Synthesia Co-Founder | The Future of Hollywood, YouTube & AI Content

0:00It's not just something you made. It's the privilege that you get to work with your hands. It's building something that serves a purpose. Proof that you have the grit to keep going. At Timberland, we understand you take your craft seriously. And we do too. Which is why our products are built to the highest quality. We put in the work so you can perfect yours. With purpose in every detail and crafted with intention. Timberland. Built on craft. Visit Timberland.com to shop. Score more with the college-branded Venmo Debit Card and earn up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash. Got paid back? With the Venmo Debit Card, you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want, like game day snacks, gear, tickets, and more.

0:43The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now at Venmo.com slash college card. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Select schools available. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo.me slash stashterms. Max$100 cash back per month. Welcome to today's episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I'm joined by Victor, the founder of Synthesia. It's a fascinating company that was first put on my radar about five years ago by MMC Ventures. They have been on a tear since then, doing incredibly well. The idea that they have is behind automating video creation, which obviously as a podcaster and YouTuber had me a little bit nervous, but we spoke about that.

1:28It's an incredible story. Victor's got a really interesting background having been born in Denmark and studying at Stanford as well so we got into all of that as well but why he is confident about building an AI company here in London. I really hope you enjoy today's episodes we have lots of exciting things coming up for you this year so please do subscribe or send this to a friend thank you. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests.

2:01Victor, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. You're here to celebrate some big news. The fact that Jimmy's Jobs of the Future has gone past 100 ,000 subscribers. I'm sure you're delighted. I'm honoured. Well, you are. Yeah, quite a big moment. You are the fastest growing unicorn in the United Kingdom, as according to the Sunday Times list. But that news is just about to get a bit bigger, right? It is. We're very excited to announce our Series E, raising$200 million at a$4.000 valuation, doubling down on what's been a fantastic couple of years and a huge opportunity in AI Video. Who's backing you this time?

2:40The round is led by GV, Google Ventures, which is one of our early investors. They invested first time in the Series B and we're grateful for their support. A lot of the existing investors are investing as well. Then we're bringing in two new funds, Evantic led by Matt Miller and the head of Sophia. what's the difference between raising like series e compared to that first round 10 years ago um so i think that all depends on the traction right um you know i think when you raised the first two rounds for us was incredibly difficult to raise the first round was like basically me and stephan my co-founder and matthias and luredis and the other co-founders with a powerpoint and uh what we thought was a good idea and turned out to be at least somewhat of a good idea but back then was completely non-consensus you know we're telling people in 2017 ai is going to be able to not just analyze data and find patterns for us which was mainly like machine learning back then it's going to be able to actually generate data and content and in 10 years you're going to be able to make a hollywood film from your laptop with nothing but your imagination right when you look at that statement today that seems very obvious you know that's if it hasn't already happened then it's very close to happening but back then it's very very difficult for investors to draw the line between the tech we were showing them and where it could eventually go, which I think is very natural when you're investing ahead of the curve and you're building ahead of the curve.

4:00But those two rounds are very difficult because we have to find people who truly were believers and pioneers. And I think it's one of the areas where being in Europe is a lot harder. In the Valley, it's easier to find people who are tech optimists and want to believe and think ahead of the curve. In Europe, unfortunately, I think it's gotten a lot better since 2017 but it's very difficult to raise those rounds back then but we're very lucky that we found some people who believed in us raising a series e is is very different right like we've gone a long way from our from powerpoint deck and the way you evaluate the business today it's of course still based on you know the vision and what we want to do and what we want to build but now it's also a very real business you know way past 100 million dollars of ar and revenue and and so you you kind of move from the the first round being pure story almost to getting closer and closer to being evaluated like how you would evaluate a public company right um but but interestingly you know because things were going really well the later stage rounds have actually been almost easier to raise than some of the earlier stage rounds which makes no sense from the outside that raising a million dollars back in 2017 took us 10 times as long as it took us to raise uh the latest 200 million dollar round that's some of those like weird mechanics that you that you see in this industry.

5:17You always get time. Who wrote the first check? Can you remember? Mark Cuban did. Mark Cuban invested a million dollars at five million dollars post. Wow. So I think, I'm pretty sure we're his best angel investment he's ever made. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, I think. This is a Dragon's Den, US Dragon's Den guy, right? For those who might not know, yeah. Exactly. I think the backstory on Mark Cuban is pretty interesting because obviously he's mainly known as being the guy in Dragon, Shark Tank, it's called in the US. But actually before that, he built and sold a company that he sold to Yahoo for 3. something billion dollars.

5:54And he was the first person who brought radio to the internet, which today seems like, you know, I mean, it's kind of like what we're doing right now. But back then, that was a completely ludicrous idea. And I think when he saw us and he heard about what we're trying to do, he saw a lot of parallels. Back when he was saying, hey, I want to bring radio to the internet, people were like, that's completely ridiculous. The tech's not going to be able to support. it's got to be way too expensive yeah who would want to listen to radio on their computer right you have a radio right there why would you need that yeah um as about mark's actually incredibly visionary in terms of of tech and um sudesia as a as a company stems from a research uh paper that my co-founder matthias nison did when he was a professor at stanford and when we when we messaged mark cuban and sent him a cold email uh we quickly found that he actually implemented this paper himself at home with a lecture right so i think my kind of entrepreneurship lesson from raising that round was that we talked to i mean way more than 100 people who all said no because we were trying to both convince them that the world is going to look like this in 10 years which was a hard sell and we were the right team to tackle that opportunity and with mark cuban and some of the other early investors we didn't have to convince them of the vision he already was completely sold on the idea that ai is going to be able to generate film movies speech whatever He was only evaluating us as the team to tackle that opportunity.

7:13And it's just generally much easier to find people who already believe in your vision and they value you as a team as opposed to having to both convince someone on a non-consensus vision and the team. Back in those days, everybody wanted to invest in fintech. Everyone believed in that. So if you went out and want to start a fintech company, they'd evaluate you as a team and, of course, the idea you had, but you wouldn't have to convince them that this is a market that's going to exist eventually. so how did you go about getting the kind of like cold email like how did that what was that process like and how did he agree to kind of invest because that's a heck of a first check investor so we are yeah i mean it was you know we were pretty young me and stephan my my other operational co-founder and we were just hustling to try and get this thing off off the grounds we obviously were young a lot of belief in the idea but we also needed money right and so we had this long list of people who we thought could be interesting and we got turned down by almost everyone um we ended up with mark cuban's email because sony got hacked a few years prior and you could actually download that data dump on the internet and in that data dump there was a lot of emails yeah my cuban you know talking about like the shark tank production and so we found his email in there we sent him the email and he responded back within like five minutes just asking us like a bunch of questions around uh we sent him like a demo and a few few words more we're trying to build and then we had this 14 hour email conversation with him mark human doesn't do video calls and he doesn't do phone calls only email so we had this like 14 hour conversation with him over email and at like 4 or 5 a.m in the morning at uk time he was basically like you know um i'll do a million dollars if the diligence checks out yeah and uh you know the diligence checked out we went to la to visit him and spent a day with him on the set of uh of shark tank which was really fun had lunch with them yeah and that was the official thought because you there back and forth female I mean that must have it I wonder what that's like now in a sort of chat GPT world as well right it's quite interesting in that because of course that's one of the great advantages you've got right is that everyone wants to invest in their AI companies now whereas you've been doing your series ABC rounds before that chat GPT even existed right yeah I think there's like freeze stages of synthesis there was like the kind of i mean it wasn't really let's call it pre-generative ai era which is from 2017 to around you know uh 2020 where i mean the tech didn't really work we're doing some demos we we had this technology where we could kind of like translate a video take an advertisement that was shot in english and give you a french version of it by reanimating the face to match a different voiceover and it was i mean we did make some money off it and it did sort of work but it was just not like a very scalable business that part of the company was very very difficult.

9:56So the next phase was we actually built something that worked. It started to scale. It was a web app, very easy to use. We essentially went from trying to build technology for Hollywood studios and video production companies and video experts to your average office worker can generate a video in just a few seconds. That started working and the company started getting traction. So we went from zero to a million dollars in AR and something like three or four months, which is, today that's less special, but back then was very special. And so we started growing really quickly and of course as soon as we started growing really quickly investors took note and became a lot easier to raise money and then so then the company started growing really quickly and then when chat jpp was released and all of a sudden ai was just the thing everybody talked talks about today right that was like one more accelerant to um to the business so it's been kind of interesting like those three stages of like you know nothing is working no traction at all to the business is working people weren't talking about ai yet but the business is working really fast and then once AI really started taking off just the kind of the kind of macro effect that had on the business right because then because that people can see like okay well we can generate scripts like and then we can turn scripts into video with me just sort of but it's also just all of a sudden everyone is like googling AI tools there's the you know watching the tick tock everybody's talking about like AI tool it's in these yeah chat GPT lovable all these other things right everyone is constantly talking about AI tools yeah which meant that and we were one of the we were actually i wouldn't say we're a mature product but by the time chat gpt got uh got released right we've been building our product for a couple of years yeah which means that we were actually one of the few companies that had an offering that wasn't just like a demo slapped together in in two weeks we had something real we had something that was pretty unique so just the fact that the world was like and every business in the world was like how's ai going to change my business how do i make sure that i don't miss the wave like all that's you You know, it's just like, it's a massive accelerant in terms of customer acquisition and general interest and willingness for budget holders to go spend budget on AI tools.

11:55So I think there's, in some sense, you could say we were too early because the very first years of the company was not very fun and things didn't work. But on the other hand, you could also say we were right on time, right? We just had to endure those like three or four years of like very painful. Training, right? You know, kind of running against the wall. But once, you know, everything started taking off, we were really well positioned. Yeah, I can see that. And so what are you going to do with the 200 million then, right? What are you going to deploy that in? So it's going to go into what you'd expect, product development, customer acquisition.

12:29The big thing for us is when we founded the company, we founded it based on basically two big ideas. The first one being that AI is going to reduce the marginal cost of creating content to basically zero, meaning that you can generate anything from your computer without needing anything else in just your imagination right i think that's kind of happening right now yeah um in a couple of years you know you will be able to see like cinematic content i think generated ai to the point where you cannot tell that it's being ai generated that's a huge business opportunity because it's it's kind of like going from a printing press to typing on a keyboard right yeah in terms of the the scale of of content production and i think that's very much the business opportunity we've tackled up until now.

13:09The second big idea is that when we invent new media technology as humans, the first phase of it is always that we use new technology to create old media formats, which is what we're doing today. We're creating video as we've always known it, right? You create one video, everybody watches exactly the same version of the video. It's a broadcast, it's from A to B, and so on and so forth. But when we invent new media technology, we always invent new media formats so the hundred billion dollar question in in our market right is like what does truly ai native video look like it doesn't look like a broadcast it's probably much more every video is tailored to the person who's watching it right if you're watching an educational video about something and there's something you don't understand you can ask that video a question which obviously can't do on youtube right yes if you're doing a corporate training thing like what we're doing a sales training rather than just having people watch a video passively and hoping to understand the content.

14:01The video can go into a conversational mode where the video pretends to be a customer and you have as a salesperson to have to overcome objections, prove you've actually understood the content in the same way you would role play with your manager, for example. There's lots of different avenues that this can go. And that's the chapter we're moving into now. We're launching our first product. It's in beta right now with 25 customers. It's going to go into GA in a couple of months. And that is essentially AI native video, right? And I think the easiest way of thinking about it like video you can talk to and video you can interact with it could be that you do the sales training thing with the first product we're launching where you're actually being examinated by the ai the ai helps you yeah like a tutor or your manager would to understand the content you're consuming could be that you're as a candidate you're watching a video about the job role that you're taking but the video is also going to give you a live case study on the call so you can prove your skill set beyond just uploading your cv for example and there's a gazillion other examples of how you can use these things and that's essentially what we're moving into now right and i think if you look at kind of like what is the what is the opportunity in this segment i think whoever managed to nail those use cases yeah becomes very very big because it takes video as we're doing it today for being purely around communication to actually being some degree of lightweight like process automation right you can have these videos actually teach your sales team not just like communicate something to them you can have them help with onboarding instead of having a person onboarding everyone in the company with the same slides the same you know two hours every single week you can do that with with one of these like video agents instead do you think there's a danger that as you were talking about that right I sometimes think about technology and it doesn't actually end up at times making us more productive so if you can ask a salesperson 25 questions you'll just end up doing it like I it I just as you were talking there about it it just made me think like okay we're going to create all this content more and more content but actually aren't we going to lose some of the human skills in terms of like well risk taking i suppose you could argue that in some cases it will probably change like our behavior and maybe there's going to be some things that makes us less productive but i think in the case of this i think what we're seeing so far and this is not not just in Synthesia, but also when you look at like education with kids, for example, that when you have a space where, you know, kind of no one is watching.

16:30Yeah. You're a lot more vulnerable and you're much more okay asking stupid questions, for example, or doing 10 practice runs because you're not, so role-playing is a, is a, in most sales teams is a integral part of being a manager, right? You role-play with your, your team members. So, you know, maybe I feel like you're not, but 10 out of 10 in product knowledge. So we'll sit down and I'll pretend to be a customer and we'll kind of do a few role plays to make sure you've understood the content. That's a very normal way of teaching salespeople how to sell. And so with this, what you can do is you can have that available in any language 24 seven.

17:05It has a memory of all the previous interactions you've had. So you can actually begin to build a data set of like, what are you good at? What are you less good at? Which helps you get better at your job, right? Yeah. Of course, I think there is like, you don't want to be just sitting and like role playing all the time. instead of actually going on sales calls, that's not gonna be very much productive. But I do think that one of the biggest and most interesting use case with AI is actually education as a general theme, right? This is education in a corporate context with a sales team, but looking at myself and like how I learn things now, you know, if you, like three or four years ago, I would always say, you know, I love reading.

17:41Yeah. And I still do read, but I mostly read fiction today because of the art form. If I wanna learn something, it's at least like five six years ago i started going on youtube instead right because like rather than buying the book on amazon waiting for it to arrive reading 200 pages of which most of it is probably outdated by the time i read it a 20 minute video on youtube can teach you much more right so video is like the easiest way of learning and i think what's happening now is that increasingly it's going to be a mix of video but also these like using it a lens right like what i want to learn something today i don't know if you've had any experience with this but it's just phenomenal putting together like curriculum yeah asking you questions explaining it in is like give me an analogy that's close to another topic that i'm really good at understanding it's just extremely powerful to have this like ai tutor that can help you understand things really quickly i know what you mean about asking the basic questions as well i was doing some stuff for my pension the other day and like pensions is one of these things that everyone sort of pretends they understand and whatever but only thinks about it once every three or four years and it was like a mate like you know I basically spent, and I was like, oh, okay, I kind of like, I get it all now and whatever.

18:47And even like comparing what your pension pot is to the national average and all that kind of stuff, it was like, yeah, it was just sort of really, it was really interesting. And it was, I was asking probably quite a lot of dumb questions, really, but, you know, you just get clarity on it, et cetera. Yeah. Go on. What have you used it for? I mean, I use it for, I just bought a partner, for example, right? and it's also like one of those things you do a few times throughout your life you're talking to a solicitor and like all these like you know old english uh documents that i have gazillions of pages and you everyone has the feeling i should probably sit down and read this and make sure i'm not like signing on to something that i disagree with that's bad but it's just the language is tough right and you have to call your lawyer that they also they have like they can't say some things they can't advise you on something which is kind of annoying just slap them into chat which is like dumb this down for me summarize the key point is anything here that's out of the ordinary right and it's interesting because that actually teaches you so much about the process just by like dumbing down the language giving you the summarized version of like a 15 page document and so i think it's not just that you can say at least for my own personal thing like it's not just that i'm like hey is this okay and i just follow blindly what the ggbt tells me it's actually that I learned something about like what are these things in a way that I probably wouldn't if I just it would take me a very long time to sit down read all these documents right so I think it helps it can also dumb us down if you're just blindly asking it and just going whatever it says but it used in the right way I think it's a it's an amazing tool to learn again that the house thing yeah property purchase is one of those things where I often think about like how anyone bought it before email is beyond me right like it's one of these things where technology slightly ends up creating more work and makes the process longer and longer, but that is a really useful case study on it.

20:40Where did the name Synthesia come from? There's a clip, Sonny. If I could change it, I probably would. So it actually comes from my big passion outside of work is music, and in music, especially electronic music, you use synthesizers, which is essentially digital instruments that originally were made to emulate physical instruments so instead of having travel around but like all of this in the world you could just have a keyboard and you could have you could play like the guitar like whatever and and of course synthesizes today is a very big part of producing music and i think there's a very obvious link to what we're doing with video i was synthesizing video instead of filming in the real world we're using digital technology to to recreate something that looks and feels entirely real and and then one of my favorite films is fantasia there's no you know Disney cartoon and it started as this like a code word for the project and then it just kind of like stuck on.

21:37I think there's a lot of things I like about it but it's very difficult to pronounce which is a problem as we just saw before. Yeah okay that's interesting. It's a lovely question to ask people because it's obviously like takes people back to those core moments of where they were kind of like sitting at the kitchen table etc. Were there any other names that you considered?

22:00Not really, because it was more like a code. It was just like, you know, it was exactly that. I was sitting in my room and I was like, I'm making this deck. I got to call something. And that just kept to mind. What's it been like? You're now almost 600 people, right? You'll probably be maybe hiring a couple hundred more as well. Like, what has the hiring process been like? And where have the kind of like step change moments been on that journey? so early days when we had nothing and you know we were both 25 26 years old um it's very difficult to hire you always get this advice of just like just only hire like rock stars like the first people you hire is the most important and that's great advice you should definitely hire all the rock stars you can get but in the early days of a company right it's it's it's hard because you can't for most people at least very difficult to go to someone who works at like a meta or google and say hey i think you're an absolute rock star why don't you come join my company because you probably can't afford their salary and at that point in time right you're just a person with a powerpoint or maybe like a very early version of the technology so in the early days it's all about finding a kind of diamonds in the dirt um i think is one way of putting it right which are these people that are truly great but they haven't necessarily they don't have the cv to demonstrate it yet or they live in some random town where for some reason there's just not like a meta or like a google that's going to snap them out but they didn't go to like a stanford or like some big important university and the way you find those people right is is by interviewing a lot of people and trying to figure out like what are the signals what what what characterizes like this type of person who has a lot of potential but maybe hasn't sort of outlifted yet right and those are the people you want to find a lot of we were also fortunate that two of our co-founders were professors so they had some PhD students which was an easier inning we obviously need the AI researchers to actually build the initial version of the product and we were very lucky to get a bunch of like truly great people who straight off their PhDs that they were young they're very good and they're excited about the space that we were working in and of course we gave them you know obviously you want to give them equity and options and give them like great upside in the company then it changes over time you know I think you for us just before we let's go into but just this is almost a sidebar on this but who what a couple of those people being I think there's a fascinating series to be done in terms of like people that join companies like in the first 20 or so because I think we line eyes founders rightly so but actually there's people that join early are almost kind of like doing a lot of the risk as well with less of the upside right I'd be fascinated and maybe tell me after a couple of people like early on that were particularly uh good because it'd be great to interview them as well but um a lot of those i think we're i bet but go sorry then you hit 50 people etc yeah i mean then you start growing and then you know the company obviously starts working which means you get a little bit more leverage when you're talking to candidates but you know i think even up until you know a couple of hundred people we were mostly hiring people that i would call i mean underdogs is a strong word but i think almost on purpose actually like not trying to hire people from you know big name brand logos but trying to really find people where they're most like

25:21hiring people that are truly hungry you know that are very smart have something to prove want to put the work in are humble about the fact that like no one knows anything and and you get this feeling that they will like you know they will put in the work and they'll have to have the raw intelligence to really kind of perform very well i think those people are so important those early days the thing that can happen and of course this is like a very broad generalization is that you go out and you're like oh my god i need this person from dropbox or pick your name brand, right? You talk to these people like, yeah, I was responsible for growing from 50 million AR to 300 million AR, da, da, da.

26:03And of course, there are some absolute rock stars in these companies. And if you hire them, you're very lucky and they can come in and they hopefully have enough mental plasticity to not just apply the same playbook because every company is very different and they may be worth the money, right? But there's also a lot of people who are great, but whose ego is maybe a bit out of touch with what their actual impact was, right? like would Dropbox have grown from 300 to 800 million dollars of AR if you weren't there? Yeah. The answer to that is that for 90 % of the people who work in growth and marketing there, the answer is probably yes.

26:33And that doesn't mean that you're not great, but it means that some people, right, if they've been on this sort of rapid journey, sometimes I think have a, you know, a kind of an incongruence in terms of like, yeah, what they can bring to the table. and that can be very toxic, right? Because you as a founder, if you're young, you'll come in and be like, I should listen to this person who's seen it before. They know what truly great looks like. And then you end up applying a lot of playbooks that maybe worked at that point in time for that company, but doesn't work for your own company, right? So the allure of like hiring people with great CVs that can just solve the problem for you because they've seen it before is generally a trap.

27:12When you get to some level of scale in the business, like the scale we're at now, it applies much more. But it is a mistake I see a lot of people do early on, right? which is like you hire people with fancy CVs because they have fancy CVs. And that could be dangerous. So our strategy was always like hire people with raw ambition, raw talent, raw intelligence. Especially when you're building a company like ours, but there's no playbook, right? We were one of the first AI native companies to emerge. We had to figure out how to grow. We had to learn that for the first couple of years, the best way to attract enterprise clients was TikTok.

27:48There's no growth marketer from the previous generation of SaaS companies who would have told us that, right? And that only worked because our technology was an enterprise technology, but it also had a huge wow factor. It was jaw-dropping, right? So you could drive that viral interest. And it's like all these lessons you have to learn for the first time, especially if you're doing something that's sort of highly innovative. Yeah. And then, of course, as you progress through, I think now we hire a lot of people that are great and are much more senior and have seen stuff, and we can afford them, we can compete more with the big tech companies.

28:19so the profile of people you hire throughout the journey of the company right does change over time but I think the point about how changes and particularly with an AI world as well like how quickly it is because we're often looking at like people who might be able to recruit and whatever and you speak to plenty of people who've worked at diverse CEO and whatever but it's like you know what got Stephen Bartlett from 100 ,000 subscribers to half a million was three years ago now it's gonna look quite different actually like Plus the content's different. There's actually so many variables. But it can be very easy to kind of clear on to that as a founder and be like, because actually most of the time you're making decisions, I think when it comes to hiring, quite often on instinct, right?

29:00More intelligence, more adaptability and so on. Yeah, it's really interesting. But I think it's also just because it's really fucking hard to be a founder, right? You have a lot of problems on your plate all the time. And you're always hoping that you can get someone in who can just fix it for you. yeah and you can sometimes get people who can fix it for you which is great but it's it's unfortunately not as easy as just for you hiring someone who've been on a podcast that was growing really quickly yeah like that's not a guarantee that that person understood the lessons and that it's the same lessons that still apply and so on and so forth um but i think it's uh it's probably it's a very human thing right they just look at someone like okay this happened over here this person will probably know how to do it um and sometimes it does apply but i think especially with things like growth marketing and well actually in everything like product growth marketing whatever just the playbook's change if if you want to be a top one percent company you have to pave the way right yeah by the time it's common sense to do some specific growth tactic everyone is doing it right and all these like growth tactics they have such a quick like decay and so you want to be the ones who discover them before people start writing blog posts about Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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30:47That's boxlight.io. Now, back to Jimmy. And let's talk a bit about the sort of cultural differences, because you spend a bit of time at Stanford and so on, and UK, Denmark, Europe as well, because you are very, like, you believe that you can build a world-leading top 1 % AI company from Europe, right? yeah but what i think it's i think it definitely i mean there's pros and cons right i think the cons i think is very well known but i think there are also some some pros so what are the pros then i think the the the most important pros actually on talent which a lot of people don't expect me to say but um what people forget is that if you're in the bay area yes there's a lot of amazing people who are very good at what they do but there's also a lot of amazing companies with a lot of money who are also trying to hire people at the same scale that you are, right?

31:38So what's happening in the valley is very high concentration of great people. But if you look at the average tenure in the Bay Area, whereas in Europe, for example, it's much shorter, right? Because there's always like the company next door is growing faster. It just hired like an even cooler AI researcher than you have. There's a sort of constant, you know, people switching jobs and going to building their own kind of personal stock portfolio and so on. And there's a lot of positive things about that as well. but it is a lot harder to compete on talent if you're in the bay area because there's just so many options right yeah in europe we don't have like that many great companies and i think especially if you're like a top five percent or top one percent company in in europe and you have something that's pretty unique right and there's a lot of great talent in europe i don't buy this idea that developers in the bay area is like you know three times as good as they are in europe yeah i think that's absolutely bs um people in europe in general i think are more loyal which has a good side to and a bad side to it.

32:34A good side to it is as an employer, most people care about, of course, a good salary. They care about a job that they like with colleagues that they like. In the US, a lot of people think of it more as like building their own personal stock portfolio. In Europe, people don't care so much about that. And that maybe means that there's some edge of ambition that's like taking off or taken off. But I think as an employer, I think there's so many great people in Europe. And if you're out of 5 % to 1 % company, it's much easier to hoover up that talent and build a really strong company whereas in the bay area again you're just competing much more with more people where it does get harder on talent is in more senior roles because europe don't have that many big tech companies who've seen hundreds of millions of ar hyper growth you know tier one products um it becomes more difficult because i mean we have an office in new york as well right so we have a big team there but you generally try have to find those people in the u.s and either move them to europe or maybe to new york which is which is obviously harder right you already have like a a strong filter and you need to find people that that are willing to um to to relocate most of the time how did you find your time at stanford because i did a couple of months there on an exec course as well and yeah found it like it was very useful yeah it was amazing i mean i was there for like one semester um basically on my bachelor's and I think I prior to that I was I was living in Copenhagen in Denmark and I was working in the Danish kind of startup ecosystem I was loving it and you want to build a company and I was like I want to go to Stanford to Silicon Valley and see what it's it's all about right and I think I left for two impressions the first one absolutely amazing the people you met there the level of of conversations that were had but just completely different right you're you're at party and someone is talking about how they're gonna like cure cancer right another person's talking about this their new company they started just raised five million dollars but it's like the level of ambition and the celebration of ambition and drive just so different than denmark which is a very which is a great country but the complete opposite a lot of like tall puppy syndrome in denmark right um and i think that was just amazing you know feeling that energy the ambition and the fact that everyone like wanted other people to succeed as well that was absolutely magical and was definitely transformative for me.

34:51They helped me think bigger also. In Denmark, when I was working in startups, I did a lot of interesting projects, but it was like building a bookkeeping system for Danish companies, right? Or doing some other like business process tooling thing. And a lot of that I think were interesting, but what I definitely learned at Stanford was I love these like weird fringe ideas, sci-fi stuff. And, you know, if you weren't in Denmark, if you were over there, that was like, no one looked weird at you if you said, I want to build like an AI video company, right? At a time where that seemed crazy. So I absolutely loved that and it was a very transformative period of my life for sure.

35:24The other part of it which I thought was kind of interesting was I think I came over there and obviously being very immersed from a distance in the whole community and the content and the people and so on. You come to Silicon Valley, right? And you expect something that looks like a Silicon Valley, right? With like lots of cool tech and flying cars and whatever. And Palo Alto is like, if you don't know that you're in Silicon Valley, you'd be like, I mean, it's like random small American city with like a bunch of restaurants and a few shops, and that's it, right? It's pretty rudimentary. It's a very, I mean, Stanford is a beautiful place, but the area around it, I remember just like being completely shocked at like, is this Silicon Valley?

36:03But it is, and I mean, it's part of the culture, the appeal, right, that it's like very, I guess. There's nothing to distract. There's definitely nothing to distract you, right? There's like one bar in town or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and what's great about London specifically as well right let's sort of like big London up a bit like because it sometimes gets a bit of shade thrown at it at the moment by lots of places what do you think is great about London and growing an AI unicorn company I mean I think if you're in Europe I think it's the only like real place to build a big global company I think it has it's I think it is like you know by far the best city in the in Europe in terms of being a melting pot and a magnet for ambitious driven people I think you I mean you see that everywhere people come to London from all over some come here just like working banking in four years but even those people also decided to leave their home country they you know they made it through the application process and they got here and they stayed for four years we have so many people who come here because they have a dream or an ambition in the same way that you see in like new york or san francisco other like big metropolitan cities and the outside of just obviously you know meeting the people which could be your co-founder it could be your colleagues could be your employees i think it also gives an energy to the city that's very different from most other european cities on top of that of course you have the capital markets here which i think is is much better i think today probably matters a bit less but back in 2017 i'd say like but VC wasn't as global as it is today.

37:34And then I think culturally, it's the closest we have to the US, easy to travel to the US. And so I think London is, I think it is the best city. London, New York is the world's international most commonly common plight, isn't it? Exactly. So I think it's a challenge in the UK for sure. It's a challenge in London, absolutely. but I even think from things like tax wealth perspective I'm from Denmark right so for me the UK is still a pretty good place to reside and let's hope the government doesn't bring in the exit tax exactly I don't think they're going to do that after the problems caused last time I want to ask a bit about Denmark because obviously Denmark is in geopolitical news more than ever at the moment with Greenland etc Like, what's the kind of relationship like when you were at school?

38:28Like, how much you taught about Greenland? Like, just what is the kind of relationship like? I mean, you learn about Greenland, right, and the history of the two countries, which is, I think, it has been kind of like challenging throughout the years. obviously it is I mean it's like a huge it's a huge country but it has a very small population and there's this like sister brother kind of relationship right but I think for I think for most Danish people I think don't think Greenland is like now obviously it's on everyone's mind because of everything that's going on but I wouldn't say it's been it's a it's not something that you you don't sort of go on a trip there aged 11 sort of funded by the government or whatever no no not really so but it's very it's very interesting that denmark being a very small country in the world um with greenland in terms of population size now is at the center of like maybe one of the biggest duplication conflicts in a in nater we've seen in a while but denmark as well just generally is often held up as a as an example i mean in public policy when i was in government as well and I know you spent a bit of time in government as well but it's like you know the Nordic countries were often sort of held up as like had done very well on child care or done very well on this and you know why do you think that is in particular is it because they're quite sort of small nations so things but but also of a scale that things can be experimented with I mean look I think Scandinavian countries I think Denmark is an amazing country and I usually say I think for the average citizen it's probably the best place in the world you can live yeah um because of all those things right i think some of the things that i don't think works very well is is again those things around tall puppy syndrome you know celebrating drive and ambition um there's this like very kind of strange stat which is like amount of unicorn founders per capita and if i remember correctly denmark is actually like one of the first countries on the list right the issue is that no one does it in denmark there's lots of great big tech companies that are founded by Danish people.

40:37I know most of them and no one does it in Denmark, right? That's a problem because in Denmark, we haven't produced any, I think maybe one now, but we haven't produced a company with more than a thousand employees in more than 15 years. So we're living off old industries and we have a lot of great companies, Lego, bestseller, Novo Nordisk, et cetera. So I think they're amazing countries. I think there's so much that we should learn from those in the rest of the world. I do think the but though is that Denmark is 5 million people. It's an extremely homogenous population. right there's basically very little religion there's very little immigration and that just makes it a lot easier to build these kind of societies it's very hard to just take that model of society and then apply it to like the US or to the UK or like anywhere else but but I think from a values perspective and I think in terms of how the societies work they're amazing places and I'm very proud to be from Denmark how many people do you think you will get to in terms, like what's the ambition on that side?

41:34So let me like sort of give a bit of context to that. Your stat there about Denmark only creating one company over a thousand people in the last 50 years. I think it's really interesting because if you look at the companies in the United Kingdom, the biggest over the last 10, 15 years that have been created, basically looking at Octopus Energy and very few others have created over 10 ,000 people. And it's one of my worries for jobs of the future, right, is that actually, you know, we're not going to see those big companies being created anymore. And look at you guys, reaching 4 billion valuation with 600 people.

42:08Pretty incredible, actually, if you look at it in the context of history. What size do you think you might grow to if you achieved everything that you wanted to do and listed? I mean, that's very hard to say, right? I think there is, of course, one force, right, which is that with AI, people can do more with less. There's a lot of people who, you know, people talking about like the one-person billion-dollar startup or like the 10-person, you know,$10 billion startup, whatever. And directly, I think there's a lot of things that's true about that. Definitely, you can do more with less. But I think, I tend to think this idea that AI is just going to replace everyone with agents and that there's not going to be a lot of jobs left is not going to pan out that way.