20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfaces are Stupid with Christian Lanng

Christian Lanng is the Founder and Former CEO @ Tradeshift, a company he took from garage to unicorn raising over $900M for with a latest price of $2.7BN in 2021. Just last month, Christian stepped away from the company and is now Chairman @ Beyond Work, building a better work experience through AI native software. In Today's Episode with Christian Lanng We Discuss: 1. Burnout: When it Hits: How did Christian know when something was really seriously wrong? What were the signs? How did being a founder literally almost kill Christian? How was that not a wakeup moment? How does being a founder make you so out of touch with reality? 2. The Things We Are Never Told: Why does Christian think one of the biggest crimes is the myth that everyone can be a founder? What are the single biggest things about VCs that founders are not told? Why does Christian believe fundraising is absolutely a game? What are the rules to win it? What makes the best VCs? What makes the worst VCs? Why does Christian not like to take a discount for a brand name VC? 3. The Chaos That Happens Inside a Company: Why does Christian believe politics should not be discussed within companies? What are Christian's biggest lessons on working with friends? Why after 14 years does Christian only have 3 friends that still talk to him? How did Christian fire 50% of his leadership team and productivity not change at all? Why does Christian believe US startups are inherently better than European ones? 4. Parenting and Relationship to Money: Does Christian regret not being a present father for his child when building Tradeshift? What are the two options as a founder you have when bringing up kids? Was Christian scared to leave Tradeshift? How does he reflect on his relationship to money? 5. AI: Co-Pilot is BS, The Future Business Model and more... Why does Christian believe co-pilot is the last dying breathe attempt from incumbents? Why does Christian believe that per-seat pricing will die? What will replace it? Why does Christian believe that AI will negate the importance of consumer-facing brands? In what way does Christian believe that UI is total BS? How does it change over time?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There's something really, really wrong when the thing you're supposed to love is actually the thing that you can't bear thinking about it. I almost died of anemia. Grit alone don't make you happy, it just get the job done, right? But the cost for me was very, very high of getting to that other side. This was not just a marathon, it was an ultra marathon times 10. So I honestly think a big problem over the last six to seven years is we started telling everyone they should become a founder. At the same time, we didn't tell them what that means.

• 0:24Harry Stebbings?

  Simply put, this is one of the best shows that I've ever done. It's an incredibly raw and honest discussion on burnout, identity and self-worth, combined with a discussion on the future of AI. What more could you want from a show? And joining me for this incredible conversation is Christian Lang, former CEO at TradeShift, a company he took from Garage to Unicorn, raising over $900 million for with the latest price of $2.7 billion in 2021. Just last month, Christian announced that he was stepping back from the company and is now chairman at Beyond Work, building a better work experience through AI-native software. But before we dive into the show today, you know all those mind-numbing tedious tasks that seemingly take up half your day?

• 1:06Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:49Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:33Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:15Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:45Harry Stebbings?

  You have now arrived at your destination. Christian, when we first did this, I was, I didn't know Charlie and the Chocolate Factory age, probably about fifteen. Uh, thank you so much for joining me once again on the show. Thank you so much for having me, yeah. Now, listen, the pleasure's all mine. I would love to start though with actually the announcement that you made a week or so ago about trade shift and your position there. Can you start by just telling us about the position change there and what's going on?

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I've been CEO, co-founder and chairman for Tresia for fourteen years. It's it sounds crazy even saying that number. It was inseparable from my life, I think, in every way. And I think this year especially, I have done a lot of reflection over how the last few years has been and also reflection of not being happy. And I think as founders, we think we just have to keep doing the job no matter what. For me, it was really important to get the company to a place where it's really good shape. But I also made the decision, I think, early this year that I would find and figure out a transition and, you know, move towards next. It's probably the hardest decision in my life and I had no clue how to do it. There was very few people you can talk to about. How do you do this? How do you exit this thing you build?

• 4:46Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you the first question, which is like, I think a lot of people misuse the word burnout or actually have it but don't know they have it. When did you first realise that actually the feelings that you had were not maybe right?

• 4:59Speaker 00

  You know, it probably started, honestly, during the pandemic, right? We were, you know, I'm a very social person. I loved coming into office. I loved having all of the engagement where everyone's seeing the creativity of what we're building. And suddenly I was just sitting for fourteen, sixteen hours in front of a screen every day, no breaks. I remember having to sort of like schedule bio breaks just to be able to run to the restroom. And the rest was just one continuous stream. And I remember, this sounds bad and for everyone who works at Tresia, don't think about it that way. But like, I end up hating looking at that screen. I end up hating even seeing at some points the logo, right? And it didn't mean I don't do the work and I didn't believe in the company and didn't want to get home. Like, I have so much drive towards that. But there's something really, really wrong when the thing you're supposed to love is actually the thing that you almost like, you can't bear thinking about it, right?

• 5:44Harry Stebbings?

  When you felt that, did you realise straight away that that was happening? Did you realise that it was?

• 5:49Speaker 00

  No, I think I just like, you know, it's that, it's like, oh, I don't like this meeting. This content here is not good or something. But then you start realising it's across the board, right? And it's like, but like the frog getting boiled slowly, right? You don't see it when you're in it. And it took sort of some pretty big reality checks, both on my health and on my work that made me realise, no, you're not in a healthy place, right?

• 6:10Harry Stebbings?

  What were those reality checks? I think everyone talks, you know, obviously I stopped drinking.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:14Harry Stebbings?

  Was that like a moment when you were like, I have to change this?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  I think one thing was, you know, like. As I said, going around during COVID and, you know, I mean, realizing I'm thinking every day more about what food I'm gonna cook tonight, what hike I'm gonna do like, and I mean, this sounds innocent, but like, at some point, my girlfriend, she's like, you're like, literally only wanna talk about things that I'm not trashy if you don't wanna, you know, if I talk about like, even for a second, you change topic, you don't wanna like, meet anyone, you don't wanna go out, you're just sitting at home, I don't wanna play computer games or cook, and you used to be this insanely social person and, you know, realizing that my whole personality was almost like flipped around, was a big part of it, and then, and I mean, she kicked my ass also and said like, look, this is not who I saw. I mean, she's like, I fell in love with you, like a different person, right?

• 6:58Harry Stebbings?

  Hearing what you say here, you're a very social person. Everyone struggled in COVID.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:03Harry Stebbings?

  How did you get over the thought that it's just COVID? And actually, I'll get over it when we get back into the real world.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that's actually, I mean, it sounds bad, I think that's almost what broke me, right? Because, you know, the moment then COVID was over, you're like, okay, finally, we can get back, finally, all the energy and you have this hope, I mean, there's this very famous saying like, the most dangerous thing in the world is hope, right? Because then you get back and it's not there. The energy is not there the same way, right? And at the same time, I mean, obviously, COVID was an extremely challenging business environment. As you can guess, also, every unicorn were ah struggling massively, right? We, we moved from a world where there was forty, sixty X revenue multiples to a world where there's seven X, right? And so you have to restructure financing in that environment, you have to go out, and all the shareholders who've been loving what you've been doing at once, or that point, really do not like to have those conversations. So it's also, you move not just from environment, where you think you're gonna be back and it can be creative, it can be fun,

• 7:55Speaker 00

  but also to an environment where every single conversation you have is just hot edged, it's tough negotiations, and that's fine, like, and that's the job. But it's also, I think, at some point, you gotta get the job done. I feel like you owe to employees, you owe to actually shareholders, to everyone, that you get the company to the other side. But grit alone, don't make you happy, it just get the job done, right? It just get you to the other side, but the cost for me was very, very high of getting to that other side.

• 8:20Harry Stebbings?

  Do you ever think that your happiness doesn't matter? I was talking to someone yesterday and it was like, it doesn't matter that I am happy. What matters is the machine of how. Harry and Harry's brand keeps going because the money that the machine makes funds so many other things. Funds mothers, brothers, fathers, teams. Who the fuck cares if I'm happy?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I've been thinking that many times during the spring and this year, honestly, right? And I think, you know, as I also said, right, like in the beginning, when you try to figure out what it means to be a leader, you think, oh yeah, it's about having people follow me. But then you realize like, you know what? Once those people follow you, then you have a real responsibility. Because, you know, I mean, it's pensions on the line, mortgages, children. So I think at that point, you make some choices where you say my happiness is not what's most important. I mean, I made some decisions where I could have got a different path, I could have got a very different path and probably, you know, had a very different outcome and been happier, but it would not, I mean, it would have been a disaster for the company and for everybody involved. So you kind of have to sort of eat that bit of medicine.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  But I think the flip side of that is with happiness comes also great work, comes great creativity and so on. So it really depends. I feel like most founders are people who can't quit and that's both a blessing and a curse. But happiness is not a given.

• 9:33Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to get to not quitting because I think it's a mantra that we all say a lot. But I do just want to ask, when you're feeling these things, you've mentioned the different people involved. Do you communicate to them? Do you say to your team, hey, I'm actually just struggling with a couple of things right now. So can you give me some space? Can you be more patient with me? Do you communicate your mental position with them?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, like there was a very small circle of people in trade shift that's been around for 10 years. And I told a few of them, look, I am really, really struggling and I'm trying. But it's also as the leader, like you're a symbol in a way, right? You can't go in town hall and the whole company and say, listen, guys, I'm actually getting severely depressed at doing the work. Or like, you know, I'm suffering from burnout and I'm not sure I can go the distance and.

• 10:15Harry Stebbings?

  Can you not say that?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Maybe I could. I don't know. That's a great question. I chose not to. I chose to say, no, no, we can get through this, right? Because also I felt like a lot of other people were of course struggling, right? Like, you know, we were going from a world of hypergrowth to, you know, margins and profitability, right? Like the work environment was also changing a lot for everybody in trade shift. And we went through layoffs like everybody else, right? Like, you know, to improve probability and so on. So I think in all of that, if you. Then stand up as a leader and say, and by the way, I'm also feeling slightly depressed and burned out. I think I might have gotten like nephew from good job of the company, right?

• 10:48Harry Stebbings?

  So. The other thing that's hard is also the relationships you have personally.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:52Harry Stebbings?

  And I feel like maybe this is kind of masochistic, male, bad kind of feeling that I have, but I feel like I need to be the strong one. I can't go to my mother with MS and be like, oh, I'm struggling with my mental. I have to be the strong one so she knows she can rely on me.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do you feel that?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I think it is some stupid illegal stuff, probably just ego. It's interesting, right? Because my partner now, she's like, I don't need you to carry me. I don't need you to help me. Like, I'm a strong, strong person. And I think that had made me reset a lot of how I approach this and why I'm doing stuff. And I'm allowed to just do it for myself. I'm allowed to do it because it's fun. I don't have to carry someone. And I think that's freeing. It's also something I'm really still trying to get used to, but you get kicked from time to time and try to learn from it.

• 11:36Harry Stebbings?

  Never, never fun getting kicked, but I agree with you in terms of the lessons. So when you have that realization, you then decide you need to make, make a decision and take action. What happened then?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  I knew the transaction had to be done. Ultimately, then it was down to figuring out how long and when and where to put the focus.

• 11:53Harry Stebbings?

  Can you have a conversation with investors and board members about mental health?

• 11:57Speaker 00

  No, I'm, I'm being brutally honest here, right? Like.

• 11:59Harry Stebbings?

  Why, why is that? I'm a board member and.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I think if you think about the type of funds and capital managers and people you deal with at, at a late stage growth startup. I mean, there's probably as much space to have that mental health conversation as there is on Wall Street in general, which is not a lot. And I think we all agreed that it was best. I stepped aside and we made space for the next generation. And I think for me, even when it was just there, like the, the most sort of prone feeling I had after was just relief. Like I was so relieved to be able to say, okay, somebody else got this now. Somebody else has the job of driving it further and getting it to the next stage. And that's what hindsight is twenty twenty, right? That's when I really realized, holy shit, I've really, really been in a bad place.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Because to feel that immense relief of letting go of something I've done for fourteen years and then not seeing it while you're in it, right? Right. So that's actually what prompted me to write the post and I was really in doubt like, do I want to write this?

• 12:53Harry Stebbings?

  So you come out of the meeting and you just breathe a massive sigh of relief?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:57Harry Stebbings?

  How did that feel?

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Part of me would have like, there should be this voice telling me that's bad and you know, you should care more for the people, you should fight some more. But I was just like, I am so done. Like this was not just a marathon, it was an ultra marathon times 10. And right now, I can't imagine anything better than I don't have to do this right now. And that's just both great and in some side incredibly sad because this is my life, right?

• 13:19Harry Stebbings?

  People often ask the question like, how do you know when to give up versus when to persist? And I always say it's when you are no longer excited to try anything new with that venture. There's no new projects you want to do, there's no new hires, there's nothing that you're excited to do.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  No, and I also think like, it's like, you see the same strategy for the 17th time and people like, hey, we have this great idea. It's like, been there. And I realized like, in the early days of Trade Shift, we always said like, be critical, not cynical, right? Like critical is to try to prove an idea and to pressure test it to make as good as possible. And cynical just means you've given up before you even try. And I realized like, I'm the cynic in the room, right? Like, I'm the last one who should be the cynic and I'm the cynic.

• 13:56Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that's normal? I'm the cynic in 20 years. You know why? It's been fucking weathered. I've been doing this for nine years. I've seen a ship.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  I think it's really, really important that you push yourself to not be the cynic or figure out how not to be the cynic. Because if you don't look at stuff with fresh eyes, like I thought all of the crypto stuff was absolutely BS. Still think like most, I've done transactions and supply chain infrastructure and payment infrastructure my whole life, right? So I had a little bit of knowledge and background to look at it from. It's like, there's no way this makes sense in any world. But then a few people challenged me and I challenged myself to say, no, no, try to look at it as if you wanted to build something in this space. I was not a big fan of a lot of the community and so on, but I tried because I don't want to be that cynic and say, okay, this is just BS, right? Ultimately, it was just BS and I'm happy I didn't build something in space.

• 14:40Harry Stebbings?

  Can I see, you come out of the meeting, you're relieved. It's 14 years of your life, you're Christian from Trade Shift, that's part of your identity.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:48Harry Stebbings?

  Rightly or wrongly, did you feel a loss of identity with no longer being Trade Shift?

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Some. Or put in another way, I think for me personally, did I leave something behind? Probably, but I also, I think, you know, learned so many lessons, like we were kids, like me and me. I was joking the other day, I was talking to, this is like, people are like, oh, SaaS metrics should be this and this should be your margin and rule 40 and all of this, like. Are you aware that none of this existed fourteen years ago? We were making it up as we went along. It's like, what should be great metrics for a SaaS company? It's like, nobody knows, right? So I think, you know, it's really important to understand that all of those lessons that today it's just a machine. It's gotta be like this. Here's the metrics. Here's the thing you gotta hit. All of that. We had to experiment, experiment and build and learn. I mean, one of the things that excites me today is to say, wow, I can take all that knowledge. I can take all those ideas and I can approach it completely from fresh.

• 15:35Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know what's funny is, and I'm probably getting in trouble for this, the investing team, do you tell me off this? Cause all the first time founders don't come to us anymore. But I always say like, I would so much rather invest in second time founders and pay a premium. Because I think the lessons that you've learned prevent you from making so many very significant mistakes that first time founders made just because you don't know.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, ultimately, there's also a chance to make a lot of new mistakes you haven't tried to make.

• 16:00Harry Stebbings?

  Sure. But we've eliminated a while.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  I can make them faster and I can learn faster, right? And I think back to the, to the burnout side, I think it's like, I was also advising on a few things and I was really getting immersed in everything that was happening in, in generative AI. I, I studied as a sociologist with language as, as a primary, like complex system and language. So everything that's happening in generative AI was peeking my brain a lot. And when you're figuring out every time, like that once a week, you're listening into that team meeting or hearing or seeing what they're building, that's the most exciting moment in, in what you're doing. And, you know, what you're doing every day is the thing you just gotta fight to do. Then I think your energy is also flowing differently. And I think that's also why the idea of, of being able to sort of have a bit of a blank slate and think differently and build differently and, and use all of my experience, that's really exciting.

• 16:44Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you a bit of a weird one? But it's, you know, we're constantly told the mantras of never give up, never ring the bell, persistence is the key to entrepreneurship, the winners are the ones who just stay. I remember Jason Calacanis told me with podcasting, he said, it's very simple. The winner is the one who just survives the longest. Jason, I fucking survived a long time.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:03Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about that persistence, never give up?

• 17:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it's true, unfortunately. I honestly think a big problem over the last six to seven years is we started telling everyone they should become a founder. At the same time, we didn't tell them what that means. And I think the people I know persisted, right? Like the people who, for instance, for like the Danish mafia, the early, you know, Sendez, Unity, all these guys, none of us are normal people. None of us with extremely unhealthy life, work balances, right? And, and so I don't think.

• 17:31Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have to have that to be successful?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  I don't know. I'll try to see if it can be different this time. Like I'm, I'll try. But I don't know, and I have a feeling once I've really pulled into the idea, it'll be hard, right? What do you think we don't tell founders that they should know? Because you're right, it was this normalization of entrepreneurship. Everyone can be a founder. Yeah. And everyone became a founder. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of things. I mean, the first thing is for ninety nine percent of startups, no offence, but VCs is going to own most of your company. By the time you have worked for six or seven years and your salary will probably be less than if you'd worked anywhere else combined. And that's if you're lucky, right? Like ninety nine percent of change, you just. That's if you're alive after six years. Exactly right. And the second thing is also just like that, as you just said, it's just about surviving, et cetera.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Like, are you willing to really think through what that means on the cost of your family life, your connections, your friends? Like, I'm lucky, I have like two or three people that still talk to me after fourteen years, but that's about it. Like, everybody else is like, we used to know you, but we don't, right? And. What do you mean by that? People outside the company at the time, right? Just because you lost friendships? Yeah, and the only friendships I sort of retained over that long time in the end happened to be people I was working with. Do you regret that? Yeah, I think absolutely, actually. What would you have done differently? Like, help me, because I feel like there's your chapter ahead and I'm making the mistakes that. I mean, I don't know, right? I mean, it's so weird, right? Because, sort of a side story, I used to play a lot of poker. And, I mean, again, back to the attention theme or your things that piggy out rain.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  But then my friends are like, why don't you play poker anymore? It's like, well, once you're done a two hundred million dollar funding round and you've just stared each other down at that table. And I'm not saying founders sometimes bluff, but sometimes we do and sometimes we take it home. It's really hard to get excited that sitting at the table and, you know, playing about a hundred bucks, like, or even if it's more. And so I think our lives become so different. What do you talk about? Like, well, I've been traveling around the world. Honestly, like, there were many years I did between one hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand miles a year. I was looking at my average, I think I spent around four years in hotels, over fourteen years. You lose, in a way, connection with reality. I mean, what are you going to talk about it? But it's like, yeah, this is what happened this week and we went to work. So I think you've got to find ways to find those common threads and remain.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Is your health just in the shitter in those moments? I mean, that travel is just brutal. Oh, absolutely. I mean. Probably too much, but like, I mean, I almost died of anemia. I just didn't have time to go to the doctor. You know, I felt really fatigued. I felt really tired. Just before annual sales kickoff, I went to the doctor and said, I feel really fatigued. Like, let's, let's take a blood sample. And we did, and I went off to Las Vegas to do the rah rah rah and, you know, in front of the whole company. And when I stepped down from stage, there's a text message from my doctor says, go immediately to the nearest ER and tell them your hemoglobin is five point four. So I remember being sort of in a blur going.

• 20:14Harry Stebbings?

  So you went back on stage, finished the talk.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  I was done with talk. I delivered the talk. They're arriving in the ER, tell them, hey, my doctor told me my hemoglobin is five point four. And she's like, no, it's not because you'll be, you'll be laying in a coma on the floor. And then I said, no, and I showed a text message. The next thing I knew, I had like a bag of blood in my arm and, you know.

• 20:30Harry Stebbings?

  Did that sink into you? I mean, that's quite.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  No, at the time it didn't. And that's actually really, really sad, right? Because the risk of dying of a heart attack, when you have that low hemoglobin, is very, very high. So yeah, you absolutely sacrifice your health over, over this process. And it's stupid stuff, like thinking you don't have time to go to the doctor and it's like, oh yeah, I'm always tired. I'm a little tired anyway. It's like, what's a little bit more tired means, just means drink some more Red Bull, uh, some more espressos and so on. So in, in one sense, it was a wake up in the sense that I really, really started caring about my health and feeling healthy and being healthy. But I don't think it sung in why I got to that point. I, I realized I needed to be healthy, but just so I could perform. I didn't realize that I got so sick because I, I was so focused or obsessed. Yeah.

• 21:10Harry Stebbings?

  Did you change anything after that?

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. Started exercising four, five times a week. Took my health very seriously, you know, monitored, I would say my health condition in general. And, you know, probably one of the best things that came out of the last fourteen years.

• 21:23Harry Stebbings?

  I think you look fantastic, by the way. I mean, you're always a good looking dude, but it's the Scandi blood. Can I ask you, this sounds weird, but for my sins, I was also bulimic. And there's like this masochistic tendency, I think, within a lot of addicts, where it's like, you quite like the feeling of being in pain. Almost when I'm so tired.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:41Harry Stebbings?

  I'm almost fucking buzzing.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:43Harry Stebbings?

  Did you ever have that where you actually quite liked almost feeling the pain?

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a really good question, by the way. I think there was this pride of just being able to keep going. We used to have a Skype group when Skype was a thing of a few people in the company that was called. Night motherfucking X Y C. That was because at two AM we were all sitting solving some problem, getting something done, getting somewhere. And we were proud that we were in that group, right? And then again, that's maybe not the healthiest sign. And so, so I, I do think there's something about enjoying that you can do what other people can't maybe. Like you can, you can be a little bit more tough, you can last a bit longer, you can get more stuff done. I can go straight from a customer meeting and then make a keynote in the car. And I came back at four AM the night before, cause I was out with customers. And for most other people, that would just mean that they would be destroyed. But how long can you do it and what are the consequences of doing it?

• 22:30Harry Stebbings?

  Because you said about your friendships there. I think one thing that I think intensely about is actually children. I love, I love children. I, I don't have any because, you know, I struggle to get up in the morning myself. But I, I would like them one day and I worry that I won't be there for them in a way that I would like to as a father.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:44Harry Stebbings?

  I hope it's okay for me to ask, were you there for your child in the way that you wanted to be? And how do you feel about that?

• 22:51Speaker 00

  You know, time will tell. I think I always tried to be honest with my son about what I do and why I do it. I always tried to be honest that I work a lot, but I also tried to include him in what is the work. So in a way, you, you have two choices if you wanna do this and you have kids, right? You can try to shield them and keep them away from it, or you can try to include them so they can see what it is. And again, as I said, time will tell, right?

• 23:12Harry Stebbings?

  Do you regret missing things?

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. There's lots and lots of things I regret missing. And I mean, we all have the right parent, school meetings, et cetera. I mean, one of my friends said though, being a parent is to permanently feeling, feel guilty. Like that's just how it is. And I mean, to your point about getting up early in the morning, I mean, if you have a problem with that, just get kids because that solves the problem. Again, I mean, that's another like thing. It ends up costing family a time and it could end up costing, you know, with your family.

• 23:36Harry Stebbings?

  This kind of semi, you weren't expecting the kind of mutual counselling session. But I constantly feel guilty because I constantly feel like I'm failing as a son, as a brother, as a boyfriend, as a fund manager, as an entrepreneur. There's so many different fucking hats.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:51Harry Stebbings?

  That if I'm winning in one, I'm by nature failing in another.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:55Harry Stebbings?

  I really struggle with that constant feeling of failure.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think it's really, really important to learn to forgive yourself. It take me, I'm, I'm still struggling with it, but it's taken me a very, very long time to do that.

• 24:06Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything that's helped? To do that.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did coaching for seven years. I'm an amazing coach. In the very first session I had with her, I said, coaching is bullshit. I don't want you to take my anger away. I'm angry about all the bullshit from my childhood and it's just like, I'm gonna build and show everyone what I can create. And she just looks at me and she says, Christian, what makes you think that it's not a bigger revenge to be happy and successful? And I said, like, F you. So that was the start. But I think one of the things she taught me is it's okay. Like, it's okay that you're failing at certain things. So I think forgiving yourself and taking some of the hats off, honestly. I also think it's about creating maybe a family life where you are aligned in what you want. You can build together, for instance, this is what I'm doing now. And in that way, it's not a constant tug of force of time, right?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  And it's more like you're pushing in the same direction. Now, that's very, very hard to find, of course, but that's at least what works for me.

• 24:58Harry Stebbings?

  Interesting, Trudy, you said there about kind of bullshit from childhood. I'll show you.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:02Harry Stebbings?

  I was like the fat kid that was bullied at school. I know you wouldn't know it now, looking at this, you know, Hulk of a man. But, uh, hey, there was a lot, which is like, I derive my own value from like bluntly my status.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, of course. And I think, I mean, I think you'll have a hard time finding a founder that don't have something that they're motivating them, right? Because as I said earlier, like founders are extreme people.

• 25:24Harry Stebbings?

  What is it for you? Is it that bullshit childhood that you're like, I'm gonna?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  It was that. And I think it, over the last seven years, it moved from being that to being.

• 25:32Harry Stebbings?

  Is that unhealthy? Like, because I don't mind.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I used to also don't mind, but I think I also learned that I also don't mind actually being happy. Did a bit of the edge go off? I think you should ask my competitors about that. They'll probably say no. And that's the thing. I think inside your head, you think it's really, really important and it's what drives you. But what I found is like, even when it goes down a little bit and you feel less of the anger, less of the motivation from that, I didn't lose my drive. So I think one thing you might be depriving yourself of is figuring out that you have the drive because you have the drive. And it's not necessarily with something external. And I mean, that's awesome. That just means you are a creative driven person with with a high amount of willpower, right? You don't need to let somebody else who was, you know, a dick in your childhood define you, right? Yeah.

• 26:15Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, it's also a financial decision walking away. And I think a lot of people don't admit the truth about finances. We all have to have these missions. It's not about the money. Oh, I don't care about the money. I just love my mission.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:28Harry Stebbings?

  How do you feel about your relationship to money today? And did that change?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  So for me, money has never been the goal. I always just been a very curious person. I always just stumbled into things that sort of pique my curiosity. And then I start digging at them, digging more at them. And what I found is that if I follow my curiosity, it tends to follow that success and money and so on. But I think also in my later years, right? Like it's it's easier when you don't have any kids and it's just you, you know? What is risk really then? Like all the investors and, you know, especially when they wanna extract a bit better terms or, you know, bully you in a down market or whatever, right? They will tell you like, we'd hate to see you lose everything, right? But the reality is my everything is my mind. They can lose some money, but I cannot lose my mind. I can still tomorrow go out and think about what's next. And so I think for me, later in life, now that I have a family and people like, of course, it's important and you can support everyone.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  But it's never been the goal. It's really nice. People say money can buy happiness, haven't tried. You can definitely make things nicer and you can make life nicer. But it gets very hard to sustain that drive if it's the only thing. There gotta be something you you wanna scratch at, a peek at, or that that tickles your mind enough that you wanna keep going.

• 27:37Harry Stebbings?

  You said it's like an ultramarathon in the last fourteen years or many ultramarathons. My question to you is on two sides. We started about kind of investors on the negotiating and discussing terms with you. What are the bullshit things that you see about VCs, investors, that you think more founders should know or wish you'd known earlier?

• 27:55Speaker 00

  I think one of the things that we were lucky early on is that we have a lot of investors that were actually, in their way, they were thinking evergreen. They did not have to have necessarily an exit in three, four, five years. Especially because we, as when we talked nine years ago, massively underestimated how hard it would be, how long it would take. But I think, I mean, what are some of the things you see, right?

• 28:12Harry Stebbings?

  Like, I think one of the biggest for me is like there is misalignments between founders and VCs. I need I need my cash back and I need more of it back than I gave you. And there will be times when I need it back and it doesn't suit you.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. But I also think VCs get pissed off when founders use exactly the same strategies as they do. Right. And I'll, I'll take an example, right. In the latest financing round for, for TradeShift. And for all the TradeShifts out there, remember to remind your investors of this. I refused to sign the papers until the employee stock option pool got moved from common to pref two. Because I did not want all of our employees to be underwater in any potential transactions in the future. And that did not include founder stock. This is the thing where people understand waterfalls, they understand the games, they understand the league pref, they understand how everything flows. Probably not made me the most friends in the, in the world at that time. And, and I did wait quite late because I knew if I was bringing it up, you know, nine months before it would be hard. But, but you know, when the transaction is about to happen.

• 29:07Harry Stebbings?

  It's too late. They have used too much time.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Exactly right. And, and this is the other thing, right. Like runway works both ways. Runway is, is an excellent tool to make sure you also are able to have some leverage in that negotiation. Because the reality is if, if your company is doing well and if you're great, then if the runway is shorter, then, then everybody needs to come to a conclusion faster. And, and that can work both for the founder and for the VC. So I think there's a lot of stuff where VCs are not your friends. But the best VCs can help you get a great, a much better outcome. And I think one of my regrets, I mean, I think earlier on we were too focused on valuation and probably made some other choices then and spent a lot of time.

• 29:42Harry Stebbings?

  Or would you have done differently?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Probably taking some lower valuations and not having to fight as hard to catch up to those numbers, to be honest, but.

• 29:48Harry Stebbings?

  Let's just dig into that. So you took higher valuations and then you felt the pressure to then catch up to them.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a very classic trap, right. Like.

• 29:55Harry Stebbings?

  Did you do things that you wouldn't have done otherwise?

• 29:58Speaker 00

  I mean, if you think about it, right. And this is, this is 14 years ago. We raised our A round at, at a hundred million dollar valuation. We did our B round a hundred and forty, C at three fifty, right. So these were hefty numbers 14 years ago. And we could, because we had a strong vision and a strong product and, and, and strong customers. But it also meant that when real SaaS metrics started emerging and the market started normalizing. And then it was really, really tough, right. Because we had to catch up to that and, and we had to do some creative structuring of financing in the interim. Because you couldn't go out and raise necessarily the same market or you would be forced into a down round and so on. So I think I got like a PhD in, in, in. As well in the last fourteen years.

• 30:36Harry Stebbings?

  But I I actually tweeted yesterday, how many very, very successful companies today raised a hundred X ARR rounds? So a million in revenue, a hundred million price. And Parker Conrad from Rippling.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:50Harry Stebbings?

  I know, and has been a guest on the show many times. He was basically like, this is a narrative that VCs like to spin. Actually, having the capital allows you to do different experiments, which is good. It's unrelated to valuation. I think he's wrong. He's very good at deploying capital efficiently.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:07Harry Stebbings?

  But ninety nine percent of people, if given a hundred million, are not.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  No, I I think you're both right. I think he's right in the sense that you do need, and in fact, our argument for raising at those valuation were, nobody has done this before. Nobody has built a global network for trade, just like you build a Facebook. It didn't exist. And I mean, to be honest, we know freaking clue how to do it. We we have a lot of ideas and we we need to iterate. So my argument was always, if we get more capital, we have more shots and we can try more times, right? And also, I kind of always dislike the whole, you should pick us as a VC. We know it's a forty percent discount to the other guys, but we're smart. Like the smart VC like story, because the reality is like, if if I need to give us forty percent discount because the VC is so smart that they will make a fun value, like, then I probably shouldn't be the founder. The VCs should probably be the founder and.

• 31:52Harry Stebbings?

  On the flip side, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I get you on the discount, but actually, there are some investors, say a Bill Gurley at Benchmark, or, you know, Rodolph at Sequoia, who the weight of their name, their contacts, and their B two B customers actually could move them. And it doesn't take away from your operator ability, but their ability to accelerate you is very significant. Is it worth it then?

• 32:14Speaker 00

  I agree, it is. You've just got to be sure that when you get that name, you also get that attention. Because you're right, if that brand is behind you, but then also give you that attention to push, then absolutely right. You've got to be a bit careful with the big names. I mean, they're really, really great. I know a lot of people there. I think they're amazing. But what you're going to ensure is you have the attention for the right people, and then what you said will happen.

• 32:34Harry Stebbings?

  Did you manage your investors well? No one teaches founders like investor management, do they?

• 32:39Speaker 00

  It's hard when you feel like you're just running from, you know, for the first seven, eight years, it's just up and hypergrowth. And then you are like in turbulent waters and you're just running from fire to fire to fire. That's hard. Like sometimes I was writing an update. By the time I was done writing the update, everything had changed. And you're like, how do you keep catching up? But like for the last parts of this process, we had to have a really tight coordination between the shareholders to pull it off. And we did that by having very frequent calls and trying to explain everything, what's going on to everyone. I think I would like to think in a future life, I could do better.

• 33:10Harry Stebbings?

  If you could advise founders, you know, we have, I think, two hundred thousand founders. If you could advise founders listening on what you know now about fundraising venture rounds, what would you say that you wish they'd known you'd known?

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the first one is don't over optimize on valuation. It's current markets also pretty easy. I think the second one is fundraising is, and nobody will admit it, is a game. Don't reveal all your cards upfront. Like, I used to always take out one or two slides of the deck, like I'll make the perfect pitch deck and then I'll remove the team slide. Because all VCs will then ask the question, but what about team? That's the question I want them to ask instead of asking some stupid question about our architecture that they don't know about anyways. And they just want to sound smart because you've got to remember VCs will always want to have a question that make them sound smart. So it's much better they ask about something you have full control over and they'll say, oh, team. And then I'll show like this kick ass team that done it like three times before and everybody was very senior and so on.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  But remember, it's a little bit of a game and make sure that you control the conversation, a bit of where, you know, do you want to go? And then, and then lastly, I think, remember you're building relationships for five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years in some cases, right? And just min max negotiating on the very first contact. Like if you're about to do something together, that might be very suboptimal for the whole length frame.

• 34:22Harry Stebbings?

  I've opened up a little bit about my struggles before in different areas. As an investor, I would like to be able to have a relationship with you as a FAS if we were invested and working together. Well, you could tell me.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:33Harry Stebbings?

  And I would like to be able to tell you when I'm struggling.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:35Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything that one could do or is it just a nature of the structure?

• 34:39Speaker 00

  I have investors where I have this relationship with, right? Like, I mean, a bunch of our investors also wrote me after my post. I mean, some were happy with the results of the round, which they just did, some were unhappy, but they still wrote me. And so that meant a lot, but it is clear, right? Like, of course, investors are in it for the money, so to some degree, most of the reasons, I think founders are as well. But I do think it's better when there is an understanding and I mean, there's the old saying. Like you know, if an investor is good, if they show up and shit is hot, right? Like, everybody is just cheering when it's like up, up, up is like, go faster. But the investors that I have a relationship with today are the investors that were there when when stuff was really, really hot. Or when something blew up in a way we didn't expect or whatever, and they were still there. And I think, you know, as an investor, you probably have some control in the sense that you show up for for for your founders when everybody else is about to bail on them, for instance, right?

• 35:24Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be honest? I don't think they come to you, and I don't think they come to you because I just don't feel they can.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  No, I mean.

• 35:30Harry Stebbings?

  And so, and so then I I think, well, is there anything that I can do to let them know that they can? It's why, honestly, it's why I do shows more like this, where I show you that, fuck, I've got a problem.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, I I think actually this is part of, used to be part of the leadership principles in trade shift. Which one of the very first things I taught all our leaders is show vulnerability. And the reason I say that is, you know, in American business culture, you've just got to be perfect. Like, it's like, hey, what do you think about this? You have an answer, right? Actually, that's why ChatGPT is kind of screwed, because it just want to give a perfect answer to everything and it can't say, hey, could you clarify? I don't know or whatever, but I told my leaders, I know people will actually trust you more if you show vulnerability. If you say, hey, this is an area I'm bad at as a leader, this is an area I'm good at. Because that helped build a relationship with people, and I think the same is true as an investor. I think it's absolutely the right strategy to show vulnerability and say, look, I've struggled with these things and so on, because it makes you a human.

• 36:16Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be really harsh? Transparency is the core trait.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 36:19Harry Stebbings?

  But you didn't share it with the team when you were struggling.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  No, that's spot on. Like, you know, I I think I failed at at the first leadership principle I I taught most of our leaders. And that's right, maybe they've gone differently if I had. Yeah, but I think still, like, I think to try to be real people is very, very important. And I think vulnerability is actually one of the biggest trust building things you can do. The hard part is I've also plenty of times shown vulnerability and gotten screwed over hard, right?

• 36:46Harry Stebbings?

  How so?

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Just because people take advantage, they see an opportunity, they see money. And and then it's really hard the morning after to wake up and say, I don't want to become a fucking silly. I'd rather have one more time where you would say, okay, I was vulnerable and I got effed. But it was more important that I don't lose sway. Now, people are on me, but so, yeah, that's true, Christian, but you could be a bit more, you could still be a bit more skeptical and a little bit more critical of people and, yeah.

• 37:10Harry Stebbings?

  When your trust is broken. Someone you believe in or trust. It's very hard not to be jaded.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  It is. It is the hardest thing in the world, but if you let yourself become jaded, then you let those people define who you are. Look, I have people out there right now that I really like. They just wanna exploit the situation that they wanna hurt me. But what I wanna focus on is like, I don't wanna give them any energy. I don't wanna think about, I wanna think about what I'm building now. I wanna think about where I'm going in the future. I wanna think about being happy. Because back to the point about happiness is the best revenge in the world.

• 37:37Harry Stebbings?

  So as someone said to me, revenge is someone else having rent in your mind.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is really, really effing hard.

• 37:43Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I said there as like an investor, I want to have that relationship with you where you can. As a founder with employees, with team members, how do you think about creating, especially with new companies now and just generally today with this workforce? Are creating environments where like, hey, mental health is serious and you can talk about it to us? Because you can and you can't.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think, I mean, talk about mental health in startups is wow, that's a, that's a big one. It's hard, right? Because I believe myself I have the hustle, karma, I don't stop, I can just keep going, all of those things, right? So, you know, when I was younger, I thought like, how do we deal with mental health and startup? We just make sure we hire people only like that, right? Like, I mean, the first joke was like, we don't need an A I department because everybody here is just like here to work and, you know, fuck it, we'll just go full speed. But I think if I can struggle, then anyone can. And if I can burn out, then anyone can. And I think startups is ninety nine percent people. That is the primary asset. If the wrong person goes down at the wrong time, that can be a very, very big destruction of value, right? So I think we gotta find better ways of thinking about it.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  It should definitely not be that we now have to all do our journaling and a lot of other woke things that I think probably just contribute more to stress than, than that actually helps solve things. So.

• 38:51Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find leadership harder today in this woke generation?

• 38:55Speaker 00

  I think a lot of the things that were the sources behind wokeness probably have rounding. It's extremely hard to discuss that within some very extreme environments like startups. Because there are extreme machines, there are extreme environments. On the other hand, there's also been a lot of founders out there that is exploiting that and said, look, it is an extreme environment, so I can do whatever I want. I can be, you know, a psychological terror or whatever, right? So you, you gotta create an inclusive environment without going over. And then you're just gonna focus everyone on one thing and one thing only, and that's building. I like what David Hammers is like, he banned politics in signals. And I think that's absolutely right. We shouldn't sit around the table discussing all this stuff. We should just build something and make it work. And if we're allowing everyone to be the best at building, then then we're doing it right.

• 39:38Harry Stebbings?

  Should you be friends with your team?

• 39:40Speaker 00

  One of the things we put into what we're building right now is that that we're a team, not a family. Because let's be real, like, some of the hardest things I've had to do, I fired a person that I've known since high school, I worked with for 10 years, who moved to California as part of the journey. At that moment, you really do not want to be friends with the person, the people you work with. On the other hand, I think it's very, very hard to do something as intense and wild and crazy as a startup without becoming friends with these people, because you have all these war stories, you have everything you do together. So one of my good friends and early advisors, he always said, look, absolutely go work with your friends, or become friends with who you work with. Just know, you might have nine really good years, and then the breakup is probably horrible. But why not have five really intense good years with someone? When most friendships,

• 40:24Speaker 00

  to be honest, is we meet in the pub and we talk bullshit about the game. It's a trade off. And I don't have the answer.

• 40:28Harry Stebbings?

  14 years, we mentioned that kind of lessons from investors and board. When it comes to like, operational lessons, what are the biggest operational lessons that stand out to you from the 14 years that you advise founders now, having seen what you've seen?

• 40:41Speaker 00

  First off, never ever compromise on quality when you hire. You will be so tempted when you're in the hypergrowth stage. Everybody will be screaming at you that they need people on this function, or this function, or this function. And I think.

• 40:52Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you can have like, A plus players in every role?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Essentially, it's just a question of pain. How much pain are you willing to endure to get the right people on the team? Because when everything is scaling like crazy, if you don't fill that role, it means everybody else is in more pain. But on the other hand, if you start filling those roles with people who are not the same level of quality, then then you have a challenge, right?

• 41:09Harry Stebbings?

  Or things just don't get done. More pain I can take.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'll give you an example. I guess a very real example is like, at one point, we fired 50% of the VPs in TradeShift.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  And there was no drop of productivity. And I really thought to myself, what the fuck have we been doing? Who the fuck are all these people, right? And, and I mean, that's surreal. Like so operational lessons is that, I think the other one is just, I mean, this is said so many times, whatever you charge, double your price. We found out in Tracy very early on that there was an inverse relationship between price and speed of sales cycle. The more we charge, the faster we close. People are afraid of that. People are afraid of saying really large numbers, especially if you come from outside this world. I think another operational lesson that is really, really important is just, you've just got to iterate faster and you've got to kill stuff faster. You're going to kill, everybody thinks that you can kill stuff fast, but it's not fast enough. The very best operators, like you mentioned Parker Conrad and people like that, they are so insane at the iteration speed and that's why they win.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  And I think there's an ability to understand that. I think in Europe, we don't really still understand. I was 10 years in Silicon Valley. I don't think we still understand how much better that most really good San Francisco startups or Silicon Valley startups are compared to the Europeans.

• 42:17Harry Stebbings?

  Why is that?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  We just honestly like vacation a little bit too much. We like coming home at five with the kids. Like we started to have other things that are other benefits, right? Because the very best people in the world in say AI or engineering or whatever, they want life quality, right? So Europe can offer a lot on that, but the extremity of execution is something I only ever seen in Silicon Valley. Actually, one other place is China.

• 42:39Harry Stebbings?

  What are some examples of the extremity of execution that impressed you or think we could learn from?

• 42:44Speaker 00

  I remember, you know, when I first came to Silicon Valley, it was Reid Hoffman who actually told me, he said like, within two square miles of where you stand, there's 5,000 startups. Within three months, 95% of them are going to be dead. And everybody there are going to be into new startups, recycling all the knowledge, et cetera, right? So you have, just to start with, the whole machine recycles knowledge most faster. But the second thing I think within those startups is that shit just get done. Nobody stops until they're like, I mean, the idea that you work or don't work on weekends, it's just not a thing. And you know, if you're doing a startup and it's early stage, you just work, you just build, you just do. And I mean, I know it's ironically, it's a certain phrase that right here as we started the conversation on Burnout. That's probably the paradox. There is no good ways to combine all of these things.

• 43:25Harry Stebbings?

  I do believe if you have to create something, if you want to create something truly that category defining, you do have to give up a huge amount that no one else is willing to give up, or very few people are willing to give up.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  They are absolutely right.

• 43:36Harry Stebbings?

  And it's like you don't build greatness on nine to five.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also think just look broader, right? Most modern work sucks, right? Why do people go to startups? Because it's exciting, because it's great, because it's fun, because you're doing something with your mind. If you go to most corporate work, ninety percent of it is like cover something from this piece of this spreadsheet into this field, type this form, click this button, you have no idea what it does, then update this and then keep going. It's so far removed from who we are as humans. I mean, we are animals. We get a kick out of defending the village, you know, hunting for stuff, raising children, like. So it's very hard to get excited by clicking update lead source four.

• 44:12Harry Stebbings?

  Catch per C D four.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Exactly right. And I think so with this new thing, like with beyond work, one of the things that I've really been thinking hard about is, can we try to redefine the modern work experience? Can we make it so it's not the applications that define how you work? Why should it be Salesforce or Workday or SAP, all these systems that make you into a robot? Why shouldn't it be you who can just work the way that your brain works and all these systems should be in the background?

• 44:38Harry Stebbings?

  So what is beyond work, sorry?

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so beyond work is.

• 44:41Harry Stebbings?

  That sounds great, but like.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Beyond work is essentially the idea that we should be able to automate any work we want as regular people. And we should be able to take any task and combine it and collaborate with other people around it without having to log into applications. Imagine you have a problem, say, hey, I want to create a vendor database based off all these invoices. Then the user interface just appears and show you that and it goes away. So.

• 45:02Harry Stebbings?

  So it's like a meta layer that sits on top of all your existing apps, plugs into all data.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Exactly right, but it's centered on humans in the center. Salesforce don't have a human in the center. Salesforce makes you into a robot that has to click buttons in a certain order. And why on earth should you learn that? Why should you spend ten percent of your brain storing information that's completely useless for anything you do? What you really want to be doing is to look at the data and, you know, pull out conclusions or figure out like who's about top ten percent salespeople. And we have some amazing powerful tools right now, like, of course, the new large language models, but they don't really solve the problem with work. They just give us some power. Give us some some stuff we can do in the engine. But what I've really been thinking about is how can we put all of this together in a new way? How can we generate a completely new work experience? And the funny thing is, I took it out to to a few of my friends who who are like C level executives in some of the largest companies in the world.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  And they were almost like, holy shit, how fast can we get this? I think we've forgotten, just some simple numbers, right? I T corporate budgets, they went from three hundred billion to seven hundred eighty billion dollars on enterprise software over the last ten years. At the same time, we doubled the amount of people in shared services, eight to sixteen million. And we doubled the amount of people in corporate I T, four to eight million. Why? We're buying all of this amazing software that should make everything better and more efficient and more productive. But instead, we just become less efficient and we hate our life more.

• 46:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not find this, I find this with like company fundraising, so which is like, hang on a minute. In a world of open source, insane tooling, product led growth, cheap tooling. We need more money to build startups that are often quite lightweight and SaaS tools. We should need less than that.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely, right? And I think that's actually where, I mean, to me, building a startup today that is A I first is as pivotal or revolutionary as it were fourteen years ago to build the first cloud companies. And I'm not talking about Chat G P T here and all that. I mean, that's amazing and they're probably gonna invent either superhuman intelligence and we're all gonna die according to Elon Musk. It's gonna be totally fine and they're gonna be almost as good as self driving cars, but they're gonna fail some of the time, right? But what I'm talking about is what are the companies built on this architecture gonna look like? And fourteen years ago, there came something completely new, cloud computing. And suddenly we could make software in a whole different way from on prem and change the world, it changed the enterprise world. And and I think today, there's a new generation of startups that's gonna come over the next five, ten years. And they're gonna be built on an A I first architecture. And what I personally find exciting is nobody has an idea what that look like yet.

• 47:13Harry Stebbings?

  I think there's a big difference there. And the big difference is who are the winners in cloud? Winners in cloud are Google, winners in cloud are Amazon, winners in cloud are Microsoft. Who were the winners before? Google, Amazon, Microsoft. Here, we have such a strong incumbent set that we have never had before. Everyone's like, oh, compared to mobile, what Motorola?

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:32Harry Stebbings?

  Like Nokia? This is a fundamentally different world.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Well, I think you are right when you talk about consumer. And I think, by the way, everybody will be making a make a big mistake if they count Apple out of the A I race. They're gonna come with a Hundred miles an hour, I mean, the company will be really, really good. But if you think about those winners, what they really provided was platforms. We went from having a thousand to thirty five thousand SaaS companies in ten years. And if you look at the explosion of unicorns, for instance, a very good chunk of them were SaaS companies, right? Because enterprise is a multi polar world. It's not winner takes all. I mean, Peter Thiel's power laws works really well in consumer. But in enterprise, there's so many modes. I mean, that's really compliance, regulatory incompetence. There's just layers of layers of layers of stuff that makes decisions happen differently. And I think the other thing is, if you look at the next generation of stuff about these modes.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  If you ask me last year, I'll say somebody like OpenAI is going to be like the AWS of AI. But nine months later, I was running on my laptop a model that was as powerful as ChatGPT three and a half. That was released as open source by Facebook. So I never in my life in computing seen something that moves this fast. And you know what's really, really exciting? I have no clue how this is going to turn out. I don't know if the incumbent is going to win or somebody is. I don't care. I just want to build something that's valuable for for people. But I think it's really exciting that we don't yet know how it's going to play out.

• 48:48Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think, one thing I've been thinking a lot about actually is like, does it actually remove the importance of user interfaces?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Completely. User interfaces are stupid. It's only because we only had that metaphor, right? We create screens with buttons every year. Every enterprise vendor is forced to come up with more screens with more buttons. Why? They sell user licenses by the seat. Guess what? Is there incentive to make the application more complex or less less complex, right? They only go one way. Why would you need that if you can just say, hey, I'm gonna take two weeks of vacation? Could you please update the company record? Or if you could say, I would like to generate a vendor database based on this folder. Google Drive folder has just sure at you with invoices. So natural language, of course, is far more efficient, but we can't just do prompt. We can't just like, I mean, everybody said, well, you can do anything you want with ChatGPT. Well, I mean, ninety nine percent of people use it as Wikipedia and that's it.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  So we need more, we need the ability to be able to push buttons, but we need to have a completely different experience. When mobile came, it took five years before we really started having the concepts of responsive mobile web design, user interfaces emerge. And I think we're seeing the same right now. There would be a new generation of user interfaces that haven't fully been invented yet. But we will look at all of the screens of the applications we use every day as dinosaurs in less than three years. We're like, holy shit, why are we sitting with thousands of buttons and thousands of screens?

• 50:04Harry Stebbings?

  It's very, I have Miles Grimshaw on from Ben Chalk, he said, he came out today and he said, you know, the future of AI is essentially selling the work and not the software.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Completely. The point is, think about like your HR system, that's the head of HR that buys that. It's not you as a worker who sits every day. Same for your P system, same for any system. Whoever made a set of tools, platform for you as a worker. It's like, I mean, if you were, you know, a forester and you're cutting down trees, you would have a chainsaw as your daily tool, right? But all these systems have been made by somebody else who is charging by the license by the user, bought by people who don't use it. And then we wonder why the people sit in the middle, they're miserable. And I think, by the way, like demographic.

• 50:40Harry Stebbings?

  Is that another why is it product that grows though? This is a phenomenon that we've seen over the last five to 10 years where a user gets their credit card out, they sit in trade shift and they can buy a single license and go.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  I mean, product growth is definitely one way, and I think that's much healthier than this sort of SaaS revenues of classic enterprise software, sorry to the people I saw for the last 14 years. But I do think the world is changing. I think we're gonna absolutely move to consumption based pricing. It's the only way. I think it's gonna be very hard to hold the mode on recurring revenue as it is today. Because customers will wanna see more value and they'll wanna see a more soft ramp up to that value. But I also think on the work piece, look at demographic problem, like most of the people I talked to, even if they wanted to replace the workers they have in their shared service centers today, one to one, they can't. Because that generation of young people, they don't wanna go in and sit in front of a computer and type formulas into workday every day. So we gotta completely change the work experience in next five to 10 years, or we're gonna run out of people to do the work.

• 51:32Harry Stebbings?

  I guess my question is, you know, we're seeing more capital rush into the space than ever before. I honestly, right now, I think ninety five percent of all new companies we see are AI related companies. Is ninety nine percent of venture dollars going and stay going to be lit on fire?

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Most likely, two things. I think we are right now, both ninety nine percent of the money going in is going to be lit on fire. And two, we are underestimating the impact of AI. And I think both are true at the same time. But I think we've got to get at least one or two cycles in to start really seeing what's happening.

• 52:00Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, number one, do we need to burn the money on AI to see the development, to see?

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Most likely, we need to do the experiments. But I think the other thing is like, in Beyond Work, we banned talking or using AI as something we talk about. Like AI is essentially as interesting as saying database, or we have a H T B R, H T M L rendering layer, whatever. It's a set of technologies. And I think what is really, really important, and I think most people right now that are rushing into, as you said, AI is missing, is I think it's about the user experience. I think it's about trust. And trust, by the way, is a user experience. It's a design exercise. You know, everybody's like, we've got to have AI stop hallucinating. Well, hallucinations, the more powerful the model, the more powerful hallucinations. Maybe it's more about showing why and it went.

• 52:39Harry Stebbings?

  So I'm just intrigued. You said that trust is a design experience. What did you mean by that?

• 52:44Speaker 00

  For us to really truly trust AI in a work environment, we need to have cues and we need to feel we can trust them as coworkers. And that is absolutely a user experience that needs to be designed. Like, if you drive a Tesla that's self-driving, it renders everything that's on the road, right? You don't have to. I mean, it's driving. It don't need to show you. So why is it showing you trust? What would it mean right now if you asked Chati a question and say, hey, you know, who won Second World War? It'll give you a prompt. But what if it said, could you please clarify, do you mean in this context or from literature or whatever, right? In fact, some of the things we've been playing around with is we call it if in doubt, ask. We sometimes ask and we already know the answer.

• 53:22Harry Stebbings?

  Apply that to marriage.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Definitely apply that to marriage.

• 53:25Harry Stebbings?

  I totally get you there. My question to you is that you said there about changing the worker experience. Dude, I'm in, you know, Series B, Series C companies, sort of flying to great, fantastic. But they're looking at replacing people with AI tools, whether it's in graphics, design, you name it. And the team know they're looking. Are being replaced and they're pushing against it. You're getting this internal resistance from employees knowing that this is coming.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  I think humans are incredibly important in the AI loop. Everybody who's pushing for AGI level AI right now, they're going to be sorely disappointed. I think it's asymptomatic curve and I think we're going to end up with Raymo style cars, meaning you almost have a lawyer, but not quite. And the five percent you don't quite have, it's going to be really, really bad. So I'm not sure there's a big market for almost lawyers or almost designers, almost whatever. I think what's very interesting is all the trivial stuff we do every day, all the trivial stuff, like as you said, even in VC, right? You have to, you know, get these documents over here and then you have to correlate and you want to run an AI. If we can automate all the trivial stuff that still requires knowledge, that's actually where the sweet spot of capabilities and models are. And we don't need AGI to get there. And then the second piece back to the human piece, which is, I think people ignoring the obvious.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Just have humans in the loop to validate it. Just have humans in loop to look at, you know, you don't have to go and find all the information. You don't have to go search and obscure and click on the really bad buttons in some UI you didn't even understand to get your job done. The AI can do all of that for you, pull all the information, correlate it, and then you can validate. You can use your brain for what you're good at. So I think it's more about when I say changing the work experience, it's actually about putting the human brain in the place in the loop where it's the very best. And stop trying to make humans into robots.

• 54:57Harry Stebbings?

  You said about kind of underestimating the impact it has on society. I think we're overestimating the time that it will take to permeate into society. We're both in Europe, we're in London. Most corporates in London and Europe don't really know what Slack is. Like they are so far behind. I think we are overestimating the speed of adoption with which we think large corporates will adopt AI.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  I think that's again about back to the trust question. I saw a pilot recently where we went from in sixty days trialing to the enterprise going, we want this deployed to three thousand people. And it's because the guardrails around the trust side and the human validation loops are so strong, that essentially they say there's no downside. Because we have humans validating it everything. Back to the impact on society and the timeline to it. I think, as I said, it's almost like we always underestimate the future in the long run and overestimate in the short run. Like if I see another agent demo on Twitter, I'm just going to like. I mean, I cannot see any more of the hype demos of AI and anyone who's building real stuff, have to do enterprise grade stuff, et cetera. Like, we know how many problems there are that needs to be solved. But I think still, when I'm seeing stuff

• 56:03Speaker 00

  like, I made a game with my son in a weekend in a programming language I never programmed in. That's real. Like, that's real world stuff. That is not overestimating anything in the future. That happened. I would not have been able to do that last year, same time. So in less than 12 months. And so, so I think what we also see is the cost of innovation will drop rapidly. Will it go to zero? Probably not. But it'd be much more about execution and ideas and necessarily having the best coders. And I mean, a good friend who was a programmer his whole life, he said to me, look, there's got to be a whole different generation of coders. I'm a very shitty programmer because I don't have patience. Right? So I thought when I learned programming, it's like, this can be fun. I'm just gonna create things with my mind and, you know, whatever. And then you learn programming is 90% debugging, and I hate debugging with such a passion. But now, I just throw my code at chat tips. Hey, where's the problem? Right? So I do think

• 56:48Speaker 00

  it will impact society massively, but in ways we can't really predict yet, even in the short term.

• 56:52Harry Stebbings?

  Miles Grimshaw said about kind of the generation of AI-first engineers.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:56Harry Stebbings?

  And that very much been front and center. Can you tell us, on the co-pilot, I'm seeing co-pilot for everything, for your medical assistant, for your lawyer, for your insurance broker, for...

• 57:04Speaker 00

  And co-pilots are the last breath from the existing enterprise applications to remain relevant.

• 57:11Harry Stebbings?

  But they're startups.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's even worse. Like, I mean, who wants a co-pilot? I want to be a pilot. Like, I don't want to have a co-pilot. I don't want to be inside an application. I don't care how many co-pilots you have. The problem is not to have an AI help you navigate an application that's shit. The better solution is to remove the application that's shit and just talk straight with AI. The co-pilot metaphor, right? I mean, what happens when we have 10,000 clippies all just talking to each other? And for you to work, you have to go and work in all of these clippies, and you're gonna have to tell clippy A to go talk to clippy B about that thing you have over on clippy C. I mean, it's gonna be worse than it is now.

• 57:45Harry Stebbings?

  I remember when I was four and at school we'd have, literally it was so exciting at the time, the paper clipping, it's like, can I help you?

• 57:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it could be, yeah.

• 57:53Harry Stebbings?

  But it's kind of like that.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, but just imagine a thousand of them and none of them kind of completely understand each other and, you know, so I don't think that's the model for the future. I think it's one of those weird things that happens when we transition from one paradigm to the next one.

• 58:05Harry Stebbings?

  Is Copilot a necessary integratory intersection to do data acquisition well to allow to be pilot?

• 58:11Speaker 00

  I think it is a necessary step for anyone who tries to still make enterprise applications to remain relevant. Even the idea of an application is going to be challenged quite hard, right? If you can just tell your phone that you want to buy two tickets to go to Barcelona and by the way, book this hotel and by the way, can you play this music? Why did you need to know about Spotify, Booking.com, all of this? Why do you need to know about any of this?

• 58:31Harry Stebbings?

  So we see the removal of brand.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  This is very, very, like, I think actually that one of the biggest impacts of AI in LMS is that most application-based brands are going to be really struggling because the brand is the UX. If you're not touching the button, so why are they making Copilots? They're making Copilots because they need you into it. In fact, everybody's talking about the big problem Google have in search with AI and their revenue stream. Nobody's talking about what it means for enterprise applications. I'm so sorry, but Salesforce is just a database and LMS are really good at talking with databases and querying data. You don't need 15 layers between you and that database to do it. That's where the real challenges are coming. They're going to be, I mean, it's going to be fun to watch.

• 59:07Harry Stebbings?

  Because I mean, new distribution channels, I think about this a lot, which is that if we remove ourselves from the UI, no longer is the newsfeed a worthwhile or a valuable place to be as a brand. Does this enable new distribution channels entirely?

• 59:19Speaker 00

  I mean, we were talking about it the other day. I think like it's almost like the idea of an app almost becomes like TikTok. It's like, here's the flavor of the second, you know, have you tried this thing? Somebody made this really good prompt that generated this fun thing or whatever. So I think in consumer, it is going to be absolutely pandemonium and to try to build a consumer tech brand and hold on to any population of users is going to be very, very, very hard in a world where innovation is almost free and LMS can make anything. In enterprise, again, as I said, it's going to be different because there's so many modes, there's so many layers of complexity, regulation, et cetera, that there's still a lot of space. And then the last bit is the biggest difference. Data in the world to come is going to be proprietary data. I'm sorry, but like with a few exceptions, right? OpenAI, Bard, all of these are trained on the same data set. It's the public data.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Okay, Google have a bit more proprietary data on where you are and you're traveling the email. Meta has some other stuff and so on, but it's all the same consumer world.

• 1:00:10Harry Stebbings?

  Are they actually trained on the same data? When you actually speak to those engineers, they're super happy to tell you about their models, super happy to tell you about their models. The minute you go to like underlying data, sorry, that's not something we discuss.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, and I think obviously because people are afraid of the copyright issues. I think the copyright issues are trending in a direction where I don't think it's going to be a major problem. I mean, fair use, I think is covering this fairly well. But I do think it doesn't matter if you have 10% different data if you train on 1 trillion parameters. It doesn't matter because it's such a big data set. That actually is such a small rounding error in what you get out on the other side. But what matters is if you have 15 years of proprietary data on how to manufacture certain enzymes or biology, you know, because that's the stuff.

• 1:00:50Harry Stebbings?

  But I actually think, yeah, I always say like no man's land is always the place where you don't want to be. I think now no man's land on data ownership is the place where you do want to be. Because if you're a startup, you have no data. And so you're kind of fucked in that way. But if you're an incumbent, you have loads of data, but you also have huge amounts of compliance, incumbent slowness.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Harry Stebbings?

  Trade shift of the world, private company, 15 years of data. You name many of your companies in that spectrum.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Harry Stebbings?

  You're perfectly intersected where you have huge amounts of data, but without the slowness of being public or behemoth.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  No, and I think, look, it's also the same with, I mean, trade shift, absolutely, but also beyond work, which is we know how to build enterprise grade data isolation, security, how to load in these models. I mean, look, I've spent 14 years convincing the largest companies in the world to give me their supply chain data, put it in the cloud. The first time I did that, people were like, you're insane. That is never going to happen. Do you think that some of the largest phone manufacturers in the world are going to give you all the supply data? That's the tax you've got to pay to get to those proprietary data. And to pay that tax, you've got to have a full understanding of compliance, regulatory, all of these things. But you're still not, you can't be Google or whatever, because then you just have too many lawyers that's going to say no.

• 1:01:54Harry Stebbings?

  Are you excited or are you scared or nervous?

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  All of the above, I think, like.

• 1:01:58Harry Stebbings?

  Because I can't predict my job in two years, which is very strange for a venture investor to say.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can at least. If anything else, you can probably license your IP to have some AI keep doing the podcast.

• 1:02:10Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, the media company is fire. But what they're gonna like remove it.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  I know, but that world is gonna be blown up completely. And you ask me, am I scared? I'm a bit nervous about what's gonna happen, but I'm mostly excited. I think it's fun when things are up in the air and we don't know.

• 1:02:22Harry Stebbings?

  Great, unScandinavian of you. Listen, I want to finish on a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:02:29Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, you can have dinner with anyone in the world that are alive. Who would you have dinner with and why?

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  That's a really good question. I would love to talk to Steve Jobs still. I think he would be one of the most brilliant people to have a discussion with.

• 1:02:39Harry Stebbings?

  Will more dollars be deployed in AI next year or this year?

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Next year.

• 1:02:44Harry Stebbings?

  Is that in companies or like dollars, do you think?

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Both.

• 1:02:47Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think so?

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's gonna be a massive concentration in dollars, but fewer companies. I think the explosion of excitement has meant that everyone and their dog gets eight dollars.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think there will still be a lot of money going into the long tail. But you're right that the concentration will happen in the top, but I think ultimately there will still be more companies getting funded just because some of the smartest people I know are just starting to boot up on it now. They spent a year or two thinking, looking a little bit at the hype, and now they're really getting into it. And I think those startups are gonna really crush it and avoid a lot of the early generation mistakes.

• 1:03:16Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think happens to financing markets? So let's be honest, they were ready to be on their knees, yeah, ready to be on their knees. And then this is the crack cocaine that venture needed.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's interesting, right? Because, I mean, you're seeing even very big names scrambling to get access to deal flow.

• 1:03:31Harry Stebbings?

  At four billion dollar prices.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so I think that's gonna be really, really hard. I think for the market, like, what's gonna happen? I mean, look, if you were there when the world switched from on-prem to cloud and you could have written the checks. There was a few people who did, right? Like Reid Hoffman, he just walked around in San Francisco and looked for any startup that has survived two thousand and eight and just gave them money. There's gonna be something similar and probably we need a good calling first, but I do think there's gonna be something similar happening in this paradigm shift here.

• 1:03:56Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about the world of AI?

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  I mean, actually, not a whole lot. Like, I mean, one of the things I was talking to Steve Krassen, who was Krassen, he's a former head of product at DeepMind, and we were both talking about the same thing, which was, he's like, if you go back five, six years, it was like AI was made by these, the cathedrals, like Google, and it was like really serious scientists doing really serious stuff. And now people are hacking in the L M models on Discord. So we have this underground that's now just hacking and building everywhere. And I think that community is really, really fun. We are part of a number of like other startups and we are everyone is in Discord, by the way, now. I mean, it's so crazy, like, nobody is on Slack that I know in in this environment. And it feels very, very different from anything I've been part of. So I I wouldn't change a whole lot. I think maybe slow down the papers a little bit so we can have time to read them because it's like a hot on new papers every day and and yeah.

• 1:04:41Harry Stebbings?

  If you could invest in one seed fund, what seed fund would you invest in?

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  That's a good question. I mean, apart from, of course, twenty we see that I I think I'll probably pick somebody like Moonfire and it it has a lot to do with the philosophy and how they're optimizing. Again, I have very mixed record as a seed investor myself, but yeah, I haven't picked one yet.

• 1:04:59Harry Stebbings?

  That suggests not always successful. What did you learn from not the success of the seed investing?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  It's a classic thing, like just because you have a great product and a great business model. I mean, if the market is wrong, the market is wrong. And it doesn't matter how much you pound like a a fight or whatever.

• 1:05:13Harry Stebbings?

  Market traction founder.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Harry Stebbings?

  How do you weigh them one through three?

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  One, because that is sort of my primary. I mean, you know, if I have a hit net, it's I know and I typically had invested in startups coming out of Denmark because the small network and a lot of them go to San Francisco. So as a founder is first, because if I know who they are, I know what they've done. And I invested quite a bit of the trace of alumni, right? So I know those guys. That's a that's the first. But then today, I would say I would say market and I probably flipped it before and said traction and market.

• 1:05:40Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, next ten years for you. When we have this conversation in ten years, I hope we do it much sooner. I've missed you. Ten years time, where is Christian then?

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  I'm hopefully doing something I'm really enjoying doing and having fun. And I'm not thinking about why I hate my work or why I need to just take a break. Yeah, I I don't know what that is. And and actually, that is exciting. I'm completely open to what that could be.

• 1:06:00Harry Stebbings?

  I think this has been one of the best shows I've done in a long, long time, which I also find heavily ironic because as you will see, there was no schedule for this.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Harry Stebbings?

  I literally was like, all right, okay, let's let's have a good chat. But thank you so much for joining me and I've loved this.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Harry. I'm really enjoying it.

• 1:06:18Harry Stebbings?

  As I said at the beginning, I think it's one of the best shows that we've ever done. If you want to see the full video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, you know all those mind-numbing tedious tasks that seemingly take up half your day? Well, Coda is here with their new AI-powered work assistant that helps you and your team not just finish tasks, but make progress. So your product team can bring a feature to market faster by using Coda AI to tag customer feedback, draft PRDs, suggest targeted audiences, summarizing product discussions and more. Your sales team can engage more customers by bringing in data from sources like Salesforce and then use Coda AI to suggest action items, meeting agendas, or lead scores.

• 1:07:00Harry Stebbings?

  And your marketing team can drive an impactful launch with Coda AI summarizing user insights, creating briefs generated from notes, and writing mock press releases to visualize taglines. With Coda AI, you can reimagine your to-do list and how you collaborate, so you're not only finishing tasks, but really making progress. If you want a work assistant that lets you get back to work, you can get started with Coda AI today for free. Head over to coda.io/20vc, that's coda.io, and get started for free. And speaking of amazing tools we cannot live without, travel and expense are never associated with cost savings, but now you can reduce costs up to 30% and actually reward your employees. How do you do this?

• 1:07:43Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Navan rewards your employees with personal travel credit every time they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true? Navan is so confident you'll move to their game-changing all-in-one travel corporate card and a spend super app that they'll give you a $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo. Check them out now at navan.com/20vc. And last but by no means least, we need to talk cash. As of the 29th of June, you can get 5.5% yield on your cash with 26-week Treasury bills. But buying Treasury bills, it's not that easy and you have to navigate a website that looks like it was made before I was born. Enter public.com.

• 1:08:27Harry Stebbings?

  Treasury accounts make it simple to earn a high yield on your cash and it takes 20 seconds. Here's how it works. Sign up at public.com, easily purchase 26 week treasury bills that automatically roll over at maturity for a compounding yield. Plus, there are no minimum hold periods. You can access your cash at any time with the flexibility of a bank account, of course, to receive the full guaranteed yield. Of course, to receive the full guaranteed yield, you do have to hold to maturity. But here's the thing, these are T bills, which means your investment has the complete backing of the US government, making it one of the safest places to park your cash. Go to public.com/20vc to lock in a historic 5.4% yield on your cash.

• 1:09:11Harry Stebbings?

  As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible 20 product episode this coming Friday with Kevin Naparro at Twilio.