Episode 1: Anton Osika & Jacomo Corbo

0:02Welcome to Only Founders in the Building, a podcast from Founders Forum Group in collaboration with Audi. Brought to you in partnership with Rothschild & Co. Some of the world's top entrepreneurs, CEOs, and innovators. Open up in one-to-one conversations with one another. No host. No interviewer. Just two people crazy enough to pursue their own ideas. Getting into what's really on our minds. Let's get started.

0:30I'm sitting down here with one of the people I really respect in Europe. It's Giacomo Corbo, who is building PhysXX. I just really like that name. And from what I understand, you're building an AI native engineering simulation stack to transform how do we do engineering and manufacturing in industrials. and I'm a nerd, Giacomo, so I understand how so much of what we consume and take for granted these days comes from the industry that you're reshaping. And if I get sick, there's this enormous supply chain that most of us never see. That is something that you're basically reshaping. And I'm super curious about how all of that works.

1:15But we're here to talk about being founders. Well, the pleasure is all mine. Antonosica perhaps needs no introduction, at least in Europe. Lovable is one of the most successful AI businesses being built out of Europe and one of the most successful companies globally. And it's one that centers on helping people bring ideas to life in software and making that incredibly accessible to people who aren't software engineers. Physics X and Lovable have a few things in common. I think we often at Physics X talk about changing what engineering and manufacturing looks like, changing how work gets done in industrials.

2:06And a lot of that basically being about raising the ceiling and lowering the floor, you know, raising the ceiling with respect to the sorts of things that you can now design, the degree to which you can optimize things, basically building, you know, moving the Pareto frontier out and doing that in some of the highest complexity domains that there are. So, you know, in engineering, in aerospace applications, in semiconductors, in very complex flow sheets for chemicals manufacturing. But the other part of that is very much about, you know, making engineering and manufacturing accessible to a much broader swathe of people.

2:57When I explain what you can do with Lovable, I should often explain it in terms of, well, anyone, however non-technical you are, can really get to this level. But at the same time, the people who have experience building products, who use a platform, they are way beyond in what they can do. But look, I have all these questions we should get through. Okay, so if your company never existed, what do you think you would be doing right now? Oh, that's a good question. Like I often ask myself that, and maybe I'll sort of rewind the clock a little bit to, you know, even before my, the first business that I, that I founded, it's really a second business, I had a small little, you know, company called Webheads around the first dot com boom.

3:53but you know my my second startup was a company called quantum black and i sometimes think about a necessary but perhaps insufficient condition to have started the company is that lehman brothers went bust and the reason i say that is because and you know to sort of skip over the whole you know, story and narrative. But in short, I was finishing my PhD, wasn't altogether, you know, sure what I was going to do next. I had, you know, I had an offer from Lehman Brothers and was, you know, I had a few friends and one very good friend in particular that had gone to Lehman brothers in quantitative finance.

4:40And I liked the group. My friend was there, great rapport with that team, but wasn't altogether sure that I wanted to go into that world and was very inclined to be in the world of engineering. So I was a little bit torn about the idea of going to quantitative finance, as much as I think the modeling challenges would have been a whole lot of fun. And of course, you know, it was an exploding offer to December 1st, 2008. And of course, September 12th, 2008, Lehman went bust. And it was only a few months later in London that my co-founder, Simon Williams, and I hatched up the idea for Quantum Black.

5:24There's a, you know, we had a few F1 teams that we could have as anchor customers. There was also, you know, Boeing waiting in the wings, all of which, you know, sort of set up the conditions for us to be able to start Quantum Black in March of 2009. But I often look back at, well, you know, what about if Lehman was still there and hadn't gone bust? And I'm not sure what I would have done, but there's there's a good likelihood that I may very well have, my entire career might have very well looked pretty different. Yeah, this sounds super scary to me that there was a close call. And I'm thankful for mortgage-backed securities being overhyped so that you're now here.

6:10Imagine your early hires were from some of that financial engineering cohort, and that made the company more successful. Is that fair to assume? for, I mean, over the years, and I'd say within Quantum Black and even a few individuals within Physics X do have a quantitative trading and finance background. When I look at that industry on the whole, and it's sort of, especially in London, I see that as sort of a misallocation of human capital, that this industry has sucked up such incredible talent over the years. And it's not to say that the work isn't rewarding, the industries themselves aren't adding value.

6:59Very important. I just think that there are more important industries to build into and more interesting businesses to build. And so I'm incredibly thankful for that bit of serendipity, maybe which was necessary but insufficient to help lay the foundations for me to like you know build quantum black and you know there's a whole lot of serendipity and connections between my quantum black journey and the time that i spent in you know in engineering manufacturing industries um you know uh and the people that i got to know and how that helped set the foundations for you know, physics acts in what I'm building right now.

7:39Like we've got, you know, today, we're still a relatively early stage business, some 400 people. But I would say out of 400 people, we've got a cohort of, you know, perhaps as many as 40 or so individuals that have, it's sometime in their history, are quantum black alums, which, you know, I'm incredibly proud of. All right. how has your upbringing shaped who you are? That's a good question. I actually think about this sometimes. And there's something called the counterfactual. You know, it's like, what would have happened if I had a different upbringing, which is impossible to answer. But I believe that I'm more curious, wonder about how the world works because of my upbringing being going into something called, something called a Waldorf school, where you don't get much homework and the philosophy behind it is that you should like light the fire in kids so that you want to learn and you're more curious.

8:47So when I got to university where I studied physics and I realized that there were a lot more people, nerds like me that really are super curious about how things work and hard technical problems. I just got super excited about how much more interesting things there were to learn there than in school before so i took like 2x the pace of the coursework um and i don't think uh i would have been there if i had been like had a lot of homework pushed down at me uh through the 12 years of school before that um so yeah that then like this freedom of doing things in an in unconventional ways i definitely was shaped by my upbringing and my parents were a bit unconventional themselves.

9:32Can I ask you a question? Go for it. All right. So A Lovable hasn't been around all that long on the one hand. On the other hand, if you were starting your company today, okay, you know, with today's access in tech, would it be easier or harder? On one hand, I like to lean that it would be more difficult to reach the scale and the awareness about what Lovable is today but at the same time I think today is an extremely good time to start a company because of how fast you can move with a small team extremely good time to start a company would not have approached it exactly the same way but right now is an extremely good time there is going to be some kind of saturations over the coming decades in how AI is maturing and how it is being utilized, what platforms, how platforms should look and which platforms consumers and businesses go to.

10:41Yeah, by the way, I couldn't agree more that there's never been a better time to build a business. The leverage, I think, that technology affords you today, I mean, I think it really calls into question the theory of the firm, right? Like the theory of the firm, like historically is that, you know, you bring in all of the resources within the firm that allows you to, you know, to do the work without undertaking the transaction costs of, you know, having those resources and that expertise. And today, the leverage model is such that it, you know, you made the point about having an incredibly small team and being able to do so much.

11:28I don't think that's just true of, you know, it's a software engineering. I think it's true across, across the board, every, you know, every function of the business, any, you know, even the, you know, very, very deep domain specialisms, in some sense, you may need, you need fewer people to access those domains. Yeah, I think it's incredibly interesting. And I think we're going to see a proliferation of companies, even in the highest complexity and niche domains that would otherwise have only been accessible to the biggest companies until recently. Giacomo, have you ever felt guilty for leveraging AI or automation in ways that displays human work?

12:10No, not as yet. And the reality is that, you know, we were talking before about the theory of the firm, You know, we're still a relatively small company. And, you know, as much as we've grown to the scale that we're at right now, sort of tipping the scales at some 400 people, I think, you know, one of the things that's amazing about small teams is one, they had just have less inertial mass to move. They can be more agile. They can change direction more easily. But there are also, you know, everyone within that team maybe in some sense is closer to the mission itself and to the most important parts of executing against that mission.

12:59And when I think about, you know, AI's use within the company, it is ultimately allowing us to grow in ways that, you know, we remain as, you know, as dense and focused a fighting unit as possible. and that all of the other roles, tasks, activities that are extraneous to that mission, which isn't to say that they're not important at all, but they're sort of one level, two levels removed, then we want to build as much leverage in those activities. So in a very real sense, AI's use is going to allow companies to be built in a pretty different way where every one of those companies and the people within them are going to be closer to, you know, the sort of needs, must resources to execute against that mission.

13:59And I would want that for myself and I would have no compunction or aversion to building the company included from here in that way. Sometimes, so if you think about the things that we do, we're working with with companies that are operating in incredibly high complexity engineering and manufacturing domains. And in a way, we have to, every one of our engineers, but myself included, have to try to understand something about those processes, those engineering processes, those machines being built and how they operate, how they work, the materials that go into them. And the way in which you would learn that, I think a few years ago, would be much more laborious, require sifting through much more literature.

14:49and um you know and in the last two years so much of that i'm navigating actually in a conversation with you know with with ai with a model that is helping me understand a specific paper or the literature in some specific field like what is semiconductor deposition what is a piece of deposition equipment do what is what does etching mean what is lithography um you know how do you you know, how does a jet engine work or a specific, you know, part of that, that jet engine? And I sometimes feel maybe you, on the one hand, it's a prerequisite to be able to have a conversation with the engineers with whom we're working.

15:35On the other hand, you know, I do sometimes get a bit of imposter syndrome, you know, like learning a little bit the vernacular and the major concepts. And you always have to catch yourself as to whether or not you think you know something about these domains, whereas what you know is incredibly superficial. So you always have to catch yourself and be humble enough about the complexity that our customers are engaging in. Yes, it's a good time to be humble as we can learn so much so fast and spend time with fewer people to get more work done. This question is from Rothschild & Co. Does a founder need a following?

16:19I think as a founder, you have this unique position where you can have a lot of leverage in being particularly good and having particularly strong focus on so many different things. Like every single part of the business can be an advantage for the founder to be actually really good at. Having a following in some shape, I think the answer is yes. You need to, a company is this social endeavor where you need to shape how everyone is thinking about problems. And there should be diversity of thinking about them, but there should also be some similarity. In some places you should have similarity. and to shape that you need you need the people who work at the company to follow you follow the founder unless you're not really stepping out and put some other leader in place but i saw that from that perspective yes having a following externally um is one of the is one of these like many many examples of what you can focus on being good at or spending your time on as a founder it can be very valuable for many companies.

17:29I totally agree with you. I think at the beginning of building a company, job one of a founder is being a talent hustler. Part of the job spec, therefore, is being charismatic, building something of a followership that is getting people who are, let's face it, have lots of options to follow your vision and believe that that is something important. And you've got to be, you know, I think, you know, maybe a sort of precondition for building a followership is that you can articulate a vision for something compelling that doesn't exist and willing it into the world and, you know, letting someone believe that the odds are low, but the work is important and it's incredibly exciting.

18:27And at some point, I think there's a transition from the founder having to build that following and it being the company itself that has to hold that mantle, right? That has to be the portmanteau for, you know, this is the mission. This is the thing that we're working on. So at some point, it graduates from like i think the founder to this is the company like the company is the one that sort of you know um um you know has the followership in that respect i think the talent hustler word i might start using internally i have a question for you do you actually feel pressure to take public stances on social issues you i'm not sure if the talent drain is a part of it um or do you prefer to stay silent?

19:17Certainly internally. I think it's very important. You know, people want to be in a place, I think, where, you know, they, you know, their colleagues are also in some sense, they're friends, you're spending so much time with them, you're building a community. And I think it's hard to do that if that community is too corporate, if that community, you know, has a whole lot of topics that are taboo and that, and, you know, and it's a management frowns down on, you know, discussions about this or that. The reality is that we live in a complex world. People will have, you know, different views about some of the things that are taking place, you know whether that's you know whether that's political whether that's geopolitical but I also think it's incredibly important for you know for you know us to be building a community where people are pressure testing their beliefs you know I think that makes us better sort of citizens you know and members of the communities in which we live but I think it's also a just a a more fun place and people get to learn from other incredible people that will may very well have different perspectives about these things so um you know within the company i have uh you know i'm i'm really really fond of talking about just about anything whether it's the you know uh russia's aggression in in ukraine our position you know on you know doing work in in

21:01and building into industries, for example, in oil and gas, in mining, in, you know, these are all industries that are fraught with complexity, but our answers to why we should be participating in them, you know, touches on nuanced arguments. And I think on the whole, building a muscle within the organization around engaging with complexity, you know, reasoning from first principles, being tolerant of, you know, different positions, I think is important and more fun. Do you do it externally as well? So I've been, you know, personally, I've been more quite externally about some of these things. It's not an aversion on the one hand from taking a stand on positions that I think are important.

21:52And, you know, I talk about this with some of our customers, with the executives with whom we engage. you know whether it's on our stance with respect to china or how we should you know how i reason or how we generally reason about you know about you know china's position in the world um and the kind of competition that we are engaged in with china in different industries um um but i you know let's say publicly and making the you know i also don't want to distract from what the company is building. And I want at this early stage, we're a really small company. I want so much of the focus to be on, you know, what we're actually shipping, what capabilities we're providing to our customers, you know, how we see the space, how we think about industrial competition and our role within that ecosystem.

22:49And if we're, you know, talking about social issues that have nothing to do, let's say with the company, as an egregious example, I don't think adds to our mission and if anything can be a distraction from it. I do think very similarly to you. I've heard about tech companies where there's way too much expectations from leaders to have an opinion on things. The place where I would be happy to dig in more, how do we make Europe a more competitive place to build for all of us yeah and that's partly a social issue for sure 100 i think that's one of the most important things and in some sense i have a perspective on those things and i don't see that as a distraction right because like with like we're more making the places from which we're building um you know um stronger places and more competitive places.

23:50And so, yeah, I see it as net additive. If you could send one message back to yourself from day one, what would that message be? The one message would be a little bit of a reminder to myself that, you know, the first job of leadership is to make the decision and to call it early. Look, I'm a first time CEO and candidly, like my style of leadership is, you know, to help build consensus within a team, you know, and, you know, trying to ask the questions and to gather the evidence that says, like, you know, this is the thing that we should do next. This is what we and in some sense, I want people to have the conviction to, you know, the conviction to also arrive at that same position.

24:43And if I could send one message back to myself, it would be that the reality is that I think consensus is overrated. I think it's incredibly important sometimes that even if they're going to be dissenting views, even if there isn't going to be much evidence for a position, if you have high conviction about that position, sometimes you just need to call it early. And I think that's the first job of leadership. Consensus is advantageous, but speed is more important. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

25:27I'm Anton Osikap. And I'm Giacomo Corbo. And you have been listening to Only Founders in the Building. Next time, we keep the dinner party conversations going and pass the mic to another two founders at the very top of their games. Only Founders in the Building is a podcast produced by Founders Forum Group in collaboration with Audit. Brought to you in partnership with Rothschild & Co. Thank you for listening and goodbye.