Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing

Torsten Reil has spent his career working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, simulation and entrepreneurship. He began as a biologist studying neural networks and complex systems before founding NaturalMotion, whose technology was used in films including Lord of the Rings, Troy and Harry Potter and later in games including Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. After building and selling NaturalMotion, he eventually returned to entrepreneurship to co-found Helsing, a European defense technology company focused on artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. Reil believes warfare is undergoing a fundamental shift from humans operating expensive weapons systems toward what he calls autonomous mass: large numbers of AI-controlled machines operating together. He explains why drones are making tanks, artillery and eventually crewed fighter jets increasingly vulnerable; how AI can navigate without GPS in jammed environments; and why Helsing developed Centaur, an AI fighter pilot that has controlled a real Saab Gripen in air combat against a human-operated aircraft. That work led Helsing to begin building its own autonomous fighter jet, the CA1 Europa. The underlying strategy is to combine simpler, mass-manufacturable hardware with increasingly capable software. Reil argues that future conflicts will become battles of materiel, making manufacturing capacity as important as technological sophistication. Helsing's HX-2 strike drone was redesigned to scale from dozens of units per month to a baseline of 1,000, with the ability to surge to 3,000. He also explains Helsing's concept of distributed “resilience factories,” which allow countries to manufacture systems domestically while reducing their dependence on vulnerable centralized production facilities. Reil also describes how he runs Helsing and why he considers talent density the most important ingredient in company performance and culture. The company closely monitors recruiting, conducts quarterly performance calibration and makes an unusually large investment in finding and retaining exceptional people. He discusses Helsing's values of “whatever it takes” and “the truth is in the field,” why founders should pursue ambitions large enough to matter, and why he believes commentary has little value compared with actually building something that changes the world. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/torsten-reil Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Drones, Tanks & the Future of Warfare (00:07:08) Why Torsten Founded Helsing (00:09:27) Founder Conviction & Betting on European Defense (00:19:19) Helsing's Mission: Protecting Democracies (00:23:38) Programs of Record & Winning the Eurofighter Contract (00:28:35) Building a Superhuman AI Fighter Pilot (00:36:14) Deterrence, Autonomous Weapons & the Morality of Defense (00:42:11) Mass Manufacturing, Software & the Future of Materiel (00:48:33) Airbase Vulnerability, Procurement & Scaling Strike Drones (00:52:46) Talent Density, Hiring & Performance Management (00:59:44) How Torsten Hires Exceptional People (01:05:27) Helsing's Culture: Whatever It Takes & Truth Is in the Field (01:07:38) Deploying in Ukraine & the Weight of Defense Technology (01:10:50) NaturalMotion, Gaming & Torsten's Path Into AI (01:18:33) Outsiders, First Principles & Ambitious North Stars (01:20:54) Why Commentary Is Worthless & Founders Should Build Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Senra?

  Let's start with what we were just talking about before we started recording. What are your opinions of the future of tanks and battleships?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I think there's a big change happening, and you can already see it in Ukraine, obviously, where, you know, tanks are barely being used anymore. The same is true for artillery systems. If you get yourself into a tank, your survival rate is very short. I mean, apparently, the time that a Russian soldier survives now at the front is about 20 to 30 minutes. You can argue about whether that's, you know, correct, but it's probably roughly right in terms of ballpark. And it probably gets even worse if you're in a tank. If you put yourself in a tank, you are one of the high-priority targets for anyone on the other side. You know, those targets can be found pretty easily now with drones. They can be destroyed very quickly with small drones or with large drones if they're a little bit further away. And so I think the era of tanks is probably over.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones. And again, they're high-priority targets. So I think we're seeing a big change right now in warfare. And those lessons have been pretty apparent, I think, in Ukraine over the past, I would say, 18 months or so. And I think people are starting to understand them now.

• 1:14David Senra?

  What's killing the Russian soldiers so quickly? Is it all drones?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  It's drones, yeah. It's the ability, first of all, to see them with ISR drones, and then, secondly, to strike them with either FPV drones or larger strike drones.

• 1:26David Senra?

  Wait, what's the difference between those two drones?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  So FPVs are basically smaller drones, quadcopters, that most of the time are controlled manually, like a remote-controlled plane. And strike drones often travel over longer distances, and like the HX-2, which is our drone, quite often AI-controlled.

• 1:44David Senra?

  You had a tweet that was interesting, where, and maybe this can tie into the dinner that we had a few years ago, where we had this fierce argument, and I left thinking that we hated each other, and now we've become friends. But you said something like, 100,000 of your drones could prevent a land war in Europe? What does that mean and why? Why do you believe that?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I said this, I think, maybe a year ago or so, and I got into a bit of trouble for this because apparently it was deemed to be provocative, but I still think that's the case. I think the deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think, is pretty, is pretty strong. And the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3,000 tanks, 100,000 strike drones that are able to navigate without GPS, that are able to find their targets, obviously specifically focusing on tanks, will destroy those tanks, I think, in a matter of hours. It's very hard to defend against.

• 2:36David Senra?

  If you were on the other side, you wanted to invade a country that had 100,000 of your drones, how do you do that?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I think it's very difficult. And so using tanks would be extremely difficult because, again, there'd be targets immediately. You'd probably want to not use those kinds of vehicles. You probably want to use autonomous systems, smaller autonomous systems. And this is basically where everything is going. So you have autonomy now, you know, with drones. You have autonomy coming up now with autonomous fighter jets. And you also have it coming up now with land systems, particular robots.

• 3:10David Senra?

  So what do you mean by autonomous drones, though? So it's all run by AI?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  It will be, yeah. At the moment, you still have, especially in Ukraine, a lot of drones are still remote-controlled. So you have, you know, thousands of very skilled drone operators. That won't scale, though, and particularly won't scale to the West and won't scale to NATO. If you really want scaled drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human surveying them, looking at what they're doing, and being on or in the loop. But the drones themselves need to be AI-controlled and autonomous. It's the only way to get to true mass. And it's the only way also to make it work pragmatically, because we won't be able to train thousands and thousands of drone operators. We need AI to control them.

• 3:48David Senra?

  Is that a solved problem yet, or you still haven't figured out?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  It's reasonably solved, I would say. I think it's, so the need so far has been on, first of all, making the drones work for terminal guidance, which is basically the last 2 kilometers or so. And then to create the software to coordinate them all, and now it's going to go towards almost full autonomy, again, always with a human in the loop.

• 4:08David Senra?

  I want to go back to the conversation we had a few years ago, when we were having dinner at Daniel Ock's house, about, essentially, your proposition to me was, you know, you're just not going to be able to have humans on the battlefield anymore, because it's just going to be about who can produce more material. I think we discussed this book called Freedom's Forge, that I've read like twice. And essentially, it's about the United States converting their industrial and commercial, industrial power from making products that people would buy to making more materials, and just mass-producing more than the opposition had.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:42David Senra?

  And that, you know, helped tilt the war, the balance, in their favor. I thought you had a very similar perspective, that that's what we would have to do. Like, the winners of the future wars are just going to have to create mass-produced more drones, more weapons, more everything.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  I think it's going to be a battle of material. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard for humans to survive in the battlefield. And again, that's already the case in Ukraine. You can't really enter the battlefield as a human and survive for very long, whether you're in a vehicle or you're on your own. It's very hard to survive. That's going to get worse and worse, because, again, at the moment, the drones attacking you are usually remote-controlled. Once they're going to be autonomous, it's going to be even more dangerous. Those drones usually don't care about jamming anymore. For FPVs, it's because they're connected through fiber-optic cables, fiberglass.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  For larger drones, it's because they are already autonomous and they don't have to worry about GPS, because they have GPS-free navigation, they can detect targets, and they can engage once you've allowed them to do it autonomously.

• 5:50David Senra?

  Wait, explain how you get around the jamming? I don't understand that.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  So the problem with jamming is, it's twofold. First of all, if you want to control your drone from afar, you need a video signal back. And usually, the battlefield is jammed, so you don't get the video signal back. So that means that the drone needs to fly autonomously, or it needs to be connected with a cable, and that's what's happening right now. And the second problem is GPS jamming. Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS-jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane does, or you do it with AI that tries to do the same thing. And those algorithms now are very robust. They work in daylight, at night, you know, in the snow, even with kind of deformed terrain,

• 6:37Speaker 01

  which obviously happens quite a lot with the shell impacts. So that technology already exists. So these drones are getting better and better. And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's going to be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where you know they're not going to survive. But at the same time, you still have to retake territory, you have to protect and defend territory, so you need, you need robots on the ground. If you extrapolate from where we are right now, I think that's where we're going to go.

• 7:08David Senra?

  I want to go into the way you're running Helsing right now, but I think to start, it's like, why you decided to found the company to begin with? We can give like a real quick overview. You came from gaming, right? You sold a company for half a billion dollars. You were angel investing, kind of looking for your next thing. Did you know for a fact that you were going to found another company after your first sale, or no?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  After I left National Motion and Zinger, I didn't think I was going to start another company.

• 7:36David Senra?

  You did or did not?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I did not, no. I was pretty exhausted, to be honest. I'd been doing it for 15 years, and I was kind of very low on, kind of in my fuel tank. That didn't take very long to recover, about three months maybe or so, and I felt kind of the energy was back. But then it took another, maybe two or three years or so, before I thought, actually, I want to start something again. And honestly, I wouldn't have done it had I not met my two co-founders, Gudberg and Niklas. Especially with what we're doing in defense, it's so complex. I mean, being a founder is already lonely, being a single founder. But in defense, the companies are so complex, you have to think about so many things at the same time. You have to obviously deal with technology, you have to deal with politics, with export law, and a whole bunch of other things, that it's very difficult to do it as a single

• 8:22Speaker 01

  founder. So when I met my two co-founders, we all independently had thought that there needed to be a new defense company in Europe.

• 8:30David Senra?

  How did that conversation even start?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Back then, I invested in Niklas's company in Munich, which was working on solving AI problems for some of the legacy primes in Europe. And I wanted to find out more about defense, because I'd invested, but I didn't know that much about it. And someone recommended I meet up with Gudberg, who at the time was at McKinsey, responsible for aerospace and defense. And we met up in a café in Berlin and hit it off, and within 30 minutes, we thought we should start this company together. Went to see Niklas, who had the same feeling, and then, like, within a few days or so, we decided to start Helsing. And this thing was very high conviction, and there was never a doubt either. And it's kind of still the feeling of the company now.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  The company moves, I think, still very fast, and a lot of it is based on... Quickly settling on founder conviction. I know in terms of what we do, that we need to go into certain areas, certain territories, etc.

• 9:27David Senra?

  Hold on, I don't want to move on from the conviction yet because this, the year you're having these conversations, what year is this?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  That was end of 20, 2020, beginning of 21.

• 9:36David Senra?

  I can't think of a more unpopular company to start at that time than a European defense tech company.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was very unpopular. We founded the company in March 2021 and it wasn't popular in our social circles. It caused all kinds of problems with banks, although this has got better now, obviously, but back then it was quite unpopular and it was hard to raise money like we didn't.

• 9:58David Senra?

  Where we caused problem with banks?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  There is a risk and some people have been debanked who've been close to our company around the time. And I wasn't, but I know another person close to the company had difficult getting credit, difficulty getting credit because we were involved in defense. So, and this is still the case now, I mean, it hasn't completely disappeared. I think ESG requirements are still there and back then the defense of a country or a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking. Because it was seen as weapons and weapons are always bad. And I empathize with the kind of gut feeling on this, it's just that when you think it through, obviously, it doesn't make sense.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And this is also why we started the company, it felt like if we don't start the company, then no one else will. We were specifically worried about Europe's reaction to Crimea in 2014, the invasion and the taking of Crimea where I think we, all of us didn't really want to think that this, you know, was the beginning of something bigger. We all didn't want it to be true, but if you looked at, you know, what the ambitions were, it was pretty clear that something else was going to happen. And we were concerned that, you know, Europe was going to be very dependent on other territories, you know, for its defense and on other countries.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, the US had companies like Android and Palantir that were very forward looking defense companies with a big focus on AI, cheaper hardware and abundant hardware. And the idea of mass manufacturing, but Europe had nothing. And so we felt we have to, we have to do this and we have to prove that we can build something like this, although with a slightly different flavor in Europe. And that's why we started it. Very difficult to raise money in 21 for defense, like NOVC wanted to talk to us and we didn't even try in the end. So we just raised money from individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel, you know, put in a hundred million euros of his own money very early on. And that allowed us to scare the company faster than otherwise.

• 11:59David Senra?

  I always read about you guys and they're like, yeah, and they got a hundred million dollar investment from Prima Materias, like that's his own money.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:06David Senra?

  That's a high conviction bet really, really early. This is before the invasion of Ukraine.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13David Senra?

  There was a seed round first, right? Didn't you raise, raise like what eight or 10 million or something like that?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was eight million euros in, in March 21.

• 12:22David Senra?

  And he was in that seed round?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was in that seed round too.

• 12:24David Senra?

  And then you guys had this conversation where he asked, well, how much do you need?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, like three months later, so.

• 12:29David Senra?

  Yeah, and your response was?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Ideally 100 million euros.

• 12:32David Senra?

  How'd you come up with that number?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  I didn't really do a specific budget for it, to be honest.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  But it felt about right.

• 12:39David Senra?

  It felt about right.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  But that's true for almost all funding rounds, isn't it? Like it's, it's, you, you kind of eyeball it because so many things, you know, change so quickly in a company. It's, it's very hard to kind of find an exact number. But Daniel had the same level of conviction that Gobert Nicholas and I had. And I think is a similar conviction person, doesn't take very long and then the conviction is very deep. And then it makes everything easier, it made all of the conversations easier. We didn't have to really kind of struggle to, to come to a deal that just happened really quickly.

• 13:10David Senra?

  You consider her more like a, another co-founder than an investor?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he's closer to a co-founder than an investor because he's been with the company from the beginning. I knew Daniel before he knew about the idea from the beginning. It was a big commitment for him to, to be also be publicly seen, you know, to be investing in this kind of company. And obviously then what happened, only 11 months after we started the company, the Ukraine war happened and public sentiment shifted. And it is now easier and now a lot of people are investing in defense, you know, both in the US as well as in Europe, but at the time it was extremely unpopular.

• 13:43David Senra?

  But I think this is one of the things I most admire about you, this, this idea of founder conviction. And I love that you're, you're like, I've heard you say this before, it's like the limiting factor is not capital, it's like actually ambition.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53David Senra?

  And one thing that I've talked to a bunch of people that have been on this podcast, it's like, I try to encourage them, stop selling your goddamn companies.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 14:02David Senra?

  Yeah, your whole thing is like, it's, stop selling your company for a hundred million and then buying a house in Italy and becoming an investor.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:09David Senra?

  Like we need more people, we have enough people in fucking finance, dude. You need more people doing shit.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I completely agree. I have this theory that the reason this happens so often in Europe is partly because Europe is such a nice continent to retire in. Because you can buy a house in Tuscany and you can fly there from Scandinavia, you're there in like, whatever, two hours or so. And, and you can live an amazing life. And once a few of your friends start doing that, then it's kind of socially accepted. But it shouldn't be socially acceptable that, that you retire as a founder that's been successful and can start another company.

• 14:39David Senra?

  My friends that sell their companies, I say this jokingly, but it's, a lot of truth is said in jest. They're like, got acquired, like, sorry to hear that.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:46David Senra?

  Entrepreneurship is the best game in the world and you took yourself out of the game on the fucking sidelines?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:50David Senra?

  To what, write checks?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it's easy for me to say because I sold my previous company as well and maybe too early, although I'd been doing it for a while. And as I said, I, for a while, thought I wasn't going to start another company because building companies is exhausting and, you know, sometimes you need to recharge your batteries. But once you've done it, I think people are also afraid that they might not find the right mission. Or even that, you know, they might find that the second company isn't as successful as the first one. And that is a risk, you know, I thought about that too. What if the whole thing just doesn't work at all? But, you know, I think that's a risk you have to take.

• 15:21David Senra?

  I just talked to Scott Wu from Cognition and, you know, they're throwing all kinds of crazy money at him, you know, and this is this huge, like a million people are trying to acquire him as a person or the entire company. And his whole thing is like, yeah, but this is like the biggest opportunity of my life. He's like, I couldn't live with myself, I didn't at least try. Like, I'm fine failing and he's, then he said, I'd be salty as hell, meaning, you know, he's super competitive. But at least I try to like be removed from the game completely as some kind of piece on somebody else's chessboard. It's just like intolerable to somebody like that.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. And for us with, with Helsing, it's the same thing. We, we made a decision probably four and a half years ago, just a few months into the company, that we're going to go full throttle and we either kind of completely crash the thing or be super successful. But we didn't want to do anything in between. And that's what we're doing right now is that we try really to keep the, the, the foot on the gas really aggressively because we want to build a company that really matters. And, and we will never sell the company.

• 16:18David Senra?

  I have a funny story about this and then we're going to get back to Helsing, but Adam, the founder of Applevin, was sitting in the chair that you're in now. And he tells this hilarious story, he takes the company public, it's like 28 billion or something like that. Every day for like 200 days, the stock just goes down and down and down. And he goes, it gets down to like 3 billion. He's like, he's like, this is either like a multiple hundred billion dollar company or it's nothing. And so then he winds up borrowing, like he was in debt by like 6 billion and does stock buybacks. And then winds up making like 60 billion on that trade. It's like, I'm not running a fucking 3D billion dollar company. It's like, this is either a big company or nothing and I'm not playing this little game.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I think that's the only way to do it.

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• 17:30David Senra?

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• 19:19Speaker 01

  The mission comes first.

• 19:20David Senra?

  Okay.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And the mission is to protect our democracies. And I always say it's always a real privilege. I always feel like we have, we talk to our new starters every month and we always say to them, you know, it is a real privilege to work in a company. At least we feel that's where the mission is so easy that we protect our democracies. That's what we're here for. And lots of other companies, you know, have to spend time and go on an offsite retreat to come up with some kind of mission paragraph that everyone agrees on eventually. And we don't have that. It is to protect our democracies. And we can point out where we're doing this right now with, you know, what we're doing with our deployed drones, for example, in Ukraine. And it makes everything easier. And we obviously never expected the Ukraine war to happen that quickly. But now that we are deployed, it's, you know, it's very concrete. And this mission is a, is a real thing.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  And then the conviction, you know, comes that there need to be these kinds of companies and, and that they need to be built in Europe. And one other reason why we are building Helsing is also we wanted to build a big company in Europe. We honestly looked at, you know, Spotify as a beacon, as an example of, you know, a large company you can build that is, that has, you know, a global ambitions, but then also actually global impact and is up there with other big companies from the US and other countries. And we wanted to build something like that too. We wanted to show that you can do this and you can do it in what is a heavily regulated area like defense. Because, you know, a lot of people find excuses why they can't build a big company.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  It's very often regulation, bureaucracy, not enough funding. And none of that is true. They're all excuses.

• 20:56David Senra?

  You have a great line about this where I love what you just said. It's the excuses like people are way too concerned about the regulatory environment, the tax environment. It's like what's missing is actually you need aggressive founders with large ambitions.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  It's just aggression that's missing. Exactly. It's strategic ambitions. You have to think about what you want to be and you, and it needs to be big. And then you need to be truly aggressive. And a lot of founders, I think in Europe have, have lost that aggression, but it's easy to find it again. You just need to, you just need role models. Like we use Spotify as a role model. And, you know, once you have them, that you know, that's what it looks like. And everything below that is failure. It is underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition makes.

• 21:37David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I think it's 95% of a company's success is that. Everything else, like I said, is excuses. So regulation doesn't matter. Yes, sure, it takes longer to start a GMH in Germany. Who cares? Yes, you have to go to a notary. Who cares? I mean, it's like, you know, we spend a couple of days more starting the company. It's not a problem. And the, the regulation that we are subject to and other defense companies are as well with regards to the certification, qualification of our systems, export law and a whole bunch of other things. Dealing with confidentiality, classified information is like a hundred times more than what a startup has to deal with in terms of bureaucracy. And you can still deal with it. It still doesn't slow us down. You just have to set the company up properly.

• 22:18David Senra?

  You're probably one of the most disagreeable people that I know. Have you always been that way?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  You said that to me before. And I've been trying to reflect on it. I don't think I am.

• 22:30David Senra?

  You just demonstrated here. Yeah, we have more regulation. Who gives a shit? Stop making excuses. Like there is, it's a, it's a superpower for founders. I'm not, obviously you know it's not a pejorative when I say it to you.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  I just don't like when people make excuses. And, and these things happen very quickly. You just need to have a bubble of people coming together and all reinforcing each other with these kinds of excuses. And then they have a, you know, content life. And then we sadly have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression. But again, I, I am very optimistic. There are quick fixes. You just have to have a few very aggressive companies that point out that everyone else is basically mailing it in. And I think a lot of people are.

• 23:07David Senra?

  Me and Daniel talked about this, this idea of like, how many prime movers are there in the world? You know, the people that are inventing the, the technology that we're all using, creating the companies, you know, power laws rule everything around us. And it's just like, it's not that many. And if you just have a handful, like you literally can change the trajectory of an entire country, entire world, whatever the case may be. When you raised the 100 million though, where did you see like your entrance into doing this? Was the idea it's like, hey, we're gonna, what you just said is like cheap, simple hardware, and then all the innovation comes in software? Is that the way you thought about it?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Actually, the biggest insight came, and I think it came from, from Gunberg, when we, when we said, we're, we're just going to go for programs of record, which as a, back then as a, as a small company was almost impossible and was extremely risky.

• 23:51David Senra?

  Explain what a program of record is.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Program of record is a, is a program that is an official government program that's in the budget, that is usually quite large and where you ideally want to be the prime. So you have the direct relationship with the government rather than working as a subcontractor through another company. And that's extremely hard to break into. And the reason most companies didn't do it back then was because, you know, you got funding and you needed to generate some revenues and some proof points, you know, reasonably quickly. And that's almost impossible to do with a program of record because it takes so long to get one and to qualify for one. But because we had the 100 million, we thought, okay, well now we can take those risks. And if the first two or three don't work that we go for, we still have enough money left. And we felt it's the only way to build a defense company reasonably quickly.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  And so we, we applied for a big program of record for the Eurofighter electronic warfare upgrade.

• 24:40David Senra?

  What is that?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  In, in Germany. So this is electronic warfare capabilities are essentially around detecting radars, detecting, you know, the types of radars, in this case, anti-aircraft radars that, you know, try to take you down, detecting their intent, et cetera. And the situation had become, you know, more difficult for Europe because a lot of those radars had become software defined, which means that they basically are shape shifting. And so the old approaches didn't really work anymore. And we came in with an AI based approach, deep learning based approach that kind of recovered that ability to, to interpret those radars. And it was a big technology jump and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner, Saab, against, you know, a lot of other consortia. And we were the dark horse, but we ended up winning it. How big was the probability?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  I don't know, but there was a high probability that we'd fail. But we went for it because we thought we can afford to because we have enough money in the bank. And this, this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program of record.

• 25:41David Senra?

  How much of like your previous work at like Oxford, stuff you were doing at Natural Motion, did you bring into Helsing?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  A lot of it was the, I think, team building and fundraising and maybe prioritization, pattern recognition that I had from Natural Motion where I, when I sold the company, where I left the company, I was reasonably pleased with myself. I thought, you know, this all went quite well in the end. But it was only in the, in the kind of two or three years afterwards where I started to reflect on some of the things, you know, I'd done and how I built the company, especially when I started to angel invest. I realized I actually screwed up a lot of things at Natural Motion that I should have done better. I, I didn't deal with performance management the way I should have. I definitely didn't take hiring serious enough, just the kind of general hiring of great engineers.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  And I also didn't think enough about how to, you know, think about your, your leadership team, how you grow your leadership team, how you bring the right executives in at the right time. And it kind of worked at Natural Motion, but we could, probably could have done a lot of things better. And, and so a lot of that, I think, pattern recognition, we were able to use at Natural Motion and particularly in the first few years. But it's also true now that, that Helsing is now at a point where it's kind of uncharted territory for me as well. The company is a lot bigger. I think we're about 1,300 people, much bigger than Natural Motion ever was. And so we, we have to now kind of think through things either from first principles or by, you know, working with people who have already built big companies like, like Daniel.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And then the other part is we were lucky that we had as three founders, very three different skillsets. You know, I had already started a company and sold it. I think I knew how to fundraise. Gunberg was very close to, to the various forces, to the military, also understood that the processes, political processes really well. And Nicholas's background was on the AI and engineering side, which is what we really needed to, to first of all, win this kind of contracts.

• 27:37David Senra?

  That was the reason I asked that question. It's like, well, how the hell do you go from founding to program of record faster than anybody else? Like, how did you even know you could solve this problem of?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  It was just a feeling, I think. And in particular, Nicholas and Gunberg, you know, pushed that. Gunberg, I think, had a strong conviction that this was a really worthwhile program of record for us to have. And Nicholas had an intuition as to how we could do it differently to anyone else.

• 28:00David Senra?

  Where did Nicholas get that intuition?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think it's just, I mean, he'd already been in this space with his, with his previous company. And so he already had a feeling.

• 28:10David Senra?

  What was his previous company doing?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  It was solving AI problems for, for, for legacy primes. And so he already had a feeling for this kind of thing. And then if you combine that with, with Gunberg's insight as to what programs of record worked, it was, it became, honestly, it became the blueprint how we approach pretty much everything now. We tried to find programs of record that are large, where we have a feeling that we can contribute something to it that's differentiated. That's basically our lens.

• 28:35David Senra?

  Can you give me an example of that?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Well, another example is, is the autonomous fighter jet that we are building right now. It's called CA1 Europa. And we went into it and invested a lot of money into it, knowing that Europe didn't have anything like it. And that we felt this is going to be a big category and that we could contribute something to it. And the reason for that was we started a, almost like a science experiment. We have a great chief scientist, Antoine Baud, who joined us from Meta where he ran co-headed Facebook AI research. And we set ourselves a task two years ago or two. To create a superhuman fighter pilot for beyond visual range combat. So the kind of combat that's

• 29:14David Senra?

  Hold on, you gotta slow this down. What? Superhuman thing again?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  It's a superhuman fighter pilot.

• 29:20David Senra?

  Superhuman fighter pilot, but there's no pilot in there?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  No, it's an AI. It's a neural network.

• 29:25David Senra?

  Okay.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And it's for beyond visual range. So the most advanced type of air combat. It's essentially chess in the sky. You have, you know, the planes. Usually it's two versus two, quite far away from each other. It's a fighter jets and they use radar. They use different types of radar. They switch the radar on, off. They use missiles, obviously. You have to go offensive, defensive. You have to try to bleed off energy of missiles that are following you. You have to have a feeling for when you can reengage. It's extremely complex. It almost looks like ballet. It's quite beautiful to watch, actually, when you look at tactical views. And we'd been told by pilots, active pilots, that this is the kind of last bastion of of air combat.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  You know, nothing will ever replace the intuition that a human has in the sky to read the situation, to have a feeling for, you know, how to engage, what types of, you know, weapons to use. And that turns out to be bullshit. You know, it actually, the AI is much, much better. And the reason is that it's able to explore the search space much more efficiently than than, you know, a human can. Because a human learns it from a textbook and, you know, in flight school, but they can't explore the search space. And so we use the same approaches, basically, as, you know, DeepMind used as well for AlphaGo and AlphaStar using reinforcement learning.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And we have an extremely high-performance simulator that runs 20, 25,000 times real-time speed. And that allows us to explore the search space with reinforcement learning much, much more efficiently. And that now means that we can train a neural network to be, you know, better than a active fighter pilot. Like, we regularly fly against Eurofighter pilots, for example, or Rafael pilots or Gripen pilots.

• 31:14David Senra?

  So you're running tests with your autonomous fighter jet against a human-powered pilot?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  So we used to do it in simulation only. First, it was only our simulation and we won. Then it was, you know, an official simulator of a, you know, of a big prime. And then, and then last year, we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did, and took full control of the plane in air combat against another Gripen, which was human-controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenarios above the Baltic Sea and proved at that point, and this, by the way, was also the point where we realized, actually, there's something bigger happening, where this actually works and it works in the real world. And so we developed a system, we called it Centaur.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  And it's now able to work in swarms as well, by the way, not just two versus two.

• 32:14David Senra?

  Wait, swarms of fighter jets now? Not swarms of drones? Now we've moved on to

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Swarms of fighter jets, yeah. And it scales really well. And it's extremely powerful. And that gave us the conviction that crewed manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities. And it's not science fiction. But like, one observation of what's happening at the moment, not just in Defense AI, but AI in general, is that things happen faster than you think. You know, back in the old days, like 10 years ago, so like, everything was always five years away. That was always kind of the number that people used. It's about five years away, whether it's kind of a particular medical breakthrough or maybe a robotic breakthrough. That's now all shrunk. The five years usually ended up being seven to 10 years, by the way, same as two autonomous

• 33:03Speaker 01

  driving. It's now the exact opposite. When you think something is five years away, it's actually usually now two years away. And so something has changed and we felt that with Centaur as well. It's like, we're thinking, like, we couldn't believe how well this worked. And still, to this day, I always feel it feels a bit like science fiction. But that gave us the conviction that we needed to be in this space. And to be in this space, because it's so slow usually to work with primes, like, we could have partnered with a prime and asked, do you want to do an autonomous fighter jet? We provide the AI, you provide, you know, the jet. It would have taken too long. So, so we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich, outside Munich, with its own runway, hangars and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities, and build our

• 33:46Speaker 01

  own fighter jet, which is now called the CA-1. And then put Centaur on it as the core technology component. And so that's going to fly for the first time next year. And, you know, we want to show that you can really leapfrog everyone in this category.

• 34:03David Senra?

  We were having this conversation, me, you and Michael Dell, were talking about this at Dell's house a few months ago. You told us about this acquisition and then Michael's like, can we come see it? And I was like, I'll come with you, but I don't want you to shoot down Michael's plane as we're coming in. But you told us about this funny regulation where, even though it's going to be an autonomous jet, fighter jet, don't you still have to have a guy in it?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So eventually, no.

• 34:28David Senra?

  But right now, yes.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we, so we don't have the, I think, the advantage of the Mojave Desert, for example, where you can fly those planes and be completely autonomous, because if it crashes, it doesn't really matter. You know, it crashes into sand. If you, you know, crashed, where we fly, you crash over built-up barrier, which is not ideal. So we have a human that's optionally in the plane for, for the first prototypes. Eventually, that's going to change, obviously. And the pilot is a safety pilot, the same way you'd have safety drivers for, you know, the early rollouts of Waymo and other companies.

• 35:05David Senra?

  The fact that you have this regulation at the moment and you need a person that has to change the design of what it looks like, correct?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  No, no, we found a way to accommodate it without changing the design. It's the same, it's the same system. By the way, it's another example of where you can, you know, beat on the EU or Europe, or in this case, Germany for having regulations. But you just find a way to deal with it. And this is the way to deal with it. You just have a pilot sitting in there like this.

• 35:31David Senra?

  It's in the back? Where is he?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  They're in the front.

• 35:35David Senra?

  Okay, so what you just described, that's very interesting. You said it's like chess in the sky and then you said it was ballet. So the way you see the short-term future is the same way it's essentially going to be immoral. I want to get into like the morality, the way you look at the morality for like what you're building. The way it would be immoral to send a human into the battlefield because you're going to get swarmed by drones?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:53David Senra?

  It's going to be immoral to send a pilot into the sky? Is that the same?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the same thing. I mean, there are two reasons. A, it's more powerful to use autonomous systems. They will just be superior because the AI is just smarter than humans for this, for this use case. And secondly, as a result, it will be immoral to send someone out because you have to assume that the other side will eventually have those systems as well.

• 36:14David Senra?

  Can you explain the, like, how you view, like, the morality of what you're building? And how you may view the other people's interpretation of, you know, essentially banning creating new weapons or creating new defense? Like, you've thought a lot about this. I kind of just want like, what's in your mind? Like, a complete overview of like, how you think about the morality of building a company you're building?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  The underlying goal has to be that you minimize the lives lost in general and ideally you get it down to zero. And the way to get lives lost down to zero is to not have any kind of conflict at all. And that's why deterrence is so important. And this is also where, I mean, this is a very old, obviously, argument, but it still comes up all the time, is that people don't understand that you have to be able to deter in order to not be a target that looks valuable or achievable for the other side. And we set up the company to deter. We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now. We'll do it, obviously, because we'll have to do it and, you know, it needs to make a

• 37:18Speaker 01

  contribution. But the idea in general is to avoid conflict altogether. And you do that by being able to deter, by having a credible posture that makes the cost calculus on the other side such that they don't want to attack because it'll be too devastating for them. And that is the first thing. If you have to go into a conflict, you want to do it in such a way that you minimize the lives lost on your side. And again, this is where, especially right now, and it's going to get worse in the future, you need to use autonomy because you cannot send humans into tanks, you know, in fighter jets or even as infantry onto the, onto the field. That's the underlying theme.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And then there's another category where you need to think about the, the way you deploy your software and what, as a society, you know, we're happy with, with the deployment of your hardware and software in terms of autonomy. So are we okay for a machine to make a decision over life and death if it is more accurate than a human? Or do we say as a society, no, a machine should never make that decision? And these are legitimate conversations. It's no easy answer because people have different values on this. And the thing that worries me is that the, these discussions happened a lot when we started the company before the Ukrainian war. No one, in particular journalists, weren't interested in asking us, you know, about the capabilities of why we were doing things.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Everyone always asked about killer robots and autonomy and our red lines and do we have a human in the loop? Which we were always happy to answer. These were the annoying questions there at the core of what we think about.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Now, though, no one asks these questions anymore. And I'm not quite sure why, but no journalist ever asks those questions. You know, how are we thinking about the ethical side? We do a lot of this ourselves. We have ethics workshops. We have a lot of deployment guides for our technologies. We have to think very carefully about, you know, things like proliferation and a whole bunch of other things. But we have to do it out of an inner discipline. And journalists don't ask the questions anymore, and the public doesn't either.

• 39:24David Senra?

  I don't even understand the counterarguments that you receive. It's like, no, we should not have any new technology. It's like, well, humans are violent by nature. We've had war since we've existed, like.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it is an interesting topic because I like, we get this pushback as well, obviously, at Helsing. And we get it, we get pushback from people who say war is always bad. And of course, at some level, that makes sense. But again, if you have a situation where you are attacked, if you have a situation where there is an adversary that is building up, you know, capabilities, you need to be able to deter in order to avoid war. And then you need to be able to fight in order to then not lose lives, you know, unnecessary lives on your side. And like I said, we get a lot of pushback and it is often from well-meaning people. So it's not that like we hate people who have a problem with our mission. I disagree with the way they look at it.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I think if you think it through from first principles, you need to have this kind of deterrence. But we don't kind of dislike people. It's like very often people who just want to have peace. It's just that we want to have peace too. We just think you have to achieve it by not letting a war happen and not being invited to a war.

• 40:35David Senra?

  But I think there's something interesting. It goes back to like your high conviction, the fact that you're extremely disagreeable. You're very comfortable taking like a counter position. Like you started this company when everybody else said, you know, it was very unpopular. Something that I asked Daniel about and he said, he's like, he's a German building a defense company in a country whose entire post-war identity was never again.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:55David Senra?

  Like you're also willing to cut across your cultural, like the culture expectations too.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that's still the case in Germany. And, you know, we're set up as a European company. We have big offices in London and Paris and a bunch of other countries as well. But, but our biggest is in Munich in Germany. And German society is a pacifist society. And it's taking a lot of, I think, facing reality right now, which is what's been happening in particular over the last couple of years or so, where I think Germans realize it hasn't been the end of conflict. There are now conflicts and they're coming closer and they might be coming even closer again. And it's very uncomfortable for a country that that thought those times are over. But it's also the country now that has one of the most thriving new defense ecosystems, I would say in the world now.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  So there is now a rethinking of some of those attitudes. And it's also the country that has, in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from 52 billion euros last year to originally, I think, 153 billion in 2029. I think it's gone up again to over 180 billion. And this is a large increase. If you think about that, there won't be more soldiers, most likely. So most of the money is going to go on to new equipment spend.

• 42:11David Senra?

  Okay, so we go back to materials. Your whole thing is like the winner is going to be able to produce more materials than their adversary. So I still don't think I completely understand the way you think about achieving that goal. Is the hardware that you're manufacturing has to be as simple as possible? And then you're offsetting all the innovation in software? Is that still the basic thesis?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  The idea is that you build hardware that is good enough and build it in such high numbers that you eventually have economies of scale, but also the ability to overcome any, you know, adversary just through pure mass. And the way you achieve that is that you, you need to be able to mass produce. You need to design to mass produce. But then crucially, you need software to, to allow those systems to, first of all, be smart and be able to, to coordinate. But you ideally also absorb a lot of the complexity of the hardware, that usually, you know, would be these exquisite systems that legacy primes will make, into your software so you can make the hardware simpler.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  That means that your sensors are simpler and you regain a lot of the accuracy through very good AI algorithms. It might also be that your, your manufacturing tolerances are a little bit bigger and you regain a lot of the control and accuracy again through software that might recalibrate the system as it goes. And this is what we do and that works extremely well. But you have to think it through as, as one unified system. And once you do that, you can go into mass manufacturing. So the HX2 is now a mass manufactured strike drone. And we had to go through like all of those learnings in July and August last year, where we had to go from dozens of HX2s per month to a baseline of 1,000.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  And it can now surge to, in the small factory that we have, to 3,000 a month. And it's a completely different kettle of fish to, to producing just a few dozen. You have to think about your supply chain completely differently. Obviously, the way you design the drone, quality control, tracking every single step. And so you have to learn this, but once you've done this and you're able to produce in very large volumes, you just have much more powerful systems because you can now overcome any adversary or target by, you know, having saturation attacks, for example, by sending more and more of these drones, by having them highly coordinated, and if necessary, just produce more and more of these. And drones are just one example. The same is true for fighter jets. You want to build, you know, many hundreds of these fighter jets.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Same is true for, you know, for other systems, maritime systems. It is going to be about being able to build these things in large numbers, to design them so that they can be built in such numbers and to have the industrial capacity and the supply chain to produce a lot.

• 44:51David Senra?

  Hold on now, if we're talking about war materials, you can never predict the potential new adversary you might have in the future. That means you guys have to be completely vertically integrated. Like if I'm a country, like or a continent, let's say we're European. It means I can't outsource some of this production to China or to America or to South America or anywhere else, correct?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say any, I mean, with China, yes, that's true. There are still allies that you can work with, obviously, and that we all work with. But there will be some areas, and it depends on the sensitivities of particular countries, where you want to be fully vertically integrated in that country. And you want to be having your entire supply chain in that country as well. There are other areas where you, you work with allies and I think that will continue and probably even grow. And then there are other areas where you say, no, it's, we're actually, there's so many different suppliers. It doesn't really matter. We are kind of free to choose.

• 45:44David Senra?

  But I feel like you would go more towards complete control. Like not talking about what you're doing now, but in the future, you're going to be running this company for the rest of your life. You just said, I'm not selling. This is my last company. This is my grand ambition.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:56David Senra?

  So like, would you not want to work towards an area where like you have complete control over everything?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yes, but you also want to work with allies. Like there are many countries that you want to work together with and where you are stronger, if you're stronger if you work together. There's some areas where, you know, specific countries have sensitivities around particular data. For example, the UK, for example, is very specific about what they're doing in maritime and understandably so, where you want to be like really just national. But then there are other areas where, where you work with allies. And you need to be able to dial it up and down. So what we're doing, we have this concept of a resilience factory where if a country wants to, buy and build our hardware, they can do it on their own territory. We put a factory there and they can also buy, build up their own supply chain

• 46:45Speaker 01

  to the point where they feel comfortable with and then buy from other.

• 46:48David Senra?

  Explain how that partnership would work. So your technology manufactured in their factories on their soil.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  So we can run the factory, but we make sure it's on their soil. And we find a way to work together with them to also make sure that the supply chain is as national, as domestic as it needs to be. And again, the sensitivities in different countries are different. Some countries don't care at all. They just buy it from us and we can produce wherever. Others really care that it's built, you know, on their soil so that they have more control over it.

• 47:17David Senra?

  Why do you call them resilience factories?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Because we design them to be not this kind of one big factory that is a very easy target for attacks. But actually, they can be distributed all over a continent or even else, or even be underground, as is the case with us, so that they are harder to hit.

• 47:34David Senra?

  You studied the Krupp family?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  No, I know of them, but I don't know any details.

• 47:38David Senra?

  There's a great book I'm going to send you. It's like 700 pages. I should do an episode on it for my other podcast founders. But this, they ran into this problem during World War II, where the Allies just found their centralized factories and just bombed the shit out of them.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, by the way, this, this problem is completely underestimated right now. Coming back to, to fighter jets again. So we have these exquisite fighter jets, like the Eurofighter Rafale and, you know, a bunch of others. But they all need airfields, with the exception of the Gripen. They, they, they tend to use a neat air bases to take off and land. Those air bases are obvious targets, obviously, for, for an attack. And, and so if you look at something like the, like the CA1, our turn of its fighter jets, it's designed in such a way that it can take off from any kind of makeshift airstrip, which would be a road, an autobahn, a motorway, a highway, et cetera.

• 48:27David Senra?

  Essentially adapting it to where you can't bomb, you're not going to bomb all the roads.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  You can't bomb all of it.

• 48:32David Senra?

  Yeah, exactly. Okay.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I think there is still, I think certain governments and militaries are still in denial what actually is going to happen in our conflict. You know, in many cases, we won't be able to take off with our cool fighter jets anymore.

• 48:46David Senra?

  So how do you go about trying to explain that to them? Like, how do you just make it obvious? Do you just do it through product demonstrations?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's like with everything else, you, you, you do product demonstrations. You show what the capabilities are. We've done this a lot with drones. And then, and to honestly everyone's credit, people do get it. I mean, it's like people complain about procurement is so slow and, and governments are so slow. Yes, but then when they do get it, it goes very fast. Like the, the large strike drone contracts that happened, happened really quickly with political support, with support of the procurement agency. And, and they went through all in record time. And now, if anything, I think that the companies, you know, are really under pressure to deliver all of this stuff really fast. So. It's like we all complained about it in the past, but it's a bit of a legacy problem. I think procurement has got faster and the realization that these things have to happen is happening faster too.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  And you know, there will be big autonomous fighter jets programs in Europe as well now. Two years ago, there was nothing, even one year ago, there was nothing, but it's now happening.

• 49:45David Senra?

  Something that just came to mind while you were speaking earlier is you're talking about how the, you know, in the AI age, everything is going to happen faster. You think it's in five years, actually two, maybe two years, maybe two months, might even be, you know, faster than even you suspect. It's so AI is making your products better than, better, faster than you expected. Can that also, can AI also help manufacture and increase your manufacturing faster too?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:13David Senra?

  Because if you're saying we're going to produce a couple of thousand a month, I think, isn't China doing like 100 million drones a year or something like that?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, it's, and Ukraine is building, I think, 2 million or so a year, but those are different types of drones.

• 50:25David Senra?

  Yeah, of course.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  They have FPVs, they're copters, and again, they have their role and they work, but they're much shorter range and they've got smaller payloads or explosives. Strike drones are much bigger. I mean, they're like this and with.

• 50:35David Senra?

  How big is your strike drone?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  So the payload, for example, the explosive is two to four kilograms or even larger. And the range that they can fly is around 100 kilometers. And so it's quite a lot more than FPVs and they're used in different ways as well. Those numbers right now, like up to 3,000 a month are really quite high for this kind of category. And you can scale it up even further. At the moment, honestly, the bottleneck isn't manufacturing speed. We can, we can build them really fast. There will be a point though in the future where you want to be even more efficient and faster, and then AI will play a role in manufacturing as well. At the moment, it's too early. It's because we're not limited at the moment.

• 51:12David Senra?

  So wait, what is the bottleneck then?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Honestly, the bottleneck right now is the big programs need to come. So the first ones are coming. We just closed a 1 billion framework contract in Germany, but they now need to come everywhere and then we can crank up manufacturing accordingly.

• 51:26David Senra?

  What do you mean by everywhere?

• 51:27Speaker 01

  In the various countries because.

• 51:29David Senra?

  In all the Western countries?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:31David Senra?

  Okay.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. There'll be some in Asia as well.

• 51:34David Senra?

  I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it.

• 52:16David Senra?

  There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

• 52:46David Senra?

  All right, I want to get into how you think about running the company. You mentioned earlier, the mistake that you made with your previous company was not putting enough emphasis on talent and recruiting. What did you mean by that?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  When you build a company, you obviously try to hire good people. And every founder will always say, you know, the most important thing is talent and the people, and they spend so much time on recruitment. But when you actually look at it in detail, and I include us there at Natural Motion previously as well, it is, I wouldn't say it's half ass, but it isn't the most important thing. And I would argue that hiring and finding the right individuals, number one. And then secondly, curating that group of individuals and also moving people out is the most important thing in a company. And it is the reason why a company has great culture. And it's also the reason why a company is high performance and it feels like it's light footed. And Helsing feels that way. I think it feels like it's a very fast, highly performing company that can adapt

• 53:40Speaker 01

  really quickly. And it is almost entirely because the talent density is so high. So if that's your kind of thesis, and it was our thesis, then you have to think how to solve it. And the two main factors, the first one is you need to hire well. So you need to build a machine that hires well and be able to monitor how it does it. And the second one, it needs to be able to curate as well. So you need to have a machine, a system, a set of processes that ideally are very easy, that allow people to also manage people out when they don't work out. And what a lot of people don't, I think, appreciate is that these two are linked because it becomes much easier to move people out that are not a good fit for the company

• 54:25Speaker 01

  if you know your hiring pipeline is so good that that position will be filled almost immediately. Then it becomes kind of a low opportunity cost thing. What happens instead in a lot of startups and probably also larger companies is that managers are hesitant to move people out of a company because A, it's always unpleasant, so you need to hold them accountable. But B, because they maybe rightly know that it will take nine months to fill that position again. And very often the argument, and many founders will be familiar with this, very often the argument of a manager will be, yeah, but if I fire this person now, then we won't be able to hit our deadline because at least they're going to get the job done somehow. Maybe it's slower than they should, maybe they create cultural problems, they have an attitude issue, but at least eventually they'll get the job done. And that's not good enough.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  So you need to always have enough pressure on the pipeline to be able to fill those positions quickly so that it becomes easier. And so what we did with Helsing at the beginning, because we knew this was, you know, going to be important. The first contract we ever signed, even before we founded the company, was with a third party recruitment agency because we didn't have anything internal. We always wanted to start with pressure on the recruitment pipeline. And Gumbenikas and I then spent easily the first year just reviewing the KPIs easily every week to see how our recruitment worked and always injected ourselves if it needed to be readjusted because the recruitment pipeline was so important. Building then the internal recruitment team was really important.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  And then building processes for how you manage performance was important as well. And the most important thing is a quarterly performance calibration review. And what we do there is we don't actually review the performance of all the individuals. We listen to the managers explain why they give their reports a certain rating. And then the manager is held accountable to that rating. So we ask them, you know, why did you give that person that kind of rating? And then we might say, well, that doesn't sound like a three, that sounds like a two or doesn't sound like a three, it sounds like a four. And that allows us to make sure that the calibration that people have of what is good performance, what does good look like, is the same across the company.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  And it also means that it's hard to hide. If someone is an underperformer and you give them a low rating, the expectation is that you do something about it. You either make sure that they become better, and that's your task as a manager, or if that's not possible, then you find ways to part ways. And this kind of accountability, I think is really useful for a company to do that because it allows you to eventually scale up and have a general view of, you know, what is the benchmark that we're looking for? And it also gives us a feeling for which managers try to protect their teams and which don't.

• 57:06David Senra?

  I got to pull something up. Do you remember we were together, we were racing cars in Sweden and Luca Ferrari was there?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:15David Senra?

  Did you spend any time with him?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't know.

• 57:17David Senra?

  You need to, or I'm not telling you what to do. You should. How about this? So we had this crazy lunch and Luca is a very, I like him a lot, but he's a very strange cat in the sense that like, I consider his, the way he runs company almost like Galapagos Island of entrepreneurship because he didn't like look to other entrepreneurs. He doesn't really know much about entrepreneurial history when I talk to him. He doesn't really pay attention to anything. He's just like, essentially like try to figure out how to run a company based on what he wanted to do. And so he's got a lot of very unique ideas. But I remember we had these notes and we were just going back and forth on WhatsApp. I was like, dude, I'm just going to type all the notes of the crazy shit that you said during this lunch because you have some very interesting ideas on talent and specifically HR. And so we had this idea, these are some notes from this, you should spend some time with him.

• 58:02David Senra?

  He goes, he talks about hiring. He says, "We make it a science." He's talking about what he's doing at Benning Spoons. He has a team of 50 in HR, but they're all engineers. I've never heard of this before. And so what they do is they'll compare one, two and three year performance to signals from their CV. So we're, he's saying, hey, you know, we think quality X is really important, but we're just guessing. So what we're going to do is say, we hired this person because of quality X. Well, what's their performance based on all the people we hire from quality X? You're 12 months out, 24 months out, 36 months out. And he says they actually. Have developed like this algorithm of a hundred different signals of what they figure like it's important for talent. And he's like, we have completely.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  That's really cool.

• 58:41David Senra?

  We treat it as an engineering process. And then he says, we sent, remember, he has all these different companies. And he's like, we centralize hiring and firing. And he says, talent managers are in charge of both entries. So people coming into your company, which you just described, and then access, which you also just described. And he's like, people, his whole thing was like, you should have brilliant people in HR. That most companies treat HR as just like.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 59:03David Senra?

  Like B, C, D players. He's like, no, you should have the best people in HR because it's so important.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Totally agree. And I think this kind of investment, taking it so seriously, it's just, it compounds over time. Because you just get the best people in, it carries a different culture. And it becomes something that it will be, it's central to being successful eventually. Because especially if you can keep that muscle over time, when you grow as a company. It's easy to lose it over time. And we always say kind of a company like Helsing has to shed its skin almost like every nine months. And you have to rethink how you do your processes again. You have to rethink about how you grow, what kind of leadership you need. But if you can keep that kind of investment in, in making sure you have a great intake of people up, it's super valuable.

• 59:44David Senra?

  Are one of the co-founders having to approve every hire? How do you guys, how do you do this?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  We don't have to approve every hire. I think that's too difficult now. I think we do get involved in hiring.

• 59:53David Senra?

  Wow, I'm going to argue with you since you like to argue.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:55David Senra?

  You have how many employees?

• 59:57Speaker 01

  One thousand three hundred.

• 59:57David Senra?

  It's not too difficult. Elon approved the first, personally approved the first 3,000 hires of SpaceX. That's in one of the books, the biography of it.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Apparently, yeah. No, that's great. We don't do it that way. We have very good leadership that is able to make those decisions. It is true that, you know, sometimes we get pulled in, you know, for our second opinion. And it's also true that we get pulled in to interview people and sometimes to convince them to come into the company. And then for certain roles, we do a lot of the hiring ourselves. We spend a lot of time, the founders and executive team on hiring.

• 1:00:27David Senra?

  I want to hear more about this.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Key positions, we, we will sometimes do end to end, end to end, the hiring as founders. We'll do the search, we'll work together with search agencies, we'll work together with our network. Because they're so important that we want to get it right. And we know that if we get the right person, it'll be transformational for the company. So Daniel also gets involved in our hiring. He just, you know, really played a very big role in hiring one of our most senior executives recently. Which is not really well. So we all chip in. It's so important to get the right people in. It is, again, it's the most important.

• 1:01:02David Senra?

  But if somebody's in front of you, how do you actually know if they're good or not?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  So everyone, I think, has different methods. For me is I try to talk to them and I try to get a feeling for the person without a standard set of questions. I just try to find whether, out whether a person is effortless. That's the probably most important person characteristic I look for.

• 1:01:20David Senra?

  Wait, what is effortless then?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  It's like one of those things you can, you can tell if they, if they don't try to impress. If they, if you get a feeling they have deep knowledge of what they're talking about. And at the same time, they're still curious and have high agency. That's kind of the combination I look for. And that combined to me is effortlessly. And it doesn't, I don't think it takes that long to, to, to find it out. It takes in a conversation, maybe 10 minutes or so, to get a good feeling for whether a person has this, this kind of effortlessly or not. That's what I look for. But I don't interview software engineers, for example. That wouldn't apply that.

• 1:01:56David Senra?

  But I mean, you're essentially, I would imagine, involved at the most key positions that you're trying to prove for. What can, what do you think is happening in these 10 minutes?

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Honestly, I haven't thought about it. I don't know. I just, I just try to get a feeling for the person. I don't reflect on these things that much, to be honest. I just, I know it works for me. And the only thing that matters for me is whether it, whether the outcome is right. So I do look obviously at the statistics. Because if I kind of came in and I just kind of vibed the whole thing and everyone, and it kind of ended up being crap after six months. Obviously, that wouldn't work, but that's not the case. We, you know, like all the senior positions are obviously interviewed by all the founders. And so we always have a kind of second and third opinion on it. But we tend to agree on people. I think we look for similar, similar things. Sometimes you have to go into longer interviews and people do longer interviews with us as well. For me, it works better if I do short interviews and I just get a feeling for the person.

• 1:02:51David Senra?

  Have there been examples where your initial intuition about a person has been proved wrong? And in Helsing in particular?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Not at Helsing, but three times at Natural Motion. And I still know the names. And it still really annoys me why I didn't read it early enough. In all three cases, they were so good at faking the effortlessly. And so good at coming up with fake facts that I didn't read through it.

• 1:03:19David Senra?

  I heard you say something on Harry's podcast. Did you actually think there's a lot more exceptional people out there than other people believe? Especially if you have a couple thousand employees.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  People's character and, and, and also performance is not set in stone. So quite often, it's also a matter of, in larger companies, sometimes in my, they actually even be harder for people who have a 10x potential to, to become a 10x person. So it's a combination of things. It's probably harder to keep just hiring 10 out of 10 people, but also harder to develop them. But it's still worth it. I mean, the, the power law in talent is extreme. There are very few 10 out of 10 people, but they make, I mean, it's a cliche, but like we see this every day. They make a disproportionate difference to the company. So it is worth trying to find these people. And it is worth finding a way to give them a home in a company where they can really thrive.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  We try to do this very, very systematically at Helsing. And we make for, I think, hopefully for everyone, we create a, a great environment where they're surrounded by amazing people. But, you know, for the 10 out of 10s, we, we go the extra mile.

• 1:04:26David Senra?

  How do you do it systematically?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Don't want to go into too much into how we do it, but we are, we create, we create an environment where they can do their best work. Because, and we make exceptions that we wouldn't always make for everyone. Because they are such big contributors to the, to the company. And many of them now have contributed so, so much already. It's also a feeling of gratefulness, to be honest, to, we have a bunch of those key employees that have made a big difference. And you can point at the successes of the company and you always know that. I mean, obviously, it's all about talent because people make all of this stuff. Maybe in the future, it's more AI, but at the moment, it's, it's still mainly people. And you can point at those people that made a difference to the company. And so we, I think we all feel a lot of gratefulness as well to those top individuals.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  To everyone in the company, obviously, but in particular to the ones that, you know, have, have turned a project from really difficult to, you know, from red to green. That happens very often. And it's quite often very small teams or specific individuals that make a big difference.

• 1:05:26David Senra?

  Based on the conversations we had, the way I would summarize your perspective on this, because you talk about this a lot. It's like talent density above everything else.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's the number one thing. It's, it's, I, I feel that culture comes from talent density. It's, we had a situation, I don't know, maybe it was 18 or 24 months ago. So where we, we had a set of values at Helsing that we came up with at some point, I think in a workshop or so. And they were on our website and they were fine, I think. And then we had one of our get togethers where the whole company got together. And a bunch of people came and said, we want to rewrite our values. We want to throw the old ones away. We know now what Helsing is about and we want to like do it completely differently. And then, so at this get together, there was this workshop. And I have to say, I was dreading it because I didn't want to do another value session because I never liked them.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  And it was effortless. Like the, the, the team came up with their own values based on their experiences. And it wasn't one of those exercises where you, where you kind of all contributed ideas. It was just kind of a mind meld and it was clear this is what it was going to be. And, and the top value was whatever it takes. And then everyone gave examples for why that was. Some had just come back, you know, from the frontline in Ukraine. Some had not slept for 48 hours and done a whole bunch of things that are just amazing and impressive. And so that, that, that was one that came out of it. Another one that came out of it was the truth is in the field.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Like it doesn't matter how much you claim that your system works, you know, in, in tests and government tests, et cetera. We found out it has to work in reality and in combat. And, and so the truth is in the field came out of that. And I was so impressed by the team and I was kind of thinking like, how do you, how did that part of the culture come about? And as far as I can tell, it came about because a bunch of really good people got together, really cared about this stuff, had initiative and thought about it. And then they came up with it. It, it was just that. I think just getting really good people together that have good chemistry. And when they, when they sometimes maybe have the sparks flying, they can find a way to work together again. That's what creates culture.

• 1:07:38David Senra?

  So you have this idea to start this European defense company. You have ideas for the product you want to build, you raise money. So then you go from the idea to now your products are actually being used in Ukraine for the first time. Do you remember the first time that you found out that your product was being used there? Where were you and then what that felt like?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  We knew from our team in the field and I do, and everyone thinks differently about these things. I think, and I respect, I think, most attitudes towards it. I personally found it very difficult. I think it became a more serious company and that some of the kind of lightheartedness, you know, was gone a little bit because if you, if you build a video games company or a SaaS company, you can be, you can be quite lighthearted about things and unserious. Yes, it's a commercial business, but you know, you can be it. It fits culturally. If you are deployed in what fundamentally is a sad thing, this kind of conflict and you contribute to it because you have to, because you can think it through from first principles.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  But in my opinion, it's still sad that it happens. That makes it a serious, you know, changes the culture. And we are, I think, very aware of it. And that doesn't mean that we don't want to create the best systems. Of course we do. And it doesn't mean that we are not super ambitious. We are, but it is serious. It's very serious. We don't take it lightly.

• 1:09:03David Senra?

  All right. So you've used the word deterrent multiple times throughout this conversation. So that means the best possible outcome for housing is nothing happens.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. You don't want a conflict. And, you know, in general, obviously, the, the, the reason why you build capabilities is in order to avoid conflict, not to use them in a fight.

• 1:09:23David Senra?

  Which this goes back to this dinner we had like two years ago, this argument we were having about this, the fact that war has been, you know, constant throughout human history. So like, what actually has to take place in your mind for that outcome to actually happen where it's like, no, there is no more human conflict?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a big question. I do think it's in human nature to have at least parts of the population that want to have conflict, that enjoy conflict, that want to, you know, increase their sphere of influence. Sometimes, you know, that is political, sometimes it's geographical, sometimes you just literally want to have more land around you. I think that is partly cultural, but it's also partly hardwired into a part at least of the population and will probably be genetic in a part of the population. In order for that, not to dominate everything else, you need to make sure that the rest of the population is, is sufficiently protected so that it's too expensive to try and, you know, use force to take what you want. That's basically what it boils down to.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  And if you could eliminate, you know, the outliers, let's say, who really are that aggressive and want to use force, then, you know, I think forever you'd have peace. It's unlikely you can eliminate it. I think it's more likely that you have to contain them. And I think that's okay, as long as you see it early enough that you have to contain them and you, and you are able to look very prickly to them so that you, they don't attack.

• 1:10:50David Senra?

  You mentioned your previous company a few times and you said something when you guys were developing the autonomous fighter jet, that you used a very similar technique that Demis used to do Alpha Bo. I just finished reading this biography of Demis. It's interesting to me that he got started, his first introduction to AI was through video games. Yours was too. Some of the best entrepreneurs come from gaming. What do you think it is about that?

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think arguably Palmer Lucky did too. I mean, certainly very close to the gaming industry. And the gaming companies are complex to build because you, you marry art with technology. And in many cases, especially, you know, console games, you know, back in the day, today it's a bit different with some of the most, I would say sophisticated IT projects that you could think of. And at the same time, they had to have artistic value as well. And you had to accommodate, you know, people from all walks of life, like, you know, very focused software engineers with, you know, artists who, you know, just try to create something beautiful. And that is not dissimilar to what happens in, in the defense industry. You know, maybe a little bit less artistry, although that exists as well.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  But we have very different people that work on very complex systems that have very different cultural backgrounds and still need to work together to produce something amazing in the end. I think that's, that's one part. And maybe it's also exposure to defense through games. I don't know. A lot of, a lot of games are, you know, have a, have a military, military theme. Maybe that's part of it as well.

• 1:12:22David Senra?

  Explain the founding of your first company. Like what was happening right in your life, right before you started that one though?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  I was studying in the UK and I, I was working on, in biology, I was working on systems, on simulations that simulated neural networks.

• 1:12:38David Senra?

  In what year?

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  The year was 1999.

• 1:12:43David Senra?

  So you were working on simulating neural networks in 99?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, using genetic algorithms. I was looking to optimize them to, to do something useful.

• 1:12:50David Senra?

  Why were you interested in that to begin with?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  I liked complex systems. So I was, I had just started a PhD in complex systems in biology and neural networks are a complex system. And specifically the ones I looked at were fully recurrent neural networks. So ones that, you know, with the right weights could start to create spontaneous cyclic activity.

• 1:13:08David Senra?

  So is that now what you were just described on the fighter jet?

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Well, it has some similarity because the, so genetic algorithms have fallen out of favor as a search algorithm. And now it's almost entirely reinforcement learning, but you could theoretically also use genetic algorithms. So there's definitely some similarity. The network architectures are different. And back then I, I based my network architectures on, on biological, what's called central pattern generators, so CPGs. They are the, the neural structures that create rhythmic movement for, you know, for, for, for walking, for your heartbeat and a bunch of other things. And so I tried to recreate one of these for walking, using genetic algorithms and a neural network, a quite simple neural network to optimize the weights. And in order to see whether it worked, I hooked it up to physically simulated creatures,

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  you know, very simple four-legged and then two-legged creatures. Physics engines had just started back then with, you know, MathEngine and Havoc and other companies. And to my surprise, it ended up working quite well. So overnight, I remember it's quite rare that you have these eureka moments, but I had this thing set up overnight and those computers were very slow back then. And then the next morning, when I looked at the experiment, I literally had this two-legged creature walk over the screen fully physically simulated. You know, did a bit more research, you know, in that area and then realized this was going to work very well and thought it's been out a company to use these things as virtual stuntmen in, in movie scenes.

• 1:14:37David Senra?

  So if I go back to you at 99, did you have any inclination that one day you'd be a founder, an entrepreneur?

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  No, no, not at that point.

• 1:14:44David Senra?

  What did that person in 99 think that they were going to do?

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  I thought I was going to be a scientist. I, I wanted to, to stay in, in science and be a biologist and in specifically do software and simulation work in biology. That's what I wanted to do.

• 1:14:58David Senra?

  Okay. But then you have this eureka moment and your first thought is I'm going to start a company?

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  It was my first thought. It, it took a little bit of time, but this was a time of the dot com boom.

• 1:15:11David Senra?

  99 was an important point. Okay.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was still, you know, it looked like you could do that kind of thing. And it was inspiring to see lots of other people start companies. And so I started Natural Motion and we first used it, you know, we produced a software called Endorphin that was used in, in big Hollywood movies like Lord of the Rings, Troy, Spider-Man, Harry Potter. And that was fun and great, but it didn't make much money because we only, I think we charged $50,000 per license and they ended up kind of doing all of the scenes with them. And it was clear that the real value was going to be in using that technology for, for games in, in real time. And Rockstar Games were one of our customers for, you know, for the old tool Endorphin.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  And they asked us, do you have a version that runs in real time on the upcoming consoles? And we said, kind of. And, and so then we started a long collaboration with, with Rockstar Games, who ended up using our technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Redemption and, and the whole range of other games. And then that company grew and it grew faster than before, but it still didn't have the, the kind of takeoff, the kind of lift off characteristics that I kind of was hoping for as a founder. You always kind of obviously hope for more of a hockey stick thing. And, and it felt like the kind of chess pieces were kind of drawing in and it was going to be hard to move. So, so we ended up saying like, we need to make games ourselves.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  And, and what you would now call vertically integrated, we didn't think about it that way. We, we felt like we were so inspired and learned so much from Rockstar Games that we thought, how hard can it be? It turns out to be quite hard, but it ended up working quite well. And we acquired a games team, did the first games, the iPhone came out and then we had a string of hit games on iPhone. And then a big breakthrough. Which was in a completely different area. All of our previous games have been in characters because that was our technology. And then there was one game that I really wanted to make because I was really into cars, which was a drag racing game, so a car racing game without any steering. And that became Befar, our biggest hit, Scott C S R Racing, and became the biggest game of all time on iPhone at the time. And that gave us the hockey stick.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Then there was lift off for the company. And then it was off and it became a completely different experience.

• 1:17:28David Senra?

  I feel there's some, like a theme connecting here, and I still don't have an understanding of this. So you'll see this in all these biographies that I read, right? So I'm reading one right now. It's a guy named Raymond Plank, writes it when he's 90 years old. And he starts this company called Apache Corporation with $250,000 in 1954. By the time the book is published, you know, 50 years later, it's like a $30 billion company. And his insight was, he was a tax planner and accountant. And some of the businesses that he was working for were these new American oil companies. And he realized there's these huge tax incentives that were taking place in America post-World War II. At the same time, you had tax benefits if you would invest in oil discoveries because the United States was trying to incentivize domestic oil production.

• 1:18:12David Senra?

  And at the same time, because there's so much debt after World War II, they increased the top marginal tax rate to like 90%. And so the very wealthy people were trying to find ways to offset. And that was the original idea. He discovered Apache Corporation, which winds up being this massive oil and gas company because of the work that he was doing in tax planning and accounting for relatively small businesses. I feel there is some kind of connection between your first company and your second that I'm trying to get to. Am I just wrong on this?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  So I don't think it was that direct necessarily. One theme that I've always felt with everything I ended up doing, I think, is that I ended up doing something slightly different to maybe what the mainstream was. And part of the reasons I've never felt kind of part of the group, of the peer group. Like I never, as a biologist, and I did a lot of biology and I loved it, but I never really felt like I was like part of the biology group. And that made it a little bit easier to do different things. That's why I ended up just doing software and simulation rather than go out into the field and watch animals and dissect animals. I never liked that stuff. I wanted to do something slightly different stuff. With gaming, I also never felt part of the gaming group and culture the same way. And as a result, I think we ended up doing quite different games that I remember that

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  our, the pricing for our games was very different to anyone else's.

• 1:19:26David Senra?

  The pricing?

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first games that we made, we priced as low as we possibly could because we felt that we just maximized revenues that way. And everyone else in the games industry said, no, your game needs to have a value, like your mobile game needs to be at least $5 so that people feel it has a value. And it never made sense to me because all I wanted to do was maximize revenues. And I felt like there was so much price elasticity that we could just go all the way down and people could spend, overall, we would make much more money because we'd have much more people. So we sold our game for 99 cents, the cheapest that was possible. And then when Free to Play came, we were the first big free-to-play 3D game, and we made it free and then charged money elsewhere. And that would have been much harder had we been part of the group. And I think a similar thing is also true for defense.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the fund the backgrounds had already been in defense companies, just much harder. It's easier to be an outsider. That maybe is a parallel. But then the other thing is like, I always tried to do things that are, that are different and sometimes cool. Like I wanted to, like, I really wanted to do the number one top grossing game in the world. I remember sitting, like, standing in the shower at one point in the UK and thinking, I would like to do the number one top grossing game. It was just a goal. And with Helsing, I think we all want to build a company that has impact. So I think that's similar too. You just kind of want to have those goals. You want to have a bit of a north star and then go for it.

• 1:20:53David Senra?

  Okay, I love that you used the word north star. One other, I think, Brian, the last thing I want to talk to you about today is I've heard you say this, essentially this criticism of like this LinkedIn or X commentary culture, that commentary is actually relatively worthless or completely worthless. What's your opinion on this and like, can you just expound on that?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think commentary is entirely worthless and it has almost, has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is it, I think it drags some people down. So it has a negative benefit. And it obviously is encouraged through, you know, the way the social platforms are, you know, incentivizing contributors. So you're incentivized if you comment, and particularly if you comment negatively, but you're not incentivized, you know, to be a creator. And I don't complain about this because it is what it is and, you know, they should do what they want. But I do think that creators are still somewhat undervalued and commentators are still overvalued because they get so much airtime.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  And there are many of them now, I think even more than before. And it contributed to some of the European, I think, perceived malaise, you know, people talking themselves and each other down. I just had this the other day, again, I was just in the car with someone who was actually, is a great entrepreneur, but he himself just kept on commenting on how bad certain things are. But there's no point in commenting about it. It creates zero value. You either do something about it or you don't talk about it. But if you don't do either, then, yeah, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a good contribution. Just commenting on negative stuff is not useful.

• 1:22:33David Senra?

  What would your advice be to do then?

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Just to focus on building your company. I always think that you have a real privilege as a founder that you can make a difference. You know, depending on which sector you're in, you can make big differences in the way a society works. Like arguably, all the social networks have made a massive difference, for better or for worse. All the AI companies are making a massive difference. Many health companies, I think defense companies are making a big difference too. And if you are a founder that is very ambitious and you're in one of those fields, you can change society. And not many categories of people can do that. Politicians can as well, certain types of other people can as well, sometimes even investors. But founders, I think, have the biggest lever.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  And if you, that's also why you have so few founders, I think, on Twitter and, and, and other social platforms, because it's already very satisfying to do the stuff that you do. You don't then need to comment on how bad everything is. You just do your stuff and it has an impact.

• 1:23:28David Senra?

  That's the perfect place then. Thanks for making the time.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Cool. Thank you.