind of kind of perfect place in the world that we're seeing today as it as it builds out for AI and agents. Speaker 1 That's so awesome. I have like, I have to ask what we I don't think I've ever we've interviewed, we've interviewed a few people on the show. I think maybe close to 200 guests now. Maybe we've never had a brother duo on. So I'd just love to ask like on on on on that front. Like what? What's it like working together? That's like must be really. Speaker 5 Painful. Speaker 1 Painful, I was going to say. Rewarding. We were together. Speaker 5 For 20 years, we've never had normal jobs, to be honest, always worked in tech, our own tech companies. I mean, Toby might say different, but do you know what the great thing is? There's always a trust there and that's always been. And The thing is we're also, we're talking cheese, you know, we have very different characters, very different individuals with very recent skill sets. Told me some brains. I'm not really the bra nor the beauty, but I compliment him in many other ways. So yeah, it's it's, I would say it's been a it's been a long, long ride, but apart from that, a great ride. Yeah, 20 plus years. This one here obviously since 2015, though we launched in 2022. But yeah, it's we fight a lot. But as you probably know, we'd like butt siblings. That's a standard, right? Standards like. Speaker 1 It's probably a good thing. Yeah, it's a good thing. You always have that trust, which is nice. I wanted to ask about the the news. I don't know how much you can say about it. I want to kind of let you guys do do your thing, but yeah. Can you say much about the news that is releasing? Speaker 5 Yeah. So I think the, the, the big thing is 3.0. So 3.0 is coming out inland league. I think it's it's being built as we speak and it'll be released to the community in in a matter of minutes. So 3.0 is a big is a big announcement today, but Jamie has more announcements as well, right. Yeah. I mean, so we obviously announcing our two of our close of our Series A well that's 38 million in total, 44 million since the. Thank you guys. Speaker 1 Huge. Speaker 5 We've kind of added an extension to the A, The reason being is that we've had no UK or European investors at the company in our C round. We were fully taken on by Alti, Matt Turk the whole round. And then to the the A1, first Mark and George and code of that and obviously joined by alumni and Crew Capital who have been great additions to the company. And then, yeah, from our point of view, based in London, you know, we spent a lot of time in the US We thought, look, it's great to have both people across the pond helping us out and giving us great advice. And therefore we brought on the formidable Mike Chalfin from Chalfin Ventures. And I could friends begin capital to to this round. But yeah, it's been a it's been a long journey since 2022. But yeah, very excited the feature. And yeah, trying to make databases cool. I think it's hard thing, especially when they're not as cool as you would think of be. That's the plan. Speaker 1 That's so awesome. Well, look, Congrats on the cash. That's absolutely huge. We've loads of questions. Maybe let's start with three-point O Yeah, I wanted to ask a few questions about the the product, but if you yeah, yeah, why don't you go? Because let's start with 3.0, right? So, so I read a few bits and I just want to kind of dive deep just generally about it first. And I've got a few questions, but the only database that enables first class agent memory kind of tell me a little bit more about that. I've got a few questions about it, but yeah, worth getting something from you first. Speaker 5 Just before you do tell, Yeah, you didn't get too, too technical. All right. I read the brief from the guys and they said there's not don't get too post code. You're right. Yeah, you go from. Speaker 1 That please. I'd appreciate that. Speaker 5 Saying The thing is if you look at all the platforms out there, the ones that you know have become synonymous with with AI and agents in the last year, a lot of them are just based around this thing called vector or vector or RAG. Effectively agents actually need more different data types and that is what severely offers. So as I said kind of a little bit early on, it's not just about semantic understanding of data. So how does this text represent itself in an AI agent or in an ALM model? That is one part of it, you know, so if that's effectively kind of pattern matching or text similarity search is one part, but actually we need to be able to understand how events have happened over time. So when I issue a query to the to an LLM and I say, you know something about a piece of business and emails from the last 12 months or the last 12 days, which is more relevant to this particular query? So the the understanding of time or temporal access in that data is important, the understanding of how relationships are manifested in part of that data. So I know someone, even if that someone has very different text similarity, searching a different name, different culture, whatever that is. If I know that if I'm related to them, does the other them have access to that information? So the ability to add to match with text similarity, to go beyond that with time to augment that with graph and relationship linking and then and other types beyond that as well. That's the most important aspect. And that is where sorority plays as biggest Forte as being able to do all those different types of data in a single platform without you having to choose upfront which one you want to use. You can just start storing more data and then you can query it in all these different ways. And then you can do that at scale. And that is kind of where sorority sits. Speaker 1 That's nuts. The a remind like the sort of way in which this area has kind of evolved where I was at a company previously that were doing browser based agents. And the big thing for us was trying to create agents that could one have memory, like they just remember previous actions, whether that was like SSO logins or they could just like, yeah, retain information based off previous conversations to them work across like a browser based website. But also like a core part of that was understanding how we can try and help them self learn in a way where they can start to understand it themselves. It sounds like this is this would fit like nicely in that this was back in 2023 and then the sales force ended up buying us after 11 months before we could do anything proper. But it sounds like even more so today with the the the open claw stuff. Like now that agents are getting a lot more personal, people are actually letting them into areas of their personal life. This is like ever more relevant than ever I guess. Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that is the thing, right? It's, and it's the way you see LLM's falling down as well, because you're seeing LLM's built against one different type of data and you know, and the models are getting more powerful, right? The models have more weights and they have, you know, they have larger sizes, but at the end of the day, they're still not, they're not kind of working in the same way that a human mind works, right? A human mind has short term, long term memories. It has the understanding of time, which is an LLM don't really have that, that well, it has the understanding of relationships and how things link to each other. It has the understanding of on the meaning as well. And that's that's really what a lot of these agents are built at the moment, just meaning, right? If I search for organization, do I also mean business and enterprise, right. That's meaning. But it's got to go beyond that. It's got to go beyond, you know, this organization is linked to this subsidiary and that subsidiary is linked to that entity. And that is where you've got to start building up a whole kind of suite of different data types, from time to graph to to meaning and everything in between. Speaker 1 With, with, with everything going on, kind of like, I feel like we're like moving into this like headless kind of world, right? Where like agents can kind of go in query and, and they have that database and they can kind of go and analyse the data, do a task, whatever. Humans won't ever need an app to go to. It's kind of all just in, I guess the ether, right? Where, where, where do you see things going? You know, obviously you mentioned that on the open close side, everything else that's happening with with agents and and what you guys are doing, how do you see it kind of evolving over, I don't know, I guess next the next month really. Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, next month is crazy how how fast things are moving, isn't it? I think, look, it goes about saying that we're going to move to A, to a world where, you know, humans are typing text and the application is built for them in a mass of seconds and presented to them as opposed to using an application. Yeah, exactly. That said, I think that, you know, there are still organizations still moving into the cloud, right? So you know, when you need to move, you know, when you're in very kind of secure, safe industries, whether that's financial services or defence, you can't just jump and move your entire organization into this agent that may or may not behave as you expect it to. And there's still a lot of questions around the guardrails, the safety and kind of, you know, the expectation, you know, the reproducibility of of Asians and how they work. But don't get me wrong, that would, you know, that's being worked on. It will be worked on and it will be improved. I think ultimately, and this is, there's kind of been the Holy Grail for the last 10-15 years. You know, we had the term big data in like 2010 to 20/20/12. And today it's still big data, right? We're just calling it AI agent. But effectively organizations, these girls will access the entirety of their, of their data. And that's not something that's always been easily achievable or accessible. You know, they need to be able to access everything from the emails to the calendar events to the stock market data to, you know, this, this internal information that's not publicly available outside the company. They need to be able to access that in order to inform these agents. So in a way that's that's the change that needs to happen. That's the change of starting to happen, but we're still a long way off from that. Being able to centralized and make accessible all the data so that agents can probably properly be informed on almost every aspect of the business and therefore make better decisions. I think that's that's the next step. Speaker 1 Yeah. And I guess like going back to products, it was great to touch on that, but important to touch on the raise as well specifically like what is what's this cash being used for? You mentioned it's amazing to get some European and some UK based invested on the cap table. What's the next six months looking like for the company with regards to the capital? Speaker 5 Good question. I mean, for example, we've got a lot of inbound enterprises using US in production worldwide. For us, we're about going to market and the sales team and growing that massively as well, especially in the US side, we have a 75 percent, 8% of our clients AUS base. So the fact that we have all these enterprise logos using us and we know we need to obviously go out there and start selling more rather than having inbounds. So that's sort of where the money will go. Obviously, continue growing the team in a sustainable way, especially like I mentioned with AOA just right now, I mean, people aren't even running code anymore. So yeah, we'll be mainly spending on go to market and the sales team in the US. Speaker 1 And how do you, you know, going into these enterprise clients, obviously they understand how fast the the industry is moving. How do you sell them on the fact that you guys can move as fast as the industry and change so quickly. And you know, the service that you guys are providing might change like on a weekly kind of basis per client, right. So how does that kind of sale sales process work with with a very large enterprise clients that you know expect you to move as fast as the industry is? Speaker 5 Yeah, that's a good question. I think look, these these enterprise clients need to move quickly, but they also need to have that stability and that safety that, you know, a tool like sort of needs to offer or does offer. That said, if you look at our, you know, what we've released over the last year and what we've released in the two previous years before that, we've moved faster than almost any other database company out there. You know, we've been releasing new features into a product that is that is able to be used by enterprises and that's important. You know, it's not, we're not building a, a website build or something here, something that is a central data store for large FTSE 100 Footsie 500 organizations and things like that. So that so, but at the same time, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible. I think just the very essence of the product itself is pushing that boundary, right? If you, if you asked anyone in the database space or anyone who knew databases 8 years ago whether what we're building is possible, they would have said no, you have to specialize, right? But we're proving that actually you are able to bring these things together and you are able to make the work. So we are, we are pushing the boundaries. We're pushing the boundaries of what's possible. We're constantly developing new features. We've got new features in this release around AI and agents and things like that. But at the same time, you can't just almost those boundaries and and and break things. You have to make it work in the in the settings of the the clients that you'll gain after or you have. Speaker 1 Need yeah, we're talking so much to to people about the kind of integration problem that's a lot of these AI companies have where, you know, they're building all the fancy stuff and and and kind of selling the thing, but actually integrating into the processes of the company is, is, is the actual hurdle, right? And and only very few are actually kind of doing it, which is interesting. Speaker 5 I think yeah, exactly. If you look at the last year, you know, there'll be so many projects, especially the the larger organization, there's so many projects that have been in, you know, kind of. Pre production or development phase, alpha phases say that have not yet materialized into production work, you know, production deployments because actually doing something cool, doing something really easy with an agent. And this is, you know, you mentioned Claude bot or open or whatever, you know, one of the many names is gone by now, but you know, incredibly easy to get going, right? You can get going. You can automate your entire computer to do that safely. And then to think about doing that in an enterprise. Impossible, right? So yeah, that will come in time. But you know, you like these things have to be have to be planned through and thought through and moving in a kind of alpha stage AI project from something that works and is cool and is is useful, but then something that can actually be made secure, ensured to be secure is much more complicated. I think we'd be very fortunate as well that all the enterprise logos we have, you know, government, defence, financial, all these inbounds and they've all run their own Pocs, they're already using production and they've come to us said, look, we love what you're doing, let's talk about enterprise contracts and licensing. And I think the fact that our community has sort of ignited this because it's open source product that you can get going on one man team in your bedroom, then introduce it to your company and that's how it comes from there. I mean the fact that we've had in our data by enterprise using US at such an early stage of database, you know it's the database such a critical part of a company and we are very, very early in this stage. And the fact that we're used by some of the biggest companies in the world already in full production worldwide is a testament to the fact we've got a great product, but also the fact that our community sees it for full potential and all introducing to the company. So yeah, we've been very lucky. Speaker 1 Yeah, Wow. That's not, not, not lucky. You've been talented. Yeah. Skill and hard work. Yeah. Appreciate that. Thanks. Speaker 5 For a nice one, thank you. Speaker 1 We'll like we'll we'll let you go. Thank you so much for spending the time and congratulations. Speaker 5 On thank. Speaker 1 You yeah, thanks for getting up early and and chain with us, no. Speaker 5 Problem at all, guys? Yeah, we're back in London to get some lunch. All right. We'll see you soon, OK. Speaker 1 Awesome stuff. Have a good one, guys. Cheers. Thanks guys. Speaker 5 Thanks guys. Take care. See you free. Speaker 3 Audio post production. Speaker 1 Biophonic.com, what a cool company. We love it. Yeah, really cool. Chat zone indeed. Leave outdated business banking behind with Airwolics, the all in One Financial platform built for the pace of modern business. Multi currency accounts, corporate cards, expense management, online payments, all in one platform. Go to airwolics.com. That is the show. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. That was a wicked show. I loved it. We had some some awesome guests and we will see you on Thursday. Ciao. Ciao.