How to survive and thrive as tariffs, AI, and politics unsettle the rules of business

Trump’s tariffs have upended global trade and created an environment of uncertainty. But this situation wasn’t created in a vacuum. The rules of business have been shifting for years as technology moves quicker than regulation, geopolitics descend into turmoil, and the law erodes and becomes weaponized. Businesses might be asking themselves, how are they meant to keep their heads above water? And what can they do to fight back? Hence AI co-founder Sean West has some answers. With a team spread across the U. K., Rwanda, the U. S., and the Netherlands, the London-based startup has raised $5.2 million to date with a mission to democratize access to high-level business intelligence—something traditionally reserved for the biggest companies with the biggest budgets. Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sat down with West, who recently published the book Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business, to dig into how companies should respond to rising geopolitical risk, the macro cost of keeping your head down, and why AI-powered tools like Hence Global, built on Palantir’s Foundry platform, are quietly redefining what it means to be “advised.” Listen to the full episode to hear more about: What businesses are getting wrong about tariffs and political risk. How companies can go on the offensive to thrive in the chaos. Why patriotism can shield companies, but comes with a cost. Why law firms and consultants are some of Hence’s earliest adopters. The broader implications of “democratizing access” to geopolitical risk intel. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bollan and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Today, we're joined by Sean West, the co-founder of Hence AI and author of Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business. In his book, Sean explains that we're living in what he calls an unruly world, one in which geopolitics, law, and technological innovation all intertwine to create a world that's unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the traditional rules of business are about to come crashing down in ways that we're already seeing. We need look no further than Trump's tariffs and similar policies to see the increased geopolitical risks that businesses face. If that sounds scary, it's because it kind of is.

• 1:01Rebecca Bellan?

  But Sean is here with some solutions and toolkits for business leaders to stay agile and manage the fallout. So without further ado, Sean, welcome to the show.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:11Rebecca Bellan?

  I'm so excited to meet with you. For those who don't know, because why would you know, Sean and I met in person, actually, a few weeks ago at like a very cool dinner in New York City. And Sean talked about his book and I was like, wow, I just got to have you on the show because it seems like so relevant, such perfect timing. There's so much going on geopolitically that is affecting businesses in ways that we just haven't seen before. I'm curious, like, what brought you to that? Like, what is your background besides doing Hence, which we'll get into a little bit later? But what's your background? Like, why are you the expert on this topic?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I spent about 15 years in the geopolitical risk industry, which, for those who don't know, is an industry of political scientists who decide that they wanted to make money and didn't want to do lobbying. So they built different entities, I worked at one of them, that would try and forecast what was going on in the world for the purposes of investors to either invest based on those theses or not invest based on risks and for companies to understand what was coming next. So I cut my Teeth is an analyst forecasting US politics for over a decade and then as deputy CEO of that company Eurasia Group. And you know, I spent all this time covering what seemed like a really tumultuous time in politics, but is actually nothing compared to what we're seeing today.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  So I find myself six years into the startup journey now at hence, but I looked up and looked around the world and just saw all the factors that were shifting at once. And I said, as much as I wake up every day thinking only how do I build my startup, I actually know a lot about what's going on in the world and I should probably say something.

• 2:42Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I'm glad you did. So in your book, you talk about the shape of risk changing and what a lot of our listeners are dealing with every day is the tariff fallout. Whenever I speak to companies about it, I'm like, how are you guys handling the tariffs? They're like, well, we're just, we're kind of seeing what's happening. They're on, they're off, there's carve outs for certain industries and then there's not. It just seems extremely chaotic. Like, what are you telling businesses? How are you dealing with it with your own?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the tariffs are a really challenging example of when the macro policy environment matters a lot more than the micro environment. So businesses are really good at trying to push for like little carve outs for themselves or trying to push for tax breaks and things like that. Particularly if you're thinking about technology businesses as they get past like a series C, series D, they get big enough that they start playing regulatory games and things like that. Certainly, the large tech companies are really good at this. The problem is that when you're only focused on yourself, you can miss the fact that the entire macro environment is changing around you. And that's what's happened with tariffs. Everybody woke up and suddenly there was going to be some economic disintermediation between every part of the value chain. It happened at a moment where businesses had decided it was better to shut

• 3:52Speaker 02

  up and not stick your neck out because you might get it chopped off due to the more personalistic approach of the current president in the US. So there had really been no counter lobby from industry groups or from the business community at all against the tariff story before it happened. And I think it was kind of cold comfort and I can tell some stories about founders I know that are dealing with this. But I think a lot of folks, you can go to them and say, well, a lot of this is going to be reversed and they'll look at you and say, yeah, but I'm still dead because I had. Six months of missing shipments, right? Or I have six months of violating consumer agreements that I had to deliver

• 4:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Exactly.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Products on time.

• 4:27Rebecca Bellan?

  Like we saw what happened with COVID. It was temporary in a lot of ways, right? But it still stopped business for quite a long time for many businesses. And that has had effects that we're still recovering from. Some businesses haven't recovered from. And yeah, I would love to hear some company reactions and stories that you have. I mean, we've spoken to like Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson. He talked about this on Strictly VC with Connie Loyds, also our editor in chief. And they're one of the largest customs brokerages in the US. And he had to just go right into the policy, like try really hard to understand and like just staying up all night, trying to understand what's going on so that he can impart that to his customers. What are you hearing? What are you seeing out there?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll give an example. So I'm involved in a cold brew coffee company as an advisor. I gave up caffeine about six years ago. And there's a cold brew company that actually has a decaf.

• 5:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Oh.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Called Explorer Cold Brew.

• 5:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Okay.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  You know, I recently worked with them just on the side for fun. And we ended up achieving a national rollout at Whole Foods, which is like kind of unheard of for a brand new consumer brand. So that's great, right? Everything seems great. Then suddenly we wake up and coffee is going to be tariffed. And the glass bottles that they sell their coffee in from China is going to be tariffed. And it's completely existential.

• 5:35Rebecca Bellan?

  Oh, my God.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  You, as a founder, have a couple of choices, right? One choice is you can act like a taker, which I think a lot of founders are doing. They don't feel like they can make an opportunity out of it. But another is you can go on offense. And this particular founder, Case and Crane, he went on CNN, he went on ABC, and he talked about what he was experiencing. In doing so, not only do you elevate the issue, but you actually get a lot of free publicity for yourself and your product. You get to talk about your products on national news, on things like this. So a lot of the advice that I'm giving to founders is to think about, how can you be opportunistic in an environment like this? Like the politics, you're not necessarily going to be able to affect. Although, you know, I saw TechCrunch reported on, I think it was like 38 female consumer product founders who wrote an open letter about it.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  I think organizing and safety and numbers and power numbers is really, really important in these environments. But you can also win in the market, even if you're not winning politically. I think that's really important. How can this actually work better for me? How can I acquire somebody else's overseas operation? Because I'm good at operating that type of business and they want to run away from the fact that it's gotten very complicated. There are a lot of opportunities out there. And so part of the thesis of Unruly as a book and part of my mindset as a founder is where everybody sees risk, there's often lots of opportunity. But you need to take your risk hat off and think about, these are just dislocations, like anything else in the marketplace. And startup founders are actually really good at exploiting dislocations.

• 7:03Rebecca Bellan?

  It's hard because it feels like with every administration, there can be another rapid shift, right? Like with Biden, there was, for example, the IRA that brought a lot of clean tech production back to the US, but also just to like friendly countries and to Mexico and to Canada. Like it brought a lot to countries that we had friendships with. And now Trump is like, okay, never mind. We're not friends with you anymore. And then let's say Trump loses the next election and then a Democrat comes in office, wants to open things up again. You're just constantly, it feels like on the back foot. And specifically, if we're talking about things like manufacturing or where you choose to invest those businesses, it just seems like it's difficult to stay agile.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  One of the big advantages startups and technology businesses more broadly, even the larger ones have, is an emphasis on agility. The entire way they build, the entire way they wake up every day and try and be data-driven in what they're doing, gives them a big advantage that kind of sleepy old corporations don't really have, which is to move the supply chain of a traditional manufacturing business. That's not like a one-week project where a startup can think of that as a sprint and suddenly be out of a market and be somewhere else. I think that can be an advantage to beating established competitors who will get stuck in a market. But there's no doubt this volatility is painful and it's problematic for companies that are trying to win. Frankly, a lot of different industry sectors, whether that be the clean tech sector like you referenced, a lot of these sectors have been propped up

• 8:25Speaker 02

  by government funding. Now, you can argue politically, they've been propped up because society wants these industries to exist. That would be like the positive argument for it. I think the current administration's argument is they've been propped up because of political reasons and political support and they have no business being propped up and therefore the subsidy should be canceled. But the reality is that Being forced to figure out if the market actually wants the products or doesn't want the products will allow startups to be more innovative and more ruthlessly competitive in a market where they are already facing subsidized competitors. I think that's a challenge. We can think through some of the strategies I offer in the book around this. Like, we've seen this push towards companies acting patriotic.

• 9:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I was thinking about that.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  To earn support, which I think we should talk a little bit about as well.

• 9:07Rebecca Bellan?

  Definitely, we should talk about that. You're seeing that all over, across industries. It's this, we're good for American. It's the American dynamism thing. I think it can be tricky because it can lead to a world in which we're racing ahead with things like AI without any safeguards because we have to beat China. But then, at the same time, if like, that's the train we're on, like, how can companies take advantage of that?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I think patriotism is a cloak that companies can use to their advantage in this type of world. When you think about the biggest companies, I think that cloak provides justification that can fend off antitrust arguments. So I write about this in the book, that like, if the government's trying to break you up, or the Department of Justice has been coming after you to break you up, all you really need to do is point at China and say, there's no limit on size there. And we're trying to win. So you're really going to break us up and America's just not going to have the most dynamic, integrated search and other goodies business in the world, or operating system slash AI slash search business in the world. And I think that that would resonate. I think those types of arguments resonate with the White House today, which is if you're actually trying to build in America, you're trying to help America win. I don't think those are arguments that will put you at

• 10:11Speaker 02

  a disadvantage in the future with a future administration if we had a political change. But I think that patriotism cuts both ways. In a world where the number of visitors coming to America is plummeting from European countries, from Canada, from other places, because America's turning a bit into a fortress, where America's pulling back from providing aid, where the State Department may not even have an Africa bureau. I think, as you covered in your recent article about, hence, a lot of my staff is in Rwanda, and we've benefited greatly from the receptiveness across Africa towards US businesses. You know, you do need some infrastructure to support that, and we're retreating from that as a country. So being patriotic doesn't necessarily mean being non-global.

• 10:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Yes.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Which is something that I think we need to think a little bit about.

• 10:53Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, that was an interesting point that I noticed in your book. It seems like the world is becoming less globalized. There's like a deglobalization happening. But at the same time, companies are still global, and their view of geopolitical risk, of legal risk, of technological innovation has to be expansive and global. It's almost like a moving target.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  There's no evidence pre tariffs, there's been no evidence in the trade data that business is deglobalizing, but the entire infrastructure that supported globalization is going away. Globalization was this massive simultaneous rush to get rich, where companies and countries were pointed in the same direction of harmonizing rules and slashing rules to make it easy to be global. And we're now seeing all that come crashing down, but businesses are left holding their cards because they're global, right? They have these footprints. It's not easy to shift out of it, nor do they want to shift out of it. Got businesses that are based in America that are dependent on foreign labor. Suddenly, that's harder to get. So even US businesses, you want to build it here, but you can't bring in the talent to build it here that you would have otherwise done. So I think that's a very hard adjustment

• 11:54Speaker 02

  because businesses by their very nature want to find markets and talent anywhere in the world and exploit them. That's just the way that we've been constructed. I think there are opportunities in that deglobalization, but you kind of have to squint to see them a little bit.

• 12:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. If you have like a, for instance, like I'm curious to help our listeners kind of visualize the way that risk is transforming based on geopolitics. Let's say your business, right? Your business has a lot of workers in Rwanda. I'm not sure what the geopolitical situation there is at the moment, but like, would it make sense for you to think about, okay, the US is offering less aid to countries in developing nations? And how might that affect the stability of those countries? How might that affect my workforce, my business, my markets in those countries? Or similarly, like, let's say you do business with Taiwan, right? And then if the US is pulling back support for Taiwan, and China says, okay, well, we're actually, we're going to surround you, we're going to take over, right? So

• 12:47Rebecca Bellan?

  it's like you're constantly thinking about the geopolitics of other countries in ways that I think a lot of businesses didn't necessarily need to as much in the past?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could take a lot of this stuff for granted. The US was effectively a public goods provider since the end of World War II, and certainly since the end of the Cold War. The US basically patrolled sea lanes and doled out aid and often was not just a good natured altruistic actor, but generally provided public goods around the world in a lot of ways. And now the US is saying it doesn't want to do that. And that's painful in all the countries you mentioned. It's painful in Europe where there are plenty of subsidies for setting up startups in Europe, but now they're gonna have to pay for their own defense. So do they continue to subsidize things like the economy when they actually have to subsidize weapons production? Like, there's a lot of knock on effects. The number one biggest implication is that most CEOs do not want to be geopolitical experts. There are a very small number of people like myself who became obsessed with that world.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Most CEOs want to build their business and they want to get paid for building their business. Part of this is about shifting your mindset to realize you have no choice, but you're stuck in this game. And as a result, you need to surround yourself with good advice or good tools to solve that. Obviously, we can talk about the tools that Hens is building to do that, but a lot of this is about advice, right? You can outsource some of this, but a big piece of that is being proactive. Think about your knowledge supply chain, the way you think about your hard goods supply chain. Like, who's giving you advice? Do you have the right suppliers? Have you gone under NDA with people who can give you crisis management advice? Or who could help you? If you had to leave Taiwan in 48 hours, do you even know who you would call? Right. You probably don't, which means that like your competitor, who already has an exclusive relationship with the best people at doing this, is gonna beat you if you have to do that. Have you even thought about the scenarios?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  If you woke up tomorrow and China said Taiwan has to follow mainland Chinese law, like, let's say they didn't invade. We all always think about invasion and stuff. Let's just say they said the laws of China now apply in Taiwan, right? Tough luck. What does that actually mean for you as an entity if you're operating in Taiwan? Can you continue to do business here? Do you have cross cutting obligations to other investors who won't let you do business in China? Or something like that? You can game a lot of this stuff out. Most businesses don't pause to do that. So a big part of this is about saying, what are the four or five assumptions that all of our value drivers rest on? What markets do they involve access to? The number of businesses that were dependent on Ukraine for technology, support that had seen Russia walk in in 2014 and take Crimea, and then saw Russia amassing troops on the border,

• 15:09Speaker 02

  and said, "Well, it's a coin flip, but we'll just do nothing until Russia crosses the border", was like, kind of astounding. A lot of this is about being proactive and just recognizing the world is changing around you. Some of this stuff doesn't matter to you. Like, a lot of stuff that's happening is, maybe you don't agree with it culturally. Maybe you do, but it doesn't affect your business directly. Some of these things really do. So you need to start planning early in that regard.

• 15:30Rebecca Bellan?

  You mentioned in the book adding a corporate diplomacy team to develop a more sweeping view of your global corporate interests. And these teams can help you just kind of develop more of an integrated and global view rather than just like a country by country perspective. If we're talking startups here, like at what stage does a startup think about having a dedicated team for corporate diplomacy? And you know, always being reactive rather than on the back foot.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  For startups, really, as you go through the evolution from earliest idea, probably through series B, like your interaction with politics is are there subsidies that support us or are there regulators that are trying to shut us down? And do I have a finger on the pulse of the general macro drivers that could affect my access to funding, talent or markets? And I think what we're living through now is that there's a lot going on that is affecting your funding, right? I mean, the dollar is declining. Some might say that it's the policy of the current administration to soften the dollar so that we export more. But if you've been raising in dollars and you have global operations, that's not good for you as a business. So like, there's examples of how do you actually monitor this stuff? Once you get into bigger sizes, series C, series D, once you're pre-IPO, a lot bigger,

• 16:37Speaker 02

  you probably have clients in 10, 20 different countries, customers in 10 or 20 different countries. You may have talent spread across different countries. I think you need to have a storyline and that's why I use the phrase corporate diplomacy. It's about storytelling of what your business stands for. If you're a US headquartered business, are you playing the patriotism game or are you playing the globalist game? It's hard to play both of those, but also we sort of need to realize, I think this is a challenge for companies that are truly like pure American companies, that we're probably going to go through a cycle like we did in the initial negative reactions to globalization, where people don't want like a homogenized Coca-Cola-ization of the world, right? On some level, like they don't want an Americanization of the world. And so all those brands try to present themselves as global.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  If your government, right, we often just talk about Trump, like, no, this is the policy of the United States. If the policy of the United States is really bad for countries you're doing business in, you as a US company are going to have problems. You need to find a way to talk to the government about the fact that you don't support that or that, you know, you had nothing to do with it, or that you're actually creating good for their society in different ways. And that they should support you like for us with our presence in Rwanda. A big piece that we've done is say, we are modeling what a Silicon Valley startup would look like in Rwanda so that you can develop companies like us that give equity to every single employee down to the admin assistants that provide mental health benefits that we're really role modeling a best in class organization so that your employees get educated on what

• 18:03Speaker 02

  that actually looks like and then demand that from other employers. And we actually lead to evolution in your ecosystem so that you can start to attract more sophisticated players in the game. We're playing a bigger game than even we're playing at hence, but who ascribe to those values because they're not going to come if you can't play that way. If the mentality is this is a cash economy, nobody wants equity, then building a startup doesn't make a huge amount of sense because cash is tight as a startup. You want to incentivize people with equity. So a big piece of this is like, what can you actually bring to the places you're operating in? And some of that is know how, but a lot of that is partnership, wanting to help the country tell their story too.

• 18:45Anthony Ha?

  What moves our world forward? Energy. History has been shaped by it, revolutions won with it, and progress dependent on it. For 190 years, Schneider Electric has been a leading force in this story, creating the technologies that harness energy and transform the competitive landscape. And today, in the dawning era of energy and industrial intelligence, Schneider is helping customers build more efficient, resilient, and sustainable operations across every sector, from data centers to homes, from buildings to industry. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. Discover more at se.com.

• 19:23Rebecca Bellan?

  Some of the investors I've spoken to in Europe and everything, they still want to maintain those business ties with the US. I mean, frankly, for money, right? There's a lot changing, but still the biggest checks are still coming out of the United States. I'm hopeful that businesses will be able to tell those dual stories and code switch, depending on who they're talking to, right? You see this happening even with clean tech startups in the US, they're using the race to AI, the American dynamism to say, we need, we need more power. You know, coal is not going to cut it. We need Need renewables or we need fusion, right? We need homegrown as much power as possible. And like, you're still kind of pushing the aim of clean tech while also driving that narrative of patriotism and the US beating China at AI.

• 20:05Rebecca Bellan?

  As you are well aware, not every startup or nonprofit or law firm or what have you has enough money to pay for consultants to help them go through this process of understanding their risk and just staying on top of everything. It's just like, I'm a journalist, the fire hose of information is just absolutely out of hand. Your product that you launched that I covered called Hence Global seeks to address this.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  The good news is technology enables us to solve this problem in a way we really couldn't solve even three or four years ago. Before the advent and ready accessibility and affordability of LLMs and building on top of LLMs, it was very hard to do anything but just keep abreast of what was going on in the news. If you're a business leader who didn't want to pay someone to synthesize it for you. And it's very expensive to pay people to synthesize. I mean, there's a reason why I made a career in that industry because you get paid a lot of money to sit with CEOs and tell them what's going to happen next. And if you're right seven out of 10 times, then they make a lot of money because you actually gave them foresight their competitors didn't have. I think for big companies, they'll pay for humans for that type of thing for the foreseeable future.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  They'll also start supplementing with tech, but for everybody else, they can't pay for humans to do that, right? I mean, if you're a nonprofit organization, you can pay a dollar to understand how the world is going to change. You can probably pay a hundred dollars to understand how the world is going to change, but you can't pay a hundred thousand dollars to understand how the world is going to change. And as a result, we saw that AI could solve a lot of those problems. So the Hence Global product, really the conception behind it was could we give you a personal daily briefing, almost like the president's daily brief, that would provide you with everything you need to know synthesized like a political scientist or a legal expert would synthesize the news to tell you what it means specifically for you. The problem with most tools that are news based or regulatory based is they're not mass customized. They're designed to just tell you what's going on and what's going on may not be relevant

• 21:56Speaker 02

  to you. And in fact, actually, the most interesting things that are happening are things you'd only get From someone knowing you deeply, I would argue actually AI can be better at doing this than humans because AI has kind of perfect recall. So if I feed hence global where your hundred factories are, unlike a human analyst who will probably only query in their head 10 or 15 of those facilities when they're thinking about risk, when they're talking to you, the system will query all 100 all the time. It'll actually catch weak signals and news stories that are not otherwise important. So what was really important to us was to democratize access to global information so that businesses who have global footprints today that are being whipsawed around by this unruliness can actually start to make sense of it and get some good advice from the best

• 22:39Speaker 02

  technology that money can buy, which we're building and we're built on top of because the tech is now enabling us to do stuff we never could have done before.

• 22:45Rebecca Bellan?

  And one thing that I just loved about when you did a little demo for me and we kind of walked through it, as you do with chatbots and LMS, you can give it very specific information about like what kind of business you are, what you're looking for, what you think your risks are, what you want to be paying attention to, and it will provide that briefing for you. And that if you ask it to monitor another company, it says, well, is it a competitor? Or is this a client of yours?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  A supplier.

• 23:10Rebecca Bellan?

  A supplier, right? And that'll change the way that it responds to you and provides insight because it quote unquote, understands what you're looking for. It just seems like a really great tool. And it was, how much was it again for an annual subscription, at least at the base tier?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  The existing pricing is a little over a hundred dollars a month, which anyone who wants to sign up, feel free to use promo code HENCE in TC if you want, and I'll give you a fat discount.

• 23:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Nice.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Right? How about that? A little on the fly promo code. But we're going to be rolling out new tiers too. We're going to roll out actually a micro tier for individuals who want to use it. That'll be cheaper than that. And we'll of course have pro and enterprise tiers too for companies that want to do more. But really, the idea here is if you want to sign up for a good news publication, you're going to pay 40 to 50 a month for that. And you'll probably have two or three or five of those. So if we can replace your need to subscribe to everything to make sure you're missing nothing, and you can just focus on the ones where you really need the good analysis and work covering the rest of it, that should be at an accessible price point.

• 24:08Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I suppose you could say this is for everyone, but are there specific sectors or businesses that you think would benefit the most from using your technology?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Client services sectors have glommed onto it immediately for obvious reasons, which is that they make money by understanding what's going on in their clients' world. So law firms in particular have been using the software to track their clients. So you as a partner might have a portfolio of 15 clients. If you can see that some rule changed in Mongolia that affects your client, and you're the first one to know that and you call them, you literally will bill that person $1,500 for that one hour phone call. You've paid for your entire subscription through one insight, right? It kind of becomes a no brainer. Big consulting firms are the same. They need to monitor what's going on in their key accounts. Today, the way most of these companies do this is they have junior analysts who are cutting their teeth by reading the news and putting together these briefings. I talked to a CEO earlier today who said to me,

• 24:58Speaker 02

  "I have a mandate for my company that anything that can be done with AI should be done with AI, and humans shouldn't be doing it." So wake up every day thinking about that. And certainly like the daily news clipping and briefings and things like that, you can definitely automate. So we've definitely seen client services organizations glom onto it. We've seen a lot of small company founders, like tech startups or smaller businesses, because there's never been a product that enables them to keep track of it. I mean, if I think about Hens as a whole, like we're in the US, we're in Rwanda, we're in the Netherlands, and we're in the UK. That's a lot to keep track of. If I have to pay four lawyers to keep track of that for me, that's expensive.

• 25:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  But I would have bought a software solution that did that if we hadn't built it ourselves. So that's important. And I think the threat in intelligence teams of large corporates, even though we didn't necessarily design it for large corporate as the first client base, those folks don't want to miss anything, and they're always willing to experiment with new tools. So we've seen a lot of uptake there as well.

• 25:44Rebecca Bellan?

  Awesome. One of your clients described it to me as kind of like Uber-y. It's like you didn't know you needed it, and now it's like, oh, this is actually so convenient. Like, I can't live without it. I think that's really great. I think that's just about all the time we have. But where can our listeners find you if they want to get in touch?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  So the easiest places to find us, go to hens.ai. You can find everything you want there about the software and about the book. If you want to find me, I write a Substack at geolegal.substack.com. Reply to any of my weekly updates, and there's a human on the other side that will write back to you, which is me. So that's probably the easiest way to find me as well.

• 26:16Rebecca Bellan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much again for joining us on the show. To our listeners, you can find me on Bluesky X, and you can find Equity at EquityPod on both of those platforms as well. Talk to you next time.

• 26:27Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.